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Category Archives: General

Five years ago on this day

Today is the 5th birthday of the iTunes Music Store, which also means I’ve been living in this condo for exactly 5 years.
April 28, 2003 was a very hectic day for me as I sold my old condo, bought this one, and moved. I packed and moved everything from my old condo, went to one [...]

Dumbest phishing email ever

Advice to phishers: learn to spell and capitalize properly.
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

MiiEditor.com is down

It looks like Nintendo shut down Miieditor.com. Their site now shows the following message:
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!
Luckily I was able to snag the graphics for each page of Mii components a few days ago, which I’m still chopping up and converting to resources that MiiView will composite into an actual mii graphic.

Congratulations to Dylan Matthews

Dylan is going to Harvard!

A celestial tribute to Arthur C. Clarke

Larry Sessions, a columnist for Earth & Sky, has suggested in his blog that the gamma-ray event whose radiation reached us a few hours before Arthur C. Clarke died, and which occurred 7.5 billion years ago, be named the Clarke Event. The outburst, which produced enough visible light to render it a naked-eye object across [...]

Easter pic of the day

Here’s the Easter basket I got today.

Questions Arising On Mercury In Compact Fluorescents

this is why I never liked the compact flourescent bulbs.
Their relative energy efficiency is unquestioned. The problem is the mercury — enough in one bulb to contaminate 1,000 gallons of water, even in newer low-mercury bulbs. The EPA has an 11-step cleanup process to follow when you break a CFL in your home. The specialized [...]

R.I.P. Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke, one of the greatest science fiction writers, has died. He’s probably best known for “2001: A Space Odyssey”, which he co-wrote with Stanley Kubrick. Clarke was credited with the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to [...]

Happy Pi Day

Today, the 14th of March, is Pi Day 2008. Pi Day is internationally celebrated in honor of the mathematical constant “Pi,” who’s actual value will — now and forever — remain unknown. NeoSmart Technologies has a run-down on the history of Pi, Pi Day, and the significance of Pi and other such “magical numbers” to [...]

Death and taxes

I got my taxes taken care of today by two wonderful ladies in Pompano Beach who do an amazing job. They’ve been doing my taxes for the last three years.
This year I also had to have them do my late mother’s taxes from 2005, the year she died, for which I ended up having to [...]

Cats prevent heart attacks

Kevin Drum writes: A recent study shows that cats help protect us from heart attacks & strokes. Dogs don’t have the same effect.
The study, by researchers at the University of Minnesota, found that feline-less people were 30 to 40 percent more likely to die of cardiovascular disease than those with cats.
Yet dog owners had the [...]

MacBook Pro Keyboard Firmware Update

I installed the keyboard firmware update on my MacBook Pro last night and it fixed the annoying keyboard problem I’ve been having since I got this machine.
I didn’t even have to reboot when I ran the updater; it simply required quitting all open applications. It took about 20 seconds to run and the keyboard [...]

Missing

When I got up this morning, I found that the orchid on my tree was gone.

Here’s how it looked a few days ago:

Happy Birthday to Minipundit

Minipundit turned 18 today, which means he’ll be able to vote in the most important election of our lifetime. He’s been working for Obama’s campaign. I’ve known Dylan since MacHack 2001 and I’ve known his father, who wrote Fetch, even longer.

Taxes don’t end with death

When my mother died in 2005, I took over her checking account, which she had in both of our names to avoid probate issues. I kept a small balance just to keep it active, although I didn’t use it, since I use a different bank. I never bothered to switch it to my name only.
I [...]

Reason #55234 that Windows sucks

I’ve been porting some Windows code to Mac OS X for the last few weeks, which involves converting Windows API calls to the equivalent functionality in OS X.
The thing that really annoys me about Windows programming is that every function takes a HANDLE, which can be a window, communication channel, file reference, or any [...]

An untimely death on this date

No, I’m not talking about Anna Nicole Smith. On this date last year, my friend’s puppy got loose and ran in front of a car.

111 Years Ago, Indiana Almost Legislated Pi

Via Slashdot: On February 5, 1897, 111 years ago today, the Indiana legislature very nearly passed a bill ‘introducing a new mathematical truth,’ that would have erroneously established pi as the ratio ‘five-fourths to four’ or 3.2. The story explaining the rationale behind the bill and how they were prevented from legislating it when a [...]

Losers

I’ll only say one thing about Superbowl.

Flock and Yahoo

Flock may be affected by the Yahoo/Microsoft deal, since Flock partnered with Yahoo to get paid for searches using the default Yahoo search box.