The late Friday Five.
1. What brand of toothpaste do you use?
Colgate, 2 in 1 Mouthwash and toothpaste.

2. What brand of toilet paper do you prefer?
Anything soft. My momma buys rough stuff. Owweee. In a couple of months I will be buying my own. Ahhh, snuggly soft.

3. What brand(s) of shoes do you wear?
I like Nike. I don't know why.

4. What brand of soda do you drink?
I drink DrPepper, Pepsi, Root Beer (any brand), Mountain Dew Code Red, and Minute Maid Pink Lemondae (Not really a soda, but hey, it comes in a can). (That is too many brands. You can find the links to them.)

5. What brand of gum do you chew?
Orbit, the flavor lasts for a long time.

I have added some interesting facts and a little background info for the AH-64 Apache.

Zero-footprint Linux distributions. [You know Linux, free Operating System (like Windows ... eh ... except not free), open source, penguin.] You can find an article about them here. I personally haven't tried it, because the one I am looking at (Knoppix) is about a 700 Mb download. My computer estimated it would take me over 48 hours to download. Darn Dialup. Anyway, it is really cool, if you have ever been interested in Linux, but was too afraid to mess with partitions, or to install it on your system, this is the route to go. Basically you burn this to a CD, insert it into your computer, restart your computer and you will have linux up and running. After you take the CD out and restart your computer, you are back at Windows. This is a great failsafe, because if Windows ever gets screwed up where you can't get to your files, use your Linux CD and print or back them up. Knoppix has about 2 Gb of highly compressed software bundled with Linux that is put on just the one single CD. There are other versions of Linux that are similiar to Knoppix, like SUSE 8.2 Live-Eval which uses a small swapfile, so you can store configuration settings, but they are stored in only one file so your Windows setup should be safe. However, it will only work with hard drives that are in the FAT format and not NTFS.

Check out this site for instructions on how to turn a floppy disk into the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek.

By the way, just to see if it is even possible with a 56 Kb connection I started downloading Knoppix, right now it has downloaded close to 7 Mb and it is still showing 0% downloaded.

Explain this to me. It was like 106F for our high temperature Sunday, 103F for Monday (I think.), and 55F Tuesday. What the heck? The high today is supposed to be 75F.

One of my friends came over last night to play a little Halo. That was fun. We played the "Assault on the Control Room" level for a little while and then went head to head. I beat him, but it looks like we are up for a little rematch tonight.

By the way, tomorrow is my last day of school, and I only have to go for one period. I get to come to school at 2:30 pm, take my final test, and then leave. My high school graduation is the 29. It took a long time, and a little bit of hard work to get here, but I feel like the real journey is just about to begin.

2 more wallpapers added.

Yesterday started out at school and ended at the movies. Yesterday me and some of my friends went and watched The Matrix: Reloaded. It was a really cool movie. Not better than the first, but still it was a cool movie.

Then I came home last night (well, really today because it was 1 in the morning) and found my mother crying. She was on the phone talking to the Vet. My lifetime companion passed away last night. He would have turned 13 years old on November 2nd. His death was so sudden. He was well loved and he died peacefully. As explained to me by my mother, he went to my mother and put his head in her lap, she let him outside, and he went and laid in the grass. There he stayed for a few minutes breathing heavlily. He then crawled into his doghouse. My mother knew something wasn't right, and woke up my dad. He went to look at him, where he pushed his nose out the door of the doghouse. He stayed there for a few minutes, pulled his nose back in and went. I believe there is a reason everything happens, and he went into the doghouse (he never goes in there unless it is winter) for a reason. I believe I was delayed getting home, for a reason. He was my best friend, and I got him when I was 6 years old entering into the first grade, and now I am about to graduate in a couple weeks. Zipper saw me all the way through school (growing up really), and he will be missed. He was always there. Our relationship was never that of a master and his dog, but that of a dog and his boy. Goodbye with love my friend, pal, brother, and confidant. (If I ever get a hold of a scanner I will post a picture of him, because he really was a beautiful dog.)

(Any thoughts? Post a comment below.)

I have added 5 new wallpapers. Have fun.

