Posts from — October 2002

MRH sorry about the lack of entries lately.

I went wardriving the other day and chalked a few spots.

Design Your Own O’Reilly Book Cover!

For Halloween, revisit My Pet Skeleton.

Search patterns, trends, and surprises according to Google. Check out the Google Zeitgeist. Today’s number one hit: His name is Sam. He draws pictures from the titles you send him. The pictures are great. I love his style.

The aren’t any new pictures in the Gallery but go there anyway and take a look.

This thing is neat.

“Vegetarian - that’s an old Indian word meaning ‘lousy hunter.’”

Did you know that it costs forty-thousand dollars a year to house each prisoner? Jeez, for forty-thousand bucks apiece, I’ll take a few prisoners into my house. I live in Los Angeles. I already have bars on the windows. I don’t think we should give free room and board to criminals.
I think they should have to run twelve hours a day on a treadmill and generate electricity.
And if they don’t want to run, they can rest in the chair that’s hooked up to the generator.

My wife uses fabric softener. I never knew what that stuff was for. Then I noticed women coming up to me, sniffing, then saying under their breath, “Married!” and walking away. Fabric softeners are how our wives mark their territory. We can take off the ring, but it’s hard to get that April fresh scent out of your clothes.

Have you heard of SETI@Home’s distributed computing network? People from all over the world share their computer’s downtime to aid in the search for extraterrestrial life. The thousands of computers cyphering radio telescope data gives the project awesome computing power. It’s been around for years and I’ve run it on my computer from time to time. The project is interesting, but I don’t feel it really serves a useful purpose.

Now Stanford’s Folding@Home project announced they have produced results because of the thousands of computers on the Internet sharing their computer’s power. This project is very worthwhile since it’s involved in the research of Alzheimer’s and other related diseases. According to Science Daily, this marks the first time distributed computing has produced significant results.

I recently installed the United Devices’ screensaver that aids in cancer research. When my computer’s screensaver pops on, my computer goes to work by volunteering its unused processor cycles for crunching numbers. It’s a good project that may someday help with the cure for cancer. Who knows?

For a list of other Distributed Computing sites, click here.

Has it been 8 days since my last update? Well, Pam and I went on a long weekend to northern Michigan. Our hope was to see the fall foilage color changes. But with the warm and dry summer, the changes weren’t all that spectacular.

We did visit Mackinaw Island for the day. The island was uncrowded, the weather perfect and many of the shops had end of season 1/2 off sales. Visit the Gallery for pictures of the trip.

Bummer: I purchased the retail version of Earth & Beyond last week. After the installation you are asked for your credit card number to pay for additional charges. Besides the $50 for the game, they expect you to pay another $12 per month to play. I missed the small print about the charge on the box and I never once saw any reference to it on their website. I felt I was totally misled and returned the damn game. The store actually gave my money back for the opened software. Cool.

So I bought Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus for my Playstation 2.

The landline at our house has been disconnected. We are completely wireless. I feel a large weight has been lifted from our shoulders - and our wallets.

I finally had it with the phone companies. We signed up for MCI a little while back and the service has been great. Then we got the bill yesterday. In addition to the $49 for the plan, there were taxes, surcharges and other crap adding another $20 to the bill. Phooey! I called MCI and disconnected the service. Now we’ll just use our 2 cell phones for all our telecommunication needs.

NextStart is a desktop replacement software package that will skin your Windows desktop with a ton of cool themes. I have it installed and its like I’m using a brand new operating system. Check it out.

I discovered NextStart by browsing the Deskmod site. It tells about a bunch of other desktop replacements you can add to your installation.

I love this guy. Read his webpage and learn something. I did. But at least I can spell and I know the difference between YOU’RE and YOUR. It’s another pet peeve that can be added to my already long list.

In case you’re (not “your”) wondering, the title of my last entry translated means: “Don’t have a cow, man.”

Booksfree does for books what Netflix is doing for DVD’s. I like the idea and the prices aren’t that bad. I’m not sure I would be able to keep up with all that reading each month.

Tonight’s episode of Enterprise was good. The Romulans came around to cause some trouble. If you watched, did you notice we never saw them on the viewscreen? Now think back to the time the later Enterprise with Captain Kirk first encountered the Romulans. They were quite surprised to see they looked just like Vulcans. Also remember that the Romulan captain in that episode was later cast as Spock’s father, Sarek. Trivia mode off.

What I could be doing right now according to the email I receive:
Losing 12 pounds in 2 days
Becoming debt-free
Receiving a bachelor’s degree online
Copying any DVD
Reading my tarot cards
Getting a mortgage at an all time low
Investigate people online
Opening any lock with kwick-pick
Getting $50,000 free cash from the government

An awesome optical illusion.

Bored? Then Hold The Button.

Is it me or is the Internet slow lately?

The real reason to switch.

What can you catch from restrooms?