Did I seriously write another feature with over 50 product blurbs?

Indeed. It's our annual utilities guide, called Supercharge Windows, has 91 programs (free and paid) (and that's up from the 67 we could fit in the magazine) that will make a Windows PC go zoom. And do other stuff, like file transfers and make it look purty.

I don't get to play with cool toys as much as I'd like in my job, but the happy exception was a recent round up review of five USB flash drives (aka, USB keys, thumb drives, or, UFDs). The reviews are now live at PCMag.com so you can go and read about which is fastest, cheapest, and has the most cool add-ons for your money.

hmmmm... melty.

My brother told me tonight that my five-year-old nephew, John, got to go to a book fair and pick out a book to take home. The book he choose?

The Story of Darth Vader.

"That's my boy," my brother said.

"You know," I pointed out, "I'm filled with the Dark Sith love, but think about it... that's like letting a little kid read about how cool Hitler was."

My brother made some half hearted attempts to point out that Hitler didn't have the force or a cool helmet and sword, but ultimately, we both had to agree... Anakin and Hitler? Pretty much on par.

I suppose in the good trilogy, you only see Vader kill one guy (Obi-Wan, who is only sorta dead). (Am I missing anyone? He didn't even finish killing the guy in the Death Star conference room that he choked with the force. [Digression: That guy getting choked looks like Rob Corddry]). So you could feel okay about liking the bad guy. After all, he's got that sad asthma.

But Lucas made sure the newly minted Vader was irredeemable in the craptastic trilogy. Never forget that Ani kills all the kids in the Jedi tower. Plus, he whined about it the whole damn time. And can't act.

Of course, it's all about fiction vs. reality. Fictional mass-murderers can be cool, right? Doc Doom, Moriarty, The Joker... Though my brother did admit he wouldn't want John reading any kids books about the cute adventures of (the still fictional) Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter anytime soon. So maybe it's all about the cool helmet and the sword.

Check out the video below of the wife and our youngest from last weekend. This was the run right before she fell and tore the muscle in her back (the wife, not the dog). A clean "effortless run" as she (the wife) put it, with Kylie doing everything right, cause she is so damn perfect (not to mention cute, despite breath that could curdle cheese. The dog I mean,not the wife).

My mommy and daddy know how to make their little (!) boy happy. They
bought me a scary, reptilian, prehistoric piggy bank.

And then they bought me lunch, all because I did their taxes. (With
help from Intuit).

They got back a lot. Me... I'm in the black for about $300, but we had
to send a check to the state. Bastards. At least now I've got a bank
so I can store money to prepare for paying them again next year.

One of the first scantily clad female figures I ever saw as a youth was Bettie Page. No, sadly, not in any vintage '50s pseudo-porn (tho lordy, would that have been sweet).

It was in the pages of The Rocketeer, the graphic novel by Dave Stevens.



He drew so damn good. It's just a shame he didn't draw more. But 10 years fighting cancer takes a lot out of a guy.

ADDED: check out Mark Evanier's obit. Stevens later met the living Bettie Page and drove her to cash her Social Security checks. Amazing.

Today was meant to be a day of suffering, as in, doing taxes. I was going to do my parents using TurboTax, and then my own if I still had the gumption.

The weather turning to icy shit put the kibosh on my parents traveling out, and after that it was all downhill...

The wife almost fell while playing dog agility this morning at the local training center. She probably should have gone for it, because her twisting and gyrating to avoid the fall tore a muscle in her lower back. Time for a trip to the doc, but, of course, our usual spot only had one doc on duty who was double booked for the day. So it was off to the Cayuga Medical Convenient/Urgent Care. (I'm not sure if the right name is convenient or urgent. It's not really very much of the latter, that's for sure). She got an x-ray and a sympathetic doc who'd had the same type of injury a month ago. So we left replete with a couple of prescriptions.

Off to Target we went in the pouring rain, fog thick as ambergris, to hit the pharmacy and buy something we could freeze and/or heat for her back, as necessary. We're waiting for our delicious, nutritious narcotics when the lights start to flicker. The registers at the pharmacy go down, and the staff there is going on lunch at 1:30. The time was 1:27. Frack. We scooted home to settle her into a chair. Target is running on a generator apparently, because our house just two miles up the road is electrically dead.

At 2:30, I hop in the minivan to scoot back to Target. Halfway there, I see a NYSEG truck working on a pole in someone's yard. Good, they're going to get the juice back on, sez I. The guy in the bucket at the pole looks at me and starts waving frantically and pointing down the road in the direction I'm heading. Crap, was there an accident? I slowed... and narrowly avoided driving into a downed tree in the road. It's what's left of the same damn tree that fell into the same road in the same location last year -- last time, it had fallen on a car. That idiot needs to buy a chainsaw.

Drugs secured, I returned home and sit in the dark– there's barely any light from outside due to the fog -- as my wife snores through her pain. Eventually, I grabbed the headlamp I got for Xmas and put it on so I could read. After what seemed like years -- but was only an hour and 10 minutes -- the power returned.

God, my life is empty without electricity.

But at least I have put off doing my taxes again for another day.

For page views that is. At PCMag.com. Apparently my story on The Best Free Software getting a placement on Yahoo! (bless you, Yahooligans) pushed the site to "a new single-day all-time traffic high of 4.3 million page views," according to our Editor-in-Chief. Even the CEO chimed in with congrats.

I'm sure the links to the story from here at SquishedFrog.com helped though. So keep clicking!

It was just pointed out to me that my feature on The Best Free Software, from the latest issue of PC Magazine, is not only online at PC Mag.com for the entire world to enjoy, but it's also the featured link right this very second on the top page of Yahoo!

Sweet.

Sadly, we've since found out that there's at least one product of the 157 in the story that is not free... and maybe one other that's arguable (I swear, they both were free when I wrote it!). But that's still 155 awesome free pieces of software, probably half of which are Web-based so you don't even have to download them. Which, far as I'm concerned, is always preferable.

I found this graph on the Tompkins County Highway Web site.


That's right. North Triphammer: we're killers!

Why was on on that Web site? I too  look up the number of who to call to remove the dead doe in the ditch in front of my house.

A couple years ago, I was absolutely baffled when I was on Route 13, stopped at a stop light, and a school bus on the cross street pulled into the intersection, stopped fully, opened its side door wide open for no discernible reason -- no kids got in or out, and he had not deployed his little red pop-out stop sign -- then closed the door and went on his way.

I saw this two or three more times over the months, always gobsmacked by the oddness of it. Did they have invisible passengers? Imaginary friends they gave a ride?

Last week, I saw three school buses in a row do it, coming from the other direction toward 13 – each in turn stopped near the railroad tracks parallel to the road and opened their doors before proceeding.

Ah ha, said the great detective. Train tracks.

One google later and I know the truth: National Safety Council suggests this as part of its "recommended procedures" for school bus drivers at railroad crossings. The point is to open the door to facilitate better visibility when looking both ways before crossing the tracks.

Why? NSC Web site says that each year, approximately 4,000 train/vehicle collisions at railroad crossings. That's 10.9 trains hitting cars every day. Seriously? Maybe on TV.... but in real life?

That's one of those statistics that makes me believe that statistic about 73% of all statistics being made up.

I've spent the last week chopping my first novel -- the one I "finished" a year ago -- down to a respectable size. Which just goes to show what a wordy bastard I am... I hacked out 15,800 words. Including an entire chapter, which now goes into the DVD Extras. That's 15% of the original book's volume... and yet almost nothing has changed, storywise.

Let's all learn from my mistake. Kill your darlings. Advice I will take to heart again as I dive back into edits and re-writes on my other book.