Free Credit Check--Really

Finally, there is an annual free credit check that doesn't involve signing up for a service temporarily or something. Lucky to be in the west this time since we are first on the list to get the service.

Go to http:///www.annualcreditreport.com it doesn't like people to go there via a link so you'll just have to type it in with your little fingers =).

symbiasm

A corporate email about our staff visioning day concluded that "Our goal is to have symbiasm." - and yes, the word was bolded in the email.

i replied to the author and asked:
Can you define symbiasm?
www.dictionary.com is not sure what it means, and tries to improve the spelling by converting it to symbolism.

this was the response:
A new word that a great person coined about a year ago.
Symbiasm is the miracle that happens when more that one entity is working in such harmony that all entities are somewhat dependant and strenthened by the working relationship. The root work comes from the word symbiotic.
There you have it.
By the way, you and -your boss- are a great example of symbiasm.

so, what do you guys think. Are we allowed to just coin buzz words?

flying free

at the winnemucca flying j and there is free wireless
hello to all you peoples up there

motorcycle signaling

on the way to work I saw a motorcycle rider that didn't quite know what to do. He made a left hand turn by signalling with his RIGHT hand and pointed right. half way through the turn he changed to signalling with his left hand, but instead of pointing left he pointed up (the right turn signal). COME ONE PEOPLE. get it together! I know its only 25degF outside, but thats no excuse.

snow shoes?

to those in the know (those in I 'da ho (like u the ho)) am i packing my claws on a deck (snowshoes) or not?

nonModern fire.

I read about a home modified knife which talked about a firepiston in the survival kit. in reading about old ways of making fire here, i learned about the fire piston.

i see this piston as having many inturesting properties. many being it's simplisic and roboust design, not to be outdone by the fact it actually makes fire.
i smell a new project coming on.

surgical tubing

heres my crappy info on surgical tubing. I really don't know where to get it but heres some ideas i've scrapped off the net

*Archery/hunting shops carry a black rubber tubing used with peep sights. Often you can even find this in the archery section in Walm-mart. It works just as good as surgical tubing.
* Dive shop
* aquarium air hose?
* Home depot, plumbing section?
* bungee launching gliders
* pharmacy
*tubing from doityourself
*I use 3/8" latex tubing from Lowes Hardware
* Many marine fishing supply stores sell the rubber bungie
****Walgreens has it as does any surgical supply house...

Related projects
*ENGR 162 project
*Soak the Teach
* some kinda launcher
tips: I use 4 strands of latex surgical tubing, 3/16" inner diameter with a wall thickness of 3/32". I have found that using many strands of small-size tubing works better than using a few strands of large-size tubing. Apparently the thinner tubing contracts faster when it is stretched and released, so the bolts come off the rails faster. When I switched from two strands of 3/8" tubing to three strands of 3/16", I added about 12 yards to my range. I added a fourth strand later just for more range.
* funelator
* surgical tubing as a paintball paint grenade

bring games

everyone traveling for Turkey day needs to bring games! or bring something that you wanna do. anyone have any car racing games to bring?
types of games to bring:
Card
Board
Computer
outdoor (gps? snowshow?)

maybe I should rephrase this to bring an activity.
I will be bringing
2 laptops
snowshoes
gps
comealong for dans slingshot (if i remember to buy it)

armagetron

armagetron seems to be a decent opensource multiplayer game. seems simple (tron like) but actually does have some tactic to it. I propose we play this crappy game at thanksiving as we will all be of equal skill and all crappy computers MAY be able to render it? not sure....

