Tomas asks: “Is it just me or is contemporary technology just never good enough?” I think he’s quite right. There never seems to be one product that has all the features you’re looking for, something essential is always lacking. I’m not sure why though.
Do they simply ‘forget’ to put it in, or do they assume that time and cost factors to incorporate the feature are simply to ‘pricy’ (i.e. others might beat them to the market, $10 extra on the cost of the good will put it out of reach for most consumers)? Don’t they understand that a truely ‘killer’ product’s intrinsic value and functionality will make it no.1? Guess not.
Those more paranoid individuals amongst our consumer ranks believe that the preverbial ‘kitchen sink’ is left out in order to be able to keep us coming back for the next product release. Quite possibly.
In the end of course, it’s just that ‘not good enough’ aspect that drives us to explore the new solutions, and develop the newer, better, still-not-good-enough technologies.
The February issue of TopGear magazine just hit the shelves here in Romania, while those fortunate buggers in the UK already have their mits on the April issue. No matter, I always look forward to a good car book such as this.
Inside, there’s a table listing gestures and phrases which, if directed at motorists or police in Germany, could end up costing you a pretty penny.
- [sticking your tongue out] - €150
- “stupid cow” - €600
- “asshole” - €750
- [waving your hand in front of your face] - up to €1,000
- “gnome” - €1,000
- “idiot in a uniform” - €1,500
- “son of a bitch” - €2,500
- “nasty piece of shit” - €2,500
- Der Stinkefinger [raised middle finger] - up to €4,000
That system would earn the government a fortune here in Romania, virtually every driver would get ticketed for each of those fines, all together, five times over, on every occasion (latin tempers). If you’re travelling to Germany anytime soon, watch yourself.
Be sure to check out Totally Off The Record for a few good laughs. I’m warning you though, don’t try this at work - some of the good ones might have you rolling around on the floor of your cubicle.
The hours I spend in front of the PC monitor are really ruining my eyesight, but I really had to do a double take when I glanced down at my watch this afternoon and it said it was the 29th! Later, when I got round to correcting the date, it also said it was April. These cheap-ass $200 watches… can’t trust ‘em.
How do you let someone down easy when their hard drive calls it quits? It’s a neglected, dust-caked, 4-year-old POS, you should have expected this and backed up. It’s almost harder for me to tell them, than it will be for them to hear that their family’s vacation snapshots, CVs, projects, notes, and schoolwork are g-o-n-e. It may be worthless to you and me, but even a hobo will mourn the loss of his trolly of junk - it’s all they have.
Eric Meyer points out that the Pioneer 10 spacecraft has gone silent. Presumably its radioisotope power source has decayed to the point where it is no longer powerful enough to transmit to earth.
Pioneer 10 explored Jupiter, traveled twice as far as the most distant planet in our solar system, and as Earth’s first emissary into space, is carrying a gold plaque that describes what we look like, where we are, and the date when the mission began. Pioneer 10 will continue to coast silently as a ghost ship into interstellar space, heading generally for the red star Aldebaran, which forms the eye of the constellation Taurus (The Bull). Aldebaran is about 68 light-years away. It will take Pioneer 10 more than two million years to reach it.
Farewell brave fellow! Wouldn’t it be cool if we were one day able to bring you back home?
The 2003 photoblog awards winners have been announced. I’m glad to see Quarlo among the other deserving Photobloggie winners. Kudos to these people for sharing their talented work with the rest of us.
I can’t say I’m impressed with the Grammy Awards this year, but I’m not someone who ascribes any value to the all this Oscar-type shit anyway. Norah Jones is an interesting newcomer, but certainly not album of the year in my book.
At the Bafta Awards they celebrate, and give prizes to convicted child rapists who flee the law: Roman Polanski. Sickening!
I’m sure after having just paid all those hospital bills, every young couple with a newborn is in the market for a $6,000 baby stroller with an mp3 player, bicycle wheels, and green flames down the side. I wonder if ‘Duke’ still fit into the stroller after the seven months it took his father to develop the thing? Baby stroller? Segway? Baby stroller? Segway? Neither.
“What’s that Alpha-Foxtrot? Bad weather blown you off course on your approach run? No problem, take her up to 4,000 feet, hang a left… KA-BOOM!! Oh! Did I say left? I meant right…”
Control tower instructions for a ‘missed approach turn’ at the Kruger Mpumalanga Airport will have planes playing ‘chicken’ with a nearby mountain peak.
