This is a first-generation Oldsmobile Silhouette sporting a Mugen sticker just under the rear window (you can't really see it in the photo—trust me, it says Mugen). Yes, the same Mugen that makes Honda parts. I wonder if it has a MoTeC exhaust....
I'm annoyed that when I take clothes which are both wet and dirty, put them through the washer and dryer, and then remove them, they're still wet. One of these two appliances is not doing its job.The washer isn't soaking clothes enough for initially dry clothes to be indistinguishable from...
Just about a week after it started, my web hosting company has reported that they've solved the 500 problem: Apache was timing out my and killing my Movable Type scripts. I suspected this was the case. All is well now. No more 500 posts, I promise....
Usually it's because I'm lazy, or busy, or both. This time, it's ... just busy. In fact, it's nearly 10pm and I'm still at the office. Oddly, I didn't have this problem for the first year or two that I was working full time; in fact, I usually got home...
If Black People Love Us! was made in 2008, it would be Stuff White People Like....
I'd be really annoyed with my hosting provider if I paid them more than $4/month. Comments are probably working again. The comment scripts are light enough to be affected little at this point....
OK, the CGI scripts are now crashing early enough to keep comment entries from completing. Please stay tuned and skip the comment forms for now....
A number of years ago I switched from using the mm/dd/YY date format to YYYYMMDD format—if you can't figure that second one out, it would result in today being rendered as 20080323. It's the most internally consistent date format I can find, it's rarely ambiguous, and it doesn't rely on...
This is clearly the best thing ever. Flipping over some (admittedly Scandanavian looking) furniture earlier today, I noticed the hilarity that is the Engrish all over these Chinese-assembled furniture tags. The best part of the tag reads: Cartif cation Is made by teh manufactuere that the materials in this article...
It appears my Movable Type installation (or any underlying component) is throwing out 500 HTTP errors in response to mostly anything put into the system. So if you get a "500'd" from the comment form, don't despair. It probably worked—but I'm still trying to figure out why....
One part about working in the Windows product group is that you end up with mostly-operational operating systems littering every machine you own. I suppose it isn't required to toss development Windows builds on machines other than test machines—but I'm a giant nerd and Windows is typically stable enough to...
Seriously. It's called a spell checker. Of course, even that won't save you from every possible embarrassment....
Drumroll please... United States of America v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins (PDF). Thanks, DotD. There are more details about this case (and its name) at this second link....
In the discussion following my post about the Rubber Room, Willy K brings up the point that it's difficult to fire government employees. I don't argue with this—in fact, one of my biggest complaints about most arms of the government has been that they aren't sufficiently empowered to slough off...
Danny's comment about heart rate monitors reminded me to mention something I've been waiting for since earlier this year: the Garmin Forerunner 405. Before I talk about the Garmin, however, I want to note that my Polar F6 has worked great for the last year and it's given me no...
The thing about snowboarding is that it's easy to rack up 3000 dietary calories of exercise while hitting the slopes for a few hours. My heart rate monitor indicated 2500 calories today, and I didn't take things as roughly as I have been lately. So at the end of the...
Which is more difficult:Printing fortunes in random order, and not worrying about whether they're dumped in the bin in the order in which the fortunes were printed, or printing identical fortunes in batches, and ensuring later that adjacent cookies are unlikely to have the same fortune? I imagine that with...
We got a flyer in the mail recently asking us to rank our preference for which local park projects should get funded. I've never gotten anything like this before. I like it. We voted for the ... park stuff....
I've worked on both incubation projects (early R&D, etc.) and on products that are far more stable in their development cycle (Windows). The development cycle for incubation is heavily front-loaded, and I find that when you get stuck, you often get stuck on seemingly simple but endlessly frustrating problems. This...
I spotted this article today (again at the Freakonomics blog) that describes something I've thought about traffic jams for a long time: jams that aren't caused by fixed events (like an accident) travel backwards in waves. The article is a little thin, but the video is neat. The only problem...
Being practically 15 years old, the BMW has some defects in its paint job. Ignoring the handful of dents on the passenger side and the occasional paint chip, it nevertheless had lots of smaller scratches and horrendous swirl marks in the paint. A wax would make these a little less...
Flipping through channels earlier, Layla happened across some pedestrian clip show (America's Funniest *), which isn't notable except for the overlaid advertisement reminder thing in the lower left corner for an upcoming episode of NBC's Deal or No Deal. The overlay read, New Deal or No Deal/Saturday 9pm Seems the...
Last week's This American Life featured an odd appendage of the New York public school system: the rubber room. In response to the increasing size of the public school system and the increased frequency of complaints from students and parents of teacher misconduct, New York's Department of Education instituted a...
The timing for this is, personally, a little remarkable: merely days after Layla and I finish watching F**k (which is in part a story about our rights to be as vulgar as we'd like), this story comes flying across the wires. The idea is that some kid got the South...
I have to admit—I'm a huge sucker for crazy door designs. So when I saw the Mégane Coupé Concept (Concépt?) from Renault, I nearly crapped my pants. The design is cool enough without the doors...but just look at those things! As far as I can tell (I haven't seen it...
I don't know exactly why, but Microsoft often arranges to brand Talking Rain sodas with whatever big product launch is coming up. This has happened three times since I started work: first for the Vista launch, then for ... something that I forgot, and now for the Heroes Happen Here...
Rich, Manuel, and I went snowboarding this last weekend at Stevens Pass. Awesome. The coolest part was that on the back side of the mountain (specifically, down the Gemini run) clouds engulfed everything and took visibility to under 100', in places. The shot at right wasn't even the worst of...
Another month, another blog post about WSDAPI. Today's entry describes the most important base platform objects available in WSDAPI. In reality, I post a lot more than once a month over at my work blog, but I've got a personal commitment to posting one substantial article each month. So "monthly"...
"Our Worst Critics Prefer to Stay" is the top-rated motto from the Freakonomics blog's poll to find a new six-word motto for the U.S. I agree a lot with this. Interestingly, Layla and I had a long discussion last night about how many great alternatives there are out there to...
Remember the Acer Ferrari laptop that debuted last year and looked more like something Fisher Price might produce, and with Ferrari stickers all over it? And the competing Asus Lamborghini which was essentially the same thing, but in yellow? Well, it turns out that Acer is still at this game,...