Welcome Dave

just a quick hello to dave who was actually finally able to click on the link and join us over here at nerdy tales. hopefully he can find time between classes and his potential girlfriend to say hello back every now and again =).

java game

I was looking a tyran over on sourceforge. very cool. a nice little RPG that fits in your browser. it even has the ability to SAVE. i played for awhile but I suck at it... plus I don't have the patience. so I'm continuing my quest to find a game I don't suck at and one that doesnt require patience.. maybe i'll find pong.

secure tunnel

This talks about how to setup a secure tunnel and use putty. someday I might have a use for this.... until then its fun to read about

GhostZilla

GhostZilla WAS a program that allowed you to surf the net from inside outlook, word, excel and what not so that it gave the illusion of actually working. I've never used it, nor have the need to (there are very simple ways to setup this up with tools already in windows) but I find it amusing that the author printed a RETRACTION for his work! he's ashamed, or at least thats my interpretation any way. the ironic thing is even though its retracted it goings open source.. so now you see it, now you don't, now every one sees it. hmm.....

google scholar

google scholar (beta) is a search engine targeted at finding academic information. now when I cheat on a paper i'll have reputable sources. I did a search for my last name, thinking someone wrote a paper, but acording to google scholar she did not =(. instead I found a Ms. Michelena with my last name that is affected by Mitochondrial disorder. I wonder what that is? I hope its not to bad, and if it is I hope its not genetic. if your otherwise inept... here is a link to the google scholar faq....

legal threats

check out pirate bay legal threats. just linking to them is probably gonna get nerdytails blown up but them theres some good reading.... =)

Muahahahaha... or not

Okay, so quite possibly you all have seen this before, but I hadn't, and it made me laugh, so there you go: the Evil Overlord List

tank milage

I have a 2000 VW TDI Golf (4-door, diesel). The tahnk is rated for about 14.7gallons. and posted milage is 45-49mpg.

There is a small switch inside the nozzle where you fill the gas tank. if you push the switch it lets air out of the tank and you can fit more in. with this method I have been able to fit almost an additional 2 gallons. I average around 48-49mpg and my current record is around 730miles on a single tank. I will probably break that record on the way home tonight (that, or i'll be walking)

so how does your vehicle do? whats your MPG and total tank distance?

Thanksgiving stuff

Okay, so I know you boys have a separate post regarding what you want to do for this years project (and oh, just a reminder, last year you beat the stuffing out of a recliner, among other things), but I'd like to talk logistics. When do y'all expect to arrive and depart? Any thoughts regarding food? Kaleb and Tammie Knauff (formerly Tammie Hood) and Tammie's mom are probably coming for Thanksgiving dinner itself (and Tammie wants to do the turkey, to which I give my glad blessing). I'm thinking that we'll probably go fairly low-key again but wondering if anyone has any thoughts they'd like to mention.

who killed the sidebar

who killed the sidebar? did one of you morons delete it?

hack da hack

I can't believe the programmers among us don't step up to the plate, instead you gotta let an EE do your dirty work.. firgures.

so I"ve incorporated my first hack over on k2h. I added the TIME to the recent posts in the form Date-HourMin

a tad ugly, but it gets the info across. maybe if I care later I'll do a quick function to limit the string length so some lines arn't longer than others and if the string is longer than what can be shown I'll replace the last 2 characters with .. or something. w3Schools.com was a good reference. you guys want me to hack this or you guys gonna step up and do it right?

Kmart @ $110

Did you guys see that kmart (Kmrt) is now trading at over 110$?!!! I could have sworn a year ago they got delisted cause they were at 25cents or something. I also thought they traded under KM. now either i"m crazy, or losing it, or both, but I'm really confused. when you look at the history of Kmrt it never shows it below like 8$. WHAT HAPPENED? (and wheres my 1000% return when I need it)

trailers...

How small is your trailer? it seems that around here if your trailer is 'small' enough it doesn't have to be registered. It probalby has something to do with if you can see the tail lights on the vehicle or not. does anyone know the geometry required to get away with not having to license it? You (or i should say I) see this alot on construction vehicles that are towing a generator, cement mixer, or barby house.

thanksgiving project

the following is a proposal for our anual thanksgiving project. I'll recap on the projects so far:
*water rocket launcher
*water rocket with deployable chute that marginally worked (kev)
*? it seems I can't think of a third thing

proposal:
how about we dig up a starter and a 12V battery and make some kind of motorized go-cart / scooter thinggy. somone at work said a starter may be capable of 40mph so I'll bring my motorcycle helmet. if we got real fancy we could build a variable pulse width controller and run it through a huge FET (or bunch of transistors) for speed control.

kev, you stripped the starter off of the beater when you gave it to the junkyard right? =)

picking up pennies

for those who don't believe in picking up pennies (which is none of the current readers probably) check out this story about cashing in pennies.

then check out the coinstar faq's to find out that they charge 8.8% (they note that this means about 9 cents for every dollar for those who are incapable of understanding percentages, which makes you wonder how these people tip at resturaunts). so for all this man's work of picking up 3.5 tons of pennies over his lifetime, coinstar made $922.25.

so which is better, picking up pennies or finding a business where people will pick them up for you and then you get a cut of the profits?

