shwango! blog
life, love and some other stuff…

Archive for May, 2004

They’re here!

The 17 year “Cicada Invasion” is under way! Here are some pictures I took a few days ago…




Now the cicadas are pretty much everywhere and fly around you at times. The noise is not bad generally, but some places are deafening! So far things are more mild than the last “invasion” back in 1987 - but we’ve got another month or so still, so we shall see!

Some links if you’re interested or have no idea what I’m talking about: Cicada Mania, Cicada Watch 2004, Cicadaville.com (quite funny)

Happy Anniversary!

Yesterday marked the one year anniversary of Jen and my first date!

We had a great day. Both of us took off work and we went to a few shops we’d never been to. Went down to Sawyer Point and walked over to Newport on the Levee. Ate, drank and were merry! For dinner we recreated our first date by eating at Dewey’s Pizza in Clifton and then bowling at Madison Bowl. Very enjoyable!

It’s been a wonderful year and wanted to thank her for that!

Jen, I love you!

Making Windows XP beautiful!

RedHat 9 and Mac OSX both had a certain “beautiful” look to them. The fonts look really great. Windows was blah… Then one of the guys at work got a new laptop running XP which had beautiful looking fonts! I had to figure out how it did it… In the performance settings, both laptops had “Font Smoothing” enabled. Font on my laptop: Tahoma. Font on other laptop: Tahoma. Same fonts! So what could it be? After going through the XP display settings, I came across something called “Clear Type” in the methods section for font smoothing. After applying that, I’m a happy camper! Really makes XP beautiful - which makes life better when I have to use Windows…

Desktop -> Properties -> Appearance -> Effects…

A dark day for radio…

97X is gone. I posted that they were moving to an all Internet station, which was cool with me. But I guess they didn’t do their homework or something cuz they didn’t have enough to keep the Internet streams alive. Now all we’ve got it dead air. 97X was the only real radio station left playing the good stuff… it’s a bit sad…