I posted this once before, but lost it when I moved the blog contents here from Radwarrior.com, so I am re-creating the post.

Have you ever wanted to email an ebay link to someone but hated copying and pasting the mile-long link?

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/Flightcom-4DLX-Classic-Headsets-Set-of-2_W0QQitemZ270530825553QQcmdZViewItemQQptZMotors_Aviation_Parts_Gear?hash=item3efce4cd51

I don't know why EBay has to have such ugly, long links. There is a way to shorterize them yourself, without using a service like http://bit.ly, or http://tinyurl.com. All you have to do is hand craft the link on http://gci.ebay.com?viewitem&item= <item number>. Here's the same item with the short link...

http://cgi.ebay.com?ViewItem&item=270530825553

There's also a way to make a nice, short link to your ebay seller's page.

http://shop.ebay.com/merchant/pblanton

And it is the finest Linux distribution I have ever used. I used to use SUSE back in the 2001-2004 time, before Novell bought it. I liked buying the boxed version at Best Buy or CompUSA. After Novell bought it, they jacked up the price and it went away from the retailers. I'd heard good things about this upstart Ubuntu distro and that is what I started using. When OpenSUSE came out, I stuck with Ubuntu, because I liked it. Recently though I was wanting to try out a new distribution on a Windows machine I was upgrading to Linux, and the OpenSUSE with the latest KDE blew me away.

After getting my new Core i7, 27" iMac, I was thinking about setting up the Boot Camp partition with Windows 7, but thought I'd try OpenSUSE on Boot Camp. I downloaded the freshly released 11.2 in 64-bit and was hooked. I can run Windows 7 in a Fusion Virtual Machine without any trouble, so my newly carved out Boot Camp partition goes OpenSUSE. My machine is *nix to the metal. It's a good feeling.

If you are a Windows developer and are looking for a nice, clean operating system for a change (Yeah, I know Windows 7 is the bomb. I don't care), I heartily recommend upgrading to a Mac, and Boot Camping, 64-bit style with OpenSUSE Linux.

I grew up on these wonderful petite dill pickles and always pronounced it "wuh jess ski - Y row bee". However I just now noticed that there is a letter missing from the first word that I always thought was there. Now I reach out to anyone with polish ancestry, to try to help me get the right pronunciation of "Weijske Wyroby".

But that's not really true.

In a recent article, Sarah Palin asks, "Are You Capable of Decency, Rahm Emanuel?" The answer is clearly "No", but I take issue with Sara Palin's outrage over Rahm Emanuel using the word, "retarded" in the context he did.

I am a huge Sarah Palin supporter and am very disturbed by Rahm Emanuel. I think he is pure evil and would say or do anything to gain and hold power over people. Exactly the wrong type of person to have in charge of anything. However, I think in this instance Sarah may be a little too sensitive. While I understand her position completely, I don't support it in this narrow case.

The word "retarded" has become a bit of a hot-potato. A pure dictionary definition of the word Retarded means in essence, "to slow, hinder, or prevent advancement." That's why it was originally used to label individuals with cognitive or developmental disabilities. However it can also simply mean to slow down. For instance, as I approach a stop light, I retard the throttle of my car. That doesn't mean that I gave my car's throttle a, "cognitive and developmental" disability.

That said, we all know exactly what Rahm Emanuel meant. He was using the word "retarded" as a euphemism; as in, "Don't be retarded".

I grow weary of the left crucifying conservatives over these silly things and do believe that turnabout is fair-play. I am so tired of the stunning double-standard that excuses people of the left from saying whatever they want because they, "think right", while conservatives get skewered for much smaller infractions. However fun it may be to throw a fistful of gander back at that goose, it is inevitably a waster of time. It's much more useful to focus on real issues and not get mired in the minutiae.

Besides, calling each other, "retarded", or "gay" is just something men do. We are coarse and unrefined. We laugh at inappropriate things, all the time. We watch awful television shows like Squidbillies, Family Guy, and South Park, and our wives roll their eyes and don't get it. We think Hooter's has good food, though no single man has ever actually tasted anything he ate at a Hooter's. We hock lugies, we prefer to pee outside, we spit, and we are retarded when we are around each other and no one else is looking, although some of us are retarded when others are looking. By the way I don't know that guy. If you say he is related to me in any way, I'll call you a liar. We are who we are, and to try to feminize us, is bad for society, but I digress.

Without regard to the fact that Democrats are indeed retarded, this whole dustup is really, kind of gay.

I do page layouts for websites sometimes and I often find myself going to http://lipsum.com, in order to find satisfactory filler text. Today I needed something a little more dynamic for testing a fluid page layout. I ended up writing a javascript function that you can call from within your asp.net page in order to dynamically create some filler text. Saves me a trip to lipsum.com, and is easy to use. it's been added to my standard debug.js file. Here it is…

<script type="text/javascript">
var chunkCount = 5;
var minChunksPerPara = 3;
var chunk1 = 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.';
var chunk2 = 'Nunc vitae dignissim turpis. Nulla eleifend felis sed velit molestie non fermentum nibh pellentesque.';
var chunk3 = 'Duis egestas dapibus felis ut posuere.';
var chunk4 = 'Ut nec neque eu lacus pulvinar commodo et vel diam. Integer semper adipiscing enim eu tempus.';
var lorem = ['p', chunk1, chunk2, chunk3, chunk4];
/* The number of chunks written to the current paragraph. */
var paraChunkCount = 0;
/* Minimum number of chunks to write per paragraph. Larger number means larger paragraphs. */
function fillLorem(chunks) {
	document.write('<p>' + chunk1 + ' ');
	for (var i = 0; i < chunks; i++) {
		var chunk = lorem[Math.floor(Math.random() * chunkCount)];
		if (chunk == 'p') {
			i--; /* decrement i, or else we'll lose a printed chunk for every p. */
			if (paraChunkCount >= minChunksPerPara) {
				/* we're writing the end of a paragraph and starting a new one. */
				paraChunkCount = 0;
				document.write('</p><p>');
				paraChunkCount = 0;
			}
		}
		else {
			/* We're writing the current chunk to the current paragraph. */
			document.write(chunk + ' ');
			paraChunkCount++;
		}
	}
	document.write('</p>');
}
</script>

…and here is how to use it:

<script type="text/javascript">fillLorem(50)</script>

That will create a filler text block made up of a random selection of fifty of chunk1 through chunk4. If you want a more natural looking Lipsum (fewer repeated passages), increase the number of chunks to something greater than four, and change the chunkCount variable to one greater than the number of chunks you have (one greater, because the 'p' is a chunk and needs to be represented in chunkCount).