*extra *extra

read all about it. I changed the comments history to 15, but its only showing 10 for some reason.. I think that was within the range of the sick ones request.

xor pop quiz

heres a little something to get your nerd minds cranking..
The following is the truth table for a 2-input XOR gate where x and y are inputs, f is the function output
xy f
00 0
01 1
10 1
11 0

Question: What is the truth table for a 3-input XOR gate? and no cheating in a book or using the net.. give me YOUR answer.

you want fries with that?

I recently got an award at work, the 150$ night on the town, you guys might of read about that earlier, but jen and I are starting to spend the money on various things. the first thing was the incredibles. so that set us back about 20$. tonight i'm hungry and jen aint home, so that means I get pizza. thats about all i 'cook'. I called up the local take and bake pizza shop, pappa murphy's, and order me up one family size olive and mushroom pizza. with the coupon that comes to 9$. since it is a food 'entertainment' expense I think this will fall under my 150$ night on the town for when I turn all my receipts in. so its paid for. I called and ordered:

them: you want a drink with that?
me: no
them: you want bread sticks?
me: no
them: you want a drink with that?
me: uhhh.. no

so after we got it all straight that all i wanted was my pizza they said it would be ready for pickup in 15 minutes. so I drive over.

I go to the cashier and say i'm here for a family size mushroom and olive. so she starts to take my order down. I was looking all over for one wiht my name on it (I gave that when I called in) but didn't see it. so then somone says.. 'oh.. he just called'.

cashier: you want breadsticks with that?
me: no
cashier: you want a drink with that?:
me: no
cashier: ok.. you total is 8.99$, do you want anything else?
me: no, JUST THE PIZZA.

wow, I wonder how much stuff they slip in? does ANYONE actually not know what they want? i'm thinkin dan would fall for this.

SG-1 Season 8

SG-1 Season 8 TOTALLY SUX. I am posting this here (as to not tarnish the image of k2h) in the hopes that one of the producers from stargate will actually see the folly of their ways and revert back to the ideals and scenaries of the previous seasons. things wrong:
*jack now leads the SGC. he is the best comic releif so why limit his role?
*Teal'C has hair, and is now acting more human. the strength of his character was in his formal, solid methodology. just like data in star trek. you could always count on a known response. now I dunno what to think about him.
*flashbacks, I've seen them throughout the shows, this doesn't necessarily talk about season 8, but STOP DOING FLASHBACK EPISODES. I hate watching an episode just to have 90% of the content come from something I've already seen. you don't even use a different camera angle or something, its STRAIGHT COPY. what, did the actors go on vacation? how many episodes do you guys make around 20 a year? so thats 2 weeks an episode. was somoene gone a month? CUT THAT OUT, and give us origional stuff.

Nudity

so there was the whole thing about the super bowl "special" which i thought was kinda funny. perhaps i wouldn't have in the past, but i do now. personally i think balancing it by showing the male streaker would have been even funnier.
anyways, i listened to "wait, wait... don't tell me" this sunday, as i usually do, to get my laughs in.
there was a rather funny mocking of these airport scanners they have in the UK now. apparently, they show people pretty well nude. the wait, wait people said that could be an ugly job, look at the people traveling--they aren't so pretty in general.
so people are mad about this nudity and others say its better than hand search.
i'm not fond of showing my body parts but this would certainly go a long way in preventing some weapons than metal detectors. so far, hijackers haven't needed to be smart about using non-detectable weapons, but i suppose they could get smart eventually.
i guess they aren't going deploy this in the US until they find a way to "mask" sensitive body areas.... what in the world? don't men typically hide guns in the groin when they are really looking to hid things? and don't women hide things in their bras? ya masking is going to improve security.
would i voluntarily go through one of these things? probably not. if it was that or hand search, i'd probably go for the scan. unless i travelled a great deal, then i'd start to worry about my lifetime x-ray exposure.

