Monthly Archives: April 2007

A rundown of the Democratic candidate debate last night.

Also, Gravel!

This is just to remind me to try this Beyrl thing. Though that Bump looks cool.

Their Windows Home Server looks like a nice addition to any home network. So far.

If you have 3-D glasses laying around, you can see the sun in 3-D.

Or you can make your own glasses, if you want.

Proper picture-hanging procedure.

The eye-level thing is the most important one. It drives me nuts when people hang their pictures up where no one can look at them.

Flying cars, Class M planet, and now hyperdrive.

It’s been a great week.

There’s a woot-off today!

Book art. It’s a little painful to look at, but I guess you could do it to books you don’t like.

This morning I was at the grocery store. I was over in the healthy section picking up a power-type bar and had to get something for breakfast. I turned around and there was the healthy, granola-ey, organic cereals. And I thought, I need something for breakfast and they healthy-type people say this Kashi GoLean stuff is good for you, for a cereal, and it’s not any more expensive than what I was going to get anyway, so I guess I’ll try it.

Terrible idea. Now, I’m not the sort that demands my cereal be laden with sugar. I like Grape Nuts, after all. But this Kashi stuff is an abomination. Apparently it’s made of puffed twigs and rice and boy, does it taste like it. I don’t care how much protein it has per serving, it should not be eaten.

It gets a bit rah-rah at the end, but the article has a valid point that needs to be addressed.

This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year.

How the CIA got six embassy employees out of Iran in 1980.

“I can’t believe you’re the Cheating on me!“

If NASA would broadcast information about their flying car projects, people would drop the whole crazy astronaut thing.

Nevertheless, NASA is designing a flying car that would humiliate George Jetson. The agency is committed to a 15-year time line for three successive generations of flying cars. The first, scheduled for 2008, will resemble a compact Cessna with folding wings that converts to road use (it shouldn’t cost any more than a Mercedes-Benz). The second, with a rollout planned for 2015, will be a two-person pod with small wings and a rear-mounted propeller. The third will rise straight up like a mini-Harrier jet and should be on the market by 2020.

A hobbit-hole doll house. I have to say it’s cool, nerdy as it is.

The article is kinda dumb but this quote makes it all worthwhile.

Almost two years ago, also in Clovis, school authorities locked down Marshall Junior High School because a student was carrying a long object wrapped in a cloth. They soon discovered the object inside the cloth was a large burrito.

An eighth grader brought in the burrito as an extra credit assignment.

The White House praises Gonzalez. How long till he’s gone?

“He has done a fantastic job in the Department of Justice,” deputy press secretary Dana Perino told reporters traveling aboard Air Force One as President Bush headed for a speech in Michigan.

Some Republican anonymously objected to a government transparency bill.

UPDATE: Not Ted Stevens. Color me shocked.

Don’t swallow magnets, kids. Actually, just don’t swallow more than one magnet at a time, kids.

Feisty Fawn is out. I might have to upgrade. I’ve been using Dapper Dan for a while now on my laptop and have been quite happy with it. The reviews for Feisty Fawn look good though.

UPDATE: If it’s good enough for Michael Dell….

FURTHER UPDATE: Thunderbird 2. w00t!

Matt points out Ace’s rebuttal to Mark Steyn’s column on Virgina Tech. And I have to say, they’re both right. Mark Steyn is absolutely right that these are adults and that they should act like it. Ace is right too, we really don’t know how we will react. We like to think we’d do the brave thing, but whenever I’ve been in vaguely life-threatening situations my first, and only, thought has always been to duck and run. Would I turn around, I don’t know. Hopefully.

And what bothers me the most is the fact that we have to discuss this now. It is incredibly hard-hearted to talk like this within days of this tragedy, but by the time people have recovered the news will have moved on and no one will want to talk about these important issues.

It’s like YouTube, only boringer. Okay, this is interesting, Spore!

via Slashdot.

Speaking of YouTube, brriiinng. Also; woosh, woosh.

The Asian American Journalist Association wants us to stop identifying people by their ethnicity in the news.

As coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting continues to unfold, AAJA urges all media to avoid using racial identifiers unless there is a compelling or germane reason. There is no evidence at this early point that the race or ethnicity of the suspected gunman has anything to do with the incident, and to include such mention serves only to unfairly portray an entire people.

You, too, could win a trip into space, courtesy of Buzz Aldrin. Other than that, details are sketchy.

The Wii is too good and not good enough at the same time.

It does have helpful warmup exercises.

Tim Blair fisks a global warming “it’s for the children” article.

“I don’t like global warming,” Alyssa continues, her eyes huge and serious behind her glasses, a stardust of freckles across her nose, “because it kills animals, and I like animals.”

So do I, little one. That’s why I own a barbecue.

Inkjet printer prints bone grafts.

It takes only ten minutes for the printer, which is the size of about three filing cabinets, to print a typical bone graft.

I love technology.

“Let’s try to define where we think we should end up, what we think the Internet should look like in 15 years’ time, and only then would we decide the path,” McKeown said.

The next internet should look like wireless neural implants with constant access from everywhere in the world. And possibly the moon.

