Reading the weather.com forecast for tomorrow, I was struck by the wording. I quote:

As upper-level energy begins to scream eastward, the area for potential severe weather will extend to southern Alabama, southern Georgia, and the panhandle of Florida through Wednesday afternoon.

OK. Now, I realize that weather forecasting isn’t exactly the sexiest thing on television, Hurricane Katrina notwithstanding; but I see a trend here. We can’t make a cold front as daring or controversial as something like The Shield… or can we? All we need to do is follow the examples from prime time TV… and throw in some of those porn-ad email spams; they seem pretty successfull… I can see the forecasts during sweeps week:

“A strong, thick cold front will be thrusting eastward from the fertile midwest tonight… It will mix with sultry, moist air from the Gulf and EXPLODE into the unsuspecting Southeast with a FURY not seen since last spring!! WATCH to see if the cast of 24 will survive this- and the SHOCKING ending that will leave you DAMP!!!”

Well, maybe not. There’s still hope for topless weather girls.

Being the paranoic control freak I am, I enjoy reviewing the website statistics generated by my hosting provider every now and again; if for no other reason to reassure myself that someone somewhere looks at the site. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell. Some of the things I look at are referrers and search terms… I think the photo gallery gets more hits than anything else; I know the hit count on the bloody tampon Halloween costume picture goes through the roof every October. Anyway, while perusing the referrers, I noticed one with a return link for the cpanel webalyzer statistics page of rustedtusks.com… someone checking their stats and referrer links. Except I recognized this URL… one of the web comics I read regularly, Slop. Waves to Mulefoot, who doesn’t know me, but I guess now knows I appreciate his comic enough to visit it daily.

Some of the search terms used that resulted in hits on this site:
grendel p10
bedroom webcams
firearms concealment techniques
grendel firearm p10
skull tattoo sketches
werewolf tattoos
painful thoughts tattoos
intel cs430
black and gray tattoos
kat s pet services

I feel sorry for the guy who searched for “bedroom webcams” and found mine. Not what you were expecting, eh? Heh. The firearms hits reminds me that I need to get off my ass and finish the handgun manual…

Well, at least somebody looks at the site. No, I’m not that insecure. Let’s face it, most weblogs are boring crap… who cares what you ate for breakfast today? I keep this one up because I’m too stubborn to care that no one cares what I had for breakfast. Which was the usual, a Coke and a Prilosec. You gotta wade through a lot of crap to find one gem on most ‘blogs. Maybe I’ll drop a gem or two every now and again; maybe not.

Holy crap, it’s cold. Yeah, I know it’s December, but damn. Thursday we accumulated about 1/4 inch worth or ice that knocked out power first to the house and then to the office, so I spent the day looking for trees blocking the road. Watching the transformer blow up outside the office was interesting, though. As usual, weather forecasters were baffled by southern winter weather predictions and smugly claimed that we wouldn’t get any ice the day before, then acted like they knew it was coming all along. I usually plan on the opposite of whatever the prediction is during the winter.

Coming up this week, firearms qualifications! Joy. All week out at the range, freezing my butt off in the morning, listening to people who should have been practicing complain about not being able to shoot. One would think that if you knew your job depended on being able to perform one action, you’d practice. Not so, apparently. And who will they blame when they can’t qualify? Me, of course. Let’s see how many of the 90 pass.

Well. At least I get Friday off for Christmas. Speaking of Christmas, this is the first one where I’ve had money to buy presents for the family.

Fixed some of the nagging CSS and table-layout issues that had been bothering me… of course, while they look fine in Firefox, they probably look cocked-up in Exploder. Oh, well… Daily News page and Webcam page got the treatment.

Still haven’t gotten the front LED turn signals yet, but here’s the accent lights, LED tail light and integrated LED rear turn signal. The only camera I’ve got is a fully-auto digital, so I really can’t adjust the aperture or shutter speed to show the tail light well. The turn signal is very yellow and very distinguishable.
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And work is… still insanely busy. For the next ten days, I’ll be filling out a detailed timesheet, noting what I’m doing every 15 minutes, as part of an efficiency study. Maybe… just maybe… it’ll show the need for a second person in training full-time.

Maybe.