laneys.info Beware of Yankees, drunks, and loose women.

The Wall Street Journal reported on some online video sites that are actually worth your (and my) time.  Unlike YouTube, which is mostly just a waste of time (fun though it may be), these sites provide some edification - sometimes practical, such as do-it-yourself home improvements, and sometimes educational, such as politics, world events, lectures, and fine arts.

Something new on the site is the addition of preview icons for any link to a site other than this one.  This free service from search engine site snap.com, called Snap Shots, allows me to provide a preview of any page linked to from this site.  When you hover over the preview icon, a Snap Shot of the page will appear.  This should be especially useful for all those links I use that point to Wikipedia.

“It was an hour in our history that troubled our minds and tore at our hearts.  Anger and hatred had risen to dangerous levels, dividing friends and families. The polarization of our political order had aroused unworthy passions of reprisal and revenge. Our governmental system was closer to stalemate than at any time since Abraham Lincoln took that same oath of office.”

— Gerald R. Ford, Jr., speaking of his inauguration

And so it is again, today.  Who will be the next Gerald Ford?

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) would like you to meet the new "health food," containing two days' worth of saturated fat in a single serving.  New chain restaurants, including the new "Fresh Mex" chains such as Chipotle (owned by McDonald's), Baja Fresh (owned by Wendy's), Rubio's, and La Salsa, sometimes have healthy food alternatives, but they frequently are peddling themselves as being healthier than they really are.

From the original article:

"Baja's Nachos are even worse. With a day's worth of calories (2,000) and sodium (2,890), and with two days' worth (39 grams) of saturated fat, the average order of nachos (made with steak, chicken, or just cheese) is worse than four Quarter Pounders."

If you're interested in this sort of thing, here is a dietary site that lists the nutritional value of fast food: http://www.dietfacts.com/fastfood.asp

Today marks the beginning of the end for my career with ColdFusion.  In 1998, I started doing web development with ColdFusion 3.11 for Workgroups on a single server.  Today, I manage eight web servers running ColdFusion MX 6.1 and 7, but I do very little coding myself.  For many reasons, none of them technical, my department decided that we needed to plan a migration away from ColdFusion.  Today, our development standards meeting adjourned after making the decision that we would move to Microsoft Visual Studio and the ASP.NET platform for all new development.  Legacy applications will be rewritten as time permits, which means that ColdFusion will continue to exist in our environment for a while yet, but the die is cast.