I’m posting a blog entry from the considerably better than before C terminal in the Atlanta airport. It actually has a considerably longer name than that, but I’m going to fallback on my position that I’m a lazy blogger and not bother looking it up. I’ve been here before — just search on Atlanta Airport and you’ll see multiple entries from 13 years ago. The quality of the airport in general is a bit more improved in many ways. Free wifi! Pretty glossy floors! Attractive passengers! Oh, wait, right, they already had those back in 2001. My theory that passengers traveling through this airport are more attractive than normal seems to be holding true. Come on and give the regular shlumpy people a fair shake, Atlanta!

I’m traveling to Philadelphia for business reasons but I’ll be visiting some tenants that I’ve never met before. Is it normal to never meet your tenants? I had three teachers in Houston living in my Country Wind house for years and we never met up. I even tried friending them to no avail. What, you can’t be friends with your cranky landlord who also happens to be super duper cool? Fine. I can see that my blogging persona is taking a sarcastic turn for the worse. I’m gonna blame my fiance’s similar caustic wit for that. Love!

I’m showing up later than usual because I traveled from Minneapolis to St. Louis where they sought volunteers to give up their seat for a travel voucher and later flight. I immediately sauntered up past Eating His Apple Too Loudly And Crunchily Next To Me Guy in retaliation for all those apple particles he grossly splayed on my left arm. Gawww! Lucky for me the voucher turned out to be for more than 500 bucks so hopefully that solves how I’m going to fly to Los Angeles and pick up my troubled van Black Magic from where it’s been hiding out in San Dimas these past few months.

Why did I buy that van again? Ragnar! I am wayyy behind in my body weight adjustment (I need to be 165 to 170 and right now I’m pushing 180) plus any semblance of running preparation. Hopefully traipsing all over Fort Washington this week will get my legs in check and prepared. Of course I forgot all my Garmin GPS stuff back in MSP so, meh, I won’t know if my heart is about to explode beyond 170 BPM without actually feeling it pre-explosion. I was briefly considering not running at all because I wouldn’t know how fast I was going, but I mean come on. Man up, Shields. I’m gonna eat a burrito now upon realizing calories will be burned shortly. Done. Probably shouldn’t have bought the Nacho Burrito from Baja Fresh now in retrospect. Is it still okay to throw up in the hallways here?

At least the garbage cans still thank you when you give them some trash to eat.

Okay, so it’s been a year that the site has been up and I posted one entry a year ago. Is the age of the blog dead? Am I just incredibly lazy thanks to the micro-status update movement of social media?

Probably.

Okay, I decided to resurrect the blog due to the fact that my 3 year experiment in suppressing one’s online presence has been a marginal success. I had to drop the MovableType as they aren’t really keeping up with WordPress from a universally accepted software option. MovableType 5.whatever.something was released by Takeshi Nick Osanai and, frankly, it’s nothing like version 4 and far removed from version 3. Guess how easy it is to migrate to WP from MT? Easy. Like, way. Way, way.

Anyhow, I’m back. I’m going to be editing older entries to turn myself into the Generic Mark Shields that I always knew I was. No home. No identifying features. Off the grid as much as possible but still available-ish. Hi.

The next phase for MarkShields.com is starting. I’m in the process of uploading all of my media that’s been previously hosted here into Facebook. The truth is that, while having a blog as a standalone piece since 2000 has proven useful in earning my SEO black belt, it’s also proven to me that without a social network content intended for friends and family is disembodied and easily overlooked. The whole site won’t be going away, but FB will definitely be augmenting and in some cases providing a bridge to a larger audience. I’ll be blogging about that as well, so don’t think this is the last you’ve heard of me on here. More to come!

Only a year after buying a 2010 Camaro 2SS — otherwise known as the Transformers Bumblebee, I’ve done it again. Click here to check out the screen used 1975 Dodge Tradesman Van — otherwise known as Uncle Rico’s Van. Yes, the real van. Uncle Rico not included (provide your own).

I’m attempting to get all of the data off my old MFM hard drives which date back to 1983 through 1985. There’s literally an inch of dust caked into these things, but that’s not what’s really annoying. The computer these run on is a
Texas Instruments Professional Computer (TIPC). Never heard of it? They never caught on since they weren’t IBM PC compatible. It was only kinda-sorta-compatible, but with better graphics and a TI flavored version of MS-DOS from Microsoft. Long story short — I have three machines with good components, but I can’t seem to put them together to make one working machine. At least I don’t think I can. It’s hard to believe that this machine has become so esoteric that there is barely any information about it on the internet. I probably need to be searching Usenet archives and sending smoke signals. One theme that I’ve found recently when looking for information are an endless supply of estate sales. I set up a Facebook community page (which is what I linked to in this blog entry) to share whatever I learn / remember about restoring the machine to use. Bleah!

My work laptop automatically receives updates to do little things to itself (that’s what she said) at odd times. Install something new here, update this, patch that… and all of these things usually conclude with the laptop rebooting itself without my approval. I’ve kept the machine pure — meaning I haven’t defiled any of the standard software and security measures that came with it. I’ve been tempted — don’t get me wrong. "It’s how they would have wanted it," is something I can say about the mysterious Desktop Support guys (and gals). With this in mind, I was not surprised this morning to find my laptop machine in a rebooted state. Sometimes I think it reboots like this when it knows I was in the middle of something important when I left it last. In fact, everything is super duper important when we get close to October 1st as we release all new functionality on that day every year. Pfft. This is definitely a blog entry not in favor of automatic updates. Windows used to do the same thing to me. I guess this is analogous to going to sleep next to someone and then the next morning you wake up to discover they left in the middle of the night. I need to surf urban dictionary to see if there’s a word for that.

I found a term that seems to match up:
Pulling the chute. Nice.

My machine appears to be back again so I must now end this brief return to blogging about the little stuff.

Go Gophers!

Let’s see what this does:

Mark Shields | Create Your Badge

DeLorean Time Machine Rental on Facebook

I let the domain markshields.org slip through my fingers years ago only to see some guy put up a cheesy family home page that was never updated and wreaked of ”hey I learned how to make HTML in Microsoft Word.” That’s over with today with my acquisition of the domain. I briefly considered parodying that guy’s site with a similar (albeit evil) version of the contents of his site. I have so much to do now that I’m back from DisneyWorld that I’m going to let that slide, too. More later. If you want more frequent updates you can start following me @thesupergenius on Twitter — http://twitter.com/thesupergenius.

Don’t like the Highlights section on Facebook?

If you don’t have Firefox yet, click here to download it. Next start Firefox and click here to install the GreaseMonkey Plug-in. Last click here to install the script. You may have to hit the F5 key to get it to kick in. If it isn’t working then make sure you have GreaseMonkey enabled by going to Tools, GreaseMonkey, and making sure ”Enabled” is checked.

Want to know what it’s doing?

// ==UserScript==
// @name        Highlights Hider
// @author      Mark Shields
// @namespace	http://markshields.com/
// @description This script will hide the highlights section on Facebook
// @include       http://*.facebook.com/*
// ==/UserScript==
// first let's look for all the DIVs (aka sections) on the page
myDivs = document.getElementsByTagName('DIV');
// next we'll loop through all of them to find one classified as UIHotStream
// which apparently is what Highlights is really called
for (counter=0; counter < myDivs.length; counter++) {
if (myDivs[counter].className == 'UIHotStream UIStream') {
// we found a match so we replace all of the HTML with this:
myDivs[counter].innerHTML = 'Hidden by Mark Shields - Super Genius';
}
}