Amen for all the amateur (and in this case, definitely not-so-amateur) reviews of consumer electronics spotting YouTube. It helps make up for the paucity of quality written reviews, and fills the gaps that even good text reviews can't cover, such as the all-important timed power-on test1. 1 Alas, it seems...
ZOMG apocalypse tomorrow. I wish they did this back in February....
I was about to post about switching back to Dvorak for writing documents and email at work when I searched across this-here-blog for ... Dvorak. I found this post about how flawed the MS 8000 keyboard series is. ...but I just bought one for the PC in the living room....
I built an HTPC earlier this week. I hit three snags:The 200GB Western Digital drive I had lying around happened to have a dead controller. The machine would take over a minute to POST with this old drive. I replaced it with an even older 45GB WD unit which makes...
Raven figured it out on his first guess, although Rob Williams ran across it too in his fusillade of responses. The two copper prong things bridge a grounding plate and one of three fan speed lines. The big black piece you see in the first photograph really is just a...
Round two. Here's where we left off last time. Sorry for the fuzzy. Any more guesses? P.S. One guess per round, please....
Taking a page from Mouser's flickr feed and innumerable kids shows and brain teaser games, here's a game where you try to figure out what something is from a photo taken horrendously close to the object in question. Sorry for the focus. My Canon point-and-shoot has decent macro, which means...
There are two primary paths between my house and downtown Bellevue. One is an arterial road, and the other is a highway. The highway is very slightly quicker. Even though they're the same speed in both directions (i.e., the surface streets take the same amount of time whether I'm going...
Do you use those AV cables packaged with (as far as I can tell) every digital camera ever sold? Busting them out once to try them doesn't count. Have you used them more than once?...
That's right, it's now a congresionally designated day of celebration. I was originally going to make some comment about Pi Day receiving official government recognition and is therefore uncool, but there's really nothing at all bad about this. Full text of the resolution is here under the link "H.RES.224.EH" (not...
We're still not quite at the point of having genuinely universal power adapters, but it's nevertheless pretty cool that rectractable prongs are catching on amongst power supply manufacturers. Yes. This pleases me....
I drink a lot of coffee. Part of that is because I live in the greater Puget Sound metropolitan area. The rest is because I'm a software developer. Over the years I've used a lot of coffee machines. Here's how they all stack up. Starbucks Interactive Cup We have these...
Last month I thought my phone was about to die. This last week in Irvine it hasn't even dropped a single bar, even though I've had it on a non-substantial fraction of the time. What the hell, phone? Why do you toy with me like this?...
I saw this float across the wires yesterday. Apparently phone manufacturers are renewing their commitment to reducing the diversity of phone charging plugs. To be honest I'm not too hopeful that they'll meet their goal on this (2012 for a standard interface—which is a little soon given the time to...
I'm sure you've all seen this shot of the space junk orbiting our blue marble at some point in the last few weeks. It's been practically inevitable since the somewhat-less-inevitable collision between Iridium and some floating Russian nuke-a-lite. My immediate reaction to this photo was a good deal of annoyance—yes,...
We've got the Roku Netflix streaming box running right now and I've killed our wireless router three times with firmware upgrades and by forcibly killing it with network traffic1. The Roku hasn't skipped a beat. Sweet. 1 never buy a D-Link WBR-1310....
I've been using my memo book for about a week now. This has been one of the most productive weeks I've had in a long time. Anything that doesn't get done immediately gets written down in the book. Any moment I have downtime the book is the first thing I...
I have no idea why this irks me. But it does. A lot. if( NULL != ptr ) { hr = func( ptr ); } if( S_OK != hr ) { // blah blah } Highlight that text with your cursor (but not the whole post—just the, ahem, "code" snippet)....
Well, the battery is dying. As far as I can tell, there's nothing wrong with the rest of the phone. I'm torn because I'm always down for new toys, but I'm also not particularly interested in smartphones—the net effect is that I'd sortof like a new phone that makes reasonable...
In April of 2004, I bought a 256MB SD card for, as I recall, around $120. This is a cost of $480/GB. Today I bought an 8GB SD card for $40, or $5/GB. That means that in the ensuing 54 months, the cost of the technology has been cut in...
I forgot to keep tabs on the Netflix queue, so the last three films we received are just whatever we queued up, say, six months ago. This bites. I need to stay more on top of keeping the queue well-balanced....
Northrop Grumman have apparently built this comparatively lightweight LASER for weapons use. Besides very helpfully noting that solid state LASERs are "powered by electricity" (thanks) they mention that this particular unit is equipped with ... Ethernet connectivity? Call me old-fashioned, but I actually prefer that this be usable only with...
I studied Japanese at school but it was primarily because I had an interest in languages (any of them, really) and because I needed a hobby. I've gotten back into it on and off in the years since I finished my undergraduate work, but nevef got too far since my...
I sampled all of these coffees at the Kauai Coffee Company. This is the second photo I took in this spot. The first was to snag a shot of this awesome shirt....
Top three reasons why I might not:The Large Hadron Collider was turned on, created an uncontrollable black hole, and swallowed the earth Trampled by elephants Elvis reincarnates in my bedroom and gibs me because I was sleeping in his respawn point Update: Kyle recommends a site for receiving up-to-the-minute status...
ACM sent me this totally awesome von Neumann mug for being a member for 3 years. I'm totally going to rock this at the office. Wait, it's only been 3 years?...
"Webmaster" and "sysop." I work in technology, but they just don't come up very often. I don't even see them in the (decently often) interaction I have with my web hosting provider. "Tier 2," on the other hand, is daily vocab....
I heard earlier tonight (in a taped discussion on legal discovery of electronic documents) that as many as 67% of emails go unprinted. If true, that means that at least 1 out of every 3 emails is printed. Who the hell prints email?...
Those of you who have used a laptop with a pointing stick have probably noticed that occasionally, the cursor will (infuriatingly) drift in a direction you're not pushing the stick. It turns out that these pointers correct their own drift, but only if you take your finger off the stick....
