Month: January 2011

Taco Bell’s Meat

On By Michel McDonaldIn Food, News2 Comments

I heard something the other day on the news about some allegations that Taco Bell’s meat is 35% meat and they were saying something about the rest being soy or something.  I don’t remember exactly what they said but I don’t listen to any of that BS.

I’ve been eating Taco Bell my entire life and if it’s the same stuff that they’ve always had before then I know it’s not going to kill me.  If anything, I eat it so often that I have built an immunity to anything that might be in the meat lol.

Guess what we had for dinner tonight?

The Wall Street Journal posted this article today about it.  The meat isn’t 100% beef, it’s actually 88%, the rest is water and spices which gives it flavor.  Go ahead and read the article.

I worked at Taco Bell when I was 17 years old.  Although I didn’t make the beef I don’t really know what spices are in it or how it’s made but I do know how the refried beans are made because I was there early in the morning to blend the beans that were being pressure cooked all night long.  I also shredded the cheese and cut the tortillas into triangles for the cinnamon crispas which they don’t even sell anymore.  They eventually put me on the line so I was assembling the food but that’s as far as I went, I quit after a month and went to Wendy’s lol.

So whatever false information you hear online about Taco Bell’s meat, ignore it because it’s not true.

An Idiot Abroad on Science Channel

On By Michel McDonaldIn TV3 Comments

I totally forgot this new show An Idiot Abroad was supposed to be on today. It’s on during one of my shows but being on basic cable it repeats. I thought about it tonight and luckily it was on demand so I could watch it instantly.

If you haven’t seen The Ricky Gervais show on HBO then you probably don’t really understand why they are making fun of him on this show. I have only really seen a few episodes, last night I watched 2 episodes on HBO On Demand to catch up a little on the 2nd season so I can prepare myself for what I’m going to see in An Idiot Abroad.

All I have to say is that Karl Pilkington is HILARIOUS! Some of the things he says is so out there that you just can’t help but to laugh out loud, literally out loud. So loud that your neighbors are like, what the hell is he laughing about over there?

Other times during tonight’s episode I was thinking, if he’s an idiot for saying some of the things he said then I must be an idiot too because I would’ve said the same thing. I mean for instance, he was in the bathroom in China and there were no toilets, actually there was 1 toilet but I’m sure it was for older people who can’t squat. The other stalls were just holes in the ground, or ground level toilets. There were walls separating them but no doors.

I agree with him on the doors part, but mostly I agree with the squatting thing. I am so glad we don’t have those kind of toilets here in the states. Also, no toilet paper… what’s up with that? Can you imagine going to the bathroom and not cleaning it up then going back to work with a stench? Uh no, I don’t think so.

We do have stalls here in Bakersfield in the parks that don’t have doors.  When I was riding my bike to the bike trail for exercise, sometimes I would have to go really bad and trust me, that’s the only way I will ever use a park bathroom, if I just can’t wait to get home.  I’d go in there and there are no doors.  Sure the walls are really high but that doesn’t help me.  I need a door for privacy.  What if someone walks in and passes me?  So I use the one on the far end so nobody can pass me then I have my bike kind of sitting in there so I can hang onto the front wheel if someone tries to steal it.  So imagine me sitting on the toilet while holding my front wheel with no door on the stall.

I don’t think that Karl is an idiot, I mean to the degree they are calling him one. I think that he says some pretty smart things and I applaud him for being able to go out of his comfort zone against his will and just deal with it and do what he was told because there is no way I would’ve been able to do that.

The food alone is a reason I wouldn’t be able to do that. I have so many food issues, I’d end up starving. Or I’d end up getting fatter off all the potato chips. I’d have to pack loads of energy bars just to keep me from starving when I refuse to eat the frogs or the bugs.

Well this is a show I will be adding to my TV page I so I don’t forget to watch it every week.  It’s on Saturday nights at 10 e/p on the Science channel.

Update 2011-02-02: I spelled his name wrong, it’s Karl, not Carl.  Who’s the idiot now?  It looks like I am.

My Twittascope For Today is Laughable

On By Michel McDonaldIn Blog1 Comment

Here is my horoscope today from Twittascope:

“Someone may come to your rescue today, whether you need the assistance or not. But in any case, accepting help is wise because it can deepen the bond of friendship. Don’t worry if another person’s involvement actually reduces your efficiency. Ultimately, it’s not about increasing your production; it’s about improving your relationships.”

I think it’s hilarious because what could I possibly need anyone to help me with? I mean seriously. Does someone think they can help me copy my blog posts over to my blog? It’s not happening. Even if someone did help me, they wouldn’t be as emotionally invested in or as passionate about my blog as I am. So they would do a half ass job at best.

