Do you ever wonder . . .

Why the sun lightens our hair, but darkens our skin?

Why women can’t put on mascara with their mouth closed?

Why you ever see the headline “Psychic Wins Lottery”?

Why “abbreviated” is such a long word?

Why doctors call what they do “practice”?And…

Why is it that to stop Windows, you have to click on “Start”?

Why is lemon juice made with artificial flavor, and dishwashing liquid made with real lemons?

Why is the man who invests all your money called a broker?

Why is the time of day with the slowest traffic called rush hour?

Why isn’t there mouse-flavored cat food?

When dog food is new and improved tasting, who tests it?

Why didn’t Noah swat those two mosquitoes?

Why do they sterilize the needle for lethal injections?

You know that indestructible black box that is used on airplanes?

Why – don’t they make the whole plane out of that stuff?

Why don’t sheep shrink when it rains?

Why are they called apartments when they are all stuck together?

If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?

If flying is so safe, why do they call the airport the terminal?

Marriage According to Nairaland

I was chatting with one of the few friends I made on Nairaland (before I left) yesterday and she told me she was getting married. Well, getting married is one of those things that have happened to all my friends. But this is different. She told she’s hooking up with one of the dudes she met there.

What is tripping me is that I never knew this kind of stuff really happens. I have seen stories like that on the net but I used to think they are hypes and falsies.

To cap it all, she said despite the fact that Nairaland is somehow messed up, she was still able to find love. If a messed up place can get you love, maybe it ain’t all that messed up after all.

I wish my friend a happy married internet life.

ColdFire: Another Ray Effort

Ray Camden just announced a FireBug extension for debugging CF applications, ColdFire. It should make life easy for everyone except me. Why? Because somehow, I never use Firefox (which is my one and only browser) to work with CF applications.

The reason is simple: I usually write only enterprise applications and Firefox is unfortunately a mile from conquering the enterprise space.

ColdFusion bouncing outside bound emails

Recently, I added some features to a framework so that it could send emails (piece of cake on ColdFusion). Well, I got my own emails while testing but a while later, something made me check the undelivered folder for ColdFusion mail engine only to discover that all outward bound mails have been dropped there.

I was baffled. I checked the internet connections, they were working fine. The SMTP server was receiving mails from ColdFusion if not I wouldn’t have gotten those sent to me.

After banging my head on the walls for 30 minutes, I went to the IT department to check the configurations of the main Exchange 2003 server. There I discovered that IP addresses of servers that can use the Exchange server to route emails must be explicitly added. After doing that, the mails were still not going until I restarted my own ColdFusion server (I don’t know why I had to do that but it worked).

This is actually no rocket science. The Exchange server sends the internal mails because those ones are not being routed while external mails must be routed before they get to their destinations. And since the router only takes mails from specified IP addresses, mine was promptly bounced.

Meanwhile, shame wouldn’t allow me to say (now am saying it anyway) that I didn’t check my mail log files until after I have resolved my issues. In clear terms, ColdFusion logged it that my mails could not be sent as the SMTP router was rejecting them.

The agony of dude with a beer gut

It ain’t everyday you get to be called a dude and when you manage to be called one, you want to hold on fast like a leech to that even if the desperate talons of old age is fast clutching at your throat.

So you can imagine the shock of a self confessed dude who woke up one morning to discover that a beer gut has grown and attached itself firmly to his midsection. What a mess! What a disgrace!

Now, to be a dude, you gotta be trim, lanky and all the works, you know. You don’t need the six packs, four would do. Definitely, a beer gut is out of it. Not that you can’t consume beer but a dude must be able to drive through a line of bottles without his gut shooting out an inch.

With the dudeship about to be forcibly yanked away by the annoying beer gut that won’t hide itself, my dude (your dude) went about looking for subtle and drastic ways of sending the unwelcomed visitor away. The most obvious strategies were to cut back on food and hitting the gyms.

Cutting back on food wasn’t difficult because the dude could convince his wife that his new found hatred of food is good for the health of both of them (and the family inclusive) even though that is a dubious assertion on its own. Hitting the gym didn’t sound too nice because it involves strength of the mind that the dude hasn’t been able to call up. Of course, he lied to his wife, and everyone who tells him about the benefit of fitness that he’s a busy professional.

Running away from food has helped a bit but the beer gut is still hanging at the mid side though smaller. So it looks like the dude either goes to borrow strength of mind to hit the gyms or come to terms with the unwanted visitor.

The truth is, the dude is getting old and you can’t be young forever. Now, what can this suffering dude do?