”…turn left after the runway and ascend to 4 000 feet, which sends the aircraft straight in the direction - to use American flying lingo - of around 4 700 feet (at the highest point) of “cumulo-granite”, a mountain.”
“The CAA has attempted to correct the problem, issuing new instruction sheets containing the correct ground station designation of PK and instructing pilots to maintain a safer height of 4 500 feet. This is still 200 feet lower than the mountain’s apex.”
I sure hope they haven’t loused up the instructions and Johannesburg International Airport - I’m supposed to be landing there in March.
Something to chew on for those of you who didn’t take to kindly to Mel Gibson’s latest movie, Signs. Well, that’s most of really. Troy’s Bucket takes a swipe.
Dean Allen has released the first Textpattern beta. I’m glad it’s finally available, and I’d love to give you a rundown on it, but I haven’t tried it out yet. Like David, I too will be switching hosts in a couple of weeks, and I’d prefer to wait until then to fiddle with all the sort of details that switching content managing, or publishing, systems provokes.
Thanks to the February 17th issue of Forbes Global, I’ll be sure to look up Ecstasky Air for my next charter flight to… to… anywhere really.
“… passengers choose their flight attendants from 135 fetching gals in teddies, merry widows and skimpy bikini underwear. Less means more, at least when it comes to in-flight services. These flight attendants offer foot rubs, shoulder massages, pedicures—and a discreet bill…”
“The private company, which owns 30 Lear and Gulfstream jets, apparently does a booming business with flying bachelor parties (Las Vegas and Cancún are popular destinations) and ferrying fat cats to macho events, like the recent Super Bowl.”
Be warned though, a ride on one of these charters will set you back $40,000!! Mike, I hope you’re paying attention!
Two sites that might put a chortle in your step today. Reid has dug up this fascimile of Saddam’s custom IE error message. Iraqi Explorer?! A cookie for whoever came up with that one. Haha!
Rod Shelly has a photo album of the stupid things he’s seen customers do with their computers. Apparently 8cm CDs don’t fit in the floppy drive, and duck tape really can be used anywhere.
Holy Smokes! I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: they really do have everything in Japan! Jeremey has found a ‘Lego vending machine’ on the streets of Tokyo. I’m quite sure that my parents are breathing a sigh of relief that these weren’t around when I was a growing up.
The world’s first animal to be cloned from an adult cell, Dolly the sheep, was euthanased following a diagnosis of progressive lung disease - just six and a half years after her birth.
“Sheep can live to 11 or 12 years of age and lung infections are common in older sheep, particularly those housed inside.”
I have no doubt that this will crop up on a number of blogs in the coming days, and that speculation will abound. The anti-gene-anything types will be saying “told you so” - crying on about premature aging of course. Not that it isn’t highly likely that some sort of genetic flaw(s), rather than natural forces, wasn’t at play here - esp. given that earlier this year she had been reported to be suffering from arthritis.
Although unfortunate, this is not a death-knell to this particular field of study. The accomplishment was after all a ‘first’, and apart from securing handsome grants for future research, scientists’ study of Dolly surely contributed greatly to our knowledge and understanding in the field. I wonder if the sheep from whom Dolly was cloned is still alive?
A Sixth-grader in Florida is facing felony charges, and possible expulsion, after ‘hacking’ into a computer to change his grade.
“While other students ate turkey tetrazzini in the cafeteria, a St. Lucie West Middle sixth-grader used the excuse of forgetting his lunch to return to his reading classroom and sat down at his teacher’s computer to change five reading assignment grades…”
“The student was booked into the St. Lucie County jail, then released to his father. Mancini said he could face several years in a juvenile detention facility, if convicted.”
Ok, so he wasn’t really ‘hacking’, the teacher just left the electronic gradebook open, still make for a good headline though. ‘Several years’ in juvenile detention? You gotta be shitting me! In my day - which wasn’t all that long ago - we would have just been sent to the headmaster’s office for a good caning - good thing we were never busted eh?!
I really do think this is a little over the top for an 11-year-old though. He didn’t ‘hack’ the mainframe, and he didn’t break into a bank. He saw his gradebook, and changed the grade. Now all of the sudden he’s going to jail, and facing legal charges?! This kind of thing just gets blown -way- out of proportion these days.
