Just wishing you people fun and fright on this devilish night!!!!!!!

I’ve waited long enough that almost everybody reading this already knows most of it. Oh well.

After jumping through legal and financial hoops for the last two months, Ben and I are finally taking over as CEO and President (respectively) of Site5, the finest web hosting provider in the known universe (tell your friends!). On top of that, we’re moving to Denver, where we just spent the last week looking for an apartment/reconnoitering/working.

Rather than bore you with any more complete sentences, here are some stats:

• Number of legal and financial hoops jumped through: 827,305
• websites hosted by Site5: >200,000
• Increase in my job stressfulness: ~100%
• Decrease in my driving time to mountains: ~93%
• Ptarmigans seen while hiking last week: 3
• Position our new building holds on the Denver Historic Register: 8
• Square feet of stained glass in our apartment: >100
• Days until I move: ~32
• JttM authors living in Denver: 3

So you’ve seen all the rumors floating around the interwebs that baby Trig might not really be Sarah Palin’s, but her daughter’s. Admittedly, they are mostly rumors, but they do make sense. For a concise rundown of “the facts” check out this blog post.

Now I don’t know for sure that Palin’s daughter missed school for 4-5 months leading up to Trig’s birth. I don’t know if when her water broke, Palin flew all the way to Alaska to give birth to her premature, down-syndrome child. No reputable news source is reporting those rumors. Yet, nobody seems to be denying them either.

I don’t know if these rumors are true, but they are certainly plausible. So here are my questions:
1. How likely do you think it is that Trig is really Bristol’s baby (I can’t wait for this made for TV movie)?
2. Why aren’t we hearing about this in the mainstream media?

It’s been around for a little while, but now that jttm is all up to date we can actually use it to post to our little blog. You can even use it to post photos using the iPhone’s camera (like this one of ben sitting on daniels floor).

I just wanted to post and say thanks to Joel for keeping this thing rolling for all these years. Here’s a newly-discovered ginger brew to you!

Also, I wanted to post because I was getting sad when I looked at the gadget on my netvibes page and saw no highlighted post titles.

One bit of tech news I’d like to throw up to the crowd is the arrival of the netbook.

About two months ago, my trusty Powerbook G4’s logic board went bad. I had already replaced the HD myself (out of Apple Care warranty), so I thought I’d just buy a logic board and try to DIY again. I found out that boards cost ~$500. A used PBG4 runs about $600 on eBay. That’s when I started looking at purchasing another machine. I’ve determined that I would want another Powerb…err…Macbook Pro, but I don’t have the extra $2000 just lying around to purchase some alumized sweetness. That put me searching for a Windows or Linux machine.

In my search, I struck upon a new-to-me market segment of notebook computers-netbooks. The first machine that caught my interest is put out by Asustek. It’s the Asus EEE pc. It was popularized after Asus tried to offer a viable entry in the OLPC project, but was unable to do so for the target price of $200, but they were able to do it for $300. These little dudes were made for internetting and basic operations, most of which running Linux Xandros.

Asus was putting out the only 9″ computer, then companies like Samsung, Acer, HP and now even Dell have jumped on the bandwagon. MSI, Asus, and Lenovo all offer 10″ versions, which were the ones I was looking at. The 9″-er’s keyboard is just too cramped for any long-term writing work, but not as bad as you would think. Standard specs is a 1.6Ghz Intel Atom chip designed specifically for this market, 1 GB RAM, either a smallish SSD or largish standard spinning platter, and most are shipping with Windows XP, but some are also coming with Linux distros like Xandros, SUSE, or Ubuntu (although rarer). Most have 3 USB ports, a multi-card reader, some sort of video out, Ethernet port and audio jacks. Most also include a 1.3 Megapixel built-in camera. No optical drive.

In the end, I went with a much larger Lenovo machine that has full-sized keyboard, DVD burner and various mulit-media options like 5.1 “surround” sound on-board speakers-largely because I do not own a TV and use my computer for all video entertainment. I’m only experiencing slight buyer’s remorse because this baby is a behemoth compared to my Powerbook, and just plain doesn’t feel as solid. It’s not a ThinkPad, it’s from Lenovo’s new consumer line, IdeaPad. I know that’s why the thing feels a little Dell-sy and only cost me $550 on TigerDirect. Oh, and I think some of the frustration is Windows-related. Yes, it runs Vista, which I firmly do not hate.

All this is to say/ask, do you guys have any experience with (1) netbooks, and which one or (2) Vista, and what do you think apart from it being bloated and requiring a minimum of 2GB of RAM.

Lastly, do you guys have any experience with more recent distros of Linux? I am considering Dual booting for simple tasks like web browsing.

Finally for real, are you guys aware of how awesome Open Office is?

I’ve been putting it off for way to long, but I finally got around to upgrading to the newest version of WordPress.

The site may not seem much different, but the inner workings should be much improved, and hopefully this will help us get the comment spam under control.

If you see something broken or if you are missing a feature that was there before, let me know

Or do they?

Many of you know DJ Murphy, so I’m posting a link to a YouTube video of his band’s first single. I’m also posting it because it’s good. It will be on sale at iTunes starting Oct. 13th.

Heypenny’s Parade.

Also, check out TV on the Radio’s new album - Dear Science. It’s floating towards the top of this year’s top-albums list.

Normally I wouldn’t care about watching VP debates, unless it was because I was participating in some silly drinking game. This time, though, I have to admit I was looking forward to a little schadenfreude at Palin’s expense. But this BBC article about her successes in earlier debates, has got me wondering if she won’t be as terrible as I hope (or more accurately, will be terrible in a way that her base will love and appreciate). Still, it should be an interesting debate; either could come out ahead, but by having done drastically different things.

Oh, btw, I am also participating in a silly drinking game for the debate. Here are my rules so far:

One drink for the following: “lip stick”, “hocky mom”, “washington insider(s)”, “golden parachute”, “wall street”, “main street.”

Anytime the proximity between Alaska and Russia is mentioned, take a drink from the person who is sitting closest to you. Or take a shot of vodka.

Every time Palin mentions one of her kids by name, take the number of drinks corresponding to that child’s number (i.e. 1 drink for Track, 2 drinks for Bristol, 3 drinks for Willow, 4 drinks for Piper and 5 drinks for Trig).

Every time Biden chuckles condescendingly at Palin, take a drink. Every time Biden chuckles condescendingly at moderator Gwen Ifill, take 2 drinks.

Every time Joe Biden mentions Scranton, PA, shotgun a domestic beer.

Anytime Palin uses the word “maverick”, flip two coins. if both are tails, everyone take a shot.

feel free to add suggestions in the comments.