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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Obstructionist Husband's LiveJournal:
| Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 | |
| 12:00 am | Links to clear my browser I've been hording a lot of stuff that I've wanted to get back to and it just hasn't happened, so I'm throwing them here. You might find some of it interesting, but it is rather long, and since I am setting the date to a future date, it'll be coming up at the top of your flist (I think), plus, I really, REALLY, like run on sentences ( Read more... ) |
| Friday, July 18th, 2008 | |
| 6:35 am | Quis custodiet ipsos custodes It's not a trailer to The Watchmen, but an interview with Dave Gibbons on the set of the movie. The makers are doing an incredible level of detail in the background, it reminds me of how nuts Ridley Scott went over the details in Bladerunner. Anyway, worth watching, if you're a fan of the comic. http://rss.warnerbros.com/watchmen/ |
| Thursday, July 17th, 2008 | |
| 6:46 am | Happy Birthday, J. Michael Stracyinski! Creator and writer extraortinaire of Babylon 5, general all-around bon vivant. Perhaps the inventor of the season-long/series-long story arc for television. If only Paramount had gotten smart and given him the Star Trek franchise. http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2008/07/h |
| Monday, July 14th, 2008 | |
| 7:04 am | OK, I'm not a fan of umbrellas, but I WANT THIS ONE! Normally I prefer a good jacket and hat when it's raining. I've always thought an umbrella was just something else to carry. I was wrong. This is the Jackie Chan, Jet Li, the Mad Max of umbrellas. http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/07/u |
| Sunday, July 13th, 2008 | |
| 9:48 am | "Why do we have to restart routers?" Yesterday afternoon a post went up on Slashdot wherein this guy wails that he always has to restart his Linksys WRT54G wireless router. And my first thought is: "Whaa? Nani?" What the heck is this guy talking about? I've been using that router for ages, I've recommended it to others who've used them and they've been pretty much trouble-free. There had been over 800 threads when I pulled up Slashdot this AM, and I knew I couldn't contribute anything insightful. Three trends emerged, aside from the "I've been using that model for years and it's trouble-free". First, apparently if you do torrents, it can eat up resources in your router and cause instability. They recommended installing something like Tomato and doing a little parameter tweaking. Second, some routers are sensitive to power, a UPS takes care of it. And according to at least one post, DLink makes really crappy power adapters and some models are prone to failure. I have one small DLink router that was retired until I got this job and had to get an apartment, I brought the Linksys down here and put the DLink in Cloudcroft. Third, maybe you've got a bad one. I was unaware that they could get squirrelly in brownout conditions, maybe I'll pick up a dinky little UPS for my networking gear, which is just the little DSL router and my Linksys. I should also get one for Cloudcroft, we get a lot of brownouts up there. |
| 9:44 am | Reiner Knizia on the Nintendo DS?! We went to Game Stop Whatever yesterday evening to pick up a Warcraft DVD for Russet ($2 for a 14 day demo) and were browsing the DS cartridges when I saw one in the puzzle/brain training category called Brain Voyage. And on the back it listed "By Dr. Reiner Knizia". I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I knew I should have known that name, but I couldn't place it. After we got home after going to my aunt's to play dominoes (I got SO horribly hammered in the first game! six rounds (out of 13) that I had no starters!) it hit me: it is only one of the most recognized names in table top game design. I didn't know he'd done a DS implementation. I should check to see if he's doing anything on the Wii. Not that I have one. Yet. |
| Friday, July 11th, 2008 | |
| 9:13 pm | Sayonara, Aoki-sama Rocky Aoki, the founder of Benihana's, passed away in New York of complications from cancer. I've only eaten at his restaurants a couple of times, but I'm very glad he brought teppan-yaki to America. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080712/ap_ |
| Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 | |
| 5:53 am | Future news headline: Rush Limbaugh dies at microphone, unfulfilled "I'm not retiring until every American agrees with me." -- Rush Limbaugh From Doonesbury's Say What? |
| Friday, July 4th, 2008 | |
| 10:27 pm | Elemental Extinction? "I mourn for the dodo, poor fat flightless bird, extinct since the eighteenth century. I grieve for the great auk, virtually wiped out by zealous Viking huntsmen a thousand years ago and finished off by hungry Greenlanders around 1760. I think the world would be more interesting if such extinct creatures as the moa, the giant ground sloth, the passenger pigeon, and the quagga still moved among us. It surely would be a lively place if we had a few tyrannosaurs or brontosaurs on hand. (Though not in my neighborhood, please.) And I’d find it great fun to watch one of those PBS nature documentaries showing the migratory habits of the woolly mammoth. They’re all gone, though, along with the speckled cormorant, Steller’s sea cow, the Hispaniola hutia, the aurochs, the Irish elk, and all too many other species. But now comes word that it isn’t just wildlife that can go extinct. The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany’s University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet’s stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century." Scaremongering? Reality? Dunno. And the article continues... http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0806/r http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?s |
| 9:56 pm | Doonesbury Say What? "There is some who say that perhaps freedom is not universal. Maybe it's only Western people that can self-govern. Maybe it's only, you know, white-guy Methodists who are capable of self-government. I reject that notion." -- George W. Bush, London, June 16, 2008 I have absolutely nothing to say in response to this quote. |
