Well, my attempt to write a template page without fully understanding what I am doing failed miserably. As you will see if you click the My Favorite Stuff icon on the left tool bar. I seem to be calling unknown functions (though I assure you that absolutely no functions were injured in the production of this website). So today I get to read a bit further into my PHP book and the WordPress Codex. I’m guessing that nobody is holding their Christmas shopping list in sweaty hand awaiting the arrival of my links. I am doing this to learn……I am doing this to learn…..I am doing this to learn….

You know, I am tired of the shoddy journalistic ethics that seem to have become standard practice. Product placements for hire, reviewers who aren’t reviewers, and journalists that are really PR hacks. This sort of crap has no place in journalism. It does, however, have a happy home right here at LostInaFog. Let the SELL OUT begin! Since I’m now up to 2.2 readers, I’ve decided to give all of you…well, both of you….a chance to help support LostInaFog. We’ve added Google Ads on the right tool bar, honed in by the magical Google formula that gives you only what you want. And I’ve now signed up with Amazon and iTunes. If you like my take on books, movies, and music, then click through our links to drop pennies into our bandwidth-still-ain’t-free-George-Gilder fund.

I’m a regular reader of ESPN’s website and am already thinking about next year’s baseball season–hey, I’m a Giants fan so we’re always thinking about next season. But all the stuff on ESPN that I think I really want to read is marked for their Insider service, meaning I have to fork over $40/year for it. So I was considering it. I started reading through the signup part of the website and notice that it says that if you are a subscriber to ESPN the Magazine, you just enter some code from your mailing label and you will get the Insider service for the term of your subscription.

My apologies that I can’t remember now where the original link came from for this site, but thank you whoever you are! Check out InBubbleWrap for a chance to win a different absolutely free business oriented book each week day. I’ve been visiting it daily this week and was notified that I won my first book last night. I can’t wait for it to come so I can pop each of the little bubbles one-by-one. Thanks guys!

I send all of you reading this (let’s see…one, two, three….) my very best wishes for a joyful Thanksgiving Holiday. I plan on spending the day with my kids and hope to drop by some friends’ house a bit later.

I am thankful mostly today for my two amazing kids who bring immeasurable joy to me. And also for my family–dysfunctional, spread out over half a continent, but always there for me. Have a wonderful day Mom and Dad, brothers, and cousins….I love you all.

Any opinion of this movie from me is prejudiced by my love of Johnny Cash’s music. If you share that love then you have to go see this movie. Joaquin Phoenix is terrific as Cash and Reese Witherspoon is a great June. The theater in my pre-Thanksgiving Day viewing was mostly filled with folks older than me, folks who could remember just how great Johnny was and the impact his music had on his fans and his contemporaries. I loved all the “guest appearances in the movie from the likes of Elvis (Tyler Hilton was a great choice to portray him and has a couple of early-Elvis songs on the soundtrack disc) and Jerry Lee Lewis (Waylon Payne).

As a father of two great kids, I worry about things that I just can’t imagine ever darkened my parent’s pillow at night. I started talking to my daughter even before kindergarten about some of the facts of this world, including that there are some really bad people out there. Megan’s Law probably does not work perfectly, but the more convicted kid hurters that have their photos and addresses constantly available the better for all of us. I want them to know they are being watched.

From the Freakonomics Weblog

I could have linked back to the original stories, but thought linking through Dubner and Levitt’s Freakonomics site would cover two birds, so to speak. Freakonomics was my favorite business book of the year and is to be applauded for marrying two otherwise unspeaking distant cousins (well, you know what I mean) in economics and logic. Check out their blog for regularly stimulating brain activity. And if you have not read the book, then you are hereby kicked off this blog until you do.

Introducing the iPod Invisa!

You know you want it…the “iPod Invisa”. The 8 million song capacity is nice, but the cool factor comes from its inclusion of Pong. Nice…..

All bow down to Ethan J. A. Schoonover and the Kinkless Getting Things Done system. I’ve been using it since way back in October (.61?) and think it is reason enough to switch to a Mac and to buy OmniOutliner Pro. The newest version of KGTD is 0.73 (that means this is beta software and may crash your system, stain your jeans, or cause hair to grow from places that might seem rude…) and I am using it everyday. I don’t actually use it to get things done. That sound you hear is David Allen turning over in his blue suit. But I’m getting in lots of good practice with this thing and as soon as I actually get a life, I am set.

Clinton Portis. Clinton Portis. Say It With Us Now. - Deadspin

Deadspin is my kind of sports coverage…with no reverence and all humor.

I love the My Status plugin, and have it running in my sidebar now. For some reason I can’t get the timestamp to work correctly in WP for the posts or Status. I have the offset set correctly under Options, but it doesn’t seem to be flowing through correctly. Which means I probably missed a setting somewhere…part of today’s projects.