Monday, January 16, 2006

I got FoxyTunes working. And found its alarm clock and sleep timer functions. A guy at work was complaining to me last week that he had gotten home the night before and found his laptop gone. "It's not the computer--OK, a $2000 Compaq computer--I could live with that. It's what's on it. I couldn't pay a bill tomorrow. I really couldn't. All my investments are on it..." Guy waits tables and drinks like a fish at 30, so I don't know where he's got money to invest from (poker winnings, maybe--he seems to be a mostly-winning gambler). Actually, he's getting some kind of karmic strike, or someone's screwing with him personally--it's the fourth or fifth piece of electronic equipment he's had stolen in a month or so, from work and home. Anyway, damned if this piece of electronics isn't now my alarm clock, entertainment center, and primary means of communication as well as bill-paying center. I know exactly what he means.

I'm also playing around with skins for FireFox and FoxyTunes (started with FT, then some of the small captures had buttons I found more appealing than the defaults, at least today). Ahh, it was Noia eXtreme that caught my eye.

You know, if I entered this many contests, I still wouldn't win any. I've gone through at least one period of several years of faithfully entering contests, and the most I've won is $100. Kid enters toy giveaways and won a Ripped-Pants! Spongebob. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the best sense of time, and is absolutely convinced that it's been much longer than 6-8 weeks already.

The kid just informed me that if he had $10m we'd get everything we wanted. We talked about it and decided with that kind of dough we could live on a cruise ship for 120 years. More if it were invested properly, natch. We could find 2 more people to share our cabin, probably get a discount, and still make a lifetime of it. Be a hell of an education, too.

Best of google video
.

I want to want to [not a typo] undertake projects like this make-your-0wn-DVR, but just reading it for very long gives me a headache. More of that genre here.

"A number of primate species display [scent] changes during their fertile period, but the majority of scientists believed that this was not the case with humans." The majority of scientists are also male. Girls, did any of you not believe your scent changed with your cycle every month? Actually, I'm not sure how a majority of any subset of the human population believed that--most of us have been or lived intimately with a woman, unless most of the scientists believing that were too young or too reclusive to have married.

Speaking of women's health, some folk in the UK are claiming we're too careful about what pregnant women put in their bodies. This is about medications, but even beyond that, I fully agree--having been a pregnant woman in the last decade and threatened with prosecution should I so much as look at alcohol (never mind that in many countries watered wine is still standard or that opiate analgesics are considered pregnancy-safe--one sip of champagne and you're a child abuser) and given reams of statistics on which fish I should avoid due to mercury risks, I'd say sometimes just taking care of ourselves as best we can is the best idea.

I want one.

All I can say is Ouch.

Screw RFID e-Passports. I want mandatory biometric standard passports, as in it reads my fingerprint and I can go anywhere, never needing a flippin' passport. For that matter, I want the same standard on military bases and all other secure installations. Visitor's pass? You get coded in with a time-limit.

When /. had a headline about an RFID-blocking wallet, a poster complained that they'd hoped for something different. I'm not sure why--that site is exactly what I expected it to be. Foil and duct tape, yep yep. If you're all THAT worried about it and don't like the geekiness of carrying a duct-tape wallet (I'd carry one but I'd want colored duct tape), just wrap anything you're worried about in foil, for crying out loud. Some people put RFID things in their wallets so they *can* be read without taking them out.

Uhhhhhh... yeah. Next up, The Crusades: the MMO. Oh, wait.

Well, it's lunchtime, and UComics is dead.

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