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Pardon me.
"Rowrwrrr! Hsssst!"
Okay, all better. I'll tend to the wounds later.
As BD mentioned a while back, he and the missus are doing their usual summer fling in Italy in a few weeks, so I'll be saving up goodies and not posting much in the interim. I'll have some pretty interesting pieces, though, including an AGW post with a very unique viewpoint, a tutorial on how to make one of those 'slideshow songs' where the pics line up with the lyrics, how to type "I ♥ Maggie's Farm" with a few quick keystrokes, and it only took two hours and 20 years of online expertise but I finally tracked down a copy of the 1974 National Lampoon Stereo Test And Demonstration Record on a backwater P2P site for your listening and stereo testing enjoyment.
On the health front, I just took my blood pressure and it was 135 (high figure), and that's without taking any blood pressure medicine for four days. That's still slightly above average, but compared to its peak of 195 a few months ago, it'll do.
The one main difference has been an almost salt-free diet. I got so curious about the whole salt issue that I purposefully didn't change anything else (exercise, smoking, coffee, etc) just to see what would happen. Despite claims that "salt does not cause these things", I must beg to differ. The blood pressure medicine initially knocked it down to non-life-threatening levels, then I halved the dosage a few weeks ago, then decided to see what would happen if I stopped it altogether four days ago. The results speak for themselves. I'll go back to halving it and get a fresh prescription when I visit the GP in a few weeks.
I also still owe the hospital over a thousand bucks and am desperately low on cash (as I've been since this nightmare started), so if anyone would care to throw a few doubloons into my relief fund, it would certainly be appreciated.
In other news, I heard via email the other day another by-now-typical domain name heartbreak story:
(the names have been changed to protect the innocent, if any)
Doc -
Well, craparoonie! You would think that "James Morgan Downing" would be an obscure enough name that it would be available, but not only was "jamesdowning.com" and "jamesmdowning.com" taken, but so was the whole thing, "jamesmorgandowning.com"! I ended up taking "james-downing.com", but I'm not happy about it. On the other hand, I suppose I should be grateful that at least it was available!
Indeed.
As I've noted before, once a domain is gone, it's pretty much gone forever because the domain harvesters will snatch it up automatically within milliseconds of it coming back on the market. They figure if somebody wanted it once, then somebody else will want it again one day, at which point they'll be happy to lease it to you for the rest of eternity — unless you want to buy it outright for a mere $4,995, of course.
The bottom line is, if you ever might want your own domain, even if just to post pics of the grandkids on in twenty years, now's the time to get it. At $5.95/mo, it's the cheapest bill in the In Box, and you don't have to actually build a site or anything to hold it.
As for grabbing it, I highly recommend BlueHost. It's run by a nice conservative company based in Provo, Utah. The CEO does a twice-yearly email round-up and the guy's hysterical, always throwing zingers and barbs at Washington and our meddling Congress. I have some tips on domain names here.
For your visual delight, a blast from the past; the incredible footage of that airliner landing on that highway out in L.A. a few years ago. The fact that a TV news crew happened to be right there when it happened was a remarkable stroke of luck, not to mention catching on film the horror of the harrowing landing, itself.
It's a miracle anyone survived.
The details of this breathtaking event are
here.
