Category Archives: Uncategorized

The economy is fundamentally sound. Unlike last November when McCain said the same thing.

What really happens when things fall apart and what’s really important, from a guy that lives in Argentina.

Windowshade, blinds for XP. Call it what you will.

An anthropological introduction to YouTube. Long, but interesting.

Hitler’s opinion of the Bills picking up T.O. I don’t follow football, but it’s still hilarious.

5 accidental inventions. (Cracked, NSFW)

Two of President Tyler’s grandsons are still alive.  President Tyler died in 1862. Eighteen sixty-two.

I don’t know how I feel about scientists creating “mass” quantities of anti-matter. On the one hand, yay science. On the other hand, devestating destructive power.

OLEDs of unusual size are being held up by the bad economy.

Since I plan on my next TV purchase being an OLED this is both good and bad news. It’s not like I could afford one anytime soon, but my LED TV only has a couple more years left. It’s a conundrum.

Stop helping it so much.

The ultimate instructional video.

California may get out of the marriage business.  IMHO, as far as the government is concerned it is nothing more than a legal contract, let them treat it like that.

Some scientists have managed to observe that if a particle and anti-particle aren’t observed, they don’t necessarily annihilate each other. This also confirms that reality is real, even if it isn’t being observed.

The Periodic Table of Awesoments.

No Canadians.

Bootie. Your source for mashups. Bootleg, bootie is short for bootleg.

That JeanLuc Picard. The Klingon KILLS me.

Clinton: Never waste a good crisis. We know politicians create and use crises to further your agendas, it’s a classic, but don’t admit it out loud, duh!

If in 10,000 years the human race, should it still be around, has not learned how to deal with nuclear waste, matter of fact, if they are still on the planet, I will be shocked, shocked!

I bet it doesn’t even take 1000 years to figure out how to deal with nuclear waste. But let’s cripple our nuclear power production while killing the coal industry. We can all live on what? solar? wind? No, wind is bad. Tidal power? Government benevolence?

People are beginning to ask.  I’m still on the baby with a hammer side, even if it is a statist liberal baby. Surely, malevolence would be more subtle.

Foiled bank heist plot involves a fake British lord, a blackmailed Japanese businessmen, a sex shop owner and Belgium hackers. Eastern European mafia and a Middle Eastern sheik are thought to also be involved.

So, this weekend I made deep-fried pie donuts. There’s a reason most people just make triangles out of their deep-fried pies. Pain in the butt to shape. Plus, the filling to crust ratio is way out of whack.

Recipes here:

Main idea
Pie filling (adapted from: boiled together on stove, mashed, drained through cheesecloth; chocolate seperated out)
Chocolate sauce – can’t find it. It was on cooks.com and the ingredients were water, butter, chocolate and sugar.
Glaze

In retrospect, I should have topped them with the leftover chocolate sauce. The amount of dough necessary to properly wrap the filling kinda buried the filling flavor. I also had to thoroughly drain the filling to keep it from oozing out of the pie and/or soaking the crust. In the end, they were still delicious, but they could have been deliciouser.

I also realized I could use the fryer as a steamer. Multi-tasking, yay!

Do you get a mortgage bailout? A quiz to see if you qualify.

Ted Kennedy gets an honorary knighthood.

Graffiti knitting all the rage in Vancouver. Weirdos.

Stuff worth paying for in a recession. Turns out it’s the same stuff worth paying for not in a recession.

Wall Street and top-end earners don’t like Obama’s plans at all. Which will lead nowhere good.

VDH.

Reliance on government funding will likely cause another recession when it’s cut off. If it’s cut off.

You no longer have to steal packets from fast food places.

Performace Plus duct tape. For when you have to hold nuclear material in. Or out.

Book art for the non-reader. It makes me sad and happy at the same time.

Cupboard size fridge.

Rolcats. Yeah, not as awesome as lolcats.

Hanson, Smashing Pumpkins, Fountains of Wayne and Cheap Trick members form a “supergroup” of pop banality.

And what is up with the announcer? Pot?

Are they prepared for the zombie apocalypse?

I’m not going to think up literally hundreds of different usernames and passwords for every piddling little site I register at.

Senator Dodd: “Oops, sorry. Did I do that?” Idiot.

If you’re nowhere close to a electronics recycling plant, Best Buy has a plan that is better than nothing.

But feeling good about it.  (NSFW, Cracked)

Haunted Mansion Counterstrike mod.

Rimshot.

New map of the proposed and funded to the tune of $8 billion thanks to the stimulus bill high speed railroad map. Unsurprisingly the West is mostly out of luck.

