Daily Doings at the Line of Death Bar & Grill

Earlier this week, I was looking for Houlihan's Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio to have a nice dinner after work. After driving up and down the road it was on, I couldn't find the restaurant. I later did some web searching and it confirmed my suspicions: the restaurant closed, back in 2007.

My first exposure to Houlihan's was back in 1992 or thereabouts, when a group of us from GEnie got together in Columbus for a meet-and-greet. At the time, the restaurant was at the Continent, a plaza built to resemble a small French village or neighborhood. I remember the restaurant having good food -- American fare such as steaks, chicken, and their wonderful "shrooms" (a stuffed mushroom appetizer).

Years passed, and I found that the restaurant moved out of the Continent to a spot on Dublin-Granville Rd. (Route 161) just east of Sawmill Rd. And they still had the same great food I remember. I also remember an active Delta Chi from the Ohio State chapter noticing my Delta Chi fraternity crest sticker on the window of my car and greeting me as only a brother could. (This was rather bittersweet; at the time, the OSU chapter was being investigated for a hazing incident.)

There is a Mexican restaurant on the site of the old Houlihan's. And there are still Houlihan's in the Cleveland area, and one in Buffalo. But I'm not going to drive 2 or more hours for dinner. When I want to eat, I usually want to eat now.

I'll miss the place.

The election ads have begun. And so has the mudslinging.

It started with Ohio gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland, saying his oppoent John Kasich worked for Lehman Brothers (the failed Wall Street brokerage firm). The Republicans shot back, using Senatorial candidate Lee Fisher as the scapegoat for losing 400,000 jobs in Ohio.

I really don't know who to believe or trust anymore.

I lean toward the Democratic side of things, because they support the social liberal position.

Bottom line: Do I hold my nose and vote Democratic this November? Or do I risk pissing away my vote and voting Libertarian all the way?

A few weeks ago, I was selected to be on call for jury duty by the county court. I was a petit juror, being on call for three days.

And so I called the phone number on Friday night per my instructions. The message: "Jurors are not needed for Monday 9/20. Call back the evening on 9/20 for further instructions." And so I repeated the daily call. Ultimately, I wasn't needed and didn't have to report for the three days I'm on call. On last night's message, the court thanked me for my service.

It'll probably be another 10 years before my name comes up again for jury duty.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the crazy idea of getting another bare-bones Dell Latitude CPx laptop and outfitting it with the spare parts I had on hand -- battery, hard drive, and memory -- and using it as a "loaner" laptop.

Yes, it's an older laptop -- it has a Pentium III 650 MHz processor in it -- but when I'm on the road, it mostly gets the job done. Web surfing, email, playing short videos, playing music -- it does all of that.

Last week, I found one on EBay for about $40 (plus $10 shipping via Priority Mail). It arrived today. I spent a little bit of time swapping in the spare parts, along with a CD-ROM module I picked up at Laptop World yesterday for $5, and voila! It worked. Well, sort of. It booted, and didn't do anything more because the hard drive was blank. So I installed Ubuntu Linux on the laptop. Now it's working.

I still need to get a wireless network card, a USB 2.0 card, and a power adapter in order for the laptop to be truly roadworthy. I'll probably be going back to EBay for these parts.

I'm finally responding to catsittingstill's suggestion that we post about relgious tolerance today. I think this is important, so I'm not going to cut-tag this.

Tolerance? filkertom posted in his LJ today about that word: "Tolerance" is an interesting word. By and large, it means putting up with something you don't agree with. You tolerate it. On some level or another, you believe it's wrong, or at least not for you. In a previous post of his -- and I wish I could find it -- he suggested that we replace "tolerance" with "acceptance". I wholeheartedly agree with him.

Today, I attended Dayton Pagan Pride Day at a local park. One section was "Tradition Row", where various pagan paths -- Wicca, Druid, Asatru -- were represented by symbolic altars. There was even a Buddha status and a shrine to Ganesh.

And this is where tolerance and acceptance begin: learning and understanding. (Sidenote: A great resource for this is religioustolerance.org.)

It's my long-standing observation that people fear and demonize what they don't know. And it's often the case where the most vocal critics of something are often the ones who know the least about it. Case in point: that preacher in Florida who was threatening to burn copes of the Koran today. (Thankfully, he recanted.) Has he even read it, or parts of it?

Many years ago, a group of people practicing a minority religion were threatened by the people following the mainstream religion. There were no holy books to burn, so they burned the people instead. Pagans like me know this period as "The Burning Times".

And what of my religious background? I was born and raised Catholic. I've had Jewish friends from elementary school onward. I married and divorced a Wiccan. I am currently a member of a Unitarian Universalist faith community. And I consider myself a pagan.

