How’s this for a bold, principled statement on a controversial topic:

“Jack Frost” is the best MST3K episode of all time.

Yes, better than its cousin, “The Day The Earth Froze.” Yes, better than “Manos, Hands of Fate,” largely because (let’s face it) “Manos” is just plain painful for most of its running time. Yes, better than “Gamera vs. Gaos.” Yes, better than “Prince Of Space.” Need I go on?

Let the evidence speak for itself, then.

• “I thought Jerry Garcia was Father Mushroom.”
• ‘No, not a princess. You are a queen!’ “In that you look like Freddy Mercury.”
• “M is for the many times you beat me. O is for the other times you beat me…”
• “Jack Frost opened fire on a stand of willows today…”
• “I’m bacon! Baconbaconbaconbacon…”
• “Bob Keeshan is Mr. Natural.”
• “Michael Nelson is Lord of the Dance!”
• “So I guess instead of vacuuming this house, you Zamboni it.”
• “Hello, this is the sun. Your call is important to us, so please stay on the line…”

At any rate, until today I had to make do with an old VHS copy, but no longer. I now own this fine bit of televised hilarity in DVD form!

You may now bask in the glory of my awesomeness. Thank you.

Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional.

I dare you to find another photograph featuring a Zentraedi Officer’s Pod, a cast-iron “rubber” duck, and a black LEGO minifig.

Context will arrive in the form of Thursday’s Quacked Panes comic.

My speakers were just fine yesterday.

This morning, however, I woke up the computer and turned on my Altec Lansing 5.1 speaker array and… HSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

I unplugged the jacks from the computer, no change. I fiddled with the knobs, turned the speakers off and on, no change. I unplugged the power cord and plugged that back in again and… change.

Now they don’t turn on at all. I guess I’m going shopping later. Le sigh.

It’s possible that I’m a bit of a weirdo.

My boss asked me to “make it so” (on a Kaseya module purchase, if you’re curious) and I did so.

I then pointed out that I have as yet been unable to make it la, ti or do, and that we may need to look into renewal pricing for do, re, mi and fa.

If nothing else, I ate far better today than I did yesterday. (Did I pig out at the poolside party last night? Yes. Which mostly made up for not getting lunch at all.)

Today featured the bulk of the Kaseya Connect conference material. Yes, there’s more tomorrow, but today we received the keynote speech and the motivational speaker (Jim Abbott, a baseball pitcher born without a right hand, quite a storyteller with a good message but not necessarily the best fit for a room full of people who don’t follow baseball, even if they’ve heard of it at all) and most of the Big Product Announcements.

So, what’s on my shopping list?

• Enterprise Monitoring: They ditched Zabbix (a product I generally like, but admit that the configuration is somewhat arcane) for Intellipool, a company that Kaseya acquired just for this purpose. The demo looks fantastic, and will probably obviate the need for the quirky, cumbersome Network Discovery module. (Um… whoops?)
• Policy Management: If we can get rid of the tangled mess of templates and replace it with policies that we can apply consistently and automatically based on service-level orgs and client groups, I’ll be able to provide a far more consistent management experience. We want it, oh yes, we do.
• Online Backup: We’re using Ahsay right now, but if Kaseya can integrate an offsite folder backup solution and let us pick our own destination, I’ll try to get the bosses to buy it. Right now, however, it’s Amazon S3 only… and we like having end-to-end control far too much to go for that.
• Mobile Device Management: I almost skipped this presentation, but a live demo of deploying the agent to an iPhone and an Android, backing up and restoring contacts, and wiping the iPhone completely convinced me that we may have a chance at selling this to certain C-level types among our clientele.

Meanwhile, staying in a fairly posh hotel provided some amusement. When they came in to tidy up while I was off at conference sessions, they not only made the bed and replaced the towels as I expected, they also took the time to line up and organize the little travel bottles of toiletries I’d left clustered (but upright, I’m not a total slob) on the sink. Cute, guys.

Tomorrow morning I get to pack up, check out, get through the last day of conferences, head to the airport, check through security, wait a few hours, then finally fly home.

I can’t wait to be home. I’ve had some fun here but after tomorrow I won’t want to travel again for a good long time…

So… I may or may not have purchased one of these earlier this week. Ahem. There’s an unconfirmed rumor that this may-or-may-not event transpired after playing with a particular person‘s recently acquired similar gadget.

At any rate, I’m amused at one particular aspect of the “ebook” phenomenon. I understand that the way most dead-tree books will become a pile of ones and zeros is through being scanned and treated with an Optical Character Recognition program, then (allegedly) proofread by a human being for error correction. The problem seems to stem from the fact that proofreaders get tired and/or bored partway through a job.

Case in point? Fred Saberhagen’s “First Book Of Swords.” Toward the end of the book I saw an entire page in which the letter “I” was turned into the number “1″, each and every time. Earlier, I saw a lowercase “y” turned into a lowercase “v”. These are understandable glitches on the part of the OCR software, but a proofreader paying any kind of attention should’ve caught them.

I don’t know what to make of another little quirk, namely that text in italics tends to be several point sizes larger than the normal text around it. This could be a problem with the particular book rather than the platform. Time will tell. I’ve only purchased two ebooks in my life so far and the other one’s not downloaded yet.

Ahem. That is, hypothetically speaking… aw, who am I kidding? Yes, yes, I’ m a sheep. I own a Nook Color. Baaaaaa.

So how is the device itself? Generally I like it. I mean, sure, if I was just going to read books all day I’d have gone for the regular e-ink device and called it good… not to mention saving $100 and potential eye strain. A big selling point for me, however, is having a 7″ screen WiFi device with a decent, working web browser. I can read books and surf the Internet? SOLD.

And to answer the geeks out there… no, I’m not going to “root” my Nook Color and turn it into a full-on Android tablet. I like the machine just the way it is, and don’t want to “break” things for the sake of being extra-geeky.

Yes, yes. I’ll turn in my alpha-geek membership card now. Big deal.