Yes, there’s nothing out there in the middle, but wouldn’t it be handy to have a way across it. Transcontinentally, if you will.

Why can’t Microsoft make Internet Explorer standards-compliant, like the other browsers?

It’s a lesson in world economics.

An actually insightful list from Cracked (NSFW of course). The best part is the pictures.

A multi-vitamin supplement won’t stop death, cancer or heart disease.

Which isn’t why you take vitamins, but that’s not important right now.

If it really all goes south, here’s some good reading based on the Russian and Cuban’s way of doing things. If anyone knows about economic collapse and the after-effects it’s Communists.

The stimulus bill won’t help as much as we said. Thanks for the money though!

Love,

The White House

LOLpresident.

What a Russian guinea pig may  look like.

Ichiban Kan – the Japanese dollar store

Fences – rein in your desktop icons

Like millions of people that are going start their diet right after this piece of cake/bag of cookies/meal at Burger King, Obama says we need to start living within our means  and not leaving debt to our children just as soon as we get out of this recession.

Yeah, that’ll work.

Congress: We were moments away from a global financial meltdown, we had to bail out the banks!

Banks: We didn’t really need the money, but thanks anyway!

The hicks don’t hate Muslims like they’re supposed to.

Schumer says American taxpayers don’t care about Congress wasting money on pork and earmarks.

The whole “autism linked to MMR vaccine” thing? The doctor manipulated the data.

Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal.

The result?

After its publication, rates of inoculation fell from 92% to below 80%. Populations acquire “herd immunity” from measles when more than 95% of people have been vaccinated.

Last week official figures showed that 1,348 confirmed cases of measles in England and Wales were reported last year, compared with 56 in 1998. Two children have died of the disease.

It’s a shame it took them 10 years to find this out instead of, say, having peers review the study and not printing it in the first place.

Also, here.

Stimulating the health care business.

Stimulating welfare.

Also, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says the recession should be over by the end of the year, without the stimulus. With the stimulus, it goes on longer.

Fake minatures (tilt-shift)  flickr pool. Interesting to see the range of abilities and what works and what doesn’t.

Stephen Fry twittering while stuck in an elevator. If you had twitter you would have seen this Tuesday.

A car cake. Cake car? And how they made it.

They can track your search history, your email, your browsing patterns,  your location and now, your blood pressure. Google Health, so they’ll know ALL about you. The problem is, I bet it’s fast and convienent so of course we’ll sign up for it..

The Congressional Budget Office says that the stimulus package will hurt more over the long term than it helps in the short term.

They have found the culprit in the “It smells like maple syrup in New York City” case.  It was New Jersey.

This dog looks surprisingly like mine.

Maureen Dowd disappointed in Obama.

Also, VDH on the implosion.

Cake wrecks.

Lolerific.

500 million Americans lose their job every month.

Google introduces a new service whereby you can stalk track people via their cell phones.

If you have credit card debt, this will help you get rid of it faster. So you can buy more stuff. Just kidding, you wouldn’t do that.

Denny’s has a free Grand Slam for you. Yes, you, specifically.

24%

Economist Robert Brusca of Fact and Opinion Economics analyzed the House and Senate versions of the stimulus plan and categorized the main elements as either Cushion (they make the downturn feel less painful), Agenda (they are items from a Democratic policy wishlist) or Stimulus (they are actually intended to boost the economy.) Here is his take on the Senate plan:

It is hard to categorize the spending. But I have looked at the Senate plan in more detail and my rough estimate is that its $365bln of spending is roughly 24% stimulus, 36% cushion and 40% agenda.

Also,  other countries and large multinational American companies not so happyabout the protectionism in the bill.

Two weeks, 17 exceptions. Brought to you by the Times of India because CNN just doesn’t care.

When the IRS will send your refund (PDF!) based on your electronic filing date.

Mike Nelson is eating nothing but bacon for the month of February.

I couldn’t do it. While I love bacon, I like variety more. I don’t understand people who can eat the same things day after day.

Awesome letter to Richard Branson concerning the quality of his airline’s food and entertainment. With pics. “Cheese, Richard, a cheese.”

Whut? This does not make me want to buy chocolate. The kid’s watch, on the other hand…

Google Image Search by exact dimensions. Nice.

An interesting article.

I wasn’t a fan of the first 2 or 3 bailouts and those republicans that voted for those and are now voting against the latest one are hypocrites that don’t deserve another term and I don’t like this 3rd? 4th? bailout/stimulus package. I do like run-on sentences though.

For the amount spent we could have given every unemployed person in the United States roughly $75,000.

We could give every person who had lost a job and is now passing through long-term unemployment of six months or longer roughly $300,000.

