Blizza Blizza

I’ve finalised (I think) the CSS-based layout and tossed the tables entirely. This also seems to have had the side effect of finally squashing the one-pixel-offset bug in the archives once and for all. A big thanks to Raena Armitage for a cogent explanation of how the CSS worked and for some example CSS to work with.

If anyone finds any bugs, please post a comment and I’ll see what I can do.

Uh-huh-huh. Dude, I like, found a picthure of ballcock nuth..uh-huh-huh…huh-huh…on the, uh, Internet…uh-huh-huh:

The page title is very good too. Thanks, Evan.

The National Transportation Safety Board is now recommending that airline passengers be weighed at least occasionally to account for potentially deadly differences between the “standard” weight of a passenger (currently 185 pounds in winter) and the actual weight of the passenger.

I have a brilliant solution or two.

Solution One (lowest-tech, easiest to implement): Put a scale at the security checkpoint. Anyone who gets pulled aside for a more personal security inspection also gets weighed automatically. If the daily mean of weights is more than, say, five pounds above “standard,” all outgoing flights scheduled for the next day are notified so the weight and balance calculations can be adjusted.

Solution Two (medium-tech, somewhat tougher to implement): Put a boarding pass reader at the security checkpoint and build a scale into the platform beneath the metal detector. Build a scale into the X-ray machine as well. Passengers scan their boarding passes in order to pass through the metal detector, where they are weighed. A computer compiles weights of all passengers and carry-on baggage for that specific flight and allows the crew of that flight to make weight and balance adjustments as needed.

Solution Three (high-tech, could be tricky, but extremely accurate): Put RFID tags in boarding passes and luggage tags. These RFID tags will be encoded with flight information. When they pass a scale, they send their ID to the scale and the scale weighs the object passing over it. Like in solution two, a computer would compile this data and warn airline staff if any adjustments needed to be made. This could be combined in part with the scale-in-X-ray from solution two, or a new regulation could be implemented requiring passengers to affix RFID-containing tags to their carry-on baggage as well.

I’ve been doing some upgrading lately.

For my best friend’s parents’ toilets.

Shaddup. It’s money.

Anyway, I’ve been replacing the fill valves with this amazing little thing by Plumb Shop. It’s basically silent when refilling the tank, and it completely eliminated water hammer on one of our toilets and reduced it to a soft “thunk” on another. Amazing little device. I’m totally sold on them.

Well, to get to the point of the story, when you install these things, you tend to have some hardware left over, especially if you upgrade the supply lines to the valve with braided stainless steel at the same time. Now, those of you somewhat familiar with toilet hardware will remember the old name for the fill valve, which is quite possibly the funniest name for any piece of hardware ever, including the “ball-peen hammer:”

BALLCOCK.

Uh-huh-huh. Huh…uh…huh-huh. He thaid “ball-cock.” Uh…Huh-huh.
Yeah! Yeah! Ballcock! Heh-heh, yeah! Ballcock!

Oh no. It gets better. Remember I said I had hardware left over? That little fill valve comes with a fastener that attaches the supply line to the threaded nipple (Heh-heh! Nipple!) on the valve. This is called…are you ready for it?

The “ballcock nut.”

Yeah! Heh-heh! Ballcock nuts!
Dude, uh, like, thettle down, Beavith. Uh…huh-huh…you thaid “ballcock nuth.” Huh-huh…nuth…for ballcocth…uh-huh-huh!

I’m totally putting these spare parts in a little baggie and hitting people with it. Then I can tell them they just got “sacked” by my “ballcock nuts.”

I wonder how many ballcock nuts this $5000 French Merovingian throne needs?

…and raise you one Cheating the Customer Too.

See, it’s been all over the Web that you could tilt the iTunes-Pepsi promo bottles to see whether or not the cap is a winner.

But what you didn’t know is that on at least some of the bottles, you can read the entire promo code right through the bottle, thereby not only cheating Pepsi out of one song, but cheating the person who buys the bottle out of a song as well.

Your humble reporter Mister Ethics did not actually write down or memorise said promo code, but I have to echo Jack Miller’s sentiments here. “Memo to Pepsi: DUH!”

My mom and I just got back from Meijer, where we were again reminded that people are really dumb.

See, she bought about half a pound (this is important later, so take note) of sugar peas, which were marked $1.99/lb. They rang up at $2.99/lb.