This is the first weekend in quite a while when I've been able to unwind completely and do absolutely nothing. Normally I don't like to do nothing but it was sortof a necessity after doing something for the last several months. So for the last two days I've been doing...
It took 3 hours to get this working. I'm not sure who to blame: Belkin, for a potentially crappy DHCP server, or Roku, for a potentially crappy DHCP client. Either way, switching over to my Linksys access point for DHCP fixed the problem. Of course, I added the Belkin in...
The Netflix player arrived yesterday and Layla was able to get it set up on our Wifi easily enough, but it fails to "connect to the local network" (whatever that means). It does request a DHCP lease so I know the layer-2 stuff is working just fine—and DHCP is difficult...
We tried Netflix's Watch Now option a while back, but it was kindof clunky and getting the PC wired into the TV was always a hassle (the Xbox 360 is the only way we pull Media Center into the living room). So I ordered the Netflix Player a few days...
There's been something of a brouhaha amongst the Microsoft technical bloggers in the last few days about this post by Eric Brechner, a director of engineering learning in the Engineering Excellence group at Microsoft1. The short version is that Eric asserts (hah—puns abound) that asserts in code aren't good ways...
This is a 250W halogen bulb from a set of cheap (and extremely effective) work lamps I bought a while back. When the bulb blew, the filament melted completely through the glass shell and left a really neat hollow strand protruding out the bottom. The bulb is flipped over in...
Holy hell. Phil tells it like it is....
Spotted over at Kotaku....
Am I missing something here? My non-smart phone is good for calls, occasionally taking crappy pictures while snowboarding, and telling the time. Is a smartphone worth the expense, UI frustration, and (most important) size/weight? I just don't see how else I'd use this damned thing. P.S. I'm not old....
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...
I feel sorry for the box art designers who work for motherboard and video card vendors. They've got tons of variations on each product, can't really reuse graphics (the RT-XG3500 has to be distinguishable from the RT-XS3500), can't really picture the object in question (it's boring), and typically have no...
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...
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...
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...
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...
I recently bought a replacement inkjet cartridge for my printer/scanner, and noticed that HP had thoughtfully included a postage-paid return envelope in which to mail back and recycle my spent containers. "This is pretty neat," I thought, "and it seems like HP's responsibility department was able to wrestle some money...
Things I've broken in the last 24 hours:The mini-USB cable to my USB hub. This is acceptable—I've got a million of these little cords. My wireless keyboard. I dropped it on the floor, and the batteries appear to have been leaking acid all over the connectors for months. I had...
A pox on any land-before-time PATA harddrive PCB or label designer who didn't include text or diagrams for master/slave jumper settings. You should have known better....
As you may have heard, the Zune 2 hardware and updated Zune software launched today. For me, the big news is that the updated firmware and desktop software all work seamlessly with my oh-so-last-year Zune 30. Highlights include wireless sync (supported by UPnP, the Vista implementation of which is owned...
We carved pumpkins for Halloween. Although, it appears to me like Darth needs to spend some time on the stair climber. He's looking a bit flabby and ... misshapen....
I used to abhor HTML mail. It was typically ugly stuff, took forever to load, and didn't render particularly cleanly on my pine terminal. And plus, people who wrote mail in HTML editors were unsophisticated wannabes who lacked hardcore. And then I climbed out of my dungeon of nonproductivity and...
Haha! Noses on sticks! For those of you who can't immediately tell (those of you who can are dorks), I'm Phil Ken Sebben, a minor character on Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. Goofy quotes abound! And Layla is a lolcat, found most prevalently at icanhascheezburger.com. Layla has dozens of velcroable...
Seeing as I don't actually use OS X, it took until today for me to run across this. I'm going to refrain from commenting except to say that I'm disappointed....
While browsing through Netflix's Watch Instantly selection of comedy films, Layla remarks: Oh, this is what they think comedy is? OK no, I want something that will make me laugh. Too true....
For a few days last week, Dell and Amazon offered the Logitech Harmony 880 universal remote for a deep discount off the ... somewhat exorbitant $250 list price. At $115, the Harmony 880 isn't exactly a steal, but I've been dying for a robust universal remote to replace the four...
This amuses me greatly. I'm quite curious to see if anything comes of this. P.S. My home theater features audio by Radio Shack....
Layla and I have tried out two IPTV services this weekend.Internet TV Beta in Windows Media Center is surprisingly cool. The beta opened up on Thursday to Vista Ultimate and Home Premium customers in the US, and everyone running those SKUs now magically have an "Internet TV" option on their...
Once again, I ask: someone please let me know if I'm missing some huge advancement in consumer power technology. But instead of big computer power supplies, I'm talking today about small wall-wart (I hate those words) consumer electronic chargers. I'm really disappointed with the lack of leadership in this space....
Apparently Samsung features a product called Wiselink, which allows their consumer electronics to read MP3 and JPEGs off of UFDs. Yes, Wiselink appears to be branding for "USB+FAT32." Anyway, I ran across this documentation for Wiselink that states that the recommended image size is ... "600 mega pixels." For you...
...it's a nuclear sockpile....
Someone please let me know if I'm missing some huge advacement in consumer power technology, but it seems that the electrical juice we're receiving today is being processed in exactly the same way it was 20 years ago. After the widespread introduction of switching power supplies, I can't think of...
It appears Marathon 2: Durandal has just been released for Xbox Live Arcade. This is ... kinda cool, actually. I'll always remember Marathon as one of the sweet Mac games that I never had for the PC, which isn't entirely accurate because I think it was the only sweet Mac...
For those of you who may have missed it two weeks ago, it appears that kids who were given the OLPC used it to ... surf for porn. I'm really really amused that this problem wasn't solved up front. I mean, did anyone seriously think kids would use this thing...
Manuel recommended the local K1 go-karting track recently for one of my bachelor parties. Well, it's a serious load of fun, so a handful of us went back this last week for a few more rounds. The thing about K1 is that they charge a good deal ($20 a person...
