I used to have many stuffed animals when I was little, including a cool teddy bear with swivellable arms and legs. Anyway, what happened was that one day I was playing with my bear, pretending to cook him in the oven. (Don’t ask why.) I forgot him in there. My mother started cooking dinner, and a horrible smell soon permeated the house. Needless to say, she had REALLY cooked my bear. The food was ruined, and of course so was the bear. I cried and cried… But I look back now and laugh at the whole thing. She cooked my bear! He didn’t have a name, but I declare, Bearnard would have been appropriate. And after his incident, he would forever be known, in teddy bear heaven, as Burnard. In fact, that probably is how he is known there to this day.

Coranto is the next version of Newspro. Both were discontinued a while ago, but the former seems to have been revived. I’m not surprised, it’s an elegant blog solution: fast, easy to set up and use, and flexible. In concept it’s what I would program if I set out to write my own blog script. News is generated as a simple HTML file that you then include using SSI within another page of your own design.

I tried out Movable Type, which reminded me somewhat of Post Nuke, both being not what I was looking for. I probably could have spent a tremendous amount of time bending MT into doing what I needed, but it also took a tremendous amount of time to rebuild the news after just adding one post. The only benefit was that MT supported user comments, but I didn’t want to enable those on this main page, anyway. Movable Type is good if you want a full-featured blog right out of the box, and don’t want to impose much of your own site design on top of it. It won’t work very well for you if you already have a website and just want to add a news section into it.

I had an odd experience parallel parking this evening.

Okay, I would like to write about how refrigerators work. No, really. How refrigerators work: When you compress a gas, it heats up. When you decrease the pressure, it cools down. So if you take a room-temperature gas, compress it so it gets hot, then let it cool down to room temperature, you’ll have a room temperature compressed gas. Then remove the pressure you added, and it gets proportionally colder than room temperature.

In a refrigerator, there’s a pipe with freon or some gas which runs inside and outside outside the box. Outside of the box, a compressor squeezes the gas and it gets hot, and a fan blows air over the pipe of hot compressed gas to cool it down. Now you have a room temperature (more or less) compressed gas. The room-temperature compressed gas circulates through the pipe into the fridge, where the pressure is removed. The (expanding) gas becomes cold, and another fan blows air over the cold pipe, equalizing the temperature between the inside of the fridge (by cooling it) and the pipe (by warming it). The room-temperature gas circulates out of the refrigerator, and the cycle repeats.

My next post will be completely serious and scientific in nature. But first, something completely different. On a level of silliness you will not believe. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present an excerpt I found from an e-mail message sent March 10, 1997, when I was but a wee laddie in the hallowed halls of higher ‘hejucashun. ‘Hejucashun. Ptooey. Excuse me. I strip myself bare for your ridicule:

The Buger Picker Model no. 402 (patent pending) is explicitly for adults only, and represents years of research and design. It is a remarkable innovation, designed to revolutionize the world of unwanted solidified snot extraction. The Buger Picker comes as part of a package called the “Breathe Easier!(tm) Mucus Removal System.” This product is in such high demand that consumers may have trouble getting hold of one. The package, sold at your local supermarket or hardware store, can also be ordered directly from Snotcom, Inc. Send $39.95 to the address below. You may also visit us on the web, at “www.mucus.org”.

I meant “booger”, not “buger”. Now go bugger off.

I managed to rescue nearly all of my old news data, thanks to Google’s cache. I’ll post it here, sometime, somewhere.

With this post shall be ushered in a new era of exuberant textual creativity.