Todd's Blog

I can't wait until May 2005...

This has got to be the most embarrassing moment in the world.  Personally, I love when people get nailed lip-synching, because I despise fake pernormances.

I posted the video here

Man, thank God the Yankees won, but why did they have to make it so close?

DrEw, I know you want the curse of the Bambino broken, but me?  I take a special glee in seeing it sustained!

Yankees - Red Sox in HDTV tonight: doesn't get any better than that!

For those who haven't experienced a live sporting event in HDTV, it is AWESOME!!

Man, was that a great ending to the Yankees playoff game tonight!

I finally figured out a way to speed up the pernormance of the main Forum pages.  For example, if you select Pick 3 from the Forums drop-down menu, it used to take at least 5-7 seconds to display the page.  Now it takes less than a second to build the page.

The reason the Forum pages have been slowing down is the sheer number of messages in the database, plus all the features that appear on the page.

It took some clever SQL programming, but that's the fun part anyway!

Thanks to a LP member for sending this to me.  I only scored an 8, but in a way I think that's a good thing!

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Older Than Dirt Quiz: Count all the ones that you remember (not the ones you were told about).  Ratings are at the bottom.

1. Blackjack chewing gum
2. Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water
3. Candy cigarettes
4. Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles
5. Coffee shops or diners with tableside juke boxes
6. Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
7. Party lines
8. Newsreels before the movie
9. P.F. Flyers
10. Butch wax
11. Telephone numbers with a word prefix (OLive-6933)
12. Peashooters
13. Howdy Doody
14. 45 RPM records
15. S&H Green Stamps
16 Hi-fi's
17. Metal ice trays with lever
18. Mimeograph paper
19 Blue flashbulb
20. Packards
21. Roller skate keys
22. Cork popguns
23. Drive-ins
24. Studebakers
25. Wash tub wringers

If you remembered 0-5 = You're still young
If you remembered 6-10 = You are getting older
If you remembered 11-15 = Don't tell your age,
If you remembered 16-25 = You're older than dirt!

I posted a real funny video to my home page.  (It's 2MB, so dial-up users may want to sit back and relax while it downloads.)

Go to my Home Page, and click Eye Test Video.  The seniors here will get a particularly good laugh out of it.

I originally posted this in the discussion forum, but I'm not sure all the bloggers saw it.  So I'm posting it here.

I added a new option to the Control Panel that sends you an e-mail when someone posts a comment to your Blog.  This is useful because there's no easy way to see that someone has posted a comment, especially for older entries.

To enable the feature, click Control Panel, then click E-mail Settings, and then select the appropriate option check box.

Finally!  The credit card processing finally got worked out, so I'm happy to announce that Gold and Platinum memberships are now available.

Enjoy!

From Reuters (22 September 2004).  Sick...

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An Iranian woman, beaten every day by her husband, asked a court to tell him only to beat her once a week.

Maryam, the middle-age woman, said she did not want to divorce her husband because she loved him.

"Just tell him to beat me once a week ... Beating is part of his nature and he cannot stop it," Maryam told the court.

The Tehran court found the man guilty and banned him from beating the wife, the paper said.

"If I do not beat her, she will not be scared enough to obey me," the husband said.

Check out this story from Minnesota this morning:

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WABASHA, Minn. (AP) - With a State Patrol airplane overhead, a motorcyclist hit the throttle and possibly set the innormal record for the fastest speeding ticket in Minnesota history: 205 mph.

On Saturday afternoon, State Patrol pilot Al Loney was flying near Wabasha, in southeastern Minnesota on the Wisconsin border, watching two motorcyclists racing along U.S. Highway 61.

When one of the riders shot forward, Loney was ready with his stopwatch. He clicked it once when the motorcycle reached a white marker on the road and again a quarter-mile later. The watch read 4.39 seconds, which Loney calculated to be 205 mph.

"I was in total disbelief," Loney told the St. Paul Pioneer Press for Tuesday's editions. "I had to double-check my watch because in 27 years I'd never seen anything move that fast."

Several law enforcement sources told the newspaper that, although no official records are kept, it was probably the fastest ticket ever written in the state.

After about three-quarters of a mile, the biker slowed to about 100 mph and let the other cycle catch up. By then Loney had radioed ahead to another state trooper, who pulled the two over soon afterward.

The State Patrol officer arrested the faster rider, 20-year-old Stillwater resident Samuel Armstrong Tilley, for reckless driving, driving without a motorcycle license - and driving 140 miles per hour over the posted speed limit of 65 mph.

A search of speeding tickets written by state troopers, who patrol most of the state's highways, between 1990 and February 2004 shows the next fastest ticket was for 150 mph in 1994 in Lake of the Woods County.

Tilley did not return calls from the newspaper to his home Monday. A working number for him could not immediately be found by The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Only a handful of exotic sports cars can reach 200 mph, but many high-pernormance motorcycles can top 175 mph. With minor modifications, they can hit 200 mph. Tilley was riding a Honda 1000, Loney said.

Kathy Swanson of the state Office of Traffic Safety said unless Tilley was wearing the kind of protective gear professional motorcycle racers wear, he was courting death at 200 mph.

"I'm not entirely sure what would happen if you crashed at 200 miles per hour," Swanson said. "But it wouldn't be pretty, that's for sure."

Last night I launched the successor to BigGameLottery.com.

I have been hard at work on the new site for 4-5 months now, so it's been a bit of a journey.

Several months ago I was looking for a way to expand BigGameLottery.com, and I came up with the idea of hosting the other USA mutli-state game, Powerball.  The games are so similar that it made sense, and I've always had a lot of people asking for Powerball innormation.

So after deciding to add Powerball, I need a new name that could be used for both games, and still maintain the heritage of the old site's roots.

I picked USA Mega because the site is targeted at a much larger audience now, and the Mega refers to the USA's mega (big multi-state) games.

Because BigGameLottery.com has been around for more than 4 years, it has developed quite a few links out there.  My big challenge now is to get all those links changed to point to usamega.com.  It's going to take a while.

In addition to all the Lottery Post enhancements (including the new members), I've been hard at work developing the successor to BigGameLottery.com.

I'm probably going to launch the new site sometime later this week.

It is completely new, with a new name, completely new look, and a new GAME.  The biggest change of all is that it is going from just Mega Millions to Mega Millions AND Powerball.

This is an exciting new site, and I'm excited about the new look -- after 4 years of BGL looking the same.

To launch the site, I'll probably have a big contest (or sweepstakes).  Stay Tuned!

I got some really great tickets for the afternoon game on Labor Day vs. Tampa Bay.  three rows behind the Yankee dugout (first base side)!

I'll definitely be wearing my Lottery Post hat, so viewers may be able to catch their intrepid webmaster on TV.