For Thursday's week of housework project, I built a box for all of my networking gear. The impetus came from the giant mass of cables and power cords that lives in one of the corners in my office. The cable outlet is in the middle of the wall, and so...
Raven put together this absolutely kickass Forza Motorsport 2 replica of Kyle Busch's NASCAR-mobile—not kickass of its own accord, but kickass because the replica is [expletive deleted] amazing and was done entirely by hand in FM2's layer editor. Holy crap, dude. This was way better than the ricegasm I sent...
Ignore the crappy cameraphone picture of the flyer left in my office kitchen, and instead refer yourself to I-DESIRE.org, some sort of weird motivational support group thing from India. It seems like these guys are trying to accomplish the right thing, but I can't help but giggle a little when...
Let's all 1337 like it's 2003....
I'm sure you're all getting a facefull of the iPhone madness today. The twins of gadget blogs have been posting non-stop about all of the excitement leading up to the product launch...which is all well and good, except that I'm finding it difficult to get my daily fill of low-thought...
I ran across something called supercooled water today. I've got no idea if this is completely legit or not, but here's what I've heard: Water, contrary to what you'd expect, takes some coercing to freeze properly. If it doesn't fall into the correct lattice structure when it reaches its freezing...
I ran across the Freakonomics blog earlier today. Lots of amusing stuff there. And holy crap, this guys posts more often than I do. Awesome!...
I'm sure you're all (mostly?) aware of the Lego Mindstorms NXT microcontroller and associated peripherals, which give your Lego creations some level of programmable robotic behavior with a bare minimum of hassle. It's a well-targeted kit that weighs in around a few hundred bucks and delivers a programming experienced that's...
The phone on my camera goes "click, whirr" every time I take a photo. My understanding is that this is so you can't secretly take photos with your phone—which, I also hear, is something of a problem in Japan. Whether this is simply a gentlemen's agreement between phone manufacturers or...
For those of you without IE running with JavaScript enabled, here's a screenshot of yesterday's post. It's more fun when it's interactive. Man. Coding the map up was easy—but damn do I hate hacking up CSS and onload crap....
var map = null;var pins = new Array(new Array( 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0 ), new Array( 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0 ), new Array( 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0 ), new Array( 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0 ), new Array( 1,...
Layla and I were playing Hoopla earlier (yes, just the two of us—we're just that cool) when she had to pantomime Mecca. After I failed to guess what the heck she was praying towards ("east?") she got me to guess:Clown? No wait, Pee-Wee Herman Pee-Wee's Big Adventure? No, Jambi? Yes!...
A while back, I bought a generic utility knife. It looks an awful lot like the one pictured at right. Yes, I scanned through a bunch of images of utility knives on the web before settling on that picture. The thing is that I lost this utility knife right the...
Everybody remember the Kursk, which sank in 2000 after it was damaged by an experimental torpedo? Well, English Russia has a salvage-boat load of pictures of the Kursk out of the water, and the damage is amazing (cached). It's really rare to see the interior of a sub like this,...
Over the last week, my Samsung SGH-T809 slider phone has started crapping out. The UI (and seconds later, the whole phone) will completely freeze after I've typed in more than three digits, making it completely impossible actually dial a number that isn't already in the phone's memory. Oh, and it...
Layla asked me earlier this week if farts are characteristically funny to all men, or if there's just something wrong with me. So I'm glad to respond with a story about what happened to me at the gym earlier. I was stretching after my workout tonight, and in the room...
Exhibit A: the lottery. Exhibit B: people who circle parking lots at walking speed looking for a convenient spot. I realize there's an end case where a lot is completely full and there's absolutely no parking nearby—and in this case, your strategy for finding a spot is probably going to...
I'm a keyboard snob. For years, all I used was a Lexmark/IBM Model M, unmatched in its spring pressure, tactile response, and roommate-annoying racket it made when you really got going on it. It's an absolute brute of a keyboard, but it had oustanding durability, fantastic keypress consistency, and sported...
...with big, nasty, pointy teeth! As a surprise, Layla snagged a pair of the murderous bunny slippers and got them to me last night. Hoorah! Unfortunately, my honkin' huge stompers are a bit too large (err, size 10.5) for the slippers, so one of them immediately split a seam as...
Just a few thoughts.The most frustrating part is my own music collection. For example, one track from a Secret Chiefs 3 album is tagged with different album information than all of the other tracks. So playing everything in order, I get tracks 1–7 and 9–16, and then track 8. Annoying....
I think an awful lot of people mistakenly refer to a, "desert island," when they really mean a, "deserted island." And due to a quirk in the English language, neither "desert" nor "deserted" (both words that describe areas void of anything important) imply the other. Desert things aren't necessarily deserted...
I've got a collector/organizer personality. I like long lists or arrangements of things, and I like the layouts to be uniform. This is probably most obvious in my music library, but applies to this journal, too. You may have noticed. Now traditionally, the media library has been a major source...
Layla got me a Zune for Christmas. Yes, it's brown. I've wanted one of these for a while—the battery life, capacity, and build quality of my mobiBLU DAH-1500i leave a good deal to be desired...and come to think of it, the FM reception on it sucks, too. The Zune has...
This came to me from NPR through a coworker through another coworker. I hadn't yet heard it. But, it's tubular. It's the song Code Monkey by Jonathan Coulton, and it's some of the best unsigned online music I've heard since Brad Sucks. You can play Code Monkey at the list...
I took this picture a while back at the local aquarium. It shows a picture of how to squeeze ... err, milt (sperm) from a fish and into a beaker. And then dumping all of that into a bucket of eggs. Oh, and those eggs were harvested from an ostensibly...
My experience is that optical drives fail far more often than nearly any other PC component (with the exception, of course, of small fans). In the last, say, ten years of working with computer parts, I've lost one motherboard, two or three power supplies, only one hard drive (despite typically...
When I first met Freeman Dyson today, it was at a bank of urinals in a restroom in the building that houses a good chunk of Microsoft Research. Back in the meeting room, Dyson gave a fantastic lecture today about genetics and bioengineering and provided fantastic responses to the somewhat...
