Worthwhile: Oh why cahn’t the marketers … learn … to … speak
This sounds like the underpants gnomes:
1). Scalable Enterprise ? Solution
2).
3). Profit!
What a fabulous idea! Works for airplane tickets and passports and similar items, too…
bq. So, you’re going to a ticketed event, like a concert or a ball game. It’s out of town. You’re carpooling with four other people. How do you ensure that everyone in the car has their ticket with them?
bq. The car doesn’t move until each person takes out their ticket and holds it to their forehead.
(quoted from 43 Folders: The Forehead Ticket Trick)
The Straight Dope: Why does the shower curtain blow up and in instead of down and out?
I always thought it was convection; hot air rising out the top of the shower stall sucks the curtain in. But it turns out that cold showers do the same thing, thanks to the Coanda effect.
You learn something new every day :-)
Apparently we’ve developed cochroach contraceptives:
The Straight Dope: Is it possible to control bugs by making them sterile?
The Straight Dope: What’s the difference between apple juice and apple cider?
Summary: the differences ranges from “none” to “extremely little”…
I’ve experience the problems described here: The Daily Whim: MT Plus Comment Spam Equals Dead Site
Several times we’ve woken up to a dead cfrq.net server, and (ignoring one disk crash) it’s always been runaway Movable Type comment scripts causing the system to thrash, until some important process gets killed because of the resulting out-of-memory condition. It invariably happens on a Saturday, which means we all get to wait until Monday morning for the server to get manually rebooted.
I’ve installed countermeasures in the past:
* I’ve renamed the comments script
* I close comments automatically after two weeks
* “Comment SPAM interlocking”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2003/10/14/comments-spam-interlock/
And still, I see a constant, steady stream of comment spam that gets posted, even to postings that are closed to comments!
So far my WordPress blog is getting fewer hits, but it’s only a matter of time until the spammers find that one…
*sigh.
Comments have been disabled
Due to a huge influx of comment spam, I have disabled comments on tnir. This affects all blogs hosted on tnir, including Luisa’s and David’s. If you try to post a ccomment, it will let you type it in, but when you click “post” it will give you some…
I saw it, I had to share:
Interesting read:
bq. So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don’t really want to be popular.
I went to a school full of smart people, so I didn’t suffer this nearly as badly as some people I know, and people actually sought me out for help with their homework. Still, I can relate with the argument…
Jeff K says: This stuff with schools is hit and miss. Mark me down as disagreeing with the theory. My strongest opinions about the good and bad of school would be reserved for teachers I ran into.
Yet another source of very small computers. I wonder what interesting things I could do with a bunch of these…
What plugs into a “60 pin Hirose I/O header” connector though? Keyboard? Monitor?
The mainboard can attach to a series of different daughter boards, with serial, USB, parallel, LCD controller, etc. etc.; that’s what the connector is for, I believe.
I’ve had no luck with “supermarket self-serve checkouts”:http://www.nelson.monkey.org/~nelson/weblog/life/supermarketCheckout.html either.
These days I’ll use them for quickly picking up snacks on the way to the Rolemaster session, but that’s about it…
Jeff K says: This is where you find out you’re old school. My 8 year old is an expert at checking out. It is true the systems work hard to prevent theft, but that just puts them back on a par with ma or pa running the store. When the authoritative voice comes on, you’re supposed to look at the head cashier and wait for the ma/pa-like “everything’s okay!” look and continue. Actually, my 3 year old likes to scan articles, but she’s only good at cans, however she does know most of the self-checkout etiquette now [after some false starts and stern scolding from her sister]. Welcome to the 21st century.
I’m holding out for the day when I can just drive my buggy full of RFID tags past the reader, and have it bill my account automatically. *That* will be progress. Self-scanned groceries are just a cost-saving inconvenience.
I got 94% (average error 38 miles) on “this US Geography Test”:http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/states_experiment_drag-drop_Intermed_State15s_500.html – much better than I expected!
(via “Perverse Access Memory”:http://www.whiterose.org/pam/archives/007206.html)
Jeff K says: avg 12 miles, 320 seconds. Maybe I should move there.
For the Star Trek Geeks in the crowd:
More for the star trek geeks, Star Trek Barbie is now a bluetooth device that works with your mobile phone.
This one has been sitting in my to-post pile for two weeks now. *sigh.
