Its Halloween today. Unlike previous, I don’t really have a lot planned for this Halloween. Sad, actually.

Oh sure. There’s the smoke machine, and the lighted skulls. And the creepy music. But that’s all been done before. I don’t have anything original this time around, other than the cheap scarecrow.

I never got around to building my Flying Crank Ghost, nor did I build a fog chiller like I wanted. That was just due to the busy weekends we’ve been spending; lots of them out of town.

I hope my Halloween reputation isn’t slipping!

Here’s something to spook you on the eve of Halloween. Medical science is at a loss to explain why flashing LEDs drastically improve healing.

Yes, LEDs similar to those in the plastic skull I’ll be using to scare the heck out of the neighborhood kids have been shown to produce almost miraculous healing.

It reminds me of the Indian shaman who recently went an entire year without eating, subsisting only on water and the sun’s rays. He attracted the attention of NASA, who funded a study to determine how the guy could do this. I wonder what kind of energy light really provides our bodies?

Maybe its time to trade in my CRT monitor for one of those LED flat-panels, huh?

A journey does not end until you’ve washed the clothes that you wore on it.

Smitty kept us up all night last night with her continual jumping on the bed. We don’t normally let her sleep there, but made a BAD decision when we got back to let her up for one night when we got back into town. Ever since, she’s tried to stake out a place on our crowded bed, only to get booted.

Well, last night she didn’t get the message and kept getting booted. And WE didn’t get the message and thus kept booting her, rather than putting her up somewhere and getting some sleep.

We won’t make the same mistake tonight, though. See y’all in the morning!

The Earth is getting pummeled today by a giant solar storm, the third-largest ever recorded. If this blog ceases to be updated for the rest of the day, you’ll know why.

Maybe some day we’ll find a way to harness this incredible electromagnetic energy that’s now considered a nusiance. But enough about my weblog…

I was looking at the page source for the website of They Might Be Giants. Here are the Meta tags which describe their site:

meta NAME=”description” content=”They Might be Giants are a band of rockers responsible for creating numerous songs about dead presidents and disembodied heads… but in a nice way. Both band leader’s names are JOHN and everyone else is named DAN.”

meta NAME=”keywords” content=”rock, rockers, malcolm in the middle, birdhouse in your soul, tmbg, they might be giants, monkeys, president heads, mink car, factory showroom, flood, ana ng, free mp3, mp3, download mp3, download, porn stars, anti-gravity boots, guitar, guitars, johns, flansburgh, linnell, band of dans, shooting gallery, taft, roosevelt, nixon, accordian, ecards, e-cards, streaming music, music, radio, modern rock, pop music, pop stars, eclectic music, alternative music, hornblow, hornblow group, chopping block”

There’s no limit to what you can do if you don’t mind looking like an idiot.

My buddy Weave has called it quits on his weblog. It’s a shame, too, since he is a good writer and usually posted something interesting to read every day or so. I hope it was the whiskey talking and not his true desire to stop writing.

Weblogs are such personal things. In D.C. this weekend, Kelly saw a friend with whom she goes WAY back. Though she and Kelly haven’t spoken regularly in years, this friend seemed to know everything about us, thanks to reading our blogs (this one and Hallie’s).

This phenomenon of people knowing things about you that you didn’t directly tell them is unique to weblogs. It’s weird trying to strike up conversation about some topic, only to have your audience tell you “oh, yeah. I already know that.” If I feel somewhat creative today, maybe I can come up with a name for it.

Anyway, weblogs are a window on the lives of my friends, family and associates. When their blogs are left to rot, or disabled entirely, I feel some sort of connection has been lost.

It’s a lonely web out there. Let’s stick together!

I received my first Internet call from the UK this morning. I found of a service which gives out UK phone numbers to Free World Dialup customers for free. Calls to the UK number get billed at the UK national rate, not the outrageous overseas rates normally paid for US calls.

The sound quality report was mixed. I heard my UK counterpart superbly – better than any landline phone. However, he said I was breaking up, with lots of echo and other odd effects. I blamed that on the Asante firewall router my in-laws have. It seems to drop and/or mangle packets from time to time.

Anyhow, its a promising start. I’ll try another call from the corporate network this week to see if the quality improves.