Things of Interest: January 2005

Picture of the day.

Car vs. Telephone Wires in Texas - (Firehouse.com Photo Stories)

At least there was a bus station handy.

Either it's cold, or this bird had a lot of onions in his omelette.

How to play the French service game ... and win

"When it comes to France, it's not so much where you go that matters, but how you do it. Opening our special French issue, long-term Paris resident Stephen Clarke gives an insider's guide to getting good service."

Wind-driven lake water spray creates thick ice scupltures

Translation of the text at the top by Babelfish: "Wednesday January 26, 2005. The opinion of great cold announced by the weather is with go. Spectacle of ice guaranteed at the edge of the lake Léman where gusts of wind are announced with 110 km/h [68 mph].... I let to you guess the temperature. Attention, certain images can shock the people sensitive to the cold!"

Picture of the day

Quotes

"You're not paying us for our time. You're paying us for the thousands of Saturday nights we stayed home to learn all this stuff."
- Robert Stephens, "Chief Inspector" of electronic retailer Best Buy's in-home service arm, "Geek Squad".
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"The really idle man goes nowhere. The perpetually busy man does not get much further."
- Heneage Ogilvie
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"Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944)

Do SUVs Make You Stupid?

"Pointless, dangerous and vain as ever, land tanks still sell millions. Only one explanation possible."

Clean the inside of your monitor screen

Works like a champ!

Sam's Mailbox Pictures

"I have always been intrigued by the ability of a craftsman to take a boring mailbox and make it into a thing of interest, adventure or beauty"

Finding a Home for Old Computers

"If getting rid of clutter happens to be one of your New Year's resolutions, nothing will clear up a few cubic feet of space like getting an old computer, monitor or printer out the door. In most cases, selling that antique hardware to a friend, co-worker or eBay user won't be an option -- computers lose their value faster than almost any other manufactured product in history. Just tossing them in the trash isn't a good idea either: Most computing gear contains such toxic components as lead, mercury and cadmium."

The meteorological results of a fire in, I believe, Perth, Australia.

Removable Hard Drive Enclosure w/Lock/Fan/LED - $7.95

Between this, a hard drive, and a copy of Symantec Ghost, you've got yourself a backup plan, bub!

Wired News: Wild Things Are on the Beach

"A self-styled god, Jansen is evolving an entirely new line of animals: immense multi-legged walking critters designed to roam the Dutch coastline, feeding on gusts of wind."

Supercharging the brain

Biotechnology: New drugs promise to improve memory and sharpen mental response. Who should be allowed to take them?

EPIC 2014

A look at how the news business might change in the coming decades, because of the internets.

What You'll Wish You'd Known

Great advice for high school seniors, and just about everyone else, really.

My car

I drive a mid-90's Dodge Intrepid that has some interesting design features, if by "interesting" you mean "stupid, and "design" you mean "poor design", and by "features" you mean "problems".

Issue 1: due to the angle of the windshield and the dash, there is a very strong reflection of the dash on the inside of the windshield. It is very pronounced. If the sun is shining on the dash it is very bad, a definite safety issue. Sunglasses become a must. I tried a dash cover, but besides looking like I was pimpin' my ride, it never laid down completely (offending my delicate aesthetic sensibilities), and made me afraid to drive, because it had a cutout to accommodate my passenger air bag, which is under a panel on the top of the dash, and I kept imagining that if I hit a bunny the airbag would deploy and give me and my passengers a 200 mph rug burn. So the
question: was this car designed and tested in Seattle, or completely inside a building, where there was no sun?

Issue 2: the trunk lid is designed such that whenever I open it when it is wet outside, all the water on the car, and apparently on neighboring vehicles and structures, and perhaps from adjacent counties, is funneled into the trunk in two streams, one from each side of the trunk lid,
conveniently about 1/3 and 2/3 of the way across the trunk, guaranteeing a good soaking to my merchandise. I guess this rules out the "Seattle" theory posited above. So the only conclusion left is that the car was designed and tested completely indoors. And apparently tested at low speeds:

Issue 3: my passenger-side windshield wiper is placed so that it catches the airflow over the hood just right (or wrong), and at freeway speeds it jumps and jiggles and generally has a party. When I first bough the car I switched over to Anco Winter Blades (sealed wipers, great for winter driving because they never get clogged with snow and ice and make you do the "reaching out the window grab and thwap". That only lasted until my first freeway ride, when the extra surface area of the wiper caused it to wave much more vigorously, to the point where I was making lots of friends in the next lane, but was worried about it's effect on mileage and low-flying birds. The driver's side wiper looks like it wants to join in, but can't get up enough steam, so it's one of those guys who dances without the feet ever moving.

I'm generally happy with the rest of the car. In fact, one of the reasons I bought it was that it's a non-transverse-mounted V6, meaning you can actually see all the spark plugs. That helps a lot with maintenance. It's comfortable and good-looking. I just can't drive it fast, or in rain, or in the sun. So it's holding its resale value, since I've only put 20 miles on it in the last 2 years.

McDonald's new Diet Shakes

Every so often I forget myself and give McDonalds some of my hard-won sheckles for some salt and fat sculpted into the shape of real food (but never as real as it looks in the ads). So this time I decided we'd just get milkshakes. They'd have a hard time screwing those up, right? So even though I order Smalls for me and the boys, we get Mediums (which are probably called Mega-Larges, because there's no Small in the hierarchy of portions at McD's), but I pay for them anyway, because I've waited so long in line that I'm about to run out of gas.

But ho! What is this? The milkshakes, which are delivered in cups, with lids and straws, cannot be consumed through straws, because they are Triple Thick, as if that's a good thing for a straw-based beverage/caulk. My youngest tries valiantly for several minutes, and to keep him from crying I offer to "warm it up in my hands", but after 30 minutes of groping it is still not appreciably less viscous. My older son, who by now has been sucking on his shake so hard that all his teeth point toward his uvula, finally gives up, noting that his vanilla shake tasted like strawberry anyway. The microscopic success I had with my chocolate shake/fix-a-flat wasn't especially chocolately, either, but more of a "hey check it out, Lester, if we mix these 7 chemicals together it kind of has a mildly chocolate after-taste" kind of taste.

But hey, at least they only cost 1.5 hours of minimum wage. Grade: F

How To Reset Security Settings Back to the Defaults

Was working on a massively-infected computer the other day, and after cleaning off the evil (Ad-Aware alone found over 1800 things), I was upgrading to XP SP2 (service pack 2) when I got the finest error message I've ever recieved from Windows: "The requested section was not present in the activation context". In a way it was good, because it sounded like it *could* be actual information, as opposed to the usual Windows error: "You screwed up". But this was SP2, a completely scripted install that I had no part in apart from the double-click to start it. Anyway, I was getting lots of other errors as well, all having to do with security ("access denied") and the registry and file system, and I was in the administrator's account, so I ended up just freshening security in the registry and file system the old-fashioned way, when I could have probably saved a lot of hassle by finding the above link before I reset things by hand.

So the moral of the story is: keep your system clean, and it will save me and you lots of time and trouble (not to mention prevent the invasion of your privacy, the stealing of your personal information, and the driving of you to insanity with pop-ups and slow internet).

How to stay clean? Get a good anti-virus product and keep it updated; get a firewall, such as ZoneAlarm; and use Ad-Aware and Spybot weekly (and the first thing you should do when you open them is update them). Thanks.

Things of Interest