I remember first hearing about this whole, you know, cup stacking phenomenon about five or so years ago—although in reality it's been around at least 25 years. Apparently the sport revolves around conning kids into developing near superhuman abilities in stacking and unstacking plastic cups. If you haven't heard of...
For those of you who haven't seen the TV comedy Arrested Development, do so. It's sharp and hilarious, and tragically cancelled. Those of you who have seen the show (or at least the third season) will probably recognize the name Bob Loblaw (say it quickly now), so-named was Scott Baio's...
I mentioned last night that I, err, got a helicopter from Layla. This is it. It's tiny. Tiny is awesome, because I can fly it indoors and use it to chase cats. It's actually quite clever—it's got counter-rotating rotors, which means that a tail rotor isn't necessary to keep the...
Part of the total awesomeness that Layla busted out for my birthday involved a completely sweetass radio-controlled helicopter. Thanks to a handful of AA batteries, I've spent most of the day tormeting felines. But the part I think you all will find most amusing is the cornucopia of Engrish smattered...
I spotted this a few days back on NASA's Earth Observatory RSS feed. It's an image of most of North America with population densities overlaid. To me, the most remarkable part is the wild, wild west. Or accordingly, just how popular the east half of the US is. I mean...
Don't fear: Captain Boomerang and his trusty sidekick, Private First Class Virtual Boy are here to save the world from terrorists! As far as I can tell, the idea behind the VeraTech Aero Phantom is fairly clever: it's a bodyless helicopter with a camera crammed rather unceremoniously in the crotch...
If English isn't your first language, tell me, how dizzying is this statement (lifted from a ranty post from last week): Learn as much as necessary as quickly as possible After I wrote it, it seemed like it could be damned confusing. P.S. Leaving town. As usual, updates will be...
I spotted this earlier today on Lake Sammamish. It's a Surf-Jet, a surfboard powered by a small Subaru marine engine. There's a hilariously old-school website devoted to the Surf-Jet and other powered board contraptions. This at least the second bizarre watercraft I've spotted—I remember seeing a WetBike in a junk...
My name is Dan, and I'm a recovering Wikipediaholic. That's right—I was addicted to Wikipediahol. I first started making serious edits to the Wikipedia in June of 2004. I remember going to look up the Prague Orloj (which I had recently seen in a trip through Europe) and found that...
I mentioned yesterday that I had my retinas imaged to look for defects in the nerves, capillaries, or retinal surface of my two peepers. This was an optional part of my treatment and even though Microsoft's medical insurance company covers it (most company's don't) the nurse nevertheless asked if I...
I've always worried what the long-term consequences of staring into a terminal for more than an hour or two at a time. Surely, staring at approximately the same focal distance without much blinking is going to cause some sort of damage if it happens for years on end. And to...
Doing something complicated the first time is always exciting, interesting, and engaging. Doing the same thing the right way the second time is so much more....
My understanding is that old people only ever use the internet to look at pictures of their grandchildren....
The picture at right is of:My old phone, Layla's new T-Mobile SDA (HTC Tornado) my new Samsung SGH-t809 a Secure Digital (SD) card the 1GB Mini SD card that Layla's camera takes the 512MB Micro SD card that my camera takes The Micro SD card is unbelievably tiny. I actually...
It's been over a year since I last got a new phone. Since my contract has lapsed, Layla and I combined our plans together (onto a family plan—it's way cheaper) and we both got new phones. I ended up with a Samsung t809 slider and Layla got a T-Mobile SDA...
Just over ten years ago I bought a hard drive for $200. It was 500MB. I think I've still got it somewhere. Today, I bought a hard drive for $200. It's 500GB. Yowch....
On Saturday, I posed a hunt for a synchronization bug. In the approximately two days since then, I've gotten ... no responses. Maybe comments are broken1. Before I get to the solution, here's another copy of the source so we know what we're talking about. class Singleton { public: static...
I think we've all heard the hyper-leftist nutcases screaming that modern media is strangling society. "It's evil," they usually say, "because it's profit-driven and numbs our brains. It makes people complacent and desensitizes them to the feelings of the world." Most of this is fairly overblown. Yes, violence in entertainment...
Standard rules apply here. You're on an x86 machine and the mutexes are, in fact, atomic. Don't worry about error-casing, because that's not where the problem lies. The reason that I bring this up is that this example is often used to describe a performant solution to the multithreaded Singleton...
Do you know the guy I'm talking about? I've seen him (or a copy of him) in nearly every class I've ever taken—he's the guy who pipes up and gives exactly the wrong answer any time the professor poses a question...even a rhetorical one. I generally loathe this guy because...
Some of you may have been following that I get tablets from the office on which to test Vista. The first of these was the Motion LE1600 and after that, I had the HP tc4200. Most recently, I've been using the Fujitsu T4010D tablet. The T4000 series is Fujitsu's mid-level...
The really big news for today was that we officially released Windows Vista Beta 2 to the masses. If you've been following the progress of Vista betas, you'll see just how far things have come from Vista Beta 1 (released in the middle of last year) and even the CTP...
I've been an information packrat for a long, long time. I got this way trying to make sure I overlooked important information, and it's turned into an endless maze of paperwork, files, and emails that I'll probably never actually need. It's unfortunate, but I'm learning a lot in the process...
The ad copy here reads: "How do you back up 9.22x1018 TB of data? Instantly." A terabyte is around 1.1x1012 bytes (or around that, depending on how much of a nard you are) and 9.22x1018 is unambiguously exactly what it is. Multiply all that out, and you end up with...
Layla and I eat rice pasta for a number of reasons—one of these reasons is that it's damned good stuff. Another is that they actually sell it here in Washington, which is the first place I've ever seen it. Earlier tonight I was cooking some rice-based spaghetti noodles when I...
I was thinking about this earlier and figured I'd ask you all: What's the most underrated band or musician from the early 1980s through the mid 1990s? I've got my own guesses, but I'm curious what you all think....
