Booyor’s BLOGgh!

My wife is trying to buy a maternity swimsuit. Pretty easy, right? From shill bids on eBay to now her most current auction being pulled due to listing errors/violation of policies, this Odyssey of hers rivals the Turkey Death Star.

Here are things that you can’t sell, but would be pretty fun to sell, on eBay:

Prohibited and Restricted Items
Are you sure your item is allowed on eBay? You can learn more about prohibited and restricted items here. These items include alcohol, animals, credit cards, food, fireworks, tobacco and weapons.

I dare anyone to make the Ultimate Prohibited Auction of drunk caribou smoking cigars over their ID theft scam while eating caviar and launching M80s. In Canada.

While in Yahoo mail , I noticed an ad for mormon.org. I clicked (without even having to shoot the monkey or zap the fly) and was taken to a page with their traditional responses about their faith. I then clicked on ‘Chat with a Live Missionary’. It loaded an applet and I waited for a little bit. Then a user, Tiffany of the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-Day Saints, came in and asked how I was doing.

I freaked. I jumped back from the computer and closed the windows. Not once has my house been visited by LDS missionaries, but I did go on their Work and the Glory website and started receiving LDS spam in my NAU account (without entering an e-mail address). Now I wonder if they’ll track my IP address and come knocking on my door in Greenland (which is where I live, if you want to stalk me).

Since I won’t sleep tonight, here’s a light-hearted look at a class where the teacher doesn’t know how to turn off her new phone.

Any item described as being ‘contaminated’ by radiation is not permitted on eBay. For example, a rock taken from a Nevada nuclear test site would fall into this category and would be prohibited.

Thanks for looking out for me, but I takes my gamma radiation like I takes my coffee…

I recently discovered how to use Smart Folders. After setting up Handbrake to rip a Turkey DVD someone had given me, I woke up the next morning (5/29) to find that it had stopped because there was only 701K on my startup disk.

Kinda freaky since I was ripping to the portable hard-drive.

I tried searching all over my MacBook and then learned how to speed up my search with Smart Folders. I searched first for all videos on my computer. I was able to clean up some old In-Law Films wedding videos that I had forgotten about. BUT I had not found the file that had eaten my hard drive. I knew that the Mac was pretty good about laying my files out in front of me (not as many temp files/folders/registry abominations as Windows) so I was sorta stressed.

I then searched for all movie files over 2 GB. I found none.
Perplexed. I thought my MacBook was just having trouble because the circle pinwheel of death kept circling. (I now know that it can’t find what is not there.)

This morning I decided to search for all files that were over 2GB, not just movies.

I found this:

I guess the console keeps logs or something. In those logs are error messages and other processes in text format. As you can tell (as far as I can tell) I had 7.45GB worth of an error message trying to Handbrake a Turkey trip DVD.

Thanks, Peter.

Actually, I think it was the DVD. After I tried my old school plug-DVD-into-camera-then-camera-into-laptop technique, I noticed that the DVD stopped suddenly when it wasn’t done playing. I’m guessing bad DVD.

But wow! I learned some new techniques, but I’m glad to have my hard-drive back.

BEIJING - The first panda to be released into bamboo forests after being bred in captivity has died, and a Chinese nature preserve official said Thursday it may have fallen from trees while being chased by wild pandas.

The body of Xiang Xiang was found Feb. 19 on snow-covered ground in the forests of Sichuan province in China’s southwest, the Xinhua News Agency said. He survived less than a year in the wild after nearly three years of training in survival techniques and defense tactics.

“Xiang Xiang died of serious internal injuries in the left side of his chest and stomach by falling from a high place,” Heng Yi, an official from the Wolong Giant Panda Research Center in Sichuan, said in a telephone interview.

“The scratches and other minor injuries caused by other wild pandas were found on his body,” he said. “So Xiang Xiang may have fallen from trees when being chased by those pandas.”

Heng said the long delay in announcing Xiang Xiang’s death was attributed to the need for a full investigation.

“We are all sad about Xiang Xiang, but it doesn’t mean the project has failed,” Zhang Hemin, the center’s head, was quoted as saying by Xinhua. “The lessons we have learnt from what happened to Xiang Xiang will help us adapt and improve the project.”

The 176-pound male panda was released from Wolong in April 2006 and had been trained for almost three years on how to survive in the wild. Xiang Xiang, whose name means auspicious, learned how to build a den, forage for food and mark his territory, experts at Wolong have said. He also developed defensive skills such as howling and biting.

According to Li Desheng, deputy director of the Wolong center, Xiang Xiang’s case shows that proves that wild panda communities are reluctant to accept male outsiders.

“We chose Xiang Xiang because we thought that a strong male panda would have a better chance of surviving in the harsh natural environment,” Li was quoted as saying. “But the other male pandas clearly saw Xiang Xiang as a threat. Next time we will choose a female panda.”

State media last year said that Xiang Xiang hesitated for a second when the door of his cage was opened, then scampered off into a nearby bamboo forest where he was tracked by a global positioning device attached to his collar.

He has been buried at the foot of a mountain, about eight miles from the Wolong center, Li said.

There are only about 1,600 wild pandas in the mountain forests of central China — the only place in the world they are found — and more than 180 live in captivity.

Pandas are threatened by loss of habitat, poaching and a low reproduction rate. Females in the wild typically have a cub once every two to three years.

I think it should be noted that in my Structured English Immersion (SEI) class (if you’re not an educator in AZ, you have no clue what SEI is) I was identified as someone who spoke Olde English. (I was talking during the break about how Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf is still a current one that is used. The teacher had previously asked for who spoke another language. I didn’t raise my hand too high (didn’t want my Spanish put on the spot) and my table partner asked if I wasn’t proud of my Klingon dialect. This inevitably led to a discussion of the guy in California that claimed he was a Klingon ELL and then into other Geek Linguistics).

The teacher made me read in Olde English out loud in front of the class. (She ironically had put up an overhead that everyone thought was spelled incorrectly but I recognized as a peasant farm report.)

It had been at least six years  (yeah, Fitzmaurice!) since I had read out loud in Olde English (my illustrious NAU education). Like riding a bike, right? I thought to myself, “How would a Cannon read it?”

This comic, though, talks about the Dark Side of SEI:

The wild west shoot-out, with a BOW, to liberate the town from goblins is awesome! (Jumping around corners, hiding behind barrels and watering troughs, with a longbow drawn and an arrow notched, rocks.)

He walks in, the wind blows the dust, and the goblins OK Corral it. And then when you win? The little old lady, the only inhabitant of the village, opens up her door to thank you.

It totally makes up for the hours I spent pushing ice blocks in the Ice Palace. Twilight Princess is very cool.

I don’t actually play (a mixture of obsession and subscriptions is not good) but here’s something gamers may enjoy.

This technological terror that you have constructed is no match for the Dark Side of the Terrabyte.

I might get bogged down with teaching summer school (and I’m actually learning stuff in the state-mandated SEI class) but I hope to put up some media this month.

And yes, I did draw the bear.

It’s always a good day when you can read about superhero eugenics. Here’s the next installment of Mutants and Masterminds. You can check out our previous adventures here.

Okay, so maybe that’s not a fair match-up, but I do think that they just weren’t trying with this one.

If you are looking for something to memorialize today, check ‘em out here.