| 9:51 pm | Happy Patriotic Explosion Day! For Americans, they rest of you are allowed to have a perfectly good day also. :-) http://www.ozyandmillie.org/ |
| 9:00 pm | New VW goes into limited production in 2010: gets over 200 MPG No joke. It's not much to look at, it seats two in tandem rather than side by side, and it looks like it has nothing for cargo space, but it's carbon fiber and has a drag coefficient of 0.16. Estimated price is $30-40k. They've had it for years, but weren't considering production until carbon fiber tech came down in price. Well, it's come down. Aside from the looks, it'll be interesting to see how it does in safety tests and I'd like to know what the repair bills would be like. They also don't talk about what the acceleration is like, and considering the size of the engine, I would expect it to be kinda sluggish. http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/07/laug |
| Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 | |
| 6:08 pm | Well, I was wrong I thought gas prices here would hit $4.00 a gallon by the 4th of July. They're hovering in the low to mid $3.80 range right now. Maybe the climb has slowed down, but I heard oil topped $143 a barrel, so maybe it's a temporary lull. |
| Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 | |
| 8:36 pm | Three stories with interesting economic news First, Citibank! Somehow the company(ies) that process Citibank transactions for 7-11 quickie stores got compromised, resulting in huge amounts of money being stolen. Citibank is covering their customer's losses, and arrests have been made. But the thefts are continuing! It's going to be interesting to see how this turns out. I've been reading about it on various sources now for a couple of weeks. Wired.com also has a lot of coverage on it. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080701/ap_ Next, Circuit City & Blockbuster! Circuit City has been in trouble, Best Buy has been eating their lunch. Also their breakfast and dinner. In rode the video rental company Blockbuster to buy them out! Hurrah for them! Alas, today Blockbuster said it was pulling out of the deal as the economy has tanked since the initial meetings and it is no longer sensible for BB to buy CC. Sucks to be them. http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080701/blockbus And finally, everyone's favorite coffee that is only slightly more expensive than gasoline (but not on a per gallon basis), Starbucks! They've been expanding at a ridiculous, if not insane, rate for the last many years, and it looks like the economy may have caught up with them. When a gallon of gas costs as much as a venti mocha soy-whip no foam something, then you're going to reevaluate what is a luxury and what is a neccessity, and there's a good chance that Starbuck's is going to be on the losing end of that equation. "...Starbucks Corp. announced Tuesday it will close 600 company-operated stores in the next year, as the faltering U.S. economy hastened the pain caused by the company's own rapid expansion. Starbucks did not say which stores will be closed, only that they are spread throughout the country. But it did say 70 percent of those slated for closure had opened after the start of 2006. To put it another way, Starbucks is closing 19 percent of all U.S. company-operated stores that opened in the last two years, Chief Financial Officer Pete Bocian said during a conference call. About 12,000 workers, or 7 percent of Starbucks' global work force, will be affected by the closings, which are expected to take place between late July and the middle of 2009..." Ouch! I wonder how Dunkin' Donuts is doing? I'm not really a coffee drinker, but there's LOTS of people who like being able to walk into a coffee shop and order a cup of coffee, and the only decision is the size and whether or not it's decaf. And I've never much cared for Starbuck's pastries, I'd much rather have a Dunkin' Donut. http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080701/starbuck |
| 8:31 pm | I can has sooperhero plz? Kthx! http://www.pvponline.com/2008/06/30/int Now here's the frightening part: when time permits, it might become a regular series! |
| Sunday, June 29th, 2008 | |
| 9:34 am | Sunday Video Roundup! Well, any day is a good day for a video roundup. Four of 'em under the cut. ( Read more... ) |
| Saturday, June 28th, 2008 | |
| 1:18 pm | An interview with the director of Dark Knight Some interesting stuff, some minor spoilers (where some scenes were shot, etc.) I didn't know that a number of scenes were shot in Imax, it's going to be interesting to see how they play out on smaller screens. Also, obviously, some mention of Heath Ledger's performance. I'm definitely looking forward to this movie, it should be pretty chilling. http://www.wired.com/entertainment/holl |
| 12:31 pm | A drug used to prevent transplanted organ rejection might REVERSE a form of mental retardation This has been tested in mice, there's no telling when this might make it to people trials. I find it interesting when one drug finds application against a different disease. A friend of mine who is going to die of ALS (Lou Gherrig's Disease) was in a drug trial where they tested a drug previously used to treat Alzheimers patients and it showed some good results against ALS. The problem is that drug insurance won't pay for it because it is labeled for use if you have Alzheimers. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=exi http://science.slashdot.org/article.p |
| 11:45 am | Wanna read an email from Bill Gates to Microsoft showing him getting pissed at Windows? It's kinda funny. He tries to download Moviemaker and gets hit with 16 meg of updates and still can't download it! http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/micr |
| 10:42 am | Where the hell is Matt? I really need to read up on this, apparently this guy went around the world, "14 months in the making, 42 countries, and a cast of thousands." And he is video taped dancing every where he goes. It's a good song, and I think it'll put a smile on your face. And supposedly you can download said video in HD. This link will take you to a larger frame version of the vid: http://www.vimeo.com/1211060 Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo. |