Daily Show.

Bizzare Japenese game show.

Not getting mail on Sunday already ruins my Netflix flow. Adding Tuesday to that would be horrible.

The Rangel Rule. I’m saving it for when I need it.

There won’t be a taxpayers march on Washington because taxpayers have jobs they need the money from and  don’t want to lose.

The House managed to do something intelligent and shot down the stupid DTV switchover delay.

I’m updating my theme, since I haven’t done it since 2.3 and now WordPress is at 2.7 and so you’ll see things shifting around and disappearing and stuff. Do not be alarmed. Just watch the awesome old-skool animated gif. Ah, the good old days, when every website had one of these somewhere….

Did my links have bullets? I don’t think they did. I’ll look into it. I guess they did. Hmm.

UPDATE: There, all better. And I should have cool threaded comments now.  Oh yeah.

Global warming is unstoppable, even if we go back to subsistence farming which, having seen that kind of life first-hand, I think it sucks mightily. I have no doubt a contradictory study will be out any time now.

So, what shall we panic about now? We could bring back the bird-flu worry. Or, peak oil?  Hmmm, Russian domination?

Finally USAir is being sued by a passenger from the failed flight. I knew it was just a matter of time.

The senate approved delaying the digital TV switchover.

Monday’s Senate vote is a big victory for the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress, who have been pushing for a delay amid growing concerns that too many Americans won’t be ready for the currently scheduled Feb. 17 changeover.

Yes, a major victory for the Democrats on such an important topic. You go, guys. Thanks for doing your part to create chaos as broadcasters will now switch whenever they feel like it.

Yes, we’re all chumps.

Buddypress. For all your web community portal needs.

The evolution of the spelling of Col. Qaddafi’s name.

Make your own washing detergent.  Kinda cool, worth the savings to grate bars of soap? I guess I could use my food processor to make it fast….

Duckfat Potatoes. The ultimate that potatoes can aspire to.

A landline replacement cell phone for your home. Comes with news, traffic, weather, calendar synching and more on a spiffy touch screen.

Next up, flying cars.

A 1474 megapixel shot of the inaguration.  They all look cold.

Ridiculously awesome.

The stimulus spending hasn’t worked, yet they’re piling more on, which we can’t afford. Also, the money goes to the politically connected.

I’m shocked, shocked to discover this.

They really don’t have any money.

Lawmakers are spending so much money that California could become a state without employees and still not balance its books.

Alternatively, Schwarzenegger could close every single state prison, fire the guards, release all the prisoners—plus cut off all funding for health care across the entire state—and still be billions in the hole.

Governor Schwarzenegger has described this deficit as a rock upon California’s chest that is suffocating the state.

Already Schwarzenegger has ordered most state offices to close two Fridays a month beginning in February. The unpaid days off will effectively reduce employee salaries by around 10 percent.

But the situation is now so critical that state Director of Finance Michael Genest says that in just over a week, California will be forced to defer making payments on certain state commitments. Instead, he says, “the state will have to defer or pay with ious for most of its obligations.”

What are they spending all their money on then?

Much of California’s problem stems from the fact that it is dependent on borrowing money to pay back old debt, as well as to finance new spending. To lawmakers, it was totally unexpected that lenders would ever grow shy of providing ever increasing amounts of money. Legislators somehow believed that, unlike individuals, the state could go on living beyond its means indefinitely. But now the unexpected has happened, and California’s creditors have cut it off, at least for now.

Ah.

Oh, yes we do.

Payack said that according to his group’s monitoring, the Obama campaign and election story had generated 717,000 citations in print, television and radio across the world in 2008 and 254 million mentions on the Internet and in Web blogs.

That surpassed media interest generated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the global financial meltdown in 2008, the Iraq War in 2003 and the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, Payack said.

Wow.

Lousy (quality) Coast Guard video of the crash, the people exiting and the ferries coming to pick them up. It all happened so fast.

Plenty of sobering news about Obama, the economy and the state of the world over at Instapundit. I won’t bother linking to them individually, you can just scan down the page.

Obama has been consulting McCain on his cabinet picks.

Why do we bother having two parties?

Think he’s going to let his followers down?

Web Developer plugin for Firefox.  Well, it saved me an hour of fiddling with CSS  anyway.

Google Notebook is dying. Man, it was super useful for saving and bookmarking stuff across multiple computers.

Picture of the USAir plane in the water.

We should use radioactive dirt more often in consumer testing. Carpets, pet shampoos, swiffers,  kitchen counter wipers, it would be awesome.

Ricardo Montelban is lounging around heaven on rich Corinthian leather now. RIP.

