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.