No amount of help is going to truly help me because this is something that will probably take months to do even with help. I’ve already copied over 200 posts from YouSayToo and have over 400 more to copy. Then I have my Blogspot site that has all of my posts from my earlier days when I first started blogging and I’ve already started pulling posts from there last night.

I can import from Blogspot and I already tried but only 60 out of 901 imported so I ended up deleting what was imported because nothing was right. Everything was double spaced with no titles, descriptions, tags or categories and there were errors in some of the posts because I didn’t use spell check at the beginning.

But I could be wrong, maybe the horoscope meant some other job like helping me clean the lawn or something. Who knows what it really means. Even then, I really don’t care enough about the lawn right now since the grass isn’t growing. It’s fine until April when I start watering.

Then again, when has my horoscope ever been right? I just don’t think it applies to me today. But it is funny that anyone would want to help me with anything. Especially where it says that accepting help will deepen the bond of friendship because I really don’t have that many friends outside of the computer. Unless it means a computer friend wants to help me with something? Hmmmm, what could they help me with? Hmm let’s see… Nothing lol.

Stupid horoscopes…

Wait, just wait for an update, I’ll probably be coming back in a few hours or maybe later tonight saying “OMG it happened, someone asked to help me” lol.

PlayStation NGP Debut Trailer

On By Michel McDonaldIn Gadgets, Games, PSP1 Comment

The PlayStation NGP debut trailer looks pretty cool but it doesn’t tell me everything about the future for the PSP. Check this video out that comes straight from the G4 website.

http://www.g4tv.com/lv3/50948

I did see something about the NGP that showed an image of what it will look like and they said that it has PS3 quality games. The icons on the home screen look way cooler and those are the round icons you see in this trailer and I’m pretty sure it’s a touchscreen. You could kind of tell in this trailer because of the way he was picking people up. If it is touchscreen then that would be pretty cool especially if you could play the game with touch as well as the directional buttons and/or analog stick which there are 2 of, one on each side.

It also seems from the video that it has the award system just like the PS3 has, which I have no clue how that works since I still don’t have a PS3 :(.

It looks really cool and I would love to upgrade but I’m still using the PSP Slim (the 2nd gen PSP) so I don’t see an upgrade in my future, no matter how cool it looks lol. That is unless my PSP suffers an “accidental” fall in my toilet. Oopsie.

Since When Is Protecting Your Kids A Felony?

On By Michel McDonaldIn Amplify, Daily Blog1 Comment

The legal system in this country is so crooked. All this woman wanted to do was send her 2 daughters to a school that is in a safer area and she pays the price by becoming a felon. Since when is protecting your kids a felony? This is just madness. Please read the article and go over to the change.org page and sign the petition. Thanks.

Amplify’d from www.change.org

Gov. John Kasich: Pardon Kelley Williams-Bolar — she shouldn’t go to jail for protecting her kids
Targeting:
The OH State Senate, The OH State House, Rob Nichols (Communications, Gov. Kasich), see more…The OH State Senate, The OH State House, Rob Nichols (Communications, Gov. Kasich), and Gov. John Kasich (OH)
Started by:
C. Lord

“An Ohio mother of two was sentenced to 10 days in jail and placed on three years probation after sending her kids to a school district in which they did not live. Kelley Williams-Bolar was sentenced by Judge Patricia Cosgrove on Tuesday and will begin serving her sentence immediately. The jury deliberated for seven hours and the courtroom was packed as the sentence was handed down. She was convicted on two counts of tampering with court records after registering her two girls as living with Williams Bolar’s father when they actually lived with her. The family lived in the housing projects in Akron, Ohio, and the father’s address was in nearby Copley Township. Additionally, Williams-Bolar’s father, Edward L. Williams, was charged with a fourth-degree felony of grand theft, in which he and his daughter are charged with defrauding the school system for two years of educational services for their girls. The court determined that sending their children to the wrong school was worth $30,500 in tuition. – Dr. Boyce Watkins

As punishment for doing everything in her power to keep her children safe, Ms. Williams-Bolar, a single mother with no previous criminal record, has been made a felon by Ohio judge Patricia Cosgrove. In addition to jail time, a large fine and probation, Ms. Williams-Bolar’s felony conviction has also robbed her of her future.

“‘Because of the felony conviction, you will not be allowed to get your teaching degree under Ohio law as it stands today. The court’s taking into consideration that is also a punishment that you will have to serve.” – Judge Patricia Cosgrove

Although Ms. Williams-Bolar had nearly completed her education to become a teacher, under Ohio law felons are not permitted to teach. She has been robbed of the opportunity to elevate her life and the lives of her family through her own hard work. She has essentially handed a life sentence for attempting to protect her children.  In a time of overwhelming economic disadvantage for so many US citizens, are loving single mothers like Williams-Bolar truly the enemy our court system should be making examples of in this way?

