Congrats msbelle! As an fyi, I pay about 140 a month for health and dental, but that's just for me.

Condolences for all the recently bereft pet owners. As someone else said, buffista pets need to not be doing that.

Much vibing for ita !'s mom, and anyone else who needs some -ma.

And that catches me up after a weekend down with the ick. This thread, at least.

Tom, what's your tumblr address?

[link]

If you really need wikipedia articles, you can look up the cached pages on google. Or use a different language, I think.

I don't really NEED it. I just didn't realize how many times in a day I think of something I want to know just a bit more about, and then look it up on wikipedia.

One day last week I looked up selvage, Jordan Clarke, Melinda Clarke, John Clarke, List of Hunger Games Characters, Tenterhooks,Wes Bentley, the word "gloss" and "Scrum.

Tom, you have such a talent for composition and contrast. I love looking at your photos. You should see if you can't exhibit your work somewhere. I'd buy more than one HQ print for my house.

New Mexico is getting bigger.

Like a waistband after Thanksgiving dinner, New Mexico's borders are gradually gaining girth, according to the Albuquerque Journal.

It’s not much, and it’s not happening very fast -- the state is getting about an inch wider every 40 years -- but the state is unquestionably expanding, according to University of Colorado geophysicist Henry Berglund and his colleagues.

Using a collection of 25 extra-precise GPS receivers planted across New Mexico and Colorado, Berglund determined that the cities of Albuquerque and Santa Fe are creeping away from each other. The rate of change seems ever so slow to the untrained ear, described as approximately 1.2 “nanostrains” per year.

Maybe I should buy property there.

[link]

Sophia, Wikipedia doesn't care if you circumvent their measures, by the way. So don't feel any way about it:

During the blackout, Wikipedia is accessible on mobile devices and smart phones. You can also view Wikipedia normally by disabling JavaScript in your browser, as explained on this Technical FAQ page. Our purpose here isn't to make it completely impossible for people to read Wikipedia, and it's okay for you to circumvent the blackout. We just want to make sure you see our message.

But there are a lot of people out there, it seems, who didn't actually read what Wikipedia wrote, and are pissy that anyone's reading any English wikipedia content.

Thanks, Tom.

You can also circumvent the Wikipedia blackout by hitting the 'Esc' key while the page is loading. You have to time it right.

Lifehacker also has a scriptlet, if you want an easily repeatable method.

So,

Here’s a little good news to cheer up your Wednesday: Today’s anti-censorship protest across the Internet has already forced Republican senators Marco Rubio and John Cornyn to drop their support of the SOPA bill. Already! Rubio and Cornyn weren’t just supporters, though — Rubio co-sponsored the legislation that would allow the U.S. government to shut down almost any website for almost any reason, and Cornyn heads the GOP’s Senate campaign group.

The New York Times reports:

Internet protests on Wednesday quickly cut into Congressional support for anti-web piracy measures as lawmakers abandoned and rethought their backing for legislation that pitted new media interests against some of the most powerful old-line commercial interests in Washington.

[link]

Link has links for you to send notes of protest to your senators and representatives.

We're expecting some snow this week in Utah, but nothing beyond what we're well used to dealing with. It's actually supposed to be a snow/rain mix, because it's been much warmer than usual around here. I would only worry if he's coming in late, when things might be freezing up a bit--which our airport is well used to coping with.