We both STINK...for your safety! Image from the Puget Sound Energy bimonthly bill flyer on natural gas....
Continue reading Me and natural gas, working together.
December 2007 Archives
Following in the path of Powergen Italia (think about it) is the Chinese communication software vendor Incesoft, who could keep their name even if they changed their mission to delivering the finest software promoting cousin love. Their tagline says that INCE stands for, "Infinity Nature Communication Experience," which does absolutely...
Continue reading Another tragic company name.
Layla and I have only really bought one new piece of furniture since we moved into our house earlier this year, so we picked up a few pieces today from a local antiques importer. This particular piece came complete with a dorknut Aleph. P.S. It looks a little fruity in...
Continue reading Bookcase comes with free goofball.
An odd thing happened today. After a long day of snowboarding, Rob and I decided that on the way home, we should stop at a local burger joint (Zeke's) and fill up before continuing the drive. It was raining heavily and highway 2 was covered in snow and slush, but...
Continue reading Accidental.
Yes, that's a BMW Z3 sporting a stupid front fascia, blingin' chrome wheels, and a ridiculous curly spoiler-looking thing....
Continue reading You damned kids..
For the most part, I really really love my non-smart Samsung slider phone. But the driver package necessary for connecting it to my workstation has two problems:Why is a driver package necessary, again? Build in a USB hub, and then connect a USB mass storage device, and connect a tailored...
Continue reading Ups and down with the Samsung phone.
It turns out that despite all of the rain we get here in Seattle, rarely do we get "significant" snow on Christmas day. In fact, we haven't had more than 1" of snow on the ground in the last 17 years. Oddly, December is one of our most precipitatious1 months,...
Continue reading Barely whitish Christmas.
About once a year, I run across some hardware vendor who does something incredibly stupid like packaging their drivers up into a RAR archive. Today's contestant is Promise Technology, Inc. and the drivers in question are for the Ultra 133 TX2 card I've got in my file server. This is...
Continue reading How to clean up after WinACE's broken uninstaller.
I like to pick on automotive marketing departments (...a lot, actually) but from time to time they're saddled with the unenviable task of drumming up interest in absolutely horrifically engineered cars. Often, the best that they can do is to slap an interesting-sounding name on the car in the hopes...
Continue reading Weigh in: ambitious names on crappy cars.
One of the terrestrial HD channels we receive is the local PBS affiliate's Spanish-language channel, V-me. And since we don't get much else in terms of broadcast television, lazy nights around the TV (like tonight) occasionally result in Layla and I watching shows in el-Spanish-o. I can't understand a word,...
Continue reading Language barrier?.
Craigslist find of the day (cached). Too bad the delivery is so hammed up. This would be comic gold if only delivered from the straight man....
Continue reading Redneck fixer-upper condo.
We had some pretty serious flooding recently in western Washington. It's cold, wet, has been raining like crazy, and big parts of the state were under several feet of water. So what should farmers be on the lookout for in the next few weeks, as the rain and temperature continue...
Continue reading Hay!.
I find that most legalese is difficult to read. In the best cases, it's impenetrable up-front, and in the worst, it's meandering and strings you along you thinking you can barely read it until you get to the end and realize you have no clue what you just read. And...
Continue reading Legal mumbo jumbo.
I was listening to a radio program on journalist casualties earlier tonight when I heard a small sound-bite at the very end that enlightened me to something I hadn't realized until now. The jist was that when public radio (specifically, NPR) correspondants travel overseas to countries with state-controlled media, it's...
Continue reading The people's radio.
When I'm running, I typically go for distances in multiples of 2.5km. But since none of the treadmills at the gym work in kilometers (heathens), I get to measure everything in miles. So I work off of the assumption that 5.0km =~ 3.1miles. The thing is that my 2.5km runs...
Continue reading Math major.
You've angered the googley-eyed toast covered in burnt cheese topping....
Continue reading Uh-oh. See what you've done?.
Layla and I just finished watching Helvetica, a documentary about the ubiquitous typeface of the same name. Hearing modern designers reflect on the history and influence of Helvetica is absolutely fascinating to me—although I admit I'm a huge sucker for all things typeface. The film is very clear in its...
Continue reading Helvetica.
Sorry folks, I broke comments last night, and can't fix them until ... later tonight. Update: It's working now. A thousand pardons....
Continue reading B'oh.
Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that the development of christmas songs halted abruptly about a century ago? I'm really sick of these songs, and I've only had to listen to them for three decades....
Continue reading Joyous songs? Shove it..
The first local craigslist post of note is this gem (cached) from someone fed up with his new truck payments. Yet more evidence why people just can't have nice things. The seller is clearly an intelligent fellow, since he blew some (probably big) bucks on stupid-huge chrome wheels and matching...
Continue reading Two killer craigslist finds.
It turns out that the second channel on my ALi IDE controller was, in fact, torched—just not as torched as the first channel. So now that I've sunk the $5 into a replacement from PC Recycle, I'm finishing my Windows Home Server installation. Although, I got into an argument with...
Continue reading Frustratomatic 6000.
I ran across this (marginally dated) article about a toy tie-in for the film Fantastic Four. I'm not particularly surprised I didn't catch this the first time around, since I assume that Fantastic Four is a really dumb movie. But the article goes a step further and illustrates just how...
Continue reading (with Light-up Headlights!).
I got a chance to go snowboarding at Crystal Mountain today which is good, because prior to now, the only place I've been boarding or skiing in Washington has been at Stevens Pass. Crystal is huge and is about as far away from me at Stevens...but this early in the...
Continue reading Crystal mountain.
Hah....
Continue reading Glamorous Wal-Mart.
BWOOON!! Courtesy of this page, which I found when looking up the new version of the USB humping dogs. Update: Um, it appears this is either "BWOOOn!!" or "BWooon!!" or something in between. It's difficult to tell....
Continue reading BWOOON!!.
This is making its way into my next presentation. Somehow....
Continue reading Best pie chart, ever.
I learned about The Thin Blue Line because Philip Glass composed the soundtrack, but watched it because Errol Morris directed it. Good stuff. I love the Texan judiciary....
Continue reading The Thin Blue Line.
Even though I first mentioned my server woes practically two weeks ago, I've just now gotten my shiny new copy of Windows Home Server running on my crappy old hardware. The difficulty? It turned out to be one of the PATA channels on my crappy ALi PCI IDE controller, which...
Continue reading Windows Home Server now running reliably.
Sometimes it's just time for a picture post....
Continue reading Here's lookin' at you.
That's right—I'm talking to you. You, as a member of the human race. As a participant in society. As a driver. Specifically, as the first driver in the left-turn only lane at a stop light. You've got a responsibility to pay attention. Both of the chumps in the lanes going...
Continue reading You have a responsibility..
I took the first picture today, at 11:24am. The EXIF lies, as my camera is apparently exempt from daylight savings time corrections1. Back yard at 11:24am This next picture was taken less than a minute later. Front yard at 11:24am What the deuce?! 1 As we speak, I am now...
Continue reading Equatorial house.
