It’s true. I read it in their code of conduct.

It’s the second most important thing. Behind Discretion, but before Safety. (Diversity before Safety- who knew vampires were Democrats!)

The code is technically called The Black Veil. It’s an optional code of conduct for people (who think they are vampires) to live by. And according to the History Channel show I saw last night, there are more of these freaks out there than I ever imagined. NYC alone has thousands of people who think they are Vampires.

You can see the whole vampire code here, on a site with a circa 1996 web design.

I thought about naming this post “Vampires Are Really Bad at Web Design,” but I decided to go with the diversity angle instead.

In case you weren’t thinking on clicking on that trainwreck of a link, I’ll excerpt the section on Discretion for you:

This lifestyle is private and sacred. Respect it as such. Do not make a sideshow of yourself. We do not have to prove ourselves to anyone. Appearing on public TV to tell the world that you drink blood is useless attention-getting. It gets a negative reaction for the whole community. Our place is in the shadows; our greatest protection from small-minded humanity is the fact that they do not believe we exist. Someday they may be ready for us to reveal ourselves to them, but that time is not now.

Do not hide from your nature, but never show it off to those who won’t understand.

Now go click the link already. Unless your soul is not ready to accept the truth.

Oh, and while you’re there, check out the Teen Vampire section, complete with a section on how to get away with wearing sunglasses in school.

Source: The History Channel

To get Tetris Party for the Wii to connect properly (when you’re trying to play with friends), you have to set port forwarding on your router. At least wii did.

Because all routers are different I can’t give specific instructions, but I can give you a general idea.

First, you have to connect to your router. To access the router interface, type the IP address of the router in the address bar of your web browser. If you don’t know the address of your router, you can get it from your computer. Go to Start–> Run–> Type CMD and hit enter –>The DOS window will open. Type ipconfig /all and hit enter. The address of your router will be the same as the default gateway. Ususally it is 192.168.1.1

Now, you have to get the IP address of your Wii. Get it from the router. The router should have a function called “DHCP Clients” or “Connected Devices” or “Client List” or something like that. Look for the Wii. It’s usually 192.168.1.3 or .2 or .4 or something.

Next, you have to find the router’s Port Forwarding function. It should be in the Firewall section of the router settings. It may be called something else. On mine it’s called “Virtual Servers.”

Add a new entry to this section. Call it Wii or something similar. Set the IP address to the same as the Wii, and then for the port range, enter 1 for the low end and 65535 for the high end. Your router may not allow 65535. If it doesn’t, pick a lower number like 65534. The type should be UDP only.

That should fix it. You may have to restart your router or the Wii for everything to work, but I didn’t. If it still doesn’t work then you probably have to place the Wii into the router’s DMZ area, and that’s typically not a good idea.

Now it is possible that next time you turn on the Wii it will get a different IP address from the router. So if you get the connection errors again, go back to the router and use it to look up the Wii’s IP address. Then go back to port forwarding and change the settings to point to the new IP address.

When you add a table to a post on blogger (as we did with the previous two posts) it gets rendered with a bunch of annoying additional spaces before it. That’s because the line breaks in your table’s HTML are turned into <BR> tags when you save the post.

So, a workaround is to define a style that suppresses the breaks for the span of the table. To do that, go into the HTML view of the blogger window and paste this code before your <table> tag:

<style type=”text/css”>.nobrtable br { display: none }</style>
<div class=”nobrtable”>

Then, post the end div tag after your end table tag, like so:

</table><div>

All together, an example would look like this:

<style type=”text/css”>.nobrtable br { display: none }</style>
<div class=”nobrtable”>
<table>
<tbody><tr>
<td>My Cell Content</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>

If you do this, you can’t use a <BR> tag to make a line break in your table. You have to use <P> tags or put your content in lists.

This is not an original solution. I got it from this guy. But he got it from somewhere else too. So, mostly I’m just posting it here so that the next time that I post a table, I know where to find it.

