Last night Stephanie, Emma, Stephanie’s dad, and myself were traveling to Florida to visit Stephanie’s sister.  Along the way, we stopped for gas twice: once in South Carolina and once in Georgia.  Both times, it took far too long for no good reason.  At the first gas station, for some reason, you have to go inside and prepay for gas, even if you are paying at the pump.  This makes no sense.  The only reason to require someone to go inside and prepay is if they are paying cash, because you are afraid they will drive away.  When you pay at the pump, the gas station has already ensured that you have enough funds on your credit card to cover the gas.  The second time we stopped, an attendant walked up to us after we pulled up beside a pump and said they were changing shifts inside and the pumps were going to be off for about ten-to-fifteen minutes.  (Also, he was smoking at the time.)  Really?  It takes fifteen minutes to balance the books when you change shifts??  And again, we were paying at the pump, which means we didn’t need to pay the guy at the register anything, so why couldn’t they at least leave the pumps open for people paying there?

Anyway, I just thought I’d share.  Enjoy your Independence Day everyone!

Last night I added a bunch of pictures from last week’s beach trip.  I also added a set of miscellaneous pictures which I titled “Emma in June.”  (The first three pictures in that set were moved from the “Emma continues to grow” set, but the rest are new.)

Some interesting tidbits-

• Emma did not care for the ocean (compare and contrast her facial expressions before and after touching the water).
• Emma’s second-cousin Clara, who is five and a half weeks her elder, was at the beach too.  At one point, Kaylor (Clara’s mother, who is my cousin) was holding Clara, and Scott (my brother) was with them, while some Asian family with a screaming baby was nearby (they were at a restaurant at the time).  Some moron—who must not have looked closely enough at Clara to realize Scott was definitely not the father—said to Kaylor, “That’s what this country needs: more good, white babies.”  Of course, Clara is only half white.  I think the guy just walked away after that (I wasn’t there).  Like I’ve said before on this blog, I’m always surprised that there are still truly racist people out there who are under the age of seventy.  I mean, if you were, let’s say, over 25 years old in 1960, maybe you were already set in your ways before we as a society figured out that racism is a Bad Thing, so you’ve at least got a bad excuse for your behavior.  For anyone younger than that:  really? seriously? there are still people that ignorant?  (Also, I can assure this guy that white babies are quite capable of screaming very loudly.)
• Emma likes riding on my shoulders.  But I think this is mainly because she likes running her hands through my hair.

Nearly two months ago, I joined Facebook.  I had low expectations, despite the fact that a few people whose opinions I value told me the same things I'm about to tell you.  I have to say, as a whole, Facebook doesn't really suck.  I guess I was expecting something more like MySpace, which just kind of looks like the Internet ate too many gifs and had to throw them up as partially-digested ads.  Or something like that.  I probably stretched that analogy too far there.  Whatever.  The point is Facebook doesn't suck, and it's actually kind of fun, even for an antisocial computer geek like myself.

If you haven’t seen something like it before, this is pretty cool.  It is a hacked Super Mario World level that can be completed without touching the controller.  As far as I can tell, it uses only elements which were already in the game (except it looks like they modified Yoshi egg blocks so that Mario automatically jumps when he hits one).  This one is a really impressive one because it is like 11 minutes long and choreographed with anime music.  Enjoy.

While scanning through my junk mail folder in Gmail, I noticed a new spam tactic: directly insulting the reader.

I’m curious if this is effective.  I find it hard to believe that anyone would ever read mail that is obviously spam nowadays, but these people must be making money somehow or they’d stop sending this stuff.  My guess is that anything which stands out is likely to be effective in piquing readers’ curiosity, much like the “I love you” e-mail virus from several years ago.  But only if other spammers don’t copy the tactic.

For all who are concerned (and I know many are concerned, because I get requests/demands frequently), some new pictures of Emma have been put up on this very website.  I also created an album of photos of Emma's nursery.  Be sure that you see the time-lapse animation of Stephanie painting the Noah's Ark mural!

A hilarious blog I discovered a few months ago is Stuff White People Like.  I’ve been meaning to mention it here for a while, but a good post last week, entitled Being Offended, reminded me I needed to share.  Here is an excerpt:

Naturally, white people do not get offended by statements directed at white people.  ...  As a rule, white people strongly prefer to get offended on behalf of other people.

Another good one is Knowing What’s Best For Poor People:

It is a poorly guarded secret that, deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them. In fact, the only reason that poor people make the choices they do is because they have not been given the means to make the right choices and care about the right things.

Those are two of my favorites.  Some other good ones to read are Study Abroad, Music Piracy, Organic Food, Hating Corporations, Religions that their parents don’t belong to, and Grammar.

And for a great cross-section of the kinds of idiots that reside on the internets, try to read some of the comments!  (I say “try to” because very few people will actually succeed.)

For the first time in Vacant Nebula history, I have retracted a blog post.  Upon further consideration (and a little pleading from Stephanie), I realized that the post might cause this website to show up as a result for certain search queries.  Let’s just say, Dateline might have been interested in anyone who came to the site and was disappointed that the link did not, in fact, point to the type of content that was claimed.  In addition, I do not want to attract that kind of attention to a website that has pictures of my daughter.

Fortunately, no one has yet arrived at my site by means of such queries.  For anyone interested, here are the top 20 search engine queries that brought visitors to this website in May, 2008:

That last one is a little weird though.  Yikes!

This fall the music game genre is going to be interesting.  Guitar Hero IV: World Tour has announced that it will be like Rock Band: two guitars, drums, and vocals for every song.  The GH4 drum kit, which you can see here, is pretty cool in that it has two cymbal-like pads on there too, instead of having all the drums in a row.  Not that I know the slightest thing about drumming, but I assume this would feel a little more authentic.  The drum pads are also going to sense how hard you are hitting them, and adjust the volume of the drums in-game accordingly.  (Maybe Rock Band already did this?  From what I read it doesn’t sound like it, but I’ve only played it like twice in Best Buy.)  For the guitar parts, they are adding something I have wanted: open notes (as in, strumming without holding any frets).  They’ll represent this on the screen as a solid bar across the fret board (the same way the kick pedal is represented on the drums).  I haven’t heard much about how Rock Band 2 will be improved yet.  Konami, however, is jumping into the genre that they created ten years ago (but failed to bring to America) with Rock Revolution.  The drum kit for that game just looks wacky.

For me, I’ll probably only get GH4 for the Wii this year, since I already have one GH3 Wii guitar controller.  The downside is that there’s no downloadable content for the Wii (at least not yet).  Mainly due to the fact that there is only 512 MB of memory in the Wii.  I am thinking about getting a Playstation 3 (Gaystation 3 to the haters) soon, so I could get any of the games for PS3, but I’d really like to not have too many plastic musical instruments sitting around my living room.  So I’m thinking GH4 for Wii is my more practical option.

This post has been retracted.  It discussed this overreaching Supreme Court ruling by doing precisely what the court ruled a felony: I made a link that claimed to point to the kind of content I don't want to be associated with this site in search engine indexes, but in fact it pointed to www.google.com.  I guess you had to be there.