I guess this is another one of those strange persistent mental connections… for some reason when I think of "maple syrup" I picture pine trees. When I think of trees being tapped, and sap being drained and collected to make maple syrup – I picture pine trees. Why? I don't know.

Here's the questions though: does anyone make Pine Syrup? I've never seen it. I've never heard of it. Is there a technical issue that makes it impractical to make syrup from pine sap? Does it taste horrible?

Edit (9/20/09):
I've found these available on amazon. They aren't made from the tree sap like maple syrup is, but I guess they're still considered "pine syrup". One is a "pine cone syrup" and the other a "pine code bud syrup". They both appear to be the exact same product though (same size, same manufacturer), just sold by two different shops. I couldn't find any "pine needle syrup".

You know what's really good with Culver's french fries?

Culver's Bleu Cheese Dressing.

MMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmm

I love Google Voice. I loved it back when it was still GrandCentral.

But today I had to set it up to send all calls straight to voicemail. 🙁

Why? Because I'm getting non-stop calls from telemarketers offering health insurance. How annoying!

They're actually leaving voicemail now – some of them at least. I guess after 2 days of their calls not getting answered they start leaving a message.

Here are a couple examples, transcribed by google:

0:37
hi my name is christine i'm responding to your online inquiry that you submitted for health care if it is very important that i speak with you i did leave you except and approve your application for immediate benefits please give me a call back as soon as possible so we can go over a couple of quotes my number here is (800) 979-4870 again that number is (800) 979-4870 my name is christine and my extension is 4219 thank have a great day bye bye

01:47
hello this message is for joel this is craig call to calling with american insurance organization how are you doing today and i hope this message finds you well i'm just calling to let you know that i received your request for some health insurance information he and i'm going to send you a some information some quotes here in your email in a few moments the quick note about myself joe i'm i'm independent broker i'm also connor mark and i am a master broker i work with all major carriers insurance anthem blue cross blue shield him and united healthcare to give a few name is but i'm looking at your information here 33 prefer a highway class no smoking and thinking that the company that's going to give you we really good coverage and the best freight is gonna be golden rule plan which is offered by united healthcare so i'm gonna send you that information and hopefully some there will work for you but if it doesn't feel free to give me a call back and let me know what it is that you don't like about it and i'll go over all the other options are available to you or if you just have some questions feel free to give me a call (262) 912-0677 if you find that the quote is what you're looking for you can apply directly from the quote but i'd recommended you give me a call first to make sure that we have everything that you're looking for and that'd suits your needs that's about it for donald i look forward to hearing from you joel's other in that have a great day thanks again take care

Ugh, Craig… I don't know where you got my number, but my name is definitely not "Joel"… also, you spoke for almost 2 minutes! Sheesh! Christine got her spiel out in under 40 seconds.

I'll post more in the comments, as they come in, if they keep leaving messages… and my blog doesn't decide to die for the 4th time in 2 days.

One of the most interesting parts of having a blog (besides when people leave great comments) is being able to look at the traffic statistics and see how people are finding my posts. I don't really get a lot of traffic here, which I think adds to the interest.

Google, yahoo, and most other webcrawlers identify themselves in a way that makes them easy to ignore in the stats. But Bing… well, Bing is a little bitch. Bing will make itself out to look like a legitimate user, and tell me that the hit came from a search on Bing. For instance, right now I'm looking at a line that says someone using IE6, on a Windows XP machine, with the IP 65.55.110.96, came to one of my posts from a search on bing.com for "remember". It's kind of frustrating – the page it hit is not even in the top 10,000 results for a search for "remember".

And guess who owns the IP address that the hit came from? Microsoft. Microsoft is falsifying page-referrer headers to make it look like I'm getting traffic from bing.

Another boycott? Hardly. Bing doesn't do anything better than Google anyway. So, now I can add "annoying" to the list of bing qualities.. just under "useless".

(also, this is now currently the only google result for "bing is a bitch", let's change that!)

If you tried to access this amazing blog any time between about 8:30am and.. now – you probably didn't see much of anything. Maybe a blank screen. Maybe a browser error page. Maybe the letter "x", which I was using as a breakpoint to figure out where and in which script wordpress was broken.

Absolutely frustrating.

It looks like, somehow, the database that houses all the data for this blog got corrupted. I'm not even sure what in the database wordpress was choking on, since it all looked fine when I looked over it. But rolling back to a backup from this morning fixed everything. Almost 12 hours later. Jeez.

I'd like to thank the fine tech support folks at Dreamhost for putting up with me while I tried to figure out WTF was going wrong.

On July 2nd I posted about how the geniuses working for Poblocki Sign Company covered my car with fine metal shavings. It's nearly a month later, so it wouldn't be totally unreasonable to expect such a small sign to be completed… and it finally is!

About a week after the original incident, they actually blocked off the area around the sign to, I'm assuming, avoid stupidly making a mess of even more cars. After several days of the area being blocked off, they finally returned and mounted a new electronic display board.

And then nothing.. until early last week when they HOOKED THE SIGN UP! I was amazed. Progress! Except the only thing it's been displaying since then is a single blinking pixel in the bottom right corner.

Today though! WOOOOOOAAAAH! The sign now shows the time, date, and temperature!

I'm guessing that now that it's displaying information, Poblocki's work is finished.

Almost a whole month to mount a 3'x4' display.

It took awhile, but they did a good job. It's too bad that they had to start things off so horribly. In my book, the Poblocki Sign Company are still a bunch of asshats.

So, apparently the city of West Bend, Wisconsin is gearing up for a BOOK BURNING.

Why? Because "All the books in the young-adult zone that deal with homosexuality are gay-affirming."

Obviously no "young adults" should be able to see material like this! </sarcasm>

These people must have missed the memo that you can't "catch the gay" just by seeing a book on a shelf.

Being gay isn't a choice, and the "young adults" age is one of the toughest periods for someone who is gay to go through. Having books that they can read and relate to can make all the negative pressures from the world around them just a little bit easier to handle. What kind of jack-ass would even consider removing them? Much less burning them?! Oh, and "gay-affirming" books can be read (and enjoyed) by heterosexuals too!

Burning books?! If we're going to jump back into the dark ages, to times where ignorance ruled… I would like to suggest that the people proposing the book burning are WITCHES, and the only reason to justify burning the books is to light the fires for the witch burning.