Jeff and I went to a plant nursery a few days ago because we are trying to decide what type of plants we should have in our back yard.

There are so many trees to choose from. We could have:

	Pomegranate- I’m still upset about an argument I had with my English teacher about the hidden significance of this particular fruit. For those of you who did not know this- anytime you read about a pomegranate- it means sex/girl parts. Yeah- I don’t get it either. Anyway, the guy showed us the tree and pulled the fruit off, cracked it in half and implored us to try it. There are these little seed things on the inside that are surrounded by a white membrane (like the stuff between orange peel and the orange). They are usually sweet if the fruit is ripe, more bitter if it isn’t quite ready yet.
	Lime- Key Limes or also known as Mexican Limes. Corona sized I’m told, but not usually the type you get in the grocery store. Mexican limes are round, not oval. If you let them ripen on the tree long enough, they become really sweet so you can just eat them like an orange. This tree is most promising, especially after last week’s successful foray into cilantro-lime rice.
	Palm Trees- oh sooo many varieties. It turns out that palm trees are heavily manicured and they actually produce fruit. They cut the fruit and the old fronds off during the manicure. The guy said that the fruit isn’t poisonous, but it probably wouldn’t taste very good. The fruit looks like little grapes.
	Orange- We just planted an orange tree- but we learned so much more about them. Orange trees are actually just cut off branches from bigger orange trees, not grown from seeds. I thought this was crazy! And, aside from the chilly MN climate it explains why my planted orange seeds never turned into anything.
	Apple- For most apple trees, you have to have a male and a female tree, otherwise you won’t get any apples. If I was going to plant an apple tree, it would be a Honeycrisp and the climate in AZ just isn’t suited for it. Boo.
	Almonds and Pecans- turns out that they grow from trees. I never gave it much thought, but if asked on ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire’ my final answer for ‘Where do Almonds and Pecans came from?’ would have been “The ground- like peanuts.”
	Fig- I saw the jungle Planet Earth where the whole jungle fights over fig trees, but this is a different variety. This tree has really cool looking leaves, but the fruit left me undecided. I had never tasted a fig aside from the Newton variety, so for those of you like me who have never tried a fig- it tasted kind of like a plum and a peach mixture, looks a little freaky on the insides.

File this under things I used to know and forgot, or things I vaguely know.

There are two different types of Eclipses, Lunar and Solar. That much I knew, but the details were what eluded me. Hence, the post.

I’ve never seen either type, and I guess it will be a long time until I do. 2008 was a good year for eclipses in North America, with both a Total Lunar and Total Solar Eclipse occurring. Drat.

Anyway, I put together a handy-dandy chart that explains the types of eclipses, for your reference and mine. I used a lot of sources for this one, but found Mr. Eclipse’s site particularly helpful. I left out most of the nerdtacular detail, so go there if you’re seeking info on penumbras, etc.

	Lunar	Solar
Diagram
What’s Going On	The moon passes through part of the Earth’s shadow. Only occurs during a Full Moon.	The moon passes between the Earth and the Sun. Only occurs during a New Moon.
Types (click for example pics)	Total: The moon turns red. Partial: Part of the moon has a shadow cast on it.	Total: The big one- The Moon blocks out the sun completely. Partial: The Moon blocks part of the Sun. Annular: Like a Total, but when the Moon is too small in the sky and only blocks the middle of the sun.
Duration	In a Total Eclipse, the “total” part lasts about an hour, the whole event is about 3 hours. For a partial, about 2 hours.	About 2 to 10 minutes
When/Where	Only visible at night. Everyone on the night side of Earth can see it.	Only parts of the Earth that are in the direct path get to see it. During a Total Eclipse, some parts of Earth see a Total, while others see a Partial.
How Often	0-3 Times per year. An average of 1.5 per year for the last few thousand years.	2 – 5 Times per year. Usually 2 per year.
Next One	December 2010	Some Time After 2015 in North America

Source: Mr. Eclipse’s primer on Solar and Lunar eclipses, space.com, and wiki.