Want to pat a whale? Be ready to pay $65,000! A woman in in British Columbia, Canada may be fined more than that for patting and feeding a lone Orca (Killer Whale), that seems to be calling the Gold River harbour his new home. Police and scientists have warned against interacting with the animal, fearing that it may become too accustomed to people, and not leave the harbor - posing a risk of accident/injury in the event of a collision between the whale and a boat. $65,000 CDN that’s like what, $10 USD? *ducks*
You know it’s 2003 when:
- leaving the house without your cell phone (which you didn’t have the first 20 or 30 years of your life) is now a cause for panic, and you turn around to go get it
- you consider second-day delivery painfully slow
- you disconnect from the internet and get this awful feeling, as if you just pulled the plug on a loved one
- you wake up at 4am to go to the bathroom, and check your e-mail on the way back to bed
- you just tried to enter your password on the microwave
- you go online before getting your coffee in the morning
Internet before coffee? Moi?
A shaken friend called at around 2am yesterday morning. She was spending the night at another friend’s place, after a rather significant portion of her apartment’s kitchen floor had fallen through to the apartment below! “Hope you didn’t lose the fridge”, is about all I could offer.
The most likely explanation for the incident? Something to do with the tenants in the apartment below hers I’ll bet. Having decided they’d like taller ceilings, for the last week-and-a-half they’ve been jack-hammering away at lowering the floor. Maybe removing 12cm of concrete around the supporting walls compromised the structural integrity of the wall, or perhaps the vibrations had shaken something loose. At any rate, she’s given notice and will be moving her stuff out this afternoon.
If this is anything to go by, I shudder to think of how disastrous the next powerful earthquake will be for Bucharest. Romania suffers at least one major earthquake every hundred years, and many significant ones in between (four ranging between 6.4 and 6.9 in the 1990s). In 1977, more than 1,500 people died and 11,000 were injured in an earthquake measuring 7.4 on the richter scale. The city’s significant population growth since then (forced urbanization during communist times, and the continued pull to the cities for those from rural areas seeking employment), and the laughable seizmic integrity of the already-crumbling Communist-era apartment blocks that almost all residents live can only spell catastrophe.
There’s some interesting photo-based work going on over at pallalink.net. In his/her more recent work, ‘Palla’ achieves fascinating effects by reflecting, rotating, and piecing together shots. Three of my favorites: 1, 2, 3.
On Friday, after nearly two months of haggling with our apartment complex, I finally got a free membership (just for the five months I’ll still be here) at the complex gym - over the last few months they’ve been offering a year’s free membership to new tenants, and we decided that after living here for nearly seven years (longer than anyone else) it’s about time we were entitled to a free membership too.
Somehow, I managed to haul my still half-sleeping ass over to Le Club - as the Frenchies like to call it - in the wee hours of this morning. I’ve been lazing away doing nothing over the last few months, and if I’m to stand any chance of doing a bit competitive rowing in Canada in the summer, I need to start making up for lost time.
Overdoing it on the first day back is always a risk, and that’s just what happened this morning. A 15-minute warm-up on the stationary bike, a few sets of benchpress and a few other things (limited selection of equipment), another 45-minutes on the bike… HURL! Thank goodness the bike is right next to the door that leads onto the balcony, and thank God that the door was unlocked. We’ll try again tomorrow.
I’m fully aware that Chris might not be speaking to me for a while after this, but I’ll go ahead and admit that I finally succumbed to watching Road to Perdition, and Signs. What can I tell you Chris? I was desperate, r-e-a-l desperate. In the last 12 months, I’ve only seen four ‘new’ movies: Black Hawk Down, The Scorpion King, The Fellowship of the Ring, and The Two Towers. Lucian offered me the discs last week, and I figured what the hell.
Road to Perdition - Paul Newman, Tom Hanks, and gangsters, should be good for something right? Wrong. Newman’s role is too small, and his character never seen at any length substantial enough to give it a commanding presence, or enjoy the actor’s talent. Hanks was there, but he failed to shine. The audience couldn’t connect with him. You never sensed that he was a man consumed by the slaugher of his family, and driven to avenge it, or protect his remaining son - perhaps he was suppossed to appear unemotional, but it didn’t really feel that way. The plot was abrubpt, and there was nothing to take away from this movie. Weak.
