Posted on 04.24.07 by Alexandria @ 10:16 pm
 Vh1 seems to be taking over the world. First we have Flavor of love then Flavor of love 2 then a spin off I love New York and yet another spin off has been released Charm school. Our form of entertainment has been lowered to watching other peoples sad lives. The sad thing is it’s not just VH1 it’s all reality TV shows. Everyone asks "Why are our kids so fat?" maybe it’s because you go out to McDonalds every night for dinner and then come home and watch OTHER people playing cards! Reality television is going to become the new history channel for this generation. Sure I like to watch Charm School when I’m really bored and we can’t go anywhere (thanks to the law that says I can’t drive) but that’s not what I see as good quality programing. I think people should turn off the TV for awhile and get some exercise stop watching the shows about other people exercising and do it yourself.
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Posted on 03.09.07 by John @ 6:07 am
Normally 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
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Posted on 03.03.07 by John @ 5:34 pm
Looks like a fine idea to me, I’d love to be able to sweep a scanner over a stack of papers and find out if a lost report is in it. Oh yeah, don’t let the title of the post fool you. That ‘xxx of the Beast‘ crap is for silly ninnies that don’t want the trains to run on time and like constant turmoil caused by the stupid notion of what happens to you after you die. I just figure that by using it in a title it’s a good way to get noticed. Note to all my friends that believe in that sort of thing, sorry to exploit your beliefs but why shouldn’t I when it’s so darn easy? Anyway, the RFID enabled staples are something that I’d buy now if I could. I’d staple everything. Papers, boxes, books, you name it! I’d never lose anything ever again. Ah, bliss! However, if I did have a cool high tech trackable stapler I’d more than likely invest on one of these fine DataSafe Security Wallets. It’s best to play it safe now and again, don’t you think? In the mean time I think I might have a closer look at this nifty RFID Experimentation kit I saw over on MAKE. Think about it, how cool would it be to run a scanner over a sealed box of books and then be able to tell exactly whats in side of it? Anyone with a closet full of stuff will appreciate this I’m sure.
[via SCI FI Tech | SCIFI.COM] Popluar Science (click on the slideshow)
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Filed under: Cool and DIY and Mad Science and Rants and Science and Technology and To be used for Evil
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Posted on 01.16.07 by John @ 9:46 am
In an effort to undoubtedly promote social harmony amongst people who park their cars, my friend Kevin (aka Dusty Weasle) has come up with a simple to deploy universal sign that you can place on peoples cars when they don’t quite hit the parking slot. Feel free to print out a bunch and keep them in your glove box for when you see someone that obviously needs a little help.
Learn to park
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Posted on 01.14.07 by John @ 10:18 pm
I’m going to show my age on this one, I can tell. I remember first reading about the BOFH (Bastard Operator From Hell) back in the early mid 90’s while browsing through the posts on the good old Usenet. At first I didn’t quite know what to think, was this just some sys admin that was venting his spleen in creative way? Turn out, I was right:
The Bastard Operator From Hell (BOFH), a fictional character created by Simon Travaglia, is a rogue system administrator who takes out his anger on lusers (his colleagues, bosses and anyone who gets in his way).
The BOFH stories were originally posted in 1992 to Usenet by Travaglia, with some being reprinted in Datamation. They were published weekly from 1995 to 1999 in Network Week and from 2000 they have been published most weeks in The Register. They were also published in PC Plus magazine for a short time, and several books of the stories have also been released.
As someone in a similar position I have been reading them ever since. The Register has the current archive but you can find older ones at Simons personal page. And while your at it, make sure you check out the DIY excuse board. I’m sure it will be very handy the next time someone calls and asks why the file they had been working on all morning (and didn’t save) is gone after the power glitch and can’t be recovered from the previous nights tape backup.
Archive of BOFH Current BOFH on the Register Bastard Operator From Hell - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Posted on 01.14.07 by John @ 9:46 pm
Humm, all you have to do is upload a clip of yourself saying that you don’t believe in god and you get swag. Not a bad proposition, eh? It’s like saying that you have a firm disbelief in unicorns, lepercons, and free lunches. Pretty safe. I encourage everyone to go and have a look at the challenge site (god fearing hackers need not) and come to the only conclusion that a rational mind can.