Baby Carrot Hoax

someone told me awhile ago that some 'baby carrot' manufacture got in trouble for wittling down normal carrots and selling them as baby carrots? jen, was that you? the reason I remembered this is one of my coworkers came in today with 2 huge carrots and told me that big carrots were only 70cents a pound and baby carrots were $1.50 a pound so he bought the big ones (and then promply threw the big end of one away cause his mouth wasnt big enough)

chronicles of riddick

So have any of you losers seen chronicles of riddick yet? its pitch black part 2. actually pretty good but since the first one was more origional I think it was better. part 2 has more action and was well done but the story just didn't jump out like me like the first one did. in pitch black if you look real close it seems that they changed the story in post production. after you watch the ending a few times just sit back and think of how many ways you could string those shots together and make it into a completely different film. first time was cool, second time was ok. third time I saw it I tore it to pieces, so now i guesse i'll have to watch chronicles of riddick as many times so I can pick it apart as well. everyone would probably like it except for jen, alodia, dan, and possible janell.. welp.. ok.. so I know kev and I will like it =)

on that note, if the rest of you never post to nerdy tails I'm gonna rename it to chronnicles of keith. don't even PRETEND that you losers actually work through lunch! dan: since your in a corporate enviroment like me I know your encouraged to take a real lunch and do something different (to ease your large mind) so take a second and clue me in on how good/bad something is!

burn my fingers, cold in the middle

Jen made these awesome burritos this weekend. they have sweet-potatoes mixed in with the beans. sounds disgusting right? well, its actually very tasty. the sweet potato tasts alot like cheese (and kinda looks like it too).

so in keeping with my cheep tradition, I took leftovers to work today, the leftovers where one of the burittos. this time instead of putting left overs in the fridge, jen put them in the freezer. so now I sit here eating my burrito that has been totally analyated by the microwave. the shell is tuff, the beens burned my hand on the way back from the break room, and its still cold in the middle.

nickel papers

there is this free paper called the sparks tribune or something like that. its just another one of those 5cent papers as far as I can tell but its fun to read the adds and if I ever have some good crap to sell I'll list it there. on friday one of my friends at work saw that someone had a lathe for sale for 100$. we looked up the model on line and it looked like a nice benchtop one. so after work we headed over to check it out (fully thinking I would be bidding against this guy to get it). turns out this thing was a MONSTER. the motor alone was about 2 feet long by 10 inches in diameter. 15A 3 phase power. WAY to big (need a crane to lift it) it was still fun to look at. it must have been sitting in his yard since world war 2, cause even the tarp it was under had disentegrated.

usb keychain linux

check out linux on a virtual private USB keychain thing. might be something kev could use.

date problem

we were having some problems with the recent posts hack. Thanks for the feedback from the author!

Hi k2h,

Thanks for commenting on the errors you are having. I'm glad you like
the hacks.

The reason you are getting the strange NNaN's is that you haven't
changed your timestamp format in your blogger settings to include both
the date and time.

The first step in the installation is to go the the Formatting section
of your blog settings and make sure that the Timestamp Format is set to
mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss (09/23/2004 8:37:08 PM). Don't forget to save your
changes.

The NaNN comes from the Javascript's failed attempt to parse your time
into a datetime that it can understand and use to determine which
comments are the most recent.

Hope that helps,

I wish I hadn't done that

post your picture of things you have done to your car or other expensive items that you wish you hadn't done.

i, for instance, was sitting at a stop light and not paying as much attention as i should have. the suv in front of me started going forward and stopped way before i expected it to and now i own a jeep bumped with a straight line problem


'fess up you all and learn to laugh at your own stupidity!

Sarah (it won't let me post an img in a comment): How about things done TO me?