Signs - Aliens? You’ve got to be kidding me?! At the very least, I thought this was going to be a message from the spirit world or something, but Aliens? The water link, how pathetic was that? This from a man who wants to do Jesus in Aramaic for reasons of ‘accuracy’ and ‘reality’. “Swing Away!”
This site still has some quirks that I haven’t taken the time to address like I should have during the past few months. Silly things like spacing difference between columns, and div alignment b/w the index, archive, and photo pages. I haven’t been browsing around in Mozilla as much as I was two months ago either, so a few other things are off here or there, and CSS tweaks might have allowed for a few bugs to creep in. Nothing too serious as far as I can tell though.
So what am I going to do about it? Nothing immediate. As you know, I’ll be relocating to Calgary, Canada in May, and my aim is to launch a fresh format at that time - something to mark the event so to speak. Please bear with me on any ‘sloppiness’ until then.
I’m also in the market for a new webhost, know anyone reliable?
nVidia’s newest flagship graphics chip, the GeForceFX 5800 Ultra, will not ship after all. Despite the fact that it failed to prove itself as an ATI-killer, the premier card required powerful cooling, that simply makes it just too loud to bear. The non-Ultra version of the card will still be made available though.
After seeing the [H]ard|OCP preview for it, I knew that I’d be sticking to my plans to support Canada’s ATI, by picking up the much cheaper, faster Radeon 9700 Pro to throw in my new system in a few months time.
Great! More computer health woes. Forget CTS, RSI, and damage to your eyesight, it seems that prolonged periods of time in sitting in front of the PC also put you at risk for deep vein thrombosis. So remember to get up and strech your legs often. No more 48-hour spells of Diablo II, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Unreal Tournament, or Civilization CTP 1&2 for me.
The -final- game is live at 20:00 GMT. Don’t miss it! Mental exhaustion is beginning to set in for chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, but let’s hope he can salvage the energy for a strong win.
update: Kasparov puzzled onlookers, by offering Deep Jr. a draw after what seemed to be a clearly superior opening, a mid-game position. The series finishes tied at 3-3, both sides take home $250k in prize money (GK gets an extra $300k just for showing up).
Yes I know, that just sounds so wrong, but a Danish brewer has launched a chocolate-flavored beer.
“The drink is brewed with 10 grams of Valrhona dark chocolate per bottle; a dash of liquorice; and six different kinds of malt and has an alcohol content of 6.8 per cent.”
Surprisingly, the beer has proven to be a hit amongst traditional beer drinkers.
This 10-page NYT article, published nearly two weeks ago, examined the similarities between the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, and GW Bush - dubbing Bush “Reagan’s Son”. A long read, but food for thought. The tragic loss of the Columbia chalks up another similarity between the two.
The other day, Heather offered up details for creating a glow effect. I thought nothing of it at the time, but with a little bit of free time on my hands today, I got round to giving it a whirl.
Now I’m no Photoshop newb, but I must say I’ve never really needed to create this kind of effect, so I’m quite impressed with the results, and can see myself using it in the future. It can really help spruce up any family/holiday snaps to which you might be looking add that little extra something, or an art project that needs to ‘glow’.
I’m currently whipping my hard drives into shape, and going through all my CDs, in preparation for making a comprehensive backup of everything that’s worth saving. Yesterday, I found this hiding away in a deeply nested sub-directory.
Scanned this shot from an article in BBW (a local business newspaper) about a two years ago. The caption reads:
“With the help of the Japanese Goverment and 2.2 billion USD, Bucharest public transport will get back on track.”
A group of researchers believe that hiccupping may be related to gill ventilation. This would suggest an evolutionary link between humans and fish. Interesting theory to say the least.
Thought you’d buy/put it on DVD and would have it forever, or at least until the next ‘big’ thing comes around? Think again. This article in the Sydney Morning Herald suggests that up to 10% of DVDs may already be corrupt due to corrosion, and delamination. This is where making backup copies comes into play, but wait… Hollywood doesn’t want you to do that. Hmm… I think I smell a conspiracy theory brewing.
David Collantes has a sleek new re-design, and the former David Collantes Monologues is now known as *drumroll please* … Photobits. I’ll be looking forward to his daily photolog submissions.
