MarkCz.com: Blog

Glenn Beck, Eric Massa, and the worst interview ever

2010-03-10T04:06:00Z

I'm someone who grew up watching the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon year in and year out. I was tuned in when David Letterman interviewed Crispin Glover and Farrah Fawcett and Joaquin Phoenix. I saw President Nixon resign and President Bill Clinton challenge a grand jury on what the meaning of 'is' is.

Tonight, I saw something that ranks right up there with any of those golden moments. On MSNBC's Countdown, Lawrence O'Donnell ran excerpts of Glenn Beck's one-hour interview tonight with Eric Massa, who resigned yesterday as a Democratic congressman from New York State.

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Oven fries recipe: French fries without hassle or mess

2010-03-08T23:14:00Z

Oven fries are the perfect solution. You can enjoy hot, healthy-ish sticks of potato that are soft and fluffy inside and crispy golden brown outside with minimal fuss and mess.

Ideally, you'll want to use a nonstick silicone baking mat on your baking sheet. This makes fry removal foolproof. As an alternative, you can take a generous sheet of aluminum foil, crinkle it up and then flatten it back out again to provide an uneven surface that resists sticking.

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Child controls air traffic at JFK Airport in NYC? FAA investigates

2010-03-03T13:58:00Z

There are reports this morning that a child was allowed to stand in as an air traffic controller at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport.

According to a story at NBCNewYork.com, "The FAA says a controller brought the child to work on February 17th and allowed him to talk to pilots."

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Amazon MP3 deals for March

2010-03-01T16:18:00Z

The first day of every month brings 100 new MP3 albums at Amazon.com, each selling for just $5.

Amazon cleverly calls it "100 Albums for $5 Each."

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Freelance graphic design / communications business guide

2010-02-18T17:18:00Z

The best book I have found on the subject is The Business Side of Creativity, by Cameron S. Foote.

Foote is the founder and editor of Creative Business, which offers newsletters, advice, and support to creative services organizations. He has thirty years of industry experience himself, as well as the collected wisdom of his thousands of subscribers to drawn on. The book -- currently in its third updated edition -- has been regarded as the bible of creative business for over ten years.

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Dick Cheney: A record of recklessness

2010-02-15T01:03:00Z

Self-appointed safety expert Dick Cheney is the guy, you recall, who shot an acquaintance in the face on a "hunting" trip that involved holding game birds captive at a spot until the "hunters" arrived in a car to shoot them. The incident made for a lot of "Deadeye Dick" jokes on late night TV, but considering it soberly raises serious questions about just how reckless a person would have to be to make such a blunder with a deadly weapon.

Cheney talks about security incessantly, but what is his record?

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David Murdock: Dole Foods, diet, Oprah, and growing rich

2010-02-10T18:18:00Z

You really should listen to the 23-minute interview yourself, but in a nutshell, this brilliant but dyslexic high school dropout was homeless in Detroit following his service in WWII with one nickle and one penny to his name. That's when a good Samaritan helped him borrow $900 toward a $1,200 diner, which he flipped for a $700 profit 10 months later. Murdock then bought a beat-up old car and drove to Arizona.

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Alton Brown's weight loss on diet of 'Good Eats'

2010-02-09T22:22:00Z

Alton Brown has succeeded in losing 50 pounds of ugly fat by creating his own four food groups:

Daily: Fruits, whole grains, leafy greens, nuts, carrots, green tea
3 times weekly: Oily fish, yogurt, broccoli, sweet potato, avocado
1 time weekly: Red meat, pasta, dessert, alcohol
0 times weekly: Fast food, soda, processed meals, canned soups, "diet" anything

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Move the domain, redesign the site

2010-02-09T07:06:00Z

Let's just say I have spent a lot of hours tweaking computer code and researching solutions to obscure technical issues over the past couple of months. I can't tell you how grateful I am to Amy for her patience when I have been lost in thought counting pixels, or over-enthusiastic about some detail of CSS.

I have plenty more to do. My most recent photos, for example, are from 1999. There are sidebar widgets to write and email templates to design. But I have at least made the jump from the old site to the new one. Now I will at least be able to write a fresh blog post from time to time, without worrying about adding to an obsolete site.

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About me

2010-02-06T14:11:00Z

I pronounce my last name "SER-nick." Speakers of Polish would say something more like "CHAIR-nyets," but I don't speak Polish, so I just use the pronunciation my parents taught me.. I'm a 49-year-old Web developer living with my wonderful wife... [Full post here]

WordPress CMS alternative: SilverStripe open source content management system

2009-11-24T18:16:00Z

After a meeting with a Kenosha-Racine area salon owner, I was working on a website proposal and trying to settle on a CMS. This site would be more like a conventional website than a blog, but the ability to edit it would still be key, and the salon's staff would need something flexible, but still very user-friendly. They would want to feature events and specials, add pages for new stylists, change prices and other details of product lines, etc.

Comparing my various options, Drupal, Joomla, and Movable Type clearly would be too complex. I was again leaning strongly toward WordPress when I stumbled upon something I had never heard of before: SilverStripe.

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Psalm 109:8 and Obama: The ignorance and the irony

2009-11-18T05:50:00Z

Obviously, anyone reading this passage is supposed to sympathize with the slandered psalmist. No one with a brain would instead adopt the "wicked and deceiving words" of the accusers as a slogan, right?

Wrong.

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Firefox spell-check: In-browser help for Wisconsin's poor spellers

2009-11-11T15:35:00Z

Here's a tip: Get Firefox.

Not only is Firefox a superior, free browser with an superabundance of useful add-ons, but it has a built-in spell-checker which flags your suspected misspellings with a dotted red underline.