I'm not sure if it's the fact that I've always used good spam filters or if I've just never had my email accounts listed in enough places to get sucked up by spammers, but paper junk mail has always been a bigger problem than spam. Two or three times each...
Because I'm a giant dork, I want to wish everyone a happy Pi Day. Usually I don't realize it's Pi Day until March 14th (as with most important dates—there have been years where I didn't remember it was my birthday until weeks later) but I actually noticed that it was...
I bought an MP3 player about six weeks ago. I've taken it to the gym nearly every morning since then (with the exception of the last two weeks when I was, ahem, sick) and in that time, I've formed the following conclusions:The buttons really are too small. I've got the...
Layla and I found these at Whole Foods yesterday. Willy K, this is for you....
I read an article recently about Zillow.com, a startup founded by an ex-Microsoft executive. The basic idea is that their online presence gives you access to home values for properties both on and off the market and doesn't require any sort of fee or even login information. It's really damned...
Layla and I ordered Chinese food tonight. Fortune cookies came with. Here's the fortune from one of them....
So, it turns out that I'm instant bad karma when it comes to anything with a display mounted on it. When I first started at work in June, one of my monitors wouldn't work at all. Somehow during our trip to New Mexico, I managed to much up some pixels...
As most of you probably already know, I'm a big stick-in-the-mud when it comes to adopting new technology. It took me until March of 2003 to actually buy a digital camera, an easy 5 years after the bona-fide geek launch of the things. Only recently have I gotten an LCD...
No, it doesn't include the goober pictured at right. You may have noticed that I've been looking at getting an LCD for my workstation for quite a while—at least two months, and really longer if you count the time that I thought that I'd get a 17" in college. The...
I've talked before about what used to be called Virtual Earth—just as a reminder, this was Microsoft's online mapping service with overlaid streets and whatnot. There have been some recent changes at Microsoft, and one of them is to reorganize some of the MSN efforts into an MSN/Windows structure called...
Especially if the money is $0. Last night Layla and I went to her division's holiday party in the middle of Seattle. The party was held in the top floor of the Science Fiction Museum (and Hall of Fame) right next to the Experience Music Project and the Space Needle1...
I've had an idea for launching a web service here at home.milkmandan.org for a while now and since I haven't gotten off my ass to actually do it (read: no time) I guess I'll give the idea away beforehand. I've always been really curious just how wrong the weather prediction...
I want to start out by saying that I have lots of fond memories of cooking frozen pizzas and microwaving Hot Pockets as a kid. My mom always did the best she could to give me and my sister nutritious meals, but times were difficult and she ended up having...
Do you have nasty socks in your drawer? No? Damn. I did, until I cleaned most of them out. In fact, there probably are a few buried down there that I missed. Anyway. My point here is that socks—even nice socks—are cheap. Why not buy a new pair? I don't...
I like credit unions. I like that my money is managed by someone other than me, and I really like that whoever is managing my money works more directly for me (as an account holder) than for some team of executives somewhere. I see these things as bonuses. The credit...
To any companies that make computers, computer accessories, or really, any consumer electronics whatsoever: why the [expletive deleted] do any blue LEDs you include in your product need to be brighter than a goddamned searchlight? All of you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every time I buy some electronic...
It's called 0xc0debabe and it's hosted here at home.milkmandan.org Just so we get this out of the way upfront, the picture on the right is Yet Another Image I Found While Searching For Layla. It's a CD, I think. You know, low-capacity DVDs. For the kids. I'm excited that she's...
I think it'd about time for me to get rid of my CRT. I've had it since sometime in early 1999 and it's served me damn well. The only problem I've ever had with it is some slight fuzzing of the blue channel near the very bottom of the screen....
Two years ago (almost to the week) I went to Maui for six days on a business trip. Beyond, you know, meetings and such, much snorkeling and diving was had by all. This was a picture that Ahni gave me because I liked it so much. She took it under...
It's 6:30 in the morning and I've actually already been up for over an hour. Since I couldn't really sleep, I decided to fix the script that I've been using to tag my MP3 collection. Some history: I've been accumulating MP3s for a long, long time. At least five or...
That's right. My name. Hot....
That's right. I'm not using the Model M any more. The rationale behind this is really twofold: first, I really don't use my keyboard at home to type English anymore. In fact, this journal probably constitutes around 90% of the typing that I do at home. I really haven't been...
I was poking around Expedia (dot com) today, and ran across something interesting. The thing to be aware of here is that, in general, the top "something" is on time 70% of the time, whereas the bottom "something" is on time 60% of the time. But what, exactly, are they...
Some of you may have noticed that there was an eclipse a while ago. And, you may also have noticed, the eclipse had prime viewing areas in Morocco and Spain. Except I left a few days before it happened. Damn. During the last week, I've been looking at pictures of...
Damn. It looks like these guys are really pulling out all the stops. You have been chosen to participate in an invitation only limited time event! Are you currently paying over 3% for your mortgage? STOP! We can help you lower that today! Answer only a few questions and we...
I got a great spam today. We are happy to present you with six deals from four different brokers. Please remember that there is no commitment required on your part, and your credit is not an issue. Please validate your information with our secure and private database to ensure our...
I ran across this on the Wikipedia page for the Cessna 172. Hootie hoo!...
Layla and I bought some beer earlier. Behold. That's right. Dead Guy Ale. I guess this is only really directed at Mouser: but it matches your Deadguy Truck. Awesome. Sortof. Oh, and this is brewed by the same people as The Best Beer Of All Time....
The things that spammers do to elude antispam filters amuse me greatly. Today, I got some spam in my NMT account that had the following text appended, ostensibly to avoid content-based filters. Nerds are caught in network marketing scandals with alcoholics. I overheard Bush talking to the gerbils, and he...
Layla was talking earlier about loaning things as collateral (or something...honestly, I don't remember exactly. Shh—don't tell her) when I thought about how certain places demand things in return for borrowing other things. For example, the whalewatching boat that we went on loaned out binoculars to patrons in return for...
