Author: John

US Postal Service Removes Clocks to Speed Up Time, WTF?

USPSNormally I’d make a long winded rant about the piss poor service I have been getting at my local post offices lately but I see little point in it. Lets just say that if the overlords at the USPS would wake up they would realize that customer service and proficiency of your tasks should be ‘job one’. Whey you employ chatter boxes and inept fools at the front lines (counter help) your making a big mistake. I don’t know what genius decided that taking the clocks out of the waiting room was a good idea but I bet i was the same ass that did away with the ‘take a number’ concept. Perhaps this is a ploy to get everyone to use FedEx and UPS so the postal employees can whine and cry about being put out of a job by those guys. Somehow the ‘forever stamp‘ works into that scenario I’m sure. Jerks. I blame the unions…

[via Consumerist]
Postal Service fixes long waits by removing clocks

No Where To Go in London

London Bathroom by smoothdudeWell this sucks. If your going to visit London make sure you go to the bathroom before you get on the plane. Apparently there is a general lack of public bathrooms these days. Seems that the local authorities have been selling off the property to make an easy buck (or pound as the case may be) because of the skyrocketing costs of real estate over there (up 53 percent in just five years) and many public toilets have been given the axe. In other cases, multi stalled public facilities that had been on private property are now being renovated and turned into living spaces. Simply amazing… The answer to all this has been a rise of private luxury toilets  where, for 5 pounds ($10US) you can  receive a hand massage (no, not that kind!) and other pampering, or if your in a hurry just 1 pound and you can answer the call of nature without having to find a convenient alleyway or parked car.

Londoners Squirm as Public Toilets Grow Scarce; New Loo Is $10
(photo by smoothdude)

Gundam Invades Taiwan Lantern Festival

This is pretty amazing, I one day hope to see full sized mecha rolling down the street at the Rose Bowl parade or at east floating in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

As part of a celebration for the Lantern Festival, a Chinese festival celebrated on the fifteenth day of the first month in the lunar year, the Taiwanese district of Jiayi put up a 1:1 scale model of the original Gundam in lantern form. Traditionally, an animal lantern is used as the central display, but this year a competition was run and as you can see, the RX-78 Gundam lantern won out. Not that the citizens had any choice in the matter: paper sheets have never looked so formidable.

From Lonelocust I saw this link to a Chinese page where you can get construction pictures. Just click on the links and the photos will open.

[via lonelocust]
Gundam Lantern, 1:1 scale, lights up Taiwan lantern festival – Engadget

Homebrew Nintendo DS Cart Released For Mass Market

Very nice, makes me want a Nintendo DS all the more. I wonder if the games are any good. It would be quite the thing to have a photo viewer on one. Keep a card with holiday snaps with you and pop it in when you want to show them off.

Home brew games and music on the move with your DS! With Games ‘n’ Music, you can put your Nintendo DS or DS Lite at the centre of your digital lifestyle. You can use it to launch home brew games written for the DS and readily available on the internet, listen to your happening sounds with the device’s integrated MP3 player or even watch videos. And you don’t need to modify your console to use it… Games ‘n’ Music comes with a 128MB Micro SD card for you to store your games and data, and if that’s not enough, just slip in a new card and expand its capacity to up to 2GB. It’s really easy to use too. Just fit the Micro SD card into the USB adapter (supplied), plug it into your computer and drag and drop your files onto the card. It’s that easy!

[via digg]
New Mass Market Homebrew Device for Nintendo DS