OK, so this is a week old. I discovered my method of authenticating whether a person could post to this was a bit, uh, strict, and I've been too lazy ever since to fix it. Well I have some time today, so I sorted it out. Here is my tale from last week.

Friday I went for an interesting bike ride. I needed an AC adapter for my FireWire hard drive so I could rescue more recent versions of my financial documents and plan out my budget for the next year. So, I figured I'd take a ride to Fry's Electronics. Just out of curiosity, I stopped by a Ford dealership to look at the new Focii. They had a few on sale for $8650, which is less than a used one usually sells for. The salesman there must have been having a hard time selling cars -- he offered to let me test drive it, even after I told him I don't have my license yet.

Later on, at a different Ford dealership on the same bike ride, three separate salesmen told me they'd take a trade in on my bike. One told me he had actually seen it done at another dealership.

I went for another bike ride on Saturday up the coast to Carlsbad, stopping for a carne asada burrito. On the way back, I was stunned to be passed going up a huge hill by a roller blader. Unfathomable! The grand total for the trip was 46.3 miles, averaging 10 MPH (not including the burrito-break).

On the technology side, I upgraded my web server to Apache 2, and figured out how to use the Tomcat WebApp connector to make the inclusion of the weblog a bit less hack-ish. You probably won't notice, but it's a little faster.

I usually am a person who will buy the cheapest version of whatever item happens to be for sale. I believe I inherited this trait from my dad. Growing up, he was the one who always did the shopping, and I pretty much always went with him. We pretty much always got the generic brands, but we would always get Skippy? Peanut butter, just because it was too much better than the alternatives, especially the Generic.

Yesterday I went shopping at Vons, and saw Oreos? on sale, as well as the derivative on sale, the Tuxedoes. Nabisco just decreased the size of the "large" oreo package from 20oz to 18, so I decided to go for the generics. It's all the same, right?

Well, I think I've found my Skippy. The Tuxedoes have such a bland flavor that paying more for the 18oz of Oreos is a better value than less for the 20 oz of Tuxedoes.

To make it harder for me to study I decided to write a web log. If you are viewing this from http://mattfedder.com, what you are seeing is server-parsed HTML which includes the output from a perl script that grabs the entries in the web log from a Java Server Page which uses a JavaBean to access the MySQL database. How cool is that?