[via neatorama] The Blasphemy Challenge
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Posted on 10.27.06 by John @ 7:10 pm

Ok, so I’m asking myself how is this news? I mean, what do you expect from a company like Microsoft? If you don’t pay for the gold you only get brass. It’s like if you buy the standard version of Office, you get Word, Excel, Outlook and Power Point. That’s at a suggested retail price of $399. Now what you don’t get is Access, that’s their database application. If you want that you have to buy the pro version and that’s another $100. Life would be so much better if they included Access with their office suite, people do the worst things in Excel just because they don’t have a good (read any) database app. Man! Well, ok this post was about Vista so I had better say a little bit about it. I have a copy (legal, Bill sent it to me himself) of RC1 at work and it runs OK. I don’t have a *&%$ expensive graphics card to power the system so the Pentium 4 3GHz with 1 GB or RAM is only benching at a 2.2. Geeze! That’s some heavy software! The ‘Aero’ components remind me of the transparent Linux windows from about three years ago so nothing big there. The Widgets or Gizmos or whatever the hell they call they desktop cycle wasters are OK but dated. Other than that it’s much like working on my Mac but has more a Windows feeling. That means the OS treats me like child and offers advice and won’t let me see all the goodies until i much with the settings. I’m sticking with XP, I can’t afford paying $200+ for a un-crippled version of Vista.
"The new [Vista] experience you hear of, if you get Basic, you won’t feel it at all. There’s no [Aero] graphics, no Media Center, no remote control."
Vista Home Basic is a lemon
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Posted on 09.12.06 by John @ 9:02 pm
Not all that long ago, like a month, I bought my wife an iPod Nano 2 GB. Both of us have PCs as our primary computers. I have a Mac but its a heavily upgraded blue and white G3 (now a G4 500 MHz thank you!) so I never expected to use the Nano on it. The Nano was un boxed (nice packaging) and instructions were read. It was charged over night and the next day she used it. The first day she only got three hours of life before it was saying ‘feed me!’. I figured that it needed to be run all the way down and the charged to set the battery life chip in it but the next time she used it it had the same life span. Weird. Ok, we took it back and exchanged it for a different one. We did the same thing with the same results. Three hours of use and then flat. Not finding any info on the web about this i decided to give it a shot on the old Mac. I hooked it up and it did it’s thing. I’ll say this, if you have a Mac the Nano integrates much better with it than the a PC. Not all that amazing but I figure I’d mention it because after I did that I was able to run it for 10 hours before it did an auto shut off. The music was played at 70% volume through the stock headphones with the same music as my wife had originally loaded on it. Did being attached to a Mac somehow jolt the energy management settings into life? Just weird luck? Has anyone else had this problem? Could this be a good reason to return it once again and just wait for the new Nanos to hit the market?
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Posted on 09.08.06 by John @ 10:15 pm
My wife, who works for an airline, will occasionally go to cities on her day off. It’s a nice perk for working in the airline business. Well today she went to San Francisco with some friends and had a rather annoying run in with the guardians of the airways, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). You have to understand that my wife collects snow globes. She loves the things. In recent months she’s been buying one from each city that she visits. As each visit is just one day she just carries her purse. It’s best to travel light you know. Today when she was going back home the TSA stops her and tells her that her snow globe is not to be allowed on the plane. The liquid inside of it might be some deadly weapon that just happens to have little bits of glitter floating around in it. She shows them her employee badge and tried common sense on them. She’s dealt with officials before and she should have known that this was an exercise in futility. She asked why couldn’t she bring the show globe on board? If someone was going to mess with the aircraft wouldn’t they stash whatever it was in the luggage and just use a transmitter? I’ll give her this, she has guts. That’s why I love her. I wouldn’t have even begin to think of stating the obvious to someone that could chuck me in a secure room for hours and hours. The guard said that she could bring it on board if she was wearing her uniform or, get this, if she were to ask an employee to carry it through for her. Huh? If she gets a uniformed employee to walk the snow globe through security it goes from being a device that might kill hundreds back to it’s natural state of a fancy dust catcher? Needless to say she didn’t have her uniform on her (it was, after all, her day off) and she didn’t see any airline employees that she knew. Gee, I wonder why? Maybe it’s because San Fran isn’t her home base? Wow… I will have to side with the TSA drones decision to not allow the snow globe on the aircraft. It does after all contain liquid. And as we all know all non-life essential liquids are strictly forbidden. (Remember to chuck the bottle of water you just bought from the cafe right next to your gate in the trash before you get on the plane. You’ed think there would be a sign in the shops reminding passengers of this.) But why can this written in stone rule be broken if you just hand the liquid to a uniformed employee? She had all her badges with her, they have her photos all over them. She has all sorts of security endorsements on them and everything, it’s quite impressive. Anyway, she lost her snow globe and has decided to bring her lunch box with her next time so she can check it in and have it ride in the hold. I can’t wait until the next plot is uncovered so we can lose granola bars, pens, and pocket combs
