We bought a mandoline yesterday. I was planning on going to Williams-Sonoma, since we have a gift certificate, but I got a wild hair while I was at the grocery store, and I bought one (next door, at Linens-n-Things). It's the Oxo one.

We used it last night to thinly slice a cucumber and an onion. It was heaven. Plus, the whole thing is dishwasher safe! But watch those blades, they just might be the sharpest thing we have in the house, and we just got our knives sharpened.

I hope to make crinkle-cut potato chips just as soon as I am able.

Okay, so I was all set to relate the wonders of Honest Tea, a tea drink in a bottle ($1.35 here in the middle of the Midwest) that was billed to me as delightful and only slightly sweet. I have a sweet tooth when it comes to drinks, and it would do me good to kick that particular habit. So today I got three bottles when the boy and I gave Mommy some alone time with a trip to the grocery store:

• Gold Rush Cinnamon - This stuff smells great, sweet, with a lot of cinnamon. It tastes pretty good, too, but here is the trick for tea: it smells much stronger than it tastes. In the case of this one, that's not bad. I would drink this again, and might even go out of my way to look for it.
• Lori's Lemon Tea - Pretty plain, boring tea. If you can't be bothered to make it yourself, you could spend some money to buy this. I was hoping, from the name, that it would be more like a lemonade tea, but it's more like a tea, with lemon wedge.
• Moroccan Mint Tea - Not so impressive. Smells like mint, has an aftertaste of mint, but the mint tea we used to brew at home from the peppermint leaves we got at the New Pioneer Coop was much better.

That said, I am looking forward to finding some of their other flavors. From their web site, I can see being interested in Vanilla Mint White Tea and Kashmiri Chai. They also have a new line of fruit juices coming out, but they might defeat the purpose (reducing my dependence on sweet drinks).

The wife is of the opinion, and rightly so, that we could make much of this at home. If I could get Honest Tea at work, or the flavors I like, it would be great. But buying it at the store and bringing it home (where I could be making my own tea) does seem silly. I do like their philosophy though, and who can resist the whimsy of their naming?

Yesterday, I spent six (6) hours chasing down one (1) bug in a web-based program I am writing for work.

Oy.

This is going to get a bit geeky.

I have a form that pulls data for a select box from a MySQL database. Based on what the user chooses in that select (a drop-down box for you non-geeks), a second select needs to be populated from the database. I could pull all the data the first time, and just parse out the appropriate material when the user makes their choice, but it is a lot of data, and it seems like that is not the right way.

Instead, when the user chooses from the first select box, it triggers a javascript function with onChange, and that function actually submits the form using submit(), but not until changing a variable in a hidden field that indicates to the page that the data should not actually be INSERTed into the database. Instead, it uses this second reload of the page to pull the data for the second select.

Only, it wasn't working. The javascript submit() just wouldn't go. I spent six hours trying to debug it, including writing the page over, finding another page online that did much the same thing, and comparing it, stripping out all the extraneous material from my form until it looked like that working form... and then, yesterday at 4:05 pm, I found it.

My form has a submit button. It was coded like this:

<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Add this Client"/>

The form I found that worked, was coded like this:

<input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Add this Client"/>

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I don't want to be a programmer.

I have an ISP, Globat.com. I am going to be rid of them soon, perhaps sooner than I thought, if I have my way. I used to park my Internet presence with Earthlink, but they cost a lot, and I had been shown this little company called Globat that offered a ton of space for your web site for just a very little money. Earthlink had given me no trouble, really, but they were expensive, and I was greedy for disk space. So I made the switch.

Globat was fine for a while, until my web site started to choke a little. And when I had questions about installing Movable Type, they were unable/unwilling to help. Each time my web site was inaccessible, or if it took several minutes to load my home page, I would dutifully send off a message to tech support, letting them know of my problems. Once it lasted a day and a half, but most times it was several hours of not-quite-outage. In one or two of these cases (and there were a dozen of them) I received a reply indicating that the problem might be other people on my same server, other customers, who were taking up too much of the server's resources.

But most of the time, I'd get a reply from Globat saying that they had checked, and everything seemed fine with my site, and they were closing the ticket. Of course, this was 24 to 36 hours later, and the problem had been gone for some time.

Finally, I felt they had strung me along enough. I was getting two-and-a-half GB of space, sure, but for all the customer service I was receiving, I might as well have been beating on the box myself.

I decided to leave. Picking another ISP was easy, but Globat was no help. I determined to move my sites slowly, leaving Globat up until it was time to renew, then letting it lapse. After all, I paid for a full year in advance.

Well, the jig is up. Tonight, I received a receipt from Globat, letting me know that I had been charged for another full year. I received no notice that my renewal was coming up. I received no indication that I should check my credit card on file to make sure my information was still valid. I just got a receipt.

And so, I asked them to rescind the charge and to cancel my account immediately. That they have done, and with an alacrity that belies my previous experiences with them.

So... if you want cheap hosting, Globat is good. If you want customer service, try someone else.

Just a quick update on Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-CA), sponsor of the Flag Amendment currently working its way through the Senate (it seems it may pass?). It turns out, according to the Washington Post in this article, that he may be a little too patriotic, to the tune of $700,000 from a defense contractor.

If it quacks like a bribe...

So, yesterday was apparently Flag Day. Whatever. _USA Today_ ran an Editorial about how a Flag Amendment (you know, the oft defeated attempt to criminalize the burning of the US flag) was misguided, etc. But they also ran an "opposing" editorial, by Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-CA), the sponsor of the latest Flag Amendment legislation.

You can read it here.

But let me point out the funniest/scariest part of his argument:

>"[Our Founding Fathers] recognized, as most Americans do, that the free-speech rights of individuals must be considered in relation to the rights of all people, most of whom support protecting our national symbol."

So, wait. So, individual free-speech rights must, in some cases, be abrogated in favor of the "rights of all people?" So, if the majority of "all people" disagree with me about, say, who should be President (need I remind us all that 51% is, in fact, a majority, just not much of one), I should not necessarily be allowed to point out that I think their choice is an evil monkey? You know, because my pointing that out impinges on their right to... feel good about winning?

Let me just point out, for those that think Mr. Cunningham makes a good case, that there is no room for argument on this: the free-speech rights of individuals must be considered more important than the free-speech rights of a majority, by simple definition. If I cannot speak my mind (or burn the flag) because more people disagree with me than agree with me, then I do not have the right to free-speech. Instead, I have a totalitarian censorship thrust upon me. Mr. Cunningham's argument is, by far, the most idiotic and specious peice of illogical granstanding I have heard in a long time. And this year has been impressively full of that.

How did the nutjobs get so bold?