Sarah: A special present for Kev

Kevin moment

I had a Kevin moment yesterday it was a little disturbing. I went to a doctor's appointment at St. Lukes Meridian (the new hospital by our house). My surgerywas done at St. Lukes in downtown Boise 10 days ago. They hand me a full stack of forms to fill out again. I was like "what can't you fax them over"... "um well we already have your chart but "they" want an update". Who are they and do they realize that nothing has changed. So I filled out the forms and started picking them apart, they were very non-normalized. For example birthdata:_____ age: _____ why ask the age it can be calculated from the birthdate. Then on all the family history stuff which I've filled out a few too many times now I got a little punchy and when they asked for current health status I started putting rotten and the like for the dead ones.

888

Anyone know how to find the origin of an 800# without calling it? I missed a call on my cell yesterday and am curious to where it came from but haven't called it back... I searched online - no luck. Am thinking about calling back on a pay phone.

Great time wasters (also, cool applications of code)

Okay, so I've been pretty caught up in my NaNoWriMoing and pretty useless to this blog, but I stumbled across several cool sites this morning:
WORDCOUNT
10x10

inventor of X

so jens article spawned a good discussion over the wall with one of my coworkers. he is adamant about how the net was 'invented' in the 60's between universities. I said.. "thats like saying Alaxander grahm bell invented the cell phone" yeah. there may have been some ground work, but the technology is totally different. I agree technology needs a starting place, but there is a time when NEW TECHNOLOGY is introduced and it becomes even more than the origional designer ever invisioned.

with that said, even tracking back when the HTTP standard was written (1989?) in stone still does not tell us who invented the internet, or when the internet we know today was 'invented' because it is build on all kinds of technology.

Internet Fame

i love/hate how everyone keeps claiming who invented the internet. htis morning i was reading a book on the way from my car to the chemistry building, as is my practice, and found that "a short history of nearly everything" (an okay book, interesting but some of the facts are a little off) makes the claim that, "There are practical side eggects to all this costly effort [CERN building its Large hadron Collider]. The World Wide Web is a CERN offshoot. It was invented by a CERN scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, in 1989."
i think my favorite claim was al gore's claim, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system." which was blown out of proportion into him saying he invented the internet.... gotta love how things get all messed up.

..moms...

Does your mom bring google to its knees? check out the article. I really enjoyed the writing style.

google start page

You have all seen the plain google.com start page, but have you seen
google.com/firefox (I like the fox)
google.com/linux (I like the pengiun)
google.com/bsd (gotta like the devil)

for the life of me I can't find a complete list! I've heard about the firefox and linux pages, I found the BSD page myself. what else is there? see what you can find and post.

shop4tech.com

Shop4tech.com has some awesome dvd media for what was bout 22cents a disk with a coupon last time i ordered (100 of them).
enter the coupon code "Thanksgiving" up throgh Nov. 26 and get 10% off storwide and 30% off 2nd air shipping (not worth it)

check out the Sonic DVD-r 1x-4x bulk media. i think that's what I got and have had only 1 bad disk in the 25 i burned. great price!

define work

check out Wired's The Geek Guide to Kosher Machines which i read last nite.
1. define work. is this a physics thing? doesn't the human body consume energy?
2. review the 4th commandment. it does not discuss machines.
3. if industry is going to persue nitche markes, where is my stylish LL Bean bullet proof, knife resistent vest for inner city school kids?

I want to write a well formed reply to wired and see if it'll be published next month.
any ideas on how I should word it?

free magazines

when I lost one of the cube mates at work he took all of his magazines with him. they were free magazines, but still fun to read and every now and again they actually had something interesting to say about the industry.

I have found a place to get TONS of free mags if you are so inclined
http://www.reed4success.com/

you never know.. you might learn something!

so I filled out a few free subscriptions with my work address. for job title I put SENIOR ENGINEER, which i'm not but I'm gonna see how long it takes for someone to notice since we have a comunal mail drop.

suitcase worth considering? nah.

in looking for a rebuttle to keith's unfounded watch ad observation, I found descriptions of a 20,000$ suitcase with more info here. That baby had better come with a build in ice-maker that gets it's water from vapor in the air and a desalinator for the ocassional executive plane crash or i'm gonna feel jipped.

