Posts from — June 2003

Thank you to all of my neighbors who run their sprinklers first thing in the morning. They effectively reduce the water pressure to zero making it difficult to take a shower. The water trickles out so slow it takes twice as long to rinse out the soap. The township has declared madatory water bans in the early morning hours but our great neighbors ignore them.

Goodbye Hotmail. So long, Yahoo mail. Hello Oddpost. This sounds pretty good to me and PC World magazine gave it their recommendation. I may give it a try and let you know.

So the PT Cruiser overheated on Pam the other day. I took it in for service and it’s running fine now. But our joke is that since it had this small problem, we’re just going to trade it in and get a new one. Well actually that’s exactly what we are going to do. The Chrysler summer sales incentives and other discounts, along with the trade-in value of the car will get us a good deal. Our plan is to trade in the car, get a new 2004 Turbo PT and not shell out any cash. We’re going over to look this week sometime.

I haven’t mentioned The Basement Project in a while. Well, we’re still painting, staining and doing the finishing touches. We should be done this weekend, and ready for the carpeting to be installed. Yee Ha!

Then I’ll take some more pictures of the final product. I was going to do some type of iPix deal where you can rotate the image around for a 360 degree view of the entire area. I think it will be cool.

The Detroit fireworks are going on tonight. I’ve never been down there. Fighting the millions (literally millions) of people isn’t worth it to me.

Remember those color by number pictures? Here’s an online version.

Fake or Foto? Can you tell the difference? I couldn’t.

This is mildly amusing, an alternate script for The Matrix.

Does he ever sit still? Vagabonding is about some guy on the road talking about the places he’s been.

Snopes has been around for a long while. If you want to know about an urban legend, this is the site to visit.

Hey, do you have the time?

Allow me to Kvetch for a minute:

I was excited about watching the season premiere of Stargate on SciFi last Friday. One of the main characters that left the show returned and the story was excellent. But my enjoyment was ruined with all the damn commercials playing. It seemed there was a commercial every six minutes. I thought I read in Wired there were 22 minutes of commercials for every 60 minute show. I wonder how long the network and its advertisers can keep this up before people stop watching. Next time, I’ll record the show and skip past the stupid commercials. What’s the number of Tivo?

No, I don’t want to fix your home computer.

Then there’s that blinker thing.

Our projection TV broke down a few weeks ago. It is the centerpiece to our new media room in the basement. So I contacted Sears and arranged for repair. I set it up over the Internet and it was very easy. I should have known better. We waited around all day Saturday for them to show up. They never did. No phone call, nothing. It was a huge inconvenience. Now we’ll have to find someone else. Crap. For future reference; do NOT use Sears at-home repair service, they are unreliable.

Dave, my best wishes to your mom.

THIS PUTS OUR WORLD INTO A PERSPECTIVE MORE EASILY UNDERSTOOD.
If we could shrink the earth’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following. There would be:

57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south
8 Africans
52 would be female
48 would be male
70 would be non-white
30 would be white
70 would be non-Christian
30 would be Christian
89 would be heterosexual
11 would be homosexual
6 people would possess 59% of the entire world’s wealth and all 6 would be from the United States.
80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition
1 would be near death; 1 would be near birth
1 (yes, only 1!) would have a college education
1 would own a computer.

Better than Kazaa but with a stupid name, eMule is a great file sharing app. I’ve been using for a while with good success. And it doesn’t have the annoyances of many other file-sharing clients. But if you still want to use Kazaa, did you know there was another version called Kazaa Lite? It’s basically a clean version of Kazaa without adware and spyware. Why doesn’t everyone use this Lite version? Because not that many people know about it.

Art or Crap?

So we finally saw X-Men 2 today. The special effects were great but the story dragged on a bit. Pam thought it was just OK but I wouldn’t mind seeing it again. I liked the new mutants introduced in the movie, especially Nightstalker.

Excellent link from Jeffery: GE Aircraft Engines 101. It’s a fascinating look into jet engines with great flash animation tutorials.

I love this kind of website; informative and fun. Skyscraper.com has a list of the World’s 10 Tallest Buildings. Check it out and learn something.

Race those pants!

Need a quick style sheet for your web page? Try Strange Banana. Each time you visit the page, a new style sheet is applied. If you like what you see, view the source and copy the CSS to use with your own page. Stealing code has never been so fun.

For my job, I’m constantly scanning the tech news to see what’s going on. The Register is one of my stops. I like their style in reporting what’s going on with with computers, the Internet and anything tech.

The new kittens are doing fine, thanks for asking.

Argument? Debate? Whatever. I’ve had many of these “discussions” with Pam over the years. Have you? This site is very funny.

Crap. I wanted one of these.