Dave Mancuso dot Com

(And I’m not talking about Frodo’s sword)

So Sting is doing a deal with Victoria’s Secret to perform at their fashion show. First it was the Compaq deal and now this. Sting, Sting, Sting. How the might have fallen. Are there no depths you won’t sink to?

Is it just me, or does news affect you differently as your life situation changes? I hate to hear bad news stories about children since I’ve had kids. Each summer I avoid the news with the inevitable caught in an overhot car stories, for instance. I just don’t want to hear it.

When I was a kid and in my early twenties, I prided myself on how I could take anything without blinking an eye. I was tougher than dirt.

I was so naive and stupid. Now I just deeply appreciate what I have every day and every moment. Sometimes you have to realize how lucky you are with the life that you live. And let the people you love know it.

So Apple’s iTunes has become Time magazine’s invention of the year. How do they do it? They weren’t first to market, but they made it work. It’s just like USB–technology that was a flop until Apple made it a standard and evangelized it. Within a year, USB devices were out for both Mac and Windows everywhere.

It’s like home wireless networks. Wireless base stations were in production from other manufacturers, but they cost $1100 apiece. Enter Apple, with a $289 base station that worked like a dream. They singlehandedly created the home wireless revolution and everyone else followed suit.

My two administrators with PC laptops asked to move back to Macs this year because of the things they can do with OS X. Now it seems that Apple has decided to roll out some of its magic to Windows products. Hey, this is a company that had the precursor to Mac OS X running on PC machines (look here if you dont’ believe me). It’s a good time to be working with computers.

iTunes is available for download for both Macintosh and Windows here. Be careful about buying those dollar songs once you get iTunes up and running, though–it can be addictive.

So Denise was telling me and the kids how she would give pills to a steer when she grew up on the farm. She would take a metal stick called a ball gun (about a foot and a half long) and load it with a pill (the ball gun had a kind of a plunger at the end for the pill). The pills were really big, as big as a three inch long hot dog. Then she would ram the stick down the steer’s throat, pop the button at the handle end, and shoot the pill down the animal’s throat.

Of course, she was telling the kids this to give Drew a choice–take his medicine, or we revive the ball gun and do it for him.

Parents are so mean. But he took his medicine right away (heh, heh).

Wow. This just in from Deborah Branscum’s weblog. Apparently “Dr.” John Gray, the author of all those Men are From Mars books, has faked all of his advanced degrees. His one degree is a high school diploma.

So the Mars guy is a fraud. Does this mean that Men aren’t from Mars? Where are we from, then?

I think most women would say men could be from the doghouse if we don’t get on the stick and get those things done around the house. Not that I speak from personal experience, mind you. It has a good ring to it, though: Women are from Venus, Men are in the Doghouse. Maybe I should publish it and make some bucks…

They always forget the Atkins Diet missing piece–sleep. At least I did, this week. It looks like I can’t miss sleep the way I used to. It just kills me. I just had trouble going to sleep for some reason.

The other missing piece that people forget is the vegetable and salad family. No one seems to remember that low carb diets feed you more veggies and salad than you’d eat in months on a carb diet, if you do it correctly. That helps too.

I’ve spent the last couple of nights (and a morning) diving into the Microsoft Exchange Server. It’s an email server that has calendaring and other goodies built in.

The one problem is that it’s a virus magnet. Everyone and everything tries to infect the messages sent through the Exchange server. If you set up this email server, you’re creating a huge target for bad mojo.

The other problem is that it’s Microsoft. This software has some weird dumb stuff going on with it, like most Microsoft programs. For instance, like Brad said, why does a software install special extras in its list, and then go to the next item in the list–special extras all over again? And then it goes through the entire list again after installation just to make sure that everything was installed? Are they just doing this to convince me that the money I spent was worth it?

Working with Microsoft is sometimes like fighting a tug of war that you know you’re losing–so you try to figure out the best way to lose in order to make the best of things.

…Web pages like this restore my faith in the fact that we’re doing ourselves proud as a species.

Wow. And if the regular technopop remix of Tiptoe Through the Tulips isn’t enough, check out the seven minute extended version on the same page.

And all because I was trying to find a page to explain Tiny Tim to my children.

My wife asks me why I use television references so often in conversation. Frankly, it’s because for better or worse, television in the past four decades is a common language of reference among our generation.

If I use the words “and they told two friends, and so on. And so on. And so on…” most people near my age will laugh and understand the reference, much better than “’tis a tale told by an idiot.”

On the other hand, maybe E. D. Hirsch was right.

I’m watching the lunar eclipse tonight–it’s really cool. At full eclipse I can see the whole moon in shadow with binoculars, yet still visible. It’s not disturbing like the solar eclipse I saw ten years ago, but it’s still fascinating. I stand there watching and I think of people watching eclipses through Grecian times and back in Stone Age times, as long as people have been on Earth. Some things are pretty timeless.

Man, I wish I could have seen it even better. I need to get a telescope. Wouldn’t it be cool to make a small platform somewhere that ambient light isn’t a factor? At least the ambient light here is much less than in Philly where I grew up–I can see much more of the Milky Way than I see near the city.