Ms. Williams-Bolar’s attorneys are currently preparing for an appeal. Please sign this petition to let Gov. Kasich know that you do not feel that Kelley Williams-Bolar’s punishment appropriately fits her crime, and that you both support and demand a full pardon.

Read more at www.change.org
See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/ansvq

Bored with Copying Posts

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

I’ve been copying my old posts back over here from YouSayToo for almost a week now and at first I felt under a lot of pressure to get it all copied and was hoping it would go really fast but now I’m just so bored with it that I don’t care how long it will take. I mean on one hand it’s all old information, who cares anymore? But on the other hand, I can see people are still looking for certain posts about certain old news stories like the girl with the stars on her face and the Elvira posts.

I have over 200 posts copied and even though I want all 1700+ of my posts back here, I don’t really care anymore. I’m sure it will all build up again eventually, it’s just the principle, you know? I want them all back but at the same time… it’s soooo boring. You have no idea lol.

I woke up early yesterday so I could get as many done as I could and I got 30 done then X-Play came on and then Attack of the Show and next thing you knew I had stopped working and paying attention to my blog and focused on that. I needed that break.

I’ve been meditating every day after lunch before going back to work and that seems to help calm my mind down but it doesn’t get rid of the boredom lol.

I don’t mean to complain, I’m just venting. If I was that bored with it I would stop dead in my tracks but I really want to keep going and get everything back here where it belongs.

I found out that my xanapus.wordpress.com blog has blog posts too but all the images are gone. Well that’s probably because I deleted them from my directory here because I’m having to upload them all over again so I might as well save space. So when I’m finished with this blog then I’ll have to export the file and import it over there so everything matches up again.

Well, I just finished copying 10 posts, I guess I should do 10 more before lunch then hopefully get another 10 or 20 before Attack of the Show comes on. Maybe I should turn some music on and that will take some of the boredom away.  Probably not but you never know.

OnLive Cloud Gaming System

On By Michel McDonaldIn Gadgets, Games, Tech2 Comments

I watched this yesterday on Attack of the Show and wanted to blog about it but I really didn’t know much about it at the time to really blog about it.  After looking at their website though I discovered that it’s a pretty cool service.

When you play video games how long do you play them before you stop playing it FOREVER?  And how much do you want to kick yourself because you couldn’t afford to spend $80 on a new game every time one comes out that you want?  Isn’t that just the most frustrating?

You could rent them with GameFly but then you have to wait for the next one to come in the mail 2 days after you’ve shipped out the previous one.  OnLive is a GameFly killer!

You get the little OnLive box that is the size of your hand and plug it into your network.  I don’t know if it has WiFi but if it’s anything like the Roku then you’re probably better off just plugging it into the router anyway.  Start up your service and you are on your way to playing as many cool new video games as you like.

Here is that Gadget Pron video from Attack of the Show via Hulu:

http://www.hulu.com/embed/XHi-t64QEBl67tCDWxwG2Q

Trust me, if I had $100 for the box, I would definitely buy this.  There are so many games out there that I want to try but can’t because I just don’t have the money for the gaming system and even if i had the system, I still couldn’t afford the games.  So this will be a great way for anyone to try out any game that is available to users to see if it’s worth the sometimes $80 cost of the game.

The game controller looks very sleek and shiny and Kevin said you’re better off using another game controller from another system and if the controller that comes with it sucks then great, do that if you have one.  If you don’t then go to Game Stop and buy a refurbished one for an x-box or PS3 or whichever one is compatible.

They only give this a 3 out of 5 but considering it will probably save you thousands of dollars on games that you buy and never play again I’m going to give it a 5 out of 5 just for the money you will be saving.

Bummed But Hopeful

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

I’m a little bummed out right now. My KewlRank number keeps going down more and more every day since I lost my database. I don’t mean to sound like a bummer talking about this and I’m sure rank doesn’t mean a lot to most people but it means something to me.

That is a bummer lol.

But since I’ve been copying my old posts back over, it looks to me like that little line is coming back up. So even though I dropped like a brick, I see it coming back up little by little. It took a long time to get over 5000 and seeing that number drop bums me out but on the other hand look how fast it’s rising again. I’m sure before you know it I will have 1200 posts back on my site (despite my 1700 that I had before) and my number will be over 5000 again and I will be as happy as can be again.

I know that I have a few regular visitors and I love them for it but that’s not really where my traffic is from, it’s the Google visitors that really make my numbers go up and as long as my old links start disappearing from the search engines and be replaced with new links then I know I will be ok again. I will bounce back.

