With apologies to R.E.M.

That’s great. It started with an attack, birds and tweets, Twitter phishing…
And rubber stamps could be all banned.
Ice in a snowy storm, the ice will keep us warm.
Small caps frustrate us, Speedcat gets blown to dust.
Boxing up a broken heart,
Without a ladder climbing branchy green-leaved tree–don’t look down.
Spammy product pitch, it’s cold outside, that just ain’t right, a government in need of an overhaul, right.
Aim for stars and going on a furn’ture quest, the doggy’s getting much too big.
Footprints left in the sky, ordered, poised, ready force.
Look at that space doggy! Weird, eh?
Oh no, Tokyo, ‘magination, common weed, but that’ll do.
Keep chickens, pen chickens.
World sees doppler shift, seeing dog in motion.
Space boys with the money and the Enterprise in the light - right…
See 12 stacking men, mem’ries fading, ball peen hammer,
Unintensified.

It’s the end of the year as we know it.
It’s the end of the year as we know it.
It’s the end of the year as we know it, and I feel fine.

Banana republic.
Don’t get caught off–surprise, surprise!
Say goodbye, wordless, stifle your freedom speech.
Goodness all, it’s full of stars. Bar code this, bar code that.
Every pict a banana. Banana borg assimilate.
Rain and thunder, it’s Hammer Time!
Speed up, speed up.
Go do some math, math… Uh oh.
This means no hue, lesions few.
Cloudy skies, fight! fight!
It’s guaranteed! It’s guaranteed! It’s guaranteed–I lie!
Making a freaky fruit, spamming me with silly spam.
And I write verse.

It’s the end of the year as we know it.
It’s the end of the year as we know it.
It’s the end of the year as we know it, and I feel fine.

I’ve been working on a site redesign for a re-launch of a long-neglected website. I’ve been working on it for a couple months. (Okay, longer than that. I did the logo redesign back in July of last year.)

Overall, I’ve liked it, but something wasn’t quite right. It was, I thought, the best way I could figure out to do it and so I kept on it. But, I didn’t quite go full steam ahead, because, deep down, I really wasn’t happy with it.

It just wasn’t quite right.

Well, last night after whining about it on Twitter, and tweeting with another designer (@DillingerKovach), I came up with a solution.

That required that I change a number of graphics, which I did last night.

This morning, I uploaded the new graphics and made the necessary coding changes.

The result was pretty good.

Then I tweaked it.

And that was better.

But something still wasn’t quite right.

So, I undid most of what I did. And did a little tweaking.

It pretty much put me back to where I started, except with some minor changes, the new graphics and a change in color.

And that made all the difference.

So, now I can more comfortably move ahead with it. Now it looks cool. The way I wanted.

Probably will miss my January 1st relaunch date, but maybe I can be close.

Anyway, so by now you know how I like teasers, so that’s what you’re going to get for now, which can be seen above.

Of course, those of you who volunteered as testers last week, please remain quiet. Let everyone else guess.

This is JD’s blog:

Purty, eh?

Black text on white, easy to read, right?

So, you read one of JD’s entertaining posts, and you want to leave a comment. Well, sometimes, unless you’re lucky enough to be first, you want to read the other comments people have left. Sometimes, you’ll want to re-read portions of the post so you know what you are commenting on.

And that’s where JD’s blog’s hate comes into the picture.

The blog doesn’t want me to do that because, when I go to leave a comment, all that purty black on white text turns into grey text on a blue background.

Doesn’t sound too bad? Well, have a look:

Clearly, if JD’s blog was doing this to everyone, people would be saying, “Hey, JD, how’s come we can’t read comments or the original post anymore? Why’s it turn from a nice black on white to a largely unreadable grey on blue? What up with that, JD?”

But, you don’t see that, do you? Nope. People happily plod along leaving comments with nary a concern about being able to read the page.

Which means her blog is only doing that to me.

Me.

Apparently, her blog has singled me out for some reason. Maybe it’s because I’ve pre-stolen too many titles from JD? Would the blog care about that?

The mind boggles.

In the meantime, I guess you can be happy that JD’s blog hates me so it doesn’t have to hate you.

But, if your day should come, well, I don’t know what to tell you, but I’ll be glad it’s not me anymore.

The answer to yesterday’s “Mystery Photo 5000: What Is It?” is an orange.

But, it’s a very special orange: a football orange.

See how it’s not quite round like a normal orange, but almost football shaped?

Cool, eh?

Maybe I should have put it up on eBay…

What is this?

Go on. Guess.

You’ll never get it.

Not in a million years will you get it.

What is it?

The average income in the U.S. is $25,000 per year. Assuming a 40-hour work week, that works out to be $12.02 per hour.

The average lifespan in the U.S. is 78 years. Assuming you start work at 18 and retire at 65, that’s 47 working years. That’s 97,760 working hours using a 40-hour work week.

In 2009, the federal government in the U.S. is estimated to have spent somewhere around $3 trillion (varies, depending on source, but $3 trillion is about the “average” figure I’ve come across). That would be $3,000,000,000,000.

It would take 24,958,403,000 hours to pay that off.

It would take 255,303 people working their entire lives to pay that off.

And that’s just this year’s spending.

To pay it off in one year’s time, it would take 11,999,232 average people giving 100% of their income.

In other words, if you figure money spent in terms of hours worked, federal spending in 2009 is the equivalent of nearly 12 million people working all year and not keeping any of their money.

Little Too was so excited about her Christmas present that she couldn’t contain herself in the picture.

Here’s Little Too playing with her new toy yesterday, right after opening it (with help).

This was before she stole one of Little One’s toys.

Merry Christmas everyone! (Redux!) (Partially.)

Little Too had her first second Christmas. She got to open her first present first. So, after that, she was curious about presents being opened, hoping there would be more stuff for her. (Recycled paragraph. Great for the digital environment.)

She stole one of Little One’s presents and later stole the other one. Plus, neither of the dogs would let the cat play with her toy, until much later. But, once poor Ink Spot got to playing with her toy, the dogs chased her into the basement and Little Too stole her toy. (New paragraph. Kind of like virgin paper, but it’s not paper. It’s electronic which is okay. Really.)

Maybe she can play after the dogs go to bed. (New line.)

Hope everyone else is having a merry Christmas. (Recycled but still relevant.)

You can read a little about Little Too’s first Christmas. (Recycled.)

Pretty much sums up where things are headed…