$35 for spaghetti dinner on a “shoestring” budget.

The recession may not be all it’s cracked up to be, eh? I regularly eat for 3-5 days on that.  That’s at three meals and a snack  per day.

Apophis is coming. April 13, 2029. Might want to hold off paying taxes until the 15th that year. Assuming the world doesn’t die in 2012.

So he might not exactly close Guatanamo or enact stricter standards on “interrogation techniques”.

So much for the tax cuts and the ban on earmarks.

The Freedom chart.

Ditch your Facebook friends and get a Whopper. What’s to keep you from adding them right back I don’t know.

I broke down and got a Eee PC 1000HA.

Pros: Size is a great compromise between portability and usability. Bright screen. No bloatware out of the box. Comes with a sleeve which I thought was a nice touch. Long battery life. Wireless works fine. XP loads quickly.  The hard drive comes as 2 logical drives (80G [C:] and 61G [D:], no Partition Magic needed.

Cons: Mousepad is  a bit small and insensitive, you have to be firm with your taps to make it work. No webcam software. Black case shows fingerprints horribly (I wanted white, but it was $10 more. Pfft, I’m not paying money for that.) I had to get TweakUI to get rid of the Eee Storage desktop Icon.

The keyboard takes a little getting used to. I don’t use the right-shift so it’s not as big a deal for me, but switching to the smaller size is an adjustment.

Sound quality is good. Videos are crisp and clear.

The familiar XP interface is nice. I know exactly what I need to do and where everything is. Kinda refreshing after wrestling with Linux.

I’m sure that sooner or later I’m going to wish there was a DVD drive to load something or other, but that can be gotten around through thumb drives.

Overall, two thumbs up.

If you have one of those government cheese DTV converter coupons, you can get a free $.01 box here.

Alas, I waited to long and the government ran out of money.

Now that we have taken a look at 2008 with Dave Barry, the new year is set up to start right.

/kinda a weird year, eh?

Interview with a Somali pirate. Strangely, it seems they do it for the money.

STOP SNOWING!!!!

ahem

You must make it through 5 minutes of boring to get to the Helvitica Scenario. Totally worth it.

I never trusted that font.

Also, Great Britian has bones and teeth dropoff bins? This frighten and confuses me.

The London Times list of the Top 20 lists of 2008.

A Very MST3K Christmas (Joel and Mike, to be fair):

And a couple lolcats that made me lol:

When they talk about pirate’s speedboats I had a more “Miami Vice cigarette boat” than “fishing on the lake outboard” picture in my head.

The RIAA is going to abandon mass lawsuits in favor of other, equally annoying, strategies.

Depending on the agreement, the ISP will either forward the note to customers, or alert customers that they appear to be uploading music illegally, and ask them to stop. If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.

The new approach dispenses with one of the most contentious parts of the lawsuit strategy, which involved filing lawsuits requiring ISPs to disclose the identities of file sharers. Under the new strategy, the RIAA would forward its emails to the ISPs without demanding to know the customers’ identity.

Hark! The Herald Angels Sing – Weezer
Jesus Christ – Elephant Micah
Gaudete – The Mediaeval Baebes
Handel’s Messiah – Reliant K
Love Came Down At Christmas – Jars of Clay
Joy To The World – Sufjan Stevens
Once In Royal David’s City – Sufjan Stevens
What Child Is This – Matt Wertz
Greensleeves – Vince Guaraldi Trio
Winter Song (with Ingrid Michaelson) – Sarah Barelles
O Come O Come Emmanuel – Sufjan Stevens
Angels We Have Heard On High – Sixpence None The Richer
I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day – Jars of Clay
Cry Cry Christmas – The Sweptaways
O Holy Night – Weezer
We Three Kings – Sufjan Stevens
Christmas Time Is Here – Vince Guaraldi Trio
Angels We Have Heard On High – Josh Wilson
Silent Night/Away In A Manger – Reliant K
I Saw Three Ships – Sufjan Stevens
It Came Upon A Midnight Clear – Sixpence None The Richer

Four plausible scenarios of what could go wrong with the US economy.

Since no one saw it, it’s hard to say. Opened on more than 2000 screens. Made $500,000. That works out to 2 people per showing. Ouch.

A thorough, concise, clear look at who’s to blame for the subprime mortgage mess. Includes this gem:

In any crisis of confidence or failure of government, it’s a pretty good bet that members of Congress are involved.

Once upon a time, someone gave me a laptop. And I was thankful. It’s a PIII 1Ghz, 256M RAM, 10G hard drive, no internal wireless, ancient and slow thing. A PCMCIA wireless card, free after rebate and viola, it does all I need it to do which is surf the internet and create documents and presentations. Did I mention it’s free? Yes, and I have no intention of spending any money on it.