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Posted on 06.21.06 by John @ 6:26 am
In light of my recent post about the SciFi channel (a channel supposedly devoted to science fiction programming) deciding on showing "an alternative brand of wrestling suited to fit the SCI FI Channel’s commitment to fuel the imagination", a friend of mine reminded me that you can send feedback to SciFi and tell them what you think about their programming. The page is http://www.scifi.com/feedback/ and the email address you want is feedback@scifi.com. Send them an email telling them that wrestling isn’t related to science fiction (unless its Godzilla doing the Tokyo stomp with a fellow monster) and you don’t want to see in their line up. Tell them you want science fiction programming, not stuff about ghost hunting or C rated movies about killer moths or black holes. Be polite and make sure you mention ECW so they don’t get confused, after all this might be read by a programming executive.
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Posted on 06.07.06 by John @ 6:48 pm
I’ve been making quite a few changes to the ‘ol site lately. If your a new reader you might not notice, if not let me know what you think. Mmm-kay? I had to re-do the RSS feeds that are going through Feedburner because my .htaccess file had become snorked up. I fixed it so if your feeds haven’t been coming through you will know why. Every thing is normal here now. OK, should be normal. If not let me know.
I ended up opting for a plugin solution to my RSS redirection as hand editing the .htaccess file is becoming a right pain in the arse. I went with the plugin offered by Steve Smith. A very cool and slick interface for setting all of it up. Just on note, if you choose to use the plugin yourself, you might have to do edit a couple of things. If your Wordpress isn’t in the root you will have to change the feed that you give Feedburner. Remove the ‘/wordpres/’ bit. You will know it when you see it. Also, in the .php file for the plugin you should change ‘get_settings(’home’)’ to ‘get_settings(’siteurl’)’. You do that (and provided your .htaccess file is set to 666) and your in like Flint.
WordPress FeedBurner Plugin // Ordered List by Steve Smith
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Posted on 05.30.06 by John @ 8:11 am

In my recent issue of Wired, I was saddened to read an article on how the amateur exploration of science and chemistry is being criminalized. It’s all in the interests of anti-terrorism or anti fireworks laws. Mostly the ‘dumbing down’ of science has been because of the lawsuit happy nature of our society. (Gee, could the greedy lawyers and the lawyer law makers be the root cause of this? I wonder…) When the United States no longer has people winning Nobel prizes, or creating new technology, or science classes in schools become electives, all will be lost. All of the people who cry "but letting kids play with chemistry sets is dangerous and irresponsible! Think of the children!" Bah! If you give a bright kid the right tools to learn with they won’t kill themselves. Some of the less bright ones might get some injuries from adding water to an acid or something like that, but it’s a lesson learned. If enough do that then you will weed out the idiots. Harsh I know but that’s life. You never get anywhere by hiding at home and living life through what you see on TV. Having hands on experience is what makes you learn how and why things work. Look at how popular magazines like MAKE or Ready Made are. That’s because over the recent years the whole ‘hands on lets see what’s inside the black box’ creativity that made this country what is it has been bashed about it’s head and neck by litigation. Heck, even buying parts of a healthily chemistry set can get you fined or even jailed. What is this world coming to?
Anyway, here are a few links that can help open the doors to scientific exploration:
Household Chemistry from the International Order of Nitrogen
DIY - Hollow Out A Light Bulb
DIY - Alcohol Backpacking Stove
Scientific American’s "The Amateur Scientist"
Henley’s Formulas for Home & Workshop
Don’t break any laws with this knowledge and try not to hurt yourself. Remember that part of science is having ethics and a broader look of the world around you. Think of the impact your experiments will have on others. Be smart and responsible. And if you hurt yourself it’s your own fault.
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Filed under: Dumb and Mad Science and News and Rants and Science and To be used for Evil
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