Thursday afternoon my office had a somewhat (ok, not at all) spontaneous BBQ and party out on the lake. Sweet. As always, my pants got soaked. This time, it was courtesy entirely of Layla. Thanks, Layla!...
The original intent was that today, I was going to post about my trip to New Mexico. I was going to talk about this because I have a bunch of pictures from there and, hey, pictures are easy to talk about. The only problem is that I'm over at Layla's...
I just want everyone to know that there are two things that are better than anything else right now: sandals, and Tetris. Thank you for your attention....
I've been playing a lot of Super Mario Brothers 3 recently. And really, it's awesome. The gameplay is phenomenal and is, in my opinion, the culmination of the entire Mario series. I've also realized, however, that the music does leave a good deal lacking. It's ridiculously repetitive and has, at...
I woke up this morning and found out that I was an überdork. And then I almost got my nipple cut off....
Yesterday, spake Layla: "Do you really need to buy a drill, or is this just an excuse to buy a new toy?" And back I quoth, "I'm a guy. I have a need to put holes in everything."...
TooMuchMilkman: Guh. Accursed heat. DerHase18T: nobody listents to me until i fart...
Well, it's here. Actually, the knob showed up last week. So far, it's been damned useful. More so than I thought. It turns out that the included software comes with about a hojillion ton of settings. Literally. I'm going to let the gadget fad factor wear off before saying anything...
I've always wanted to make a font out of my own handwriting. For a long, long time. Probably since I was 3. Maybe not. And two weeks ago, I did. I did it using the MyFontTool by Philip Lanier. Fantastic tool. According to the PCMag link above, he lives in...
On NPR this morning, I heard that LANL (Los Alamos Natural Libations Brewing Company) is replacing the replica Fat Man/Little Boy bomb casings in the Bradbury Science Museum with versions that are, oddly, less accurate. NPR alluded that the reason was security-related. In a related story, the Pentagon has reclassified...
Holy shit. I finally cleaned out well over 99% of my inbox. I only have seven messages left. Wow. Crazy. Update: 0 messages left. Booyakasha....
I was on Comcast's website doing the billing thing for my really surprisingly quick high-speed net access, and noticed that they have a special running for something called "Digital Plantinum" cable. It will cost you $98.98 every single month. That's fucking incredible. I don't know of anyone who loves TV...
I've been cleaning out all my shit that's accumulated over the last twenty years or so, and I keep running across things that I didn't really expect to exist. Here is one such thing. Proudly sporting the world's worst haircuts since 1991....
I admit—I'm a terrible terrible packrat. I'm not sure why, but that's just sortof how it is. I've realized that I've had about enough of it, too. So right now I'm going through all my shit and figuring out what I can offload and what I can dump. Too bad...
I'm sorry. I apologize in advance...because what I'm about to say is probably the dorkiest thing that has ever been said. Dude, where's my car?...
I've wanted one of these for a long time. Since pictures are great, here's one I've ripped off of thinkgeek, who sell them. It's the blue glowy puck on the right. They sell for $45, although you probably know that if you're equipped with a mouse button, fingers, and a...
I don't understand a lot of things about genuinely common culture. Birthdays, in particular, completely elude me. Why celebrate some day that your mom's physiology decided it was time to pop you out? Why not celebrate the start of the whole event nine months before that—Broken Propyhlactic Day '79? Another...
I learned some things today:A cat can knock over a bicycle really easily. That same cat shits a lot Absolutely positively don't ever say you don't have enough work If you're a Canadian, don't import your car to the US. It's not worth the trouble If you're a Canadian, don't...
There's something about Fry's electronics. I'm not really sure why it is, but every time I go there, I end up with something completely different than what I had in mind when I walked in the doors. Cases in point:I wanted: A motherboard, CPU, memory, and a video card. I...
As you can tell, my workstation has been having some problems. Since I'm loaded now (not really), I figured this would be a damned good opportunity to pick up some new computer parts. In specific, a new motherboard, processor, and cooling system is probably in order. Half of the reason...
This morning, my cats didn't wake me up. At all. This isn't that they weren't being little bastards, because they were. The reason is that my workstation started emitting an overheating alarm at 4:45am. Now, Layla and I spent an hour or two geeking out at Fry's the other day,...
...is how you say "I'm cutting my hair" in a number of languages. We don't use ourselves the reflexive very much in English. It's at the point where my hair is borderline mullet, so it's time to get it taken care of. I've gotten a recommendation to go to a...
I just noticed that I got my journal up and running exactly one month after I landed in Seattle. I've also managed to backfill the 30-someodd posts from /tmp into /dev/null, although I haven't moved the photos or fixed the links yet. That will probably take a few days to...
Holy shit, it finally works. What a mess. For now, I'm going to enjoy all the delicious horrors of my newly reinstated internet access. And we all know what that means: fixing my egregious phone bill. Seriously, though, I think I've got everything working the way it needs to be....
The movers stuck a bunch of little stickers on all of my stuff, presumably because their offices are staffed by 13-year-old girls. This sort of thing happens. This meant everything, really. All the boxes are tagged, and more importantly, everything that didn't go in a box was tagged, too. So...
I'm still tickled by Rob's network name suggestion. And admittedly, if zerocool didn't come up, something like your_pussy may just have made the cut. Not. So there we go. It seems I've already changed all the network names over, so now all I need to do is remember to set...
As a Microsoft employee, I get discounts on Microsoft swag. This is pretty common knowledge, and it gets mentioned an awful lot during things like campus recruitment visits. Today, I bought another copy of Windows XP and Office because I'm ... switching a machine over from Linux. Right. The problem...
Dammitalltohell. I'm back at the office, and the CD I've burned has yet again got the wrong data on it. I suspect that moai (my workstation at the apartment) is picking up a different session than the one here. Every time I burn it, it gives me the correct data...
