Entries from April 2007 ↓

Soft Scrub rules!

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Nobody did. The "shocking" ending was that this week was all about the giving back, and the "voting to keep your favorites", so no one was eliminated. But next week, two people are going home. Gotta stay on scheduled, don't ya know.

i didnt get to watch it who got booted??

Apparently tonight was also "Idol Gives Back", which basically meant the night was one big telethon. I don't really do telethons. Jack Black was funny. For the most part we fast forwarded.

The only real "hook" for the show was that Ryan promised a *shocking* result to the end of the vote. Based on how calm everybody was, and how they didn't really focus on the bottom two as the show progressed, you sort of knew what was going to happen. When it came down to Chris R and Jordin as the bottom two and Chris was safe, I told Kerry, "The shock is going to be that no one's going home." Sure enough, that's exactly what they did. This week is about the telethon and the money, not the elimination.

Next week, though, *two* people are going home. That's going to be brutal. I'm waiting to see Chris R go. It bugs me that he's probably going to stick around long enough to knock out somebody who I like (like Blake).

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Yeah, hotel was pretty lousy too. If there were only a web site of some sort where I could go and give my review!

So while in DC I stopped at a few gift shops (hotel and airport, 'natch) to grab some stuff for the family. It's interesting to play the game of political souvenirs, because for every "Clinton in 2008!" shirt there's a "Dear God, Another Clinton??" shirt. Repeat for all presidential candidates, as well as the current president. I was wondering if you could survey the feelings of the shopkeeper based on the amount and distribution of the merchandise. That is, do all the pro-Bush items get the best displays?

Anyway. At the hotel gift shop, next to the cash register was a basket of candidate buttons. You know, the "Edwards in 08!" or "Vote Romney!" sort of thing. All basically the same size, all either red or blue, and basically just a big basket of buttons that appeared to all come from the same source. I asked the lady behind the register, "Which button sells the most?"

"There's no Barrack Obama in that basket," she said. "He's sold out."

She was right. There you go. Quick political poll. I thought for a minute, as per my comments above, that an anti-Obama shop could simply choose not to put his buttons out, but if that was the case then she wouldn't tell me that he was sold out and make him out to be the most popular.

(To be completely honest about the story I've translated pretty heavy for the poor woman who had trouble with her English. What she really said was something more along the lines of "Which one is black? His buttons all gone." Earlier when I'd walked into the shop I asked, "Do you have any sort of coloring books that I could take home to my kids?" and she said, "You want t-shirt?")

Hi everybody,

Sorry I'm behind, but I just got back from out of town and the server was down for several days and I'm way behind. Short answer, it's Heather and John in the bottom two, and Heather goes home. I don't feel bad to see her go, though, when she busts out a written farewell speech that is just painfully awkward. She blames Carrie Ann for them leaving ("She gave us a 7, we knew we wouldn't come back from that"), and then starts rambling about the makeup ladies in the back, and eventually I just gave up.

Next week should be John, by all rights, or possibly Billy Ray. But I wouldn't be surprised to see Ian drop down there as well since he's not getting any love from the judges (they even said, "Watch Billy Ray") and he doesn't have the sort of audience support the other two do.

You know that Duane is out of town when his blog is down for two days and he isn't on IM so that you can yell at him about it.

I believe it's a rule that if your router is going to die on you, it will do so while you're out of town. I appear to be back up now, but it was quite the weird experience.

I log in from my hotel room and notice that while I can ssh in to my host, I cannot get to the web site. I reset the website (sometimes that happens) but still nothing. I then begin to wonder if my cable company is causing me grief, as they just recently shut down my email server. Before I know it, I can't even SSH into the machine anymore which is strange because my ssh connection that is still open is, well, still open. But it can't communicate back out to do any nslookups or anything. So then I'm wondering if the DNS has gone down or something bizarre like that.

Eventually that window died as well and then for the last two days I've had no contact at all with my machine . My domain names are up for renewal (but I thought that was in a few weeks!) so I had a weird feeling that they'd disappeared on me. I checked that (I'm at a conference in the middle of a keynote using the meeting room wifi connection to check the status of my domain names :)) but as I thought they don't expire for weeks.

Then later Monday evening I'm talking to my wife and she says "The computer doesn't work, says it can't see Google or sometihng." At that point I realized that it probably wasn't the outside in (or at least, not only that) but something internal.

I just got home. Reset the cable modem, reset the router, bounced the web server, and I seem to be back up.
We shall see.

Do you think he wrote it about going home from A.I