Month: February 2004

Try Zuma, a very addictive game. Looks like it won’t run on Mozilla, at least not until I find an ActiveX plugin… 🙁

CNN reports on the trend of Atkins dieters, AKA “Atkinites” or “carbovoids,” further eroding the American culinary landscape. First it was “bunless hamburgers” (Hello? That’s not a burger anymore; it’s just a slab of meat!), and now there is talk of low-carb pizzas. Some restaurants are attempting to utilize “soy protein and other ingredients” in an attempt to produce a low-carb crust. At least that is a “breadlike-product,” but I’d be very surprised if it didn’t taste like crap. As one innovator of low-carb crust says, “Wipe away any memories of your old traditional pizza crust.”

Reminiscent of the “bunless burger,” Bearno’s Pizza of Louisville, Kentucky “offers a crustless pizza on the usual circular baking pan.” I don’t get that one at all. Perhaps the most disturbing item mentioned was Escondido, California’s Pit Stop Pasta offering “what may be a traditionalist’s worst nightmare: ‘pizza in a bucket.’ It has all the pizza toppings placed in a crock or, for takeout customers, a metal can.” OK, this is just ludicrous, straight out of The Jerk. Cup o’ Pizza, anyone?

I guess I can’t fault people for trying to stick to a diet while still eating food that they enjoy, but in some cases, those two things just need to be mutually exclusive. It is a diet, after all. I shouldn’t talk, as I could stand to trim down a little, but the Atkins Diet is definitely not for me…

It’s time to face the annual decision of how to get the taxes done. Paper forms? Buy preparation software from CompUSA? Hire somebody? Thanks to a timely discussion on Slashdot, I discovered a nice little web-based service called TaxACT that seems to be comparable to Turbo Tax and the like, but doesn’t require any software installation. Its cost is also very reasonable, with a tiered pricing model. I spent about $18 total for the deluxe version of the service plus electronic filing of my state return. The deluxe version includes federal electronic filing, an accuracy guarantee, and several other features. If you don’t care about E-File and all that, they also have a free service. If you choose to use the same service next year, it will remember your data, and they seem to have a pretty solid privacy and confidentiality guarantee. It gave me PDF copies of all relevant paperwork to print for my records. My taxes this year were fairly simple, but I was pretty happy with the overall experience. Just thought y’all might want to check it out before you plunk down the $$ and deal with the hassle of installing Turbo Tax.

IFilm has videos available of all the commercials that aired during Super Bowl XXXVIII. It seemed like there were less funny commercials, although after looking over the list I guess there were a couple of pretty good ones. There were a lot more movie trailers, which got to be a little annoying, although there are a couple that I didn’t know too much about, like Van Helsing, that look like they could be cool. I guess it wasn’t too bad, but my overall impression was that other Super Bowls were better…

CNN reports that “Tacking Jr. or II onto a boy’s name is too common, a new father decided, so the self-described engineering geek took a software approach to naming his newborn son,” naming his newborn Jon Blake Cusack 2.0. I guess it was only a matter of time before this happened, although they certainly upped the chances of that kid getting beat up. Actually, the thing I’m most surprised about is that The Simpsons didn’t do this with Professor Frink’s child…

Once again (and for the fourth time!), former Redskin Art Monk was denied entry into the Football Hall Of Fame, despite having “more catches than anyone currently enshrined in Canton, Ohio.” I ranted about this last year when he was also ignominiously eliminated in the first round, so I will spare you the brunt of my wrath and refer you to that post. Still, I’m beginning to wonder what the voters are smoking after these horrible, repeated oversights.