The end is in sight. I went over to the cable company today and apparantely a badged and uniformed member of their service team will be arriving at my domicile on Tuesday morning (between the hours of 8 and 12) to install my goddamned cable. Sweet. P.S. I have a...
I've heard two unexpected things said in the last two weeks:Last Monday, I heard an HR representative use "whack whack" to describe slashes in a URL, and this morning, I heard someone say "smarminess" in an NPR report on museums. Wow!...
In a lot of ways, I'm something of an anti-nerd. It took me until April of 2004 to buy my first digital camera, for example. I still don't have an MP3 player, really. And I just bought my first DVD player. Technically, that's not true; I still have the 4x...
I'm sure most of you remember the awful racket that my room used to make in Socorro. In fact, ever since my first place in Fitch hall, I've had a ton of computers on 24/7—and most of them made terrible, terrible noises. Myjohnson wasn't much better. I know we've pulled...
I noticed something today at the Fred Meyer (that's a supermarket for those of you in New Mexico) today: they have one hell of a pricing scheme for aisle-display DVDs. It goes like this:If the movie is good, it costs $14.99. If the movie is new and sucks, it costs...
I noticed today that there's something of a flaw in that my bank's account number obscuring policy is inconsistent. I'm sure you've seen this kind of thing before: when printing a receipt, they replace, for example, the last 4 characters of your account number with Xs. This would then completely...
I've had DSL, I've had wireless, I've had university ethernet, and hell, I've even had a 2400 baud dialup connection. 1200 when the 2400 modem was busy on the other end. And soon I'm about to embark on a voyage of unparalleled magnitude: cable internet access. I suppose it's unparalleled...
I was thinking earlier, "would it be possible to cut a key just by knowing its profile and having a picture of the side of it?" And do camera phones make this any easier? I suppose something similar could be done by making a rubbing or something similar. I have...
Do you see that? It's a raisin. And it's on My Johnson....
Today I heard a cellphone conversation started like this: Hey you, it's me. At that point, I imagined the person at the other end saying, "lies!" and then I giggled to myself....
I buy a lot of cat litter these days. I buy 25-lb. bags of Purina non-clumping litter for something like $6 a bag. Note that I say, "bag." Purina also sells 20-lb. plastic buckets of the same litter for $11. $5 for a tub? I don't get it. That's one...
It's sortof odd writing all this knowning that nobody is going to be reading for at least a few days. I know I'm crossposting to /tmp when I get the chance, but it's not really all that often. Being able to see all my posts as God himself intended (on...
I try not to write about politics, but when I do, I try to keep it concise. Hopefully this will be quick and painless, and then we can all go back to reading about cat flatulence and the like. Consider, for a moment, an unfamiliar political group. For some of...
I haven't been keeping up with my email recently, primarily because it's a giant pain in the ass to do so. As it sits right now, I have to bug Layla (and drive into Redmond) to check on the essentials and get whatever information I need for the next few...
Only without the XXX. Oops. I found out two things today:My new Nokia (and possibly my old one—I haven't checked) has French predictive text. Awesome. I just sent a message in French to Will. Everything else I sent to Will over the last few days ... probably didn't get to...
After something like three years, I finally got a new phone. The old one has been having some serious issues for a long, long time. In specific, the "select" button and the "up" button (easily the two most operated buttons on the Nokia 3390) were busted. Additionally, my battery was...
I like C-SPAN. A lot. Every once in a while something superboring will be on (e.g., legislation that names post offices after politicians) but most of the time it's really interesting and relevant stuff. Today, for example, I found out that the Yucca Mountain fuel dump is going to cost...
It's been a nutty-go-round week. This is primarily why there haven't been the usual slough of updates here. Most of my time has been claimed by The List. I've been building The List since January and it's got everything I need to take care of before I leave Socorro and...
The sound card that Jason gave me (thanks again!) seems to be working. Woo! First, I've gotten through several DVDs so far, without any crashing whatsoever. You may remember that this simply wasn't possible in the past. There are two other things I've noticed, as well:The software control panel has...
Here are some shots I took today. This is why I like having an easily portable camera. Behold, the naked roof! It was cooler with all the jacked-up shingles on it. Ohwell. Next, I spotted this character rolling through the Smith's parking lot. By the time I rolled around to...
Because my incessant bitching fixated on the poor stability of my sound card last week, Jason stepped up to the plate and offered one of his old sound cards for my machine. Awesome, thanks again! I'm pleased to report that it does, in fact, make sound. Unfortunately, fully testing it...
In a month, I'll be throwing money at geek toys. I need your help. I BESEECH YOU, COMMENT VERILY ON YE OLDE AMUSEMENTS FORTHWITH! In specific, I'll be in the market for:Laptop Digital SLR camera Cell phone Car1, and likely, a new stereo head unit 1 I already have The...
I need a new soundcard, stat. I've currently got a Diamond MX300 card based on the Aureal AU8830 chipset. It causes my machine to lose audio output and get really slow every once in a while, which is infuriating when I'm actually trying to get something done. Additionally, it pops...
Because I'm sick of cranking on code at the moment, here's a screenshot of my desktop. The left half is shown on my second monitor, which is why it's slightly smaller than the right half. All the black and green stuff on the right is a bunch of terminals I'm...
I just ran across this in the manpage for rand(): FreeBSD adds a function void sranddev(void); that initializes the seed for their bad random generator rand() with a value obtained from their good random generator random(). Strange. What's doubly odd here is that the words "good random generator random()" are...
Slickdeals is one of the many sites in my Firefox bookmark folder titled, The Daily Shnizzle. I used to visit SlickDeals a lot, because they used to have fantastic listings. In fact, I bought my Optio mostly because it was listed on Slickdeals for supercheap. Since around November of last...
I haven't watched any substantial networked TV in years—in my house on Terry Ln. we'd occasionally watch The Simpsons, but really the last time I watched anything significant was probably mid-2002. The end of my TV-watching career (as it really sucked enough hours to be considered so) coincided with the...