From “My head just exploded”:http://www.xoverboard.com/blogarchive/week_2004_10_03.html#000967
bq. So this website, by means of a Kevin-Bacon-style relationship of crossovers, has logically linked one hundred and sixty-two television series as existing in the same universe of continuity… and therefore are all the creation of the autistic Tommy Westphall.
Check it out…
I remember being skeptical a few years ago when I heard about the technology, but it sure has taken off!
I missed the season premiere of “Joan of Arcadia”:http://www.tvtome.com/JoanofArcadia/. I fumbled the VCR programming and taped from 7:59 until 8:01. (Note to self: build “MythTV”:http://www.mythtv.org/ based Media PC ;-).
Prompted by a “recent entry”:http://rae.tnir.org/archives/000671.html on “Reid’s blog”:http://rae.tnir.org/, I “seached the web”:http://www.google.com/search?q=arcadia+bittorrent, “found a torrent”:http://torrent.youceff.com/download.php?cat=107&ref=0&subref=4, downloaded “Azureus”:http://azureus.sourceforge.net/, and about 2 hours later had a copy of the episode on my disk. In testing, I found that I had to find a copy of a “XviD binary”:http://www.xvid.org/, which was also straightforward (thanks to Google :-). We plan to watch the episode after the kids go to bed tonight.
There are days when I say “I hate computers”, but today has been a good day for technology!
Jeff K says: You may still hate computers… I have yet to be caught by bit-torrent, but on the other P2P networks it is distressingly common for a G-rated type file name to actually contain XXX stuff. I think I make my wife paranoid by hiding the screen and turning off the sound when I first fire up a music video or whatever. I’ve seen quite a few things I would never have wanted to on the P2P networks, but so far nothing of the highly illegal type [knock wood, thank God, etc.]
I must admit that I’ve never had trouble with bad files, either on P2P networks or with torrents. Maybe I’m just lucky? In any case, the episode of Joan was fabulous quality, and contained no ‘icky’ bits…
I’ve also recently started using Azureus, which has all the features I’ve wanted for a while. Unfortunately, I managed to K-O some in-progress, multi-gig downloads by turning on a setting somewhere that “imports” torrents, making them non-usable by other BitTorrent apps. Actually, not so much of a problem, as my slow downloads in Azureus were being caused I think by not enabling UDP communication. I still haven’t found where I can tell it how many ports it can use — I have over 100 set aside. The doc mentions how this app doesn’t need many ports like other apps somewhere, but I’m still not 100% sure it wouldn’t help.
P.S. Your site looks iccky today. Did the CSS file go missing?
Oh, never mind about the iccky CSS comment; all looks well now. I must have caught the site at a bad time or something!
“zombies seeking brains”:http://www.defectiveyeti.com/archives/001006.html
The commentary is the usual, but I loved Mr. Greenspun’s way of phrasing it:
bq. American labor is wonderful but it is a luxury that most American families can’t afford
(from Philip Greenspun’s Weblog:)
I was looking up forecasts, and tripped over a short-range (i.e. 3 months) map of “temperature predictions”:http://weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/saisons/image_e.html?img=sfe1t_s for Canada. The second map on the page is the one that amused me; it’s a map of historical accuracy. Most of the map hovers around 50%.
In other words, they’d be just as well off flipping a coin :-)
Japan has come up with “an expensive version”:http://www.gizmodo.com/archives/bottle-cap-tripod-017939.php of a bottle cap tripod for your camera, but you can “build your own”:http://www.fiendishthingy.org/tripod/ with a trip to the hardware store…
That’s one scary posting title. And I can so identify. When I worked for a dot.com, my supervisor was the head of Marketing. I often felt as if we were speaking different languages.
Scalability is an important concept, however marketing is full of double-speak. Unfortunately, however, *every* technical field is loaded with evolving language. I found it funny watching a [otherwise unnotable] movie the other day where grandpa was talking about how he souped up his Dodge Charger to his grandson who had a souped up Japanese car and the grandson said, “You’re speaking a dead language grandpa”.
There are other more sinister word meaning changes I’ve found. What is “paranoia” to a layman is now “delusion” to a psychiatrist see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusional_disorder
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusional
(I checked that in 2 modern psychiatry texts, btw).
That should be quite useful in flame wars, I’ll bet.. isn’t the evolution of language grand?