This is where we'll put up items we've forgot to mention on our show, extended rants, pictures, etc. If you'd like to subscribe to this page, click on the XML logo on the left. Enjoy!

Today I finished the EA Sports Active 30 Day Challenge. Yea! As a master of creating excuses to avoid physical activity, it’s a pretty important milestone for me. The results? Well, I haven’t experienced a Biggest Loser-esque physical transformation, but weight loss wasn’t really my goal. I was aiming more for a general increase in my fitness level. And maybe getting two tickets to the gun show.

So, I’m done. It’s over. But what now? In the final “pep talk” video, Bob Greene suggested taking the 30 Day Challenge again at a higher intensity level, or creating a custom workout routine. I’m thinking I’ll be doing the latter, because schedule-wise, I won’t be anywhere near home in the next month. I’ll just be content for now with the fact that I was able to commit to a workout program for longer than five minutes, and that I didn’t smash my TV while attempting jump squats and boxing drills in the living room.

Thought I’d check in on the kids back home again today – Oh! Would you look at the weather.

I wasn't, Grrrrrreat!

In episode #2, “Ladies Night”, who was the President not one of three college graduates could name? His was the shortest presidency…mostly because he acted like a man and wouldn’t put a damn coat on.

Bonus: Who was the guest host?

Ohio man charged with drunken driving on bar stool

NEWARK, Ohio (AP) – Authorities in Ohio say a man has been charged with drunken driving after crashing his motorized bar stool.

Police in Newark, 30 miles east of Columbus, say when they responded to a report of a crash with injuries on March 4, they found a man who had wrecked a bar stool powered by a deconstructed lawn mower.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2009-03-31-bar-stool-dui_N.htm

I have got to quit watching “The Prince and Me” when it comes on. Dammit Luke Mably is hot – but not a Dane! Impostor.

Yay! Just talking about my love of Demetri Martin on the last Borderline. A funny hipster type sans pretension, and more wit in his little finger than the whole of Coldplay * shudder, that was unfair *.  It’s a based on a true story about Woodstock and the memoir of Elliot Tiber. Count me in opening week.

This is the she-wolf statue that Lynn brought back for me from Rome. Unbeknown to either of us, it changes color like a Generra t-shirt in the dryer. After some unscientific experimentation, I believe it gets pinker when the air is very humid. No matter what, it’s ridiculous and fantastic. Best… souvenir… ever!

As a professed animal lover, I hate to hate on anything, but the gd squirrels are back. I had a brief respite after the landlord put metal grills over the HOLES in the house exterior (seems to me a grander reparation would be appropriate). I had been re-reading Harry Potter waaaay to close to bedtime and was dreaming about Dementors clawing the flesh off my arms. I woke up to hear the rhythmic scraping and clawing wasn’t coming from from the skeletal hands in my dream, but from a pretty-tailed rat attempting to burrow into my room. * shudder *

And yes Lynn, I got out the Swiffer. Didn’t help.

I just received this terrifying piece of junk mail today. Little tip for the sender: using red underlining 30 times in a row doesn’t add emphasis. Rather, it make your envelope look like a blackmail letter written by a 4 year old. And call me skeptical, but somehow I don’t think a blessing from God is coming via a form letter addressed to “Resident”.

It’s been about a week since I flipped the switch and moved our site to the new server. Everything seems to be working (fingers crossed!), so I thought I’d post a little something about the redesign.

First off, I’d like to make it clear that I am lazy. Extremely lazy. There used to be a time when I thought nothing of spending days to hand-code a web site, but now I just don’t have the patience. So if someone else has a better idea, I’d rather use their code then pull my hair out trying to do the same thing by myself. Today’s open-source Internet is perfect for my lazy tendencies, but I still want to give credit where it’s due. So here’s a list of software, plugins, and resources that I used to redesign bdline.net.

The Basics

• WordPress – the last version of bdline.net was created with software that generated static HTML pages. The result looked like a blog, but in reality it was a mess. Now we’re running the site with WordPress, which is 100% better. Finally we have a true dynamic web site, not something that looks like it was hacked together with string and tin cans.
• A Small Orange – our web host. We don’t have giant server needs for bdline.net, but the switch to a A Small Orange gives us more options at half the cost of what we were paying before. That savings is going into the Borderline Booze & Bail Fund.
• Theme – For the new look of bdline.net, I ended up modifying an existing theme, Ambient Glo by Nathan Parikh. The main changes were modifying the header image, removing the 3rd column, and tweaking the fonts a bit.

WordPress Plugins

• FeedBurner FeedSmith – Redirects all traffic from the default WordPress RSS feeds automagically to our FeedBurner feed.
• Flickr Photo Album for WordPress – This is a two-for-one deal. The plugin accesses your Flickr account and lets you easily post your pics with WordPress. It also comes with a sidebar widget to display Flickr photos, which I think looks better than the standard Flickr badge.
• Get Recent Comments – WordPress has a sidebar widget to display recent comments, but this plugin does a better job.
• Swift SMTP – Our e-mail is handled by Google, so this plugin lets us use Google’s servers to send comment notifications.
• User Photo – See that photo of me in the headline? It’s there because of this plugin.
• Viper’s Video Quicktags – The WordPress post editor thinks it knows more than you do when writing a post, rewriting the code and making it nearly impossible to embed Flash videos. This plugin fixes that issue.
• WP Super Edit – Another plugin for the post editor. Adds some nice options for formatting that normally are not available.

Miscellaneous

• Podcast Pickle Player – there are a lot of Flash players out there that read podcast feeds, but the Pickle Player is the nicest one I’ve seen. Plus, we love the Pickle.