This is the coolest thing ever. The best commercial I have ever seen. It took them 606 takes to make it and it was completely done without any computers. Imagine filming that the 600th time when one little minute thing gets off a fraction of an inch and screws up the rest of it. It is simply a work of art. (You will need Flash 6 to view it, and you can find the video with different download sizes here from Honda. You will just have to dig for it a little bit though.) You have to check it out, I can't just say how cool this is. Kudos to Honda.

The Friday Five has arrived.
1. Would you consider yourself an organized person? Why or why not?
I am half organized and half not. If that makes sense. I try to keep some things organized, but I do tend to let things pile up on my desk. I am too lazy.

2. Do you keep some type of planner, organizer, calendar, etc. with you, and do you use it regularly?
I am currently using a Palm PDA. It's borrowed. I don't use it as much as I probably would once I graduate from high school. I don't have a lot of appointments and such to have to worry about. I mostly just use the To Do list part of it.

3. Would you say that your desk is organized right now?
No.

4. Do you alphabetize CDs, books, and DVDs, or does it not matter?
DVDs and CDs I have are organized alphabetically, books I have organized mostly by subject.

5. What's the hardest thing you've ever had to organize?
My room, but that was many moons ago.

Sorry for not posting anything for a while, but I have been feeling terrible lately.

Forget about the Friday Five for this week.

Bill is back again with his latest article, Let's Misbehave

Perhaps the most profound change in American society over the past 40 years is how bad behavior is processed. When I grew up in the 1960s, bad boys and girls were usually held accountable for their misbehavior, punishment was almost a lock, and very few scandals resulted in profit participation.

Today, all that has changed. In the latest of a long line of rewards for questionable activity, Monica Lewinsky has been hired to host a prime-time television program called "Mr. Personality." Since Ms. Lewinsky has no prior TV experience, one can assume that the only reason she is doing "Mr. Personality" is that she did Mr. Personality, if you know what I mean. Monica's employment follows a long list of people who have profited from notorious incidents. G. Gordon Liddy has a syndicated radio show, Oliver North works for Fox News, Wynona Ryder is doing commercials fresh off her shoplifting conviction, Robert Downey Jr. got a role on "Ally McBeal" right out of drug rehab. The list goes on and on.

Even Paula Jones, who made a federal case out of sexual harassment allegations against then Governor Bill Clinton, was paid six figures for showing her figure in Penthouse magazine. After seeing those pictures I wanted to sue for sexual harassment.

Jessica Hahn and Tonya Harding also made some good money in the aftermath of their scandals. Many rappers will tell you the more they are busted by the police, the bigger their recording contracts. R. Kelly has a hit album after being charged with sexually abusing a minor. The message here is that American society really doesn't care how anyone behaves and that some in corporate America will reward tawdry behavior all day long. Believe me, this situation is not lost on children. They see Monica scoring in the media, and they know exactly how the play was made. Surely TV programs starring Anna Nicole Smith and Ms. Lewinsky send a signal that the USA is a place where hard work doesn't really matter if you are ready to marry an 89-year-old guy or exceed your internship job description.

While it is true that we Americans love a story of redemption, contrition is not needed to capitalize on scandal. Few of the infamous ever admit wrongdoing, and it is certainly not required by those who hire them. No, the only thing that is required is a famous name, and it really doesn't matter how you become famous just as long as you are.

You would think that the National Organization for Women (NOW) would be outraged over Monica's "Mr. Personality" gig. First of all, aren't there any women in America who are actually qualified to host a reality program of this kind? Who actually worked for years developing communications skills? Where is NOW on this?

In fact, where is anybody on this? I know these TV programs are culturally insignificant, but there is a larger issue here. Isn't there?

Unfortunately, very few of us care about the issue. Americans are numb to tawdry actions because we see so much of them and the celebration of boorishness has now been elevated to a level the decadent Roman emperors would have enjoyed. The result is that America unquestionably has become a coarse society, a country where crude can be very profitable. And we're not talking oil here.

File the hiring of the infamous under freedom of expression. The Constitution gives us all the right to profit from our mistakes. And never has the business of bad behavior been better.

Fred did it again. Thanks.