10:10

I thought 10 after 10 was the best time for se.... ahh. you get the idea =) but it didn't even make into the article!

Shill Bidding

so I read an article on geek.com about shill bidding. this is the process of artificially inflating the bid amount on a product. I have mixed feelings if this should be legal or not. I'm kinda thinking it should be LEGAL. you represent yourself... the auction house or person represents getting the most money for a product that they can. if they find a good way to sucker you into it then you were too weak to begin with! what do you'all think?

cube crap

I sit in a cube that has 4 spots. that is if each person gets a corner which is pretty typical in this day and age. we had one person transfer across teh country and another person transfer to a different department (temporarily or so he claims) so that leaves 2 of us in one cube. We are much enjoying it. no one plays stupid music anymore, we waste less time in a day because there arn't as many people to talk to. all in all it just a better deal.

the problem is there is some extra desk area. so my cube mate and I have been using it off and on for some of our projects but about 1/2 of the space in the cube is unused. so a different team broght their crap to the cube for me to play with. after I was done playing with it they wouldn't take it out, because they don't have any room. so I just got a big box, dumped all the crap in. now the desks are back to clean. if they want space they can get their own. my desk is not their space.

halo 2 released

Halo 2 reviewed here is released today. it's going to be a good evening.

Blender

check out blender.
after reading about the game engine keith found, this seemed like a logical extention for making the graphics (as several of the developers are using it)
it's got more math and options then i'd use. maybe i'll start with a box or something.

*disclaimer*

I found this on Adventure Game Studio web site, it is an SDK to help you write your own game. I love the disclaimer....

NOTE: AGS is not for everyone. To make more advanced parts of a game, such as cutscenes, you will need to be prepared to learn the scripting language. It is recommended that you have at least a basic knowledge of computers before attempting to use AGS - such as, you know what a PCX file is, you can think logically and you know the difference between your hard drive and your RAM.

nation wide walki-talki

talk about FREE advertising. I am totally sick of the phones that you can use as a walki-talki (sp?) that are very loud and anoying. if it wasn't bad enough that everyone and their dog is now on a cell phone they now have to make a public display out of it. the best part was when one of our coworkers had an argument with his wife in walki-talki mode and the dept. got to listen in. you could her it half way across the building it was so loud.

then today I hear someone basically reading the paper into one.

please STOP!

I can't wait until the perfect thought based communications so I don't have to be invovled in everyone elses absent personality. they are there (in person) but mentally they are 100/1000 miles away with the person they are talking with. its like walking past a bunch of zombies.

Posting on Dan's behalf

Now imagine it inside.

ghost for linux

I spent a little time awhile ago looking for a ghost like tool for linux and came up with limited answers.

DD
some command that can be used to copy an entire partition.
pros: copies everything?
cons: copies entire partition or disk, cna't remember, so if you didn't 0 pad your disk your backup file will be HUGE.

partimage
a rudimentary partiion backup tool that runs on linux, its part of knoppix so you can take a look. i'm not sure how well it'll work with NTFS. mayabe one way around this is to use FAT32 so that its much easier to backup with opensource tools?

as you can see I need someone that knows backup for linux to post a comment!

office xp and a lost key

the pastor who had his files recovered last week is now doing a full reinstall.
he purchased his computer a few years ago from Dell as a refurbished notebook computer and got a software bundle that included office xp at a premium price.
He managed to save everything except the box and the keys for office (on the back of the origional sleeves, which he did not catch) because he did not have to install anything: all preinstalled.
2.5 years later - NOW he realizes no keys.
so, 2 hours on the phone with dell, they conclude he should call micorosft and also give him a key that does not work.
20 minutes on phone Microsoft concludes it's dell's problem as they can't generate keys with out the volume liscening information (true) so we call dell back and they say to talk to microsoft. we escellate the problem to 'supervisor' level and they conclude that they can only give us the origional key as that is the ONLY key that will work with those disks (odd, ok, considering they already gave us another key, AND a key I had worked - AND the key I cracked in the time we're on the phone worked) - so they just wanted to give him a key for ms word, not the office suite - AND just give him 100$ office 2k3 discount coupon (good if your a nonprofit - but who knows if dell honors that during software resale)

so, he is prompted to go home and fax them documentation demonstrating that he purchased office xp from them. I told him to put the disks on the scanner as the origional receipt probably just says 'software bundle' just like dells records.

translation - don't loose your keys.

oh yeah, the key crack took about 6 minutes using 75omhz.
sad when google can get you stuff faster then legemite customer support.