I got an email the other day from "milkman." In the past, things in my inbox from "milkman" have invariably been test messages sent to me from me. This time, however, it was from milkman@nlamerica.com. And, attached was a virus. Thanks, me! Poking through the strings output of the zipped...
The Toyota MR2 page at the Wikipedia has been lacking known-free images for a long time. The old images were fantastic but the uploader didn't put source information on them. Since the Wikipedia purports to be "free," they needed to be replaced. I asked Peter about this a week or...
I ran across this image in my big pile of unsorted photos. It didn't seem right, so I fixed it. Hopefully the gentleman in charge will be happier, because his day doesn't seem to be going as poorly anymore. Click for the original....
This is my 200th post. Mini-party in honor of the numbers 2, 0, and the number 0. I have a problem with pants. "Why," you must be saying to yoursel(f|ves), "that explains the misdemeanor charges." And to that I say that Senator Hutchinson (R-TX) needs to learn a thing or...
I bought some Half & Half the other day. For coffee. The thing that I noticed was that the little cap thing got in the way of the ink delivery system, and part of the expiration date got printed on it. I can only think of three ways this would...
I ran across this today at lifehacker: Typing in a site's 2LD (like, "amazon" for "www.amazon.com") and pressing Ctrl-enter will automatically wrap the name with www. and .com and launch the page for you. Hot. Way hot. This is saving me a lot of keystrokes in the future....
w00t. First message on my ja.wikipedia talk page is: a boilerplate welcome announcement. Quick translation: Hello. Welcome to Wikipedia. Ahem. In any event, it turns out that the user who posted that speaks (at least) German, English, and Japanese. Bitchin'....
I've always wanted to know how to use the Japanese language on a computer. I spent six semesters learning how to read, write, and speak Japanese, but the alphabetic differences induce two very severe problems:It's difficult to read anything with a lot of complex Kanji1 because there's no easy way...
There are two important things of note here:I need to buy a scanner. Until then, you get photos of things I should be scanning, laid out across my floor. When I looked at the index for the Jennifer Love Hewitt section, I found out it was on page 144....
I just cooked a pizza because:I'm hungry, and I'm too lazy to cook something real. But, mostly because I'm hungry (see reason 1, above). One thing that I noticed was that the megacheap pizza I bought earlier has a surprisingly low pepperoni density, despite the fact that it is, in...
Tuning a guitar is a tricky thing. It's just occured to me that there a ton of small tricks that I regularly use that I don't think I've ever seen written down. Most everyone simply shows the typical pattern, and moves on. So to start, here's the typical pattern: e||--|--|--|--|--|...
A few years ago, I ran across a controller board for an old (~100MB) hard drive which had a picture of a Pontiac GTO printed on the PCB. Fantastic! The picture was taken with a 640x480 (as I didn't have a digital camera proper until April of 2004), but I'm...
I made an earlier reference to Kyrgyzstan in an article about corporate socialism. Unexpectedly (to you, at least), this wasn't just something I pulled out of my ass: I listened to an interview about Kyr—fuck it, I'm just going to call it K* from now on—anyway, I listened to the...
I'm torn on the Wikipedia Watchlist. I've been thinking about it recently because the Wikimedia servers came back up a few days ago, but had Watchlists disabled for a few days until the databases were fully operational. This left things mostly usable for casual users, but left heavy contributors like...
Even with my lovingly crafted explanation (Washington DC/Cincinattus), there was still significant confusion over what the hell a Smith chart actually is. Part of the problem is that two of the axes are the same in certain directions and one isn't even printed on the chart anywhere. So, here we...
I really really like mechanical and graphical computers. I've been doing signal reflection problems all morning and figured I'd share one of the most clever and elegant computation systems I've seen so far: the Smith Chart. This is actually a four-dimensional chart. In order to make this easier to understand,...
As I'm sure many of you know, I organize nearly everything I come across. The car video archive and photo gallery, for example, are perfect examples of this. My paper filing system is no different. I've got a 2.5'-deep two-drawer filing cabinet that is packed solid with paperwork. I've been...
I have two monitors on my desk. There's a problem with one of them. The center monitor is fine—it's a Hitachi CM751 running 1600x1200@75Hz off of the analog connector on my Radeon 9100. The problem monitor is sitting to my left—it's a Dell 1025TM running at 1280x1024@60Hz on the DVI...
Some of you may be familiar with the ChildCare Action Project (CAP). Amongst some of the best website design this side of Mahir's I Kiss You and Hello My Future Girlfriend, CAPAlert provides hyperconservative movie reviews to the type of people who have fierce internal debates over how best to...
The more I learn about the Atmel board, the cooler it becomes. I'm most impressed by Atmel. From their website, I've snagged the development environment, bootloader hex code, preinstalled OS hex code, and the entire source for the OS. I haven't installed the devel environment yet, but so far I...
Today hath rained a bountiful plenificence of boo-tay upon my coffers, opened wide by the possibility of wicked bling. First on the agenda was an order from Amazon, including some really fantastic music. In specific: Schubert Complete Trios, including one of the best movements ever. I really like Schubert—he's one...
Last year, I volunteered to write problems for an ACM programming contest. The results were hilarious. I wrote three problems, two of which were uniquely of my own devising--the third was written with suggestions by Dr. Mazumdar in the CS department. The two that were mine still crack me up....
CompUSA is staffed by a bunch of hotties. Really. I went up to Albuquerque to pick up a new hard drive, and was astonished to find that the managers at the I-40 & San Mateo location has filled their registers with a bunch of megababes, ostensibly to intimidate the inbound...
AIM (and all of AOL, I suppose) is run by a bunch of jackasses. Details follow....
The last few posts have highlighted a few points about Movable Type. I want to start by saying that it's exceedingly well executed and has everything put in precisely the right spot, but there are a few very serious flaws in the structure that make the system behave unexpectedly....
I'm a member of the Wikipedia. It's been reported that Google wants to host "some" of the projects within the WikiMedia ... thing. So I've done a quick and rigorously unscientific analysis of the impact the Wikis would have on Google's bandwidth....