Many Best Western and Choice Hotels (Comfort Inn, Clarion, Sleep Inn, etc.) will allow cats to stay with you when you travel, and they only charge $10 for the honor. (For comparison, the Homewood Suites we stayed in during our relocation charged us $100.)

The policy varies by property, so best to call the actual location before you book.

Knowing which hotels are cat-tolerant is important when planning an 1800 mile cat-inclusive road trip.

I’ll be sure to post a review of the Quality Inn East in Amarillo, Texas, for those readers who may happen to find themselves there in the future.

Source: PetsWelcome.com

Cloud Seeding has always been one of those pseudo-sciences, despite the claims of the Chinese during the Olympics.

But a new study has proposed that we may have been overlooking a critical aspect of rain making in our previous seeding endeavors: rain making bacteria.

A scientist from Louisiana State University has detected a certain type of bacteria that he claims is present in snow all over the world, and he’s thinking that it gets there from the clouds. He’s also thinking that the bacteria is part of the rain making process.

I sure hope so. Because, as you may or may not know, we’re in the 14th year of drought around here…

Source: Nerdular Nerdance

We’re in the 14th year of drought here in Phoenix. I read that statistic every time it rains. Or when it may rain. Or when it was supposed to rain, but didn’t. Or if someone dares to say rain in passing conversation somewhere within the city limits. It rained over the last two days, so mentions of the drought are through the roof.

Every time I read it, I find myself wondering- if you never get any rain, how do you know if you’re in a drought? If only there were some type of world wide web of information out there to answer these questions.

Fortunately, there is. And this article does quite a good job of explaining it:

Tony Haffer with the National Weather Service, chair of the monitoring committee, defines a drought by looking at our current rainfall stations and river flows for the current year, and comparing them to data from the last 30 years.

If the current levels are at or below 15 percent of the 30 year average, then we are in a drought.

Droughts are also put into two different categories including a 12-month and a 48-month category.

We are above average in the 12-month category this year, but still in the moderate range for the 48-month period, or long-term drought status.

Because of the chronic low water conditions, water conservation is kind of big deal here. But not as big a deal as I expected.

The city of Phoenix does a great job of systemic water conservation, and they claim we have enough water to last 50 years of drought conditions.

In fact, water use in the Phoenix metro area is only up 35% in the last 25 years, despite a 77% growth in population over the same period. GPCD (gallons per capita per day), has been reduced by about 21 percent over the same period.

Source: Phoenix City Web Site and the article I excerpted above, which actually gets the water use statistics wrong

Jean Paul Gaultier is a fashion designer from France. We carried some of his stuff at Macy’s. He designs things like this:

But he also designs things like this:

And This:

Yep, Jean Paul Gaultier was the costume designer on The Fifth Element.

Source: The credits from The Fifth Element, which is way better than Blade Runner

Someone repeated this urban legend to me a few weeks ago, and it just took me a long time to get around to looking it up.

A few problems with this story: First of all, meat is not sold with grade letters. Second, all meat sold for human consumption in the US is edible. There are mandatory inspections of meat plants to ensure this.

There is also a voluntary additional inspection that can be performed to label beef as Prime, Choice, or Select. This process mainly exists so the meat providers can have independent verification of the meat quality for the customers who demand the highest quality cuts (like high end restaurants). But when I talk about quality, I mean things like age and marbling. Things that make a big difference between a $20 steak and a $50 steak, but nothing that will matter in your soft taco.

Bottom line, the quality difference is mostly about taste. And if your burrito beef didn’t taste so good, you wouldn’t go to Taco Bell so much.

Eggs, on the other hand, are sold with grade letters (AA, A or B). Those letters again correspond to the overall quality of the egg, but all are edible. The less perfect eggs are usually just shipped off for industrial baking use.

Source: Snopes. For more reference, go to this site here, and/or this one here, but warning- both get into more detail than you probably ever wanted about your steak, and use the word carcass even more than I’m comfortable with. For eggs, go here.