I'm Home

Last night I got released from the Hospital. That was very good since they didn't expect me to go home so early. It still hurts pretty good when I move around and I won't take more drugs that I really need to take. Speaking of which I slept well last night and didn't wake up needing drugs. I should be able to be back at work parttime next week. Once there I also should be able to do more than 'think' about what I can do and we should have first si on the first mobile ddr product coming out. (mobile ddr = ddr for your cell phone). I got to keep the hardware out of my back it looks pretty cool and is fairly light weight (aka titanium). I need to go find my tools and finish putting it back togather and get some pics online for you all to ooogle at. Many of the nurses were impressed by the hardware they pulled out.

My back is still stiff and hurting but hopefully I'll be up to snowshoeing and stuff by the time t-day rolls around. Since kevin was probably wondering there were lots of warnings on the release forms about engaging in sexual activity before you should.

Dan

Cheap ISP

Every so often it can be useful to have dial up access. I was pointed to access-4-free by this financial advice from Modest Needs. Pretty straightforward, a one time setup fee of $4.95, and then it's free up to 10 hours/month. After that it's $1/hour up to $10, with $10 being the maximum monthly rate (which is still less than most ISPs). The beauty of it, though, as I see it, is that you can sign up sometime when it's needed, use it, and then forget about it until the next time. You don't have to worry about cancelling it because there's no fee for less than 10 hours/month. The other cool thing is that it's high quality, offering v90 and v92 in most places with virtually no dropped connections. Oh, yeah, and no ads.

Pi

I looking for my birthday in pi, i stumbled across a slashdot article discussing some flaws with using Pi as a springboard for compression. I've concluded it's not very likely it would work, but it sure is inturesting to think about.

dans slam

my rebuttal to DANS SLAM

way to work in a slam in the PS.

unlike you I haven't become a trator to test yet. there are alot of people that have become trators and I'm glad to see your one of them! =)

it seems just when people start to learn what is going on and are able to be productive they pack up.. pull up roots and move! usually they get a raise too cause the pay in test SUCKS.

someday I too may pull up stakes but I'm happy where i'm at.

as for not working at work? did you miss the post where I talked about writing a teest for a guy that did what took him 2 days in 3 seconds? (it took a few hours to write the test) but 3 seconds is ALOT better than 2 days..

i'm not defending my actions, just pointing out a case history of NOT being a slacker. at times there really is nothing productive to do, or more likiely the brain is too fried to work much out. most would just do something and then redo it the next day. I prefer to sit and think for awhile, and then do it right the first time (the next day) and we actually have management support for this method.

I quote: "if I come by and you guys have your feet kicked up on the desk looking into thin air I'm just going to assume your thinking about something in your head".

so...... we think in our head alot.

oops, oops, oops ... my bad.

a coworker described to me at lunch how he'd been to an airport a while back, and noticed one of the little tractor/trains baggage train loose a suitcase. it sat there for a moment until another tractor/train came along and Darin describes how he thought the driver may go around it. It didn't work out that way - the tractor hit it at full speed and each traincar went over it too.

fog lamps -installed

got the fog lamps installed. bailing wire comes through again making it only necessary to drill two holes (one for each lamp) to secure it to the bumper.
I went cheep on the install and did everything under the hood - only comes on with brights, and no dash indicator lite - maybe on version 2. but the circuit is self contained and fused and requires the ignition and brights to be on in order to trip the relay - so it should work.

keith sure does know how to pic spontanious gifts.

once I get the factory fogs working, that baby'll be all light and i'll get to watch the deer splatter accross the hood instead of wondering what it was.