Phase means (among many other things): “any distinct time period in a sequence of events”.

Faze means: “to disturb the composure of”.

(Perhaps people think that any word containing a Z must be a misspelling…?)

Any TV connected directly to Comcast service without a digital device will eventually lose access to some of the channels it currently receives. You’ll keep the 15-30 Comcast Basic Cable channels, (local broadcast TV stations, plus local government, education and public access channels) but you’ll lose all Expanded Basic channels, like Disney, CNN, Lifetime and 30 to 50 others.

The slogan for this latest screw-the-customers ploy is Welcome to the World of More!, which apparently refers to the price: digital service just happens to cost an extra $20/month (or, if you’re not paying attention when you place your order, an extra $60/month).

It seems we have two options, here at Stately Rice Manor:

1. Pay more money for more channels that we’ll never watch, and throw away the TiVo (because it won’t work with digital cable); or
2. Drop back to basic cable (which is $40/month cheaper), keep the TiVo (because basic cable will stay analog), and download from iTunes or Amazon anything else we might want to watch.

Hm…what to do, what to do….

The big find on this page: a photo of Sylvanus Felty’s grave marker. It was just a flimsy-looking metal plaque, stuck in the ground (in front of what I assume is the stub of the original gravestone); when I saw it, I thought: Felty? Perhaps he’s related to Barbara Felty. So I took a picture, and made a note of the name for further research.

Sylvanus Felty was Barbara’s father, which makes him my great-great-grandfather.

Between one of my visits to Newman Cemetery and the next, the marker disappeared. Now there’s nothing to mark his grave, which makes me just a little sad.

Centrue Bank and Citizens National Bank, Paris, have been downgraded to “problematic” by the BauerFinancial bank rating service based on data from Dec. 31, 2009.

The Centrue branch on Neil Street did not bother to clear the snow from their sidewalks after the last storm. And now they’re “problematic”.

Coincidence? I think not!

Later: Centrue is on Neil, not Mattis. I don’t know why I wrote Mattis. Fixed….

One result of all this moisture dumped into the air: fog. This morning’s fog was pretty thick, visibility under half a mile. Jake & I had a foggy time at the bus stop.

Two hours later, the fog hadn’t lifted, so my morning walk (truncated at Mattis & Springer when the 6E happened to arrive just as I did) was also foggy.

Alas, it was gone by lunchtime.

If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue. Because we are a technology site, we have a very large base of ad blockers. Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn’t pay. In a way, that’s what ad blocking is doing to us.

I understand why Ars Technica opposes the use of ad blockers: it’s costing them money.

On the other hand, the business model for publications (newspapers, magazines, web sites, etc.) is a bit deceptive. Ostensibly, they’re selling their content to me; but the truth is they’re selling me (or my attention) to advertisers.

It’s a tricky balance: readers should notice the ads (and maybe click on a few, now & then), but the ads should not compete with the content for readers’ attention. When the ads get too clamorous & annoying, the balance is lost.

Rather than accuse ad-blocker users of thievery, perhaps the Ars Technica people should invest in some kind of feedback system: if an ad is too annoying, click the X to get rid of it. Readers would have less incentive to use global ad-blockers, advertisers would have no reason to use the more odious ad formats. Everybody wins.

(I don’t use ad blockers, mainly because I’m too lazy to find a good one & install it on all the computers I use.)

Half the dialog is in French and/or German, and the closed-captioning – while in English – is generally rather small & hard to read. I’m too lazy to fetch my spectacles from the bedroom, so I’m not getting as much out of the film as Mr. Tarantino might have wished.

Later: after thinking on it for a while, I realized I dislike two things about Inglourious Basterds:

I was annoyed by the ending of Gladiator, in which the Roman Republic is inexplicably restored, and I was equally annoyed when Inglourious Basterds brings World War II to an early (not to mention explosive) finish. It’s one thing to insert a fictional guerrilla band into a well-known period of history, but it’s just lazy writing to monkey with history. (Unless that’s the whole point of the work, e.g., The Man in the High Castle.)

The (Tarantino trademark) ultraviolence directed at low-ranking German soldiers – torture, disfigurement – was not justice, nor even the simple waging of war. It was just evil.

I’m left wondering who – if anyone – I’m supposed to be cheering for in this movie. Perhaps no one.

SPRINGFIELD — Counties and cities would be allowed to impose a $100 fee on anyone accused of a crime who fails to appear in court and has to be pursued by law enforcement authorities, under a bill approved by a House Judiciary committee Thursday.

That’s a great idea, but why stop there?

If a police officer who issues a traffic citation fails to appear in court to support it, perhaps the city should pay a $100 fine to the defendant.

That seems fair….

It didn’t work so well.

Poking around the Sweetcron discussion forum this afternoon (while a test build burbled away in another window), I learned that Sweetcron’s developer has lost interest in his creation: no more development, no new releases, no support.

I believe I will remove Sweetcron this evening, and begin searching for alternatives.

Later: Sweetcron is no more.