I’ve unveiled the Valentine’s theme on my site; you can click here to see it. (If you don’t like it, click here to go back to the old one.) It was created 100% by me using an image I bought off iStockPhoto; the fancy post titles are from the Fancy Headlines plugin and the fancy section titles are a direct implementation of the ALA Dynamic Text Replacement tutorial.

• Tips and tricks for browsing adult sites on the Internet
  Pop-up windows, spam, viruses… annoying ploys to part you from your money. But the it doesn’t have to be that way. You can enjoy trouble free browsing of adult sites if you follow a few simple rules…
  (tags: sex)
• Classic Dykes
  Welcome to the home for lesbians and all wimmin affirming wimmin in midlife and beyond.
  (tags: queer women)
• The Truth about Cochlear Implants
  Elisa tells us about the hidden dangers of cochlear implants - like not being able to ride in a hybrid car, or not being able to ride a roller coaster that has magnetic brakes.
  (tags: deaf)
• Cute baby pandas get playful
  Deaf-friendly video of the only thing in the WORLD that’s as cute as baby meerkats.
  (tags: animals)

I took this paid post for two reasons. First, the pay was good. Second, I actually have something I want to share. The site is cool enough that I might have put it in my quicklinks, but why do that when I can get paid $15 for it instead?

The site in question is Image Hosting Directory. They are doing something that I tried to do over at Listible, but they’re actually making a full-fledged site out of it. Everybody knows Photobucket and Flickr are the heavyweights in this market, but there are a lot of other image hosting sites out there. Some of them don’t have very intuitive URLs, but they’re a good place to post random stuff. The Image Hosting Directory, in addition to listing the Photobucket clones, also has sections for paid hosts (which typically have more features), hosts that let you manipulate your image (ie, resizing), and scripts that let you host your own images. But I think the best part of the site is the adult image host category. A couple of months ago, somebody posted on the adult message board I frequent asking about a place to post adult images. It seems that most of the free places have a line in their TOS about not posting pornography, but there are a couple of image hosts out there that welcome it.

My only suggestion for improving the Image Hosting Directory would be to list features in the descriptions. If I’m looking for a site that allows remote hotlinking, for example, it would be nice to see that in the directory before having to go to the actual site and read their terms.

Tonight I watched the premiere of “Meerkat Manor,” a new half-hour series on Animal Planet. Everybody knows meerkats are adorable as they pose up on their hind legs. But do you know what’s even cuter than a meerkat? A baby meerkat. Specifically, a three-week-old baby meerkat. Especially when they’re practicing balancing on their hind legs. And when you put a couple of baby meerkats together, the cuteness factor shoots through the roof. See, I made this icon to prove it:

“Meerkat Manor” is narrated by Sean Astin, known to most of us as Samwise Gamgee from the Lord of the Rings films. The narration is a mix of anthropomorphizing and reality - the writers attribute a lot of emotions to the meerkats, but in a way that might just indicate what they’re actually feeling - or at least doing. The animals probably don’t have the depth of feeling we do, but they definitely interact in a social way, and it’s captivating to watch. If you get Animal Planet, I definitely recommend checking out “Meerkat Manor.”

For more information about meerkats, check out the Fellow Earthlings website. For $100 you can adopt a meerkat, and that includes a two-hour session for four within the meerkat enclosure! (The center is near Palm Springs, CA.)

Ack! I was all set to use some of Illogirly’s lovely graphics in an attempt to make my own fall-themed layout, but they’re gone. Most of them were on StockStash, but that URL now leads to a poker site - I guess somebody didn’t renew the domain name. (At least it’s not a porn site, heh.) But I’d really like to play with slices and try making my own layout…does anybody know where to get those images? I remember some lovely fall Illogirly illustrations!

• I took A to the metro station today; she and her mom caught an 8:00am bus from Union Station up to Bayonne, where their cruise leaves from. I am going to miss her a lot! I plan to keep an eye on the ship’s webcam just for fun.
• I can’t believe I just figured out “Knockturn Alley” this morning. I got Diagon Alley a while back, but this one eluded me. DOH! So far, I have read up to the first trip to Hogsmeade.
• There is a brightly colored - lots of bright colors - SUV that parks at a house on my street advertising Verizon FiOS. Not knowing what it was, I went to look it up. It turns out to be some weird new broadband offering from Verizon; for kicks I put in my phone number to see if we could get it - and we can’t. So I have this gaudy billboard vehicle in my neighborhood advertising something we can’t get. Argh!
• Oh. My. God. I only just figured out how to use slices for images. Photoshop even writes the HTML for you. Where have I been all these years?! Now I can do things like this and this! Yeah, I need to work on the graphics a bit, but I did do it!
• Yes, I have done that “tell us about your interests” meme. But the post has vanished from where I think I saved it, and I don’t feel like doing it all over again just now. Perhaps I should do a mini-project in which I explain all my interests - all 150 of them.
• Whoa! My bottle of soda just got me, my shirt, my chair, and part of my cube wall all wet. I hadn’t even shaken it, it was just sitting there! Too bad it didn’t go all over my desk - that’s easy to clean up. But thank goodness it didn’t get into the keyboard, that would have sucked. At least I had a whole ton of napkins here, too. But I didn’t even win a freebie!
• Squick Warning! This has an extremely high squick factor. If you really want to know, paste the garble here, then come back and click the link (which is not garbled, but rather clickable). Note: this is not worksafe, so I have not even clicked the link myself.
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