I got 27 posts copied over today and I’m up to 167 posts from 1700+.  Even though it’s not going very fast, it’s the only pace I can take since I’m only one person. I had hoped that I could do a couple hundred per day but that’s just too many considering I have to edit them all over again and add tags and give them all categories. It’s a lot of work. More than most people would probably want to do and I’m sure if that happened to someone else they would’ve thrown in the towel by now. See how dedicated I am?

Tomorrow is yet another day and I will work hard to get hopefully 30 more posts copied. Who knows, I might work overtime and get 40.

My Blog Progress

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

Things aren’t going as fast as I had hoped they would. My projection last night and this morning was that I would get at least 200 posts copied from YouSayToo but that just wasn’t the case.

Last night, in just maybe 4 hours, I had copied 18 posts so that is where I got my estimation. I figured it would be so much easier today and I would have gotten way more than last night. I have only gotten 27 copied over.

The thing is, it’s so boring lol. I mean, I have the YouSayToo website loaded in a tab and my blog in a tab so it’s not difficult switching tabs to copy from one site then paste to the other. It’s all the editing I have to do and adding tags and putting each post in a category and this and that and the other. Plus there are images that I have to use that I have to upload all over again because even though the images are all in my blog uploads folders, they don’t show up because it’s a new database. I could go on and on but no matter how long it takes I will keep at it until it is all done.

The problem is, people are still coming to my blog from the search engines with old posts that no longer exist. How do I tell the search engines that my old links don’t work anymore? I can’t. So all I can do is hope that people do a search for themselves on my blog to see if they can find what they are looking for and go from there.

My toolbar has a notification explaining what happened so if they see it great, if they don’t then there is nothing else I can do. Tomorrow is another day so we will see how many I can copy then. I already have all of January 2011 and December 2010 copied so maybe I can do 1 month per day. Yeah, that will make it easier. Let’s hope November 2010 was uneventful in the blogging department :p lol.

Fixing My Blog

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

Yesterday when I got on the computer I discovered that my database had issues and I went half of the day without any blog posts but my blog was still functional, sort of. I called my web host and they fixed the database but could only give me their backup from before December 23rd. I thought, ok that’s fine. I’ll only have a month of posts to restore, no big deal.

Unfortunately it wasn’t that easy because as I was restoring the 2nd post everything went wrong. The backup that they installed was still corrupt and everything disappeared. Not just the posts but my entire blog became useless. I couldn’t do anything at all.

Today I got back on the phone with them and thought it was all fixed when I hung up but it was far from fixed. I didn’t call them back but instead I re-opened my support ticket and sent them an email telling them it’s still not working. I got tired of waiting so I just decided that they weren’t going to be able to help me so I’ll just start over.

I created a new database and started from scratch. I got most of my ad’s back up so I get paid for them and while I was at it I figured, while I’m starting over I might as well change the permalinks. It’s the way the website address (URL) looks. Instead of being xanapus.com/blog/?p=(numbers) it’s going to have the date and the name of the post in the url. That makes it easier so if I have that issue again with my database then I can easily add the posts without having to contact the companies I do posts for with a new url because they will automatically be the same as before.

The downside is that I had over 1700 posts. I had more than twice that amount of comments and they are all gone now. The only way I can get any comments back is if new people comment. I was fortunate to have 616 of my blog posts copied over to YouSayToo and I had about 609 posts over on Blogger so all I have to do is copy and paste those posts.

The good thing about being able to copy my posts back manually is that I can edit which ones I copy over. Like all those Roku posts, I can finally just delete all the useless posts and make 1 new post review of the product.

The bad thing is that my arms and wrists aren’t going to be too happy with me. I’m already in pain in my left arm and both my hands from the carpel tunnel syndrome. This is going to take a lot of time to do but I will get as many posts back up as I possibly can.

I have spent the last 4 years making this blog what it was, I am not about to throw in the towel just because my database is corrupt and I wasn’t smart enough to do backups. Although, I will be doing monthly backups from now on lol.

My widget bar on the right doesn’t have everything in the same order as it was and I’m probably missing a few things but those are things that I thought might have been there.  I’ve also changed the paragraph style so they are fully aligned like a newspaper or book.  I think it makes it easier to read.  That has always bothered me but 1700+ posts made it difficult to want to change every post.  Now I can since I have to manually add them.

Well, tomorrow is another day and hopefully I can get as many posts added as I can before my arms fall off.  I copied 18 posts tonight but that was in a very short amount of time.  Tomorrow I will have the whole day to get as many copied before I get too tired to go on.

So until tomorrow…