Surprisingly, banana/pineapple coffee is drinkable.

Note that I did not say "great," or anything, but it is drinkable. A large portion of this might be the fact that the only place I've ever seen it is at the Dole plantation, sold as Waialua Coffee, and Waialua Coffee is grown right down the road from there - in other words, it's probably starting out as very good coffee.

Other information we gained when Katie came to visit: Don Quijote, a Japanese "Super Walmart," is pretty cool. More mochi than man could ever want. Natto-flavored chips (no one was willing to try, mind you). The funky Japanese lightly-carbonated drinks with glass beads as seals. And happily for me, mabo tofu at less than $4.

The penguin-warrior they use as a logo disturbs me, as does the happy-rainbow world that looks like something straight out of Katamari that's on their front page.

My daughter will be born in the same building as the 44th President of the United States.

OK, so everything should be fine now. I've switched to using Mollom for spam filtering, and also tweaked the layout a little bit (lower max comments on page) so it won't get massively huge.

For the most part, banning just a few IPs did most of the work, anyway.

Incidentally, the amount of forum spammers out there is a little insane. Right now, the few IPs I banned (maybe about 10-15, plus three blocks: 94.102.48.0/20, 195.225.176.0/22, and 78.157.142.0/24 based on Spamhaus reports) are generating ~1K hits per day here. Google and Yahoo bots are about 50 hits/day, and real hits are probably about 10/day or so.

Mostly from people searching for how to build a wooden bed, and bizarrely, rambutan. Weird thing is that most of the comment spam is targeting the "I Am Legend" page. Bizarre.

I was going to hold off mentioning this because I'm going to get a DVD of the game to Anna (and anyone else who missed it - though I still need your address), but I figured I should link to it sooner.

This is from before and after the game, which was really cool of ESPN. On a similar note, there was also a pretty cool story on ESDBS about Joe Paterno as well.

The second read is really interesting - the first statement is "Joe Paterno is dying in front of our eyes", and Jamie's initial reaction was "why do they have to say that?" and then I think she realized: because it's true. And in some ways, it's foolish to ignore it, or feel sad about it. People die - their lives end. It's simply true. It's far more important to recognize what someone is doing, and how they are choosing to spend the remainder of their lives, and appreciate that, than it is to bury your head in the sand and pretend it isn't happening.

It's also interesting to me because, quite simply, I don't really plan on retiring. I love what I do. If I didn't, I would do something else. I do what I do because I think I can contribute something, not because they pay me money. That's just a nice benefit. I think it might be a bit inherited - I think it's a teacher's mentality more than anything else, and it's a similar thing here. Paterno's said "I'll keep coaching so long as I feel I've got something to contribute," and I salute him for that.

WE ARE!

I'm glad I live in a pointless state for this election, but unsurprisingly, the politics coverage is still absolutely grating. Seriously, it's scary to hear what some people think.

Jamie played a story today of some Republican young woman who's head of a "national prayer group for the Republican party." I'm sorry. That scares me. A lot. You don't pray for a political party to win. You don't. Democracy is not about winning or losing.! Democracy is about the will of the people being represented in the leadership.

If a Democrat gets elected, and you think that's wrong, do you know what to do? Move - because the reason the Democrat got elected is because most of the states in the country wanted him to be President. You don't 'pray' for that to happen. You can pray for people to see that your candidate is better, but honestly, praying so that people will see that your new way of taxing people is better than their new way of taxing people is, uh, just a little bit stupid. I can think of just a few better things to spend your time doing.

Similarly, I've been looking at a few websites that try to analyze the race statistically, and one of them suggested that since the national race is pretty close to done (and it pretty much is, if you look at the polling - it's ridiculously unlikely that Obama won't win), you should put your money to certain "key" races in the country, because it'll "do the most good" there. Sounds reasonable - well, it might, if it wasn't wrong.

You know what? You don't have a right to influence an election in an area you don't live in. You don't. It's their right to decide. If they elect a Republican, or a Democrat, that's their choice. You don't live there. You don't know their concerns. You don't get a say in their government.

Democracy isn't about winning or losing, and I think that's getting lost today.

So I apparently screwed up something when I updated the spam module, and had to disable it (by force). So comments by anonymous users (i.e. everyone else) are disabled for now.

I'm going to have to do something about spam anyway, since the Drupal spam module just wasn't cutting it.

Obviously, though, pretty busy around here, so that'll take a bit of a backseat. Comment over on livejournal if you want - here for Pat, here for Jamie.

Yeah, this is long. Always tends to be when I get a bee in my bonnet about something, huh? What's funny is I'm not normally the 'conspiracy theory' type, but still, this situation makes me wonder.

Went out to this free "Positively Pregnant" class by Kapiolani Medical Center. It was okay, in general. Informed us about a few things we didn't know about, but in general most of the stuff Jamie had already heard from the doctor or read in pamphlets anyway.

One of the things that did catch my ear was this suggestion about bis-phenol A (BPA), which had a bit of a flurry of news back in April. In the baby store we went to yesterday to start to get an idea for stuff to put on a baby registry, I saw a bunch of plastic baby bottles which were labelled as "free of BPA," and that raised eyebrows. But I figured it was some random toxin that normal bottles might have, so they had specific "baby safe" bottles. Turns out that's not the idea. BPA is found in pretty much any polycarbonate plastic - so any hard plastic bottle (think Nalgene bottles). The class was actually suggesting that Jamie avoid them as well.

This raised my huh? response, because to support her point, the nurse brought up an NTP (National Toxicology Program) report on BPA, which stated that there was "minimal risk" to infants and "negligible risk" to pregnant women. So immediately, I'm like "what? if there's negligible and minimal risk, why are we worrying about this again?" So home I go, and as it turns out, I'm timely in looking this stuff up: the FDA just released a draft report saying that BPA is safe, as in as safe as anything else we use to prepare food (Apparently the European Food Safety Authority concluded the same thing as well about a month ago).

Come January, the name of this website will be too short.

I was recently just checking out some NFL fan blogs today, and I saw that sadly, Daniel Sepulveda, the Steelers punter, was injured and is out for the year. What really caught me, though, is that it was a random Steelers fan's blog, and they used the term "ROBO-PUNTER" to describe Sepulveda.

Why did that catch me? Because I coined that term, about 2 years ago after the 2006 draft, on a Football Outsiders thread. FO fans and staff caught onto it (they even have a jersey/t-shirt), and it spread. One of the writers there (Ryan Wilson) is a Steelers fan and writes several prominent Steelers blogs, and started referring to Sepulveda as ROBO-PUNTER. Other fans caught on, and a nickname was born. Doubt me? See the thread here.

Crazy how things spread.