The problem is an operating system that won’t choke it. When I first got it, I didn’t have a XP license available, but I thought, “It’s just for browsing basically, I’ll try Ubuntu.” I’ve flirted with Linux before, but never really got down and just did it. So I did. And it was swell. Especially when I upgraded to Feisty Fawn, which found my wireless card without the whole ndiswrapper fun, which is awesome.

However, Feisty really bogged my poor lappy down. Especially if I wanted to use OpenOffice and Firefox at the same time. OS loading times were bad. It was okay until login, then it took forever to get the desktop up.

I had just looked into my lightweight Linux options and was about to switch to Xubuntu–the others were too pared down for my Linux n00b use–but for my class I needed XP. By this time I had upgraded to Vista and had an available XP license, so it was all good, yo. Here’s the thing; XP with SP3 = ~6G of hard drive space. Yes, over half my hard drive is operating system. So I put Portable Apps’ programs on to save space. And it was fine.

XP’s loading speed was on par with Ubuntu. Programs opened slightly slower.

Now, class is over so I could switch to Xubuntu. Yay! Then the hard decision: Hardy Heron or Intrepid Ibex. I decided to go for it and went with Intrepid. Only the latest and greatest for me!

Same easy install as Ubuntu, torrent the ISO, burn a CD, pop it in, tell it you want to install, answer a few easy questions and wait. It was even polite and asked if I wanted to dual boot with XP.

Xubuntu is nimbler loading and opening multiple programs than either Ubuntu or XP. Yay! It only takes up 4G of hard drive space. A couple gigs here or there doesn’t matter much when you have 120 of them, but when you only have 10, that’s a big deal.

I love, LOVE the window shade action. LUFF EET!

Xubuntu didn’t recognize my wireless card. Boo. But these excellent directions walked me through the process painlessly. And actually, Xubuntu is better recognizing and connecting with routers than XP was with the stupid competition between Windows Zero Service and the manufacturers little program. (Why, WHY, WHY does every laptop and modem manufacturer think we need programs to use wireless? Windows does it fine on its own and using 50 brazilian different interfaces makes everyone’s lives harder. Yes, even those kids in Africa who’ve never seen a computer.)

Xubuntu doesn’t come with Open Office, so I had to download that, which was easy enough. It still bogs everything down when it’s running, but switching around is not quite as bad as with the other two.

Then I tried to pimp my desktop out. It all went fine, but the Avant Window Manger bogged it down so hard it was unusable. Alas. So, back to the standard gnome(?) taskbar. I’m still working on getting Conky going in a manner I like. But really, these are things I never bothered with in Ubuntu or XP and if they don’t work it’s not that big of a deal.

Xubuntu’s version of a quicklaunch bar is teh suck. I have no idea where OpenOffice keeps its icons and since I can’t drag and drop programs or shortcuts into it, I had to go with a random icon I could find. I learned a lot about where programs install themselves while looking around, though, so I have that going for me. Which is nice.

The Add/Remove Programs is painfully slow. Synaptic Package Manager is slightly better, but it’s still best to just walk away. Even with lighweight programs like VLC. Just walk away.

My only other beef is that you can’t sudo drag and drop files in the Thudnar File Manager. If you want to move a protected file, you have to use Terminal.

Despite my complaints, Xubuntu does what I really care about, it works faster. And that’s a good thing.

Hopefully in the next 6 months or so I’ll get a netbook and all this will be moot.

WINDOWSHADES, YEAH!

Let’s see how the Ford Fiesta does with the Royal Marines on a beach assault. Well, now we can’t. Thanks BBC. Here’s the Carol of the Christmas Pickle instead.

This is the pie crust to use. Trust me. Comes together quickly and easily, no guessing with the water amount, nice texture, and tasty too.

Xubuntu. For all your ancient laptop resurrection needs.

All the viral videos you missed, in one handy package (NSFW).

The auto bailout is put off for a while. I guess we owe one to the UAW.

It could have been like his were.

Rational responses like this won’t win VDH any friends.

Left lane slow-pokes are starting to get tickets. Good.

And given the cops propensity for handing out tickets around here it really surprises me that they let this issue go. Maybe ease up on the 3mph-over people and crack down on the 5mph-under-in-left-lane people. Just a thought.

It’s the smell of a thorough fisking.

My cats love to steal toilet paper. They, apparently, are not alone.

The Top 10 Stupid Christmas Gifts.

I’m not surprised that there’s a sugar daddy dating site, but still, wow.

Let me google that for you.

LOL. I’m rich!