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The "Vanguard" - a college-age vigilante justice group - was featured in the plot of last night's episode of Numb3rs on CBS.

Looks an awful lot like the Rivet icon, no? I joked with Brad that we should sue CBS for copyright infringement, but hey, at least we were kind of on the "good side."

I'm likely a candidate for LASIK surgery if I ever wanted it I've never felt the need. Why let someone cut my eye when wearing glasses and contacts don't bother me? There's too much risk for the upside.

A friend of mine recently had PRK ((Photorefractive Keratectomy)), a procedure that doesn't involve cutting the eye, and I'd even be hesitant to get that. There doesn't seem to be nearly as much downside (just an increase in cost) or risk, but I'm not even certain that a week of recovery time is worth the upside of "no more contacts or glasses."

How do you feel? Have you had either surgery? Are glasses/contacts a big pain to you?

From my friend Aaron, who thought I'd appreciate this image:

The idea has been rolling around in my head for several years, but now we have a three-person team attacking the idea with ferocity, and UDSLR is set to become a reality.

UDSLR is a new site geared towards learning photography. It takes an approach no one has taken before. If you're interested in working with us, check out udslr.com and email Josh.

Remember that period of time in blogging history when we all shared our playlists? Scripts and applications that maintained our "most recently played 20 songs" online were all the rage. I even wrote a few of my own.

Now, not so much.

Incidentally: Erik is listening to "Monday Morning" by Fleetwood Mac from the album "The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac" (2002). Erik has rated this song 4.0 stars and last played this song Saturday, October 28, 2006 4:07:50 pm.

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It happened again.

And by "it" I mean that Rivet stopped showing images properly. The screenshot to the right shows the media browser in Pages ((The same browser can be found in Keynote and a few other Apple apps.)). Note that images made after the Cinci Zoo album don't show up. Lovely.

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A few days ago I took in the new Bond flick and came away severely disappointed.

• Very little dialog or character development.
• No gadgets.
• Fast-paced, quick cuts that simply caused confusion. This was most evident during the many fight scenes, but was even evident when they were touching, tapping, and twirling things on a computer display.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that because of those things, this was the worst Bond movie ever.

I just wasted well over an hour upgrading The Sand Trap to WordPress 2.7.

The problem appeared as most WordPress errors do: I had a blank page. The twist to this one? Only the home page was blank. Other pages worked just fine. I could set my "About" page to act as the home page if I wanted and it would display.

It wasn't a theme problem, because I tried the default WordPress theme and ran into the same issue. I re-uploaded the files several times. I checked the permissions. I removed some whitespace from my wp-config file. No luck and nearly two hours down the drain.

Then I stumbled onto the solution: I had to change "Blog pages show at most 9999 posts" to 999. Or 1000. But not as high as 2000. 1250 works too. I didn't spend time figuring out what number broke WordPress.

The problem with this is that my theme file already sets the number of articles to nine: $posts = query_posts('showposts=9');. I have a high limit set because I'd like archive pages to show everything without pagination. WordPress 2.6 accepted 9999 as valid - WordPress 2.7 does not.

The Sand Trap has 2099 total posts.

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I spent several hours playing with this blog's comments. I used this post as a guide and, in general, had things working quite well.

In the end, I've reverted back to my WordPress 2.6 comments template. I simply didn't like the fact that the actual comments block - each comment - was output in pre-defined HTML. Though I could probably create a plugin that wrote out my specific desired HTML, or create a filter, as of right now I don't feel that's worth the time it'd take. And though I could get the default HTML to look reasonably similar to what I've been using, it wasn't close enough and I couldn't include certain features like the # to permalink to comments or the "Quote Me" functionality. The gravatars were 32 pixels instead of the 40 I prefer. I didn't like the use of single ' instead of double " around div attributes. And so on for about three or four other small annoyances.

Now I'm off to tackle the upgrade at The Sand Trap.

As I write this, Mike Komisarek and Andrei Markov still lead the NHL All Star voting for defensemen. Carey Price is still the leading gaolie. Three Habs still occupy spots 3-5 for forwards, only recently being overtaken by Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin.

The game's being held in Montreal to celebrate a centennial, so I get that Habs fans are excited.

Unfortunately, they're also cheaters. Early NHL voting didn't feature a CAPTCHA or any sort of system to prevent automated ballot stuffing, and Habs fans stuffed the ballots. Their guys all had something like 300,000 votes within a few days.

The NHL was made aware of the ballot stuffing and did nothing to correct it. They put an end to it with a CAPTCHA, but the ballots that had already been stuffed remained.

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This blog is now officially six years old. I've posted every day in those six years. Some posts, like this one, were lame. Others were not.

My focus has shifted a few times through the years, but one thing has stayed the same: this blog is for and about me.

When did you start reading this site? Post in the comments. I'm curious.

I'm off to Myrtle Beach today to test some golf equipment. I'd call it a fun trip but it won't be - I'll fall behind on some other work, miss my family, and will endure some fairly lousy weather.

I'll be back on Saturday ((At which time I'll post this - I don't post about any trips I'll be taking beforehand.)).

Last year I played with a Garmin Nüvi 200W. This year, my in-laws bought a Garmin Nüvi 200 for me for Christmas.

Last year - with coupons - I paid something like $250. This year, the unit's free (or, if you're an opportunity cost kind of person, it cost me "$100 in other presents").

For $250, the 200W wasn't worth it. For free/$100, the 200 is a great fit. I'm looking forward to using it immediately. We've been borrowing their rather bulbous GPS model for various trips this past year, and it turns out I really don't need much. Though it'd be nice if we had the "speaks street names" feature, that's about the only one that could really add to the experience. The others - Bluetooth (we don't live in New York state and don't talk on the phone all that much to begin with), traffic (don't live in an area with a lot of traffic), and who knows what - don't do much to excite me.

I will likely find it annoying that custom POIs can't be added to the generic search at some point, though. I'm guessing that's still not a problem that's been fixed. Perhaps I just won't install my own POIs.

Brad and I will soon be pushing out a free iPhone application, a companion to the desktop Scorecard software. Because it's free (and a bit of a trial balloon), we plan to immediately start work on Scorecard 2.0 ((SC2 may or may not use the same icon as 1.0.)), and it's a "companion" application, we wanted to keep the same general icon we're already using on the desktop.

So we came up with several mockups, all featuring varying levels of de-saturation of either the pencil, the scorecard, or both:

In the end, there was one obvious choice to the three of us ((The third is Geir-Tore Lindsve, our Windows developer.)). Can you guess which one we chose?

At one point today I typed "homedepot" into my browser's location bar and hit return. I was annoyed, then, when RoadRunner gave me their usual "oops, that's not a valid domain" page: http://ww23.rr.com/index.php?origURL=http://homedepot/. It's the same thing I dislike(d) about OpenDNS and my dislike has not subsided.

Fortunately, I noticed today that you can set your preferences at http://ww23.rr.com/prefs.php. Your URL may vary depending on your location, but hit it up and do what you need to do. I've changed mine to Disable, Disable, and Do Not Filter.