I like to think of myself as something of an audiophile, an enthusiast really - forever tweaking, getting my music to sound ju—-st right (if you know what I mean). So it’s somewhat embarassing to admit that my Audigy soundcard is going to waste, as I rely on a pair of really crappy speakers for my audio fulfillment here on this machine. I hate your weak-ass, distortion-packed, reverb-challenged, kill-me-now, pathetic excuse for something pretending to be quality equipment, click and scratch when adjusting the volume - not to mention ugly - pieces of shit!
How I miss my Technics receiver, and the 2x300w (RMS), 4-way (15” woofer, 3” mid-range, 2” tweeter, 1” supertweeter) floor-speakers, plus my Bose satellites - all of which I bought freshman year in College to scare the living shit out of the guy upstairs who thought his Creative multimedia set was going to keep me awake at night. They’re back in my apartment in the US right now, just waiting to be cranked up.
Investing in something better this side is totally out of the question! I’d have to spend at least $160 to get something that I could pick up for half that in the US, seriously. I’m not a cheap-ass, but I refuse to be ripped off like that for stuff that I’ll be ditching when I head to Canada in May.
In the meantime, I have my amazingly delicious Sony Fontopia 20th Anniversary Edition earphones to soothe my ears. It’s astonishing how these little babies, together with my iPAQ mp3 player (picked it up for $60 as an ‘open item’ at BestBuy with 128mb included - it’s small and gets the job done), make any track sound infintely better than one could ever imagine it to be when listening to it on the speakers. I love how all the little nuaces of a piece are revealed, a beat here, a scratch there, a chord in the background - things that you didn’t pick up from the speakers - it’s like you’re listening to it for the first time!
I’ve been rudely awoken these past two mornings. Yesterday it was maintenance drilling holes in the wall — believe you me, it takes quite a while to drill 7 holes (yes I counted them) into double reinforced (seismic) concrete — to mount a satellite dish for the apartment next door. Oh and did I mention how cute it is that it just totally obscures the view from my kitchen window? It will be relocated soon - and not at 6:30am either!
Today, it was some fool’s car alarm going off repeatedly from 5:30am onwards. If it’s anything but the sun’s rays that rouse my body from its slumber tomorrow, someone will pay!
Traffic Police in South Africa’s Western Cape Province couldn’t believe their eyes when they stopped a taxi, and 46 passengers piled out. To give you a little perspective, these taxis almost always carry upwards of 25 people, and are frequently involved in accidents as a result of unroadworthiness, unlicensed, drunk, and reckless driving. Few passengers, if any, survive a road accident.
“The driver of the vehicle was arrested for drunk driving in addition to his heavy load, and the vehicle was confiscated because it was not roadworthy.
The taxi, which carried 28 adults and 18 children, had faulty brakes and broken lights. The tyres were in a bad condition and the steering mechanism needed serious attention.”
The Toyota Hi-Ace is the most popular minibus taxi in South Africa, designed to carry 16 people, with a legal limit set at 21.
Slate Magazine’s Christopher Hitchens tackles Nelson Mandela’s Iraq remarks head on. Hitchens does a good job of digging up the history to refute Mandela’s claims of racism.
”…this latest garbage is a very timely caution against our common tendency to make supermen and stars and heroes out of fellow humans. Iraq is not Saddam any more than Zimbabwe is Mugabe, and being on the right side of history once is no guarantee that the subsequent fall will not be from a very great height.”
A Nobel Peace Prize is indeed a poor measure of infallibility, and it is all too easy to award special reverance to persons for singular achievements. Read the article, Hitchens underscores more points than would be feasible to quote here.
I was barely five-and-a-half-years-old in January 1986. Sitting on the floor, inches away from the massive television screen in my grandparents’ new living room, digging through a mound of VHS tapes to find my favorite MacGyver, Airwolf, and A-Team episodes, all the while slowly smothering the carpet beneath in a generous layer of cookie crumbs, and washing the ones in my mouth down with a hefty glass of cold, flat Coke — an afternoon much like any other at my grandparents’ house.
Looking up, the images on the screen etched themselves onto my mind’s eye, forever indelible… the Challenger shuttle consumed in an expanding cloud of rocket propellant, NOT streaking across the sky, up, up, up, out of sight. Immediately, my five-and-a-half-year-old self perceived the loss… good people… gone! The sadness swept through me.
That same sense of profound loss struck me Saturday evening when I switched the TV on. My sympathies go out to the families, friends, and colleagues of: Commander Rick Husband, Pilot William McCool, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, and Col. Ilan Ramon.