A very good friend of mine -- and the best man at my first wedding -- is a Sikh. He has told me numerous stories of religious intolerance, from being harrassed at Buffalo Bills games because he wears a turban, to his family being publicly lambasted by Pat Robertson on his TV show, "The 700 Club" all because his family dared to propose to their school board that Christmas concerts be re-branded holiday concerts and thus be more inclusive.

While things like book burning and flag burning are protected by the First Amendment, such actions are what I would conder hate speech and therefore disrespectful.

I am proud to have friends and acquaintances of many differing faiths.

When we last left this story, a friend of mine had given me his HP Pavilion laptop, which was getting an "NTLDR is missing" error when he booted up.

After discussing the problem with a computer-savvy colleague today, he theorized that the hard drive has a virus or is in the early stages of failure. So I took the hard drive out of the laptop, put it in an external enclosure, and performed a virus scan on it. It was clean. I then performed a backup on it, while listening to the drive. It took a little while to spin up, but the backup completed. I then restored the files to a spare WD Scorpio Blue 250 Gb hard drive, installed it in the laptop, and it's working fine now.

The puzzling thing is that none of the web sites I visited in the past couple of weeks that contained "NTLDR is missing" made no mention of impending hardware failure. Oh well. Live and learn.

Now to get a replacement for that spare hard drive I had. It's harder and harder to find PATA laptop hard drives these days. newegg.com has one for $80.

Oh yeah. Someone chucked an HP Pavilion DV9000 laptop in my trash bin. I fished it out and the aforementioned colleague wants it for spare parts.

Maybe that's my calling. To follow in the footsteps of Fred Sanford and run a computer salvage business.

Today I went with The Ex and The Girl to the Montgomery County Fair. We got to see some of the farm animals, eat some carnival food, and ride the rides. We didn't go in the exhibit hall, though.

It's been a long time since I've been to a county fair. I think the last time I went was the early 1970s, and that was the Erie County Fair in Buffalo. My parents took me and my sister there, and we did the usual fair thing: see the farm animals, ride the rides, and eat fair food. The big difference is that the Erie County Fair is the largest county fair in the USA, or so they've said.

I remember the Mile-Long Midway from my youth, and hated the noise the Tip Top ride made. It would release air in a loud "whoosh" as the ride ascended and descended.

Thankfully, The Girl didn't go for the wild rides. I rode a few of the tamer ones with her, like the Dizzy Dragon, the Himalaya, and the Crazy Bus.

(Aside to mseuphrates: There was a sighting of the big strawberry ride, but it wasn't assembled.)

I've been following the scuttlebutt on my LJ friends list, and have decided not to link up these two accounts. I don't want everything I post to LJ cross-posted on Facebook, and vice versa. If I want to crosspost an item, I'll do it manually. And please, if my item is marked friends-only, please don't share it with the rest of the world.

tardis Mk III -- my Dell Latitude Cpx J650GT laptop -- is running intolerably slow. This is after putting in 512 Mb of RAM a couple of months ago. It's only recognizing the first 256 Mb of RAM. I've tried different memory chips, and it is getting a parity read error at locations 10000000 or 10000020. This leads me to suspect it's a problem with the memory socket, and not the chips.

There are three ways I can fix this problem, in descending order of cost: (1) Buy a new or refurbished laptop, (2) buy another Dell Latitude CPx J650GT if I can find one, or (3) replace the motherboard. I happen to like the model I have, not to mention the docking station and swappable drives I bought for it. (I can take out the CD drive and swap in a Zip drive, a floppy drive, or a second hard drive.)

And so I looked online. overstock.com has a nice refurbished Dell Latitude D620 for $350. amazon.com has a Dell Latitude CPx J650GT for $150. And eBay has a refurbished motherboard for $40 including shipping. I'm going with the last solution. The memory socket should be on the motherboard. Hopefully this will fix my problem, and I'll have a fully functional laptop again. I just hope I can find some clear table space to do the motherboard swap.

Yesterday, filkertom posted a link -- with minimal commentary -- to an ad for a feminine hygiene product. The ad was very cloying -- douche and you might get a raise.

Gaah! Who writes this shit? And are these products really necessary?

I've seen the same strategy employed for men's products, specifically for products like Axe body spray. Use Axe and the women will start falling all over you. Yeah, right. Not even pheromones can have such a strong field effect.

At my church, we have a "no scents" policy because a few of our members are hyperseneitive to colognes and perfumes.

My response to Tom's post (with a few added words): "Because Madison Ave. is full of people who job it is to make you think the human body is a horrible, smelly thing and that you should buy their products so you can be pleasing to the people around you."

I'll stick to the bare essentials -- soap, shampoo, deodorant stick, pre-shave, after-shave balm.

On the other hand, Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty has been wonderful at dispelling the beauty myths that has been perpetuated by the ad industry. Watch their videos, especially the one called "Evolution".