/still waiting on that rocketpack

Nailgun injuries are on the rise in America.

It would be news if they were on the decline. That thousands of people would injure themselves with pointy bits of metal flying out of a readily available tool at incredible speeds should be obvious.

It’s a nice dream.

Survey says TV has become increasingly less intelligent. I would have said they were becoming slightly more intelligent. Which isn’t saying much, I grant you. Compare and contrast Hawaii 5-0 and CSI. Battlestar Galactica and Battlestar Galactica. Greatest American Hero and Heroes. Lengthier story arcs, more involved character development, I think it points to a more intelligent show.

Looks like Gore is installing solar panels in his mansion. In the coming days, barring a death of Anna Nicole Smith stature, we will hear how this is, a. the greatest thing evar and b. too little, too late, the hypocrite.

A supermassive black hole. And thanks to an eclipse, NASA roughly figured out the size of it.

It contains a so-called active galactic nucleus, or AGN.

So-called? Is there debate about the terminology?

A movie choreographed by Yuen Woo Ping, starring Jackie Chan and Jet Li. Can the world withstand the forces of awesomeness that will be emanating from this movie?

VDH doesn’t help at all.

If the United States could curb its voracious purchases of foreign oil by using conservation, additional petroleum production, nuclear power, alternate fuels, coal gasification and new technologies, the world price might return to below $40 a barrel.

We know all this, so what?

Kurt Vonnegut has died. RIP.

Those guys at Leeds have too much time on their hands, but if it makes a better bacon sandwich, who are we to complain?

John Scalzi and Tim Minear on Instapundit’s podcast.

If the otters and the polar bears changed places all would be well in the world

Google Earth is focusing on Darfur.

When users zoom in to a level of magnification that keeps most of Darfur on a computer screen, the icons seem to indicate that much of the region is on fire. Clicking on flame icons will open windows with the village’s name and statistics on the extent of destruction.

A useful description of the situation over there.

The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side.

I’ll add my 5 tomorrow.

Probably not, but just in case…

Today’s posting is nonexistent because I’m busy bringing happiness and joy to the NGO workers in Darfur with a new line of clothing and mugs just for them.

Now I admit, if you don’t have to deal with Sudan’s Humanitarian Aid Commission or regularly get your vehicles hijacked, these probably aren’t the products for you. But feel free to buy them anyway and make up more culturally relevant meanings for yourself.

Statements from the released hostages. I like the camo/blue/camo pattern in the picture.

Mark Steyn and VDH on the Iran/Britian hostage thing.

We invade Iraq to get the oil, and now they’re going to send it to China, Vietnam, Indonesia and India first. Meanwhile gas prices creep toward $3.00 here.

I’m so confused.

Why reporters should pass 5th grade life science before writing a story about squid.

They are deadly, huge and fast moving. Their tentacles can suck the life out of a human being and they’ve arrived in Northern California.

Tentacles suck the life out of you? Like the Wraith? Flay the skin off of you, sure. Suck the life out of you? Not so much.

They are giant squid.

These aren’t giant squid. Giant squid live far below the surface and rarely seen. These are probably Humboldt squid. Which are large, but not “giant”.

Squid aren’t fish. They are molluscs.

More interesting than it’s more popular cousin, BB stacking. No really.

See, if your nice to people, they let your hostages go.

Someday we’ll find out what kind of deal was actually struck.

An article to let you know that science doesn’t know exactly what makes us happy yet.

Lyubomirsky, Sheldon and another psychologist, David A. Schkade of the University of California, San Diego, put the existing findings together into a simple pie chart showing what determines happiness. Half the pie is the genetic set point. The smallest slice is circumstances, which explain only about 10 percent of people’s differences in happiness. So what is the remaining 40 percent? “Because nobody had put it together before, that’s unexplained,” Lyubomirsky says. But she believes that when you take away genes and circumstances, what is left besides error must be “intentional activity,” mental and behavioral strategies to counteract adaptation’s downward pull.

I probably won’t be bringing this up again until the end of the season and then only if they do well, so Go Padres!

Bush vetoed another bill! That makes, what, two so far?

Not that I mind the veto.

Top 100 April Fool’s pranks of all time. Or at least the last little while.

PC World ranks the 50 best tech products evar. I was expecting more along the lines of fire, the wheel, abacus, Babbage Difference Engine, Turing machine, ENIAC, you know, that sort of thing.

Instead I got Epson MX-80, Mirablis ICQ, and Netscape Navigator. All time = 30 years at PC World.

Lileks fills in for Dave Barry this week.

Eventually. Some, however, will be dying of nasty, virulent super-bacteria.

“Infection with MRSA outside hospitals is not uncommon, but this is the first time we’ve seen such a highly virulent and quickly progressing strain. Treatment is difficult and we want to warn people in the medical profession,” she said.

Apparently, blogging is writing and writing is about words. I learn something every day.

International blame shifting over Britian’s 15 hostages. Ingenious.

You will now be able to get DRM-free music from EMI and Apple, for a slight additional fee.

At least they offer it. Baby steps.