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How to carve a turkey: Alton Brown's Thanksgiving video tutorial

2009-11-10T16:40:00Z

The thought of Thanksgiving coming up and people having to figure out how to carve the bird reminds me of two extremely helpful things:

Our Cuisinart CEK-40 Electric Knife. We've had it for about a decade, and its two blades work like magic on both roasted meats and breads.
The baseline cutting trick, as demonstrated by Alton Brown in the video above from his Food Network show Good Eats. This genius carving tip makes a huge difference.

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Clicky Web Analytics: Website stats in depth, in real time, with Google Maps

2009-11-08T21:29:00Z

Clicky Web Analytics is a real time Web statistics service. Its charts and graphs show you up-to-the-minute data. At any given moment, you can see how many visitors are at your site, how they got there, and what they're looking at. You can see their locations on a Google Map, and you can find out whether and exactly when they've visited before. You can see their operating systems, their browser versions, and their screen resolutions. You can see their ISPs or company names, and their cities and states. There's even a "Spy" display for tracking their paths through your site in real time, so you can see exactly which pages and links your visitors are using right now.

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Happy Halloween!

2009-10-31T14:13:00Z

Season's greetings to you and yours from Frankenstein's monster and his lovely bride.

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Pomplamoose: Music duo going viral via social media

2009-10-26T16:43:00Z

A couple of hours ago, though, the video above -- a Pomplamoose cover of Beyoncé's "Single Ladies" -- slowly slid down my home feed at FriendFeed. I clicked on it, and I was instantly hooked. The video has been up for just over a month and viewed nearly two million times.

From there, I went to the PomplamooseMusic channel at YouTube, where I watched some more of their amazing "VideoSongs" -- like this version of The Chordettes' "Mister Sandman":

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Halloween music playlist: Scary, spooky songs for the horror season

2009-10-14T20:15:00Z

If you need some Halloween-themed tracks to fill out your iPod library, here are a few suggestions. You can download these tunes in handy MP3 form via Amazon.com and enjoy them at an upcoming costume party or hayride, use them as background music for your haunted house or trick-or-treat display, or relax with them while you're pumpkin-carving or lost in a corn maze. Please take care, however, to remove your earbuds when bobbing for apples.

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UK Transplant patients given smokers' lungs

2009-10-12T13:53:00Z

In the radio segment, Prof. John Dark, senior transplant surgeon at The Freeman Hospital in Newcastle, said that data suggest the lungs of smokers "do a little bit worse, but not much worse; perhaps five percent worse."

Professor Dark also noted the possibility that a donor's lungs might be harboring a very early cancer, and "If you take lungs with a cancer in them and give them to a recipient, there's a chance the cancer may grow in the recipient. And that has happened from time to time over the years."

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Movie review: 'Vicky Cristina Barcelona' (2008)

2009-10-11T13:22:00Z

Many of Woody Allen's more recent films are beautifully shot in luxurious foreign locations. They star contemporary name actors of great mystique who are all absolutely obeisant about the honor of working with Mr. Allen. But while they still feature the same Windsor EF Elongated titles and jazz/classical soundtracks as in previous works, the storytelling falls flat and the jokes are forced.

I keep waiting for something matching Allen's previous brilliance, but Vicky Cristina Barcelona is not it.

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WGN-TV shuts out The Museum of Classic Chicago Television

2009-09-30T14:45:00Z

For anyone whose childhood included countless hours of Ray Rayner and His Friends, Bozo's Circus, and Frazier Thomas hosting Garfield Goose and Friends and Family Classics, The Museum of Classic Chicago Television (online at www.FuzzyMemories.TV) has been a gift and a treasure, preserving fragments of our past that might otherwise be lost forever.

Now, however, it appears that Tribune Company superstation WGN-TV has flexed its muscle and forced the little nonprofit to pull all WGN-TV material from the museum website.

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Metal detector enthusiast in Staffordshire finds huge hoard of gold treasure

2009-09-24T13:39:00Z

Now, from England, comes the astounding story of Terry Herbert. Using his metal detector, he found a hoard of more than 1,500 precious Anglo-Saxon military artifacts. The collection is 1,400 years old. Much of it is gold and silver of consummate craftsmanship, with arrays of tiny garnets cut to shape. Some of the items are unique and incomparable, making them nearly impossible to appraise or price. The trove likely belonged to a king. A former keeper at the British Museum says the discovery is "absolutely the equivalent of finding a new Lindisfarne Gospels or Book of Kells."

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Heart-shaped potato

2009-09-22T19:14:00Z

Last night, Amy and I watched President Obama on The Late Show with David Letterman, where he was given a heart-shaped potato by audience member Mary Apple of Independence, Missouri, who brought the same potato to Letterman's show two years ago.

Today, upon opening a new bag of Wisconsin russets, Amy happened upon her own heart-shaped potato -- and this one was actually bigger and more heart-shaped than the one that garnered so much attention.

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Netflix million dollar prize overlooks the obvious

2009-09-21T17:10:00Z

The real problem with the Netflix movie rating system is that it uses five stars -- whole stars only, and zero is not selectable. This gives you only five possible ratings choices.

The tried and true standard movie critics' star rating system, on the other hand, is based on just four stars -- but half-stars are used, and zero stars (a bomb) is an option. This permits nine alternatives, a far better range than just five.

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Time Warner Cable bill payment still questionable

2009-09-11T14:50:00Z

Back in June, I blogged about a significant flaw in Time Warner Cable's PayXpress bill payment system. Three months later, nothing seems to have been fixed.

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