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.

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?

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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!

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”.

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.