My mom, being the observant and obsessive receipt-checker that she is, noticed the error and went to customer service after paying. After a long discussion with the girl there, she was issued a $1 refund. Understandably confused by this, my mom asked for an explanation, whereupon the girl replied:

Well, they were marked $1.99 [per pound], and we charged you $2.99 [per pound], so the difference is a dollar.

Meijer had better hope they haven’t hired many more people this intelligent.

A sixth-grader in Ohio has been suspended for three days.

Why?

Because he brought (oh, horrors!) the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated to school.

Now, I agree that an elementary school probably isn’t the place for SI’s swimsuit issue, but like the boy’s mother said, it’s not as though he brought pr0n to school. I can understand maybe one day of detention, or a heart-to-heart with the principal about why bringing that in was a stupid thing to do, but three days’ suspension? Geez.

Of course, if I had realised I could get on the front page of CNN’s Web site (and probably mentioned in their broadcast news) simply by getting suspended from school for three days for something this harmless, I definitely would have done that in elementary school. Think of how cool this kid is going to be to all his peers when he gets back from school: he got three days off, and he’s a national hero to sixth-grade boys because he had the swimsuit issue of SI.

School officials are obviously too far removed from sixth grade themselves to realise this. There are advantages to thinking like a kid, after all.

Garry Trudeau, Doonesbury’s cartoonist, is now offering US$10,000 to anyone who can verify Dubya’s account of his National Guard service record.

And these same Republicans had the gall to call Clinton a draft-dodger. Shameful, I tell you. Absolutely shameful.

Then again, this isn’t really news…what has Bush II’s administration done YET that wasn’t shameful?

It’s a shame I hadn’t heard about Grey Tuesday before 15 minutes ago. I would have joined the monochrome protest. But hop on over there and grab your MP3 copy of Danger Mouse’s remix of Jay-Z’s Black Album with the Beatles’ White Album. I’m listening to it right now, and it’s actually pretty listenable hip-hop.

iDig™

A (former) South Haven Public Schools assistant principal has admitted he planted pot in a student’s locker in order to get the student, whom he believed was a drug dealer, expelled.

If you think your school officials are out to get you, you might be right.

Uhmmm…

Mar. The Other Red Planet. With all those rover’s on it’s s’urface…

Nader is running again.

Because giving Dubya the first election wasn’t bad enough. Someone should drop a Corvair on his head.

My mother is a lifetime member of the NEA. According to Dubya’s PR-ignorant Secretary of Education Roderick Paige, this makes her a terrorist. Guess we can add teachers to the list now, eh? Is there anyone in the US who isn’t a terrorist by the government’s standards?

Last July, I pointed out a very funny article on The Slot about the so-called “comma of direct address.”

This time, it’s a complete lack of punctuation that leads to a very amusing Freudian slip. A local martial-arts academy is (apparently) running a special on tuition. Their marquee, posted along a major traffic artery in town, says:

COME IN
MASTER CHUNG
FOR LESS!

I have no desire whatsoever to give a 65-year-old Asian guy a hot beef injection, no matter what the price. For that matter, I don’t have any desire to “COME IN” anyone of the male persuasion. Will someone please fix this sign? It’s disgusting!

Whew. My crack^H^H^H^H^Hbroadband connection is back up.

Some tips for hooking up a third-party router to SBC DSL with the Speedstream 5100 modem…

Change the IP address of your router to 10.0.0.1. It probably came from the factory with a 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1 address, and the Speedstream 5100 ships with this IP address by default. Also, the Speedstream’s internal router sets itself to mask out the entire 192.168.xxx.xxx address space. Setting your router to something outside this address space will avoid any potential conflicts.

You do not need the software they provide on CD-ROM, but I haven’t found any way to set up a user name/password without it. Best advice at this point is to go through the install once — it’s fairly innocuous, if very patronising — and then go ahead and delete the new configuration it adds to the Network prefs pane.

SBC uses PPPoE. This isn’t immediately obvious, but it’s true.

Don’t try to connect to the Internet through the router yet, and don’t even connect the router to the DSL modem. Instead, hook the DSL modem directly to your computer’s Ethernet port, set the computer to use Ethernet for Internet access, and log into the modem at http://192.168.0.1/. Go into the Advanced options and tell it to let the computer handle the PPPoE business. Once you do this, the “Internet” status LED on the front will no longer light up, but it will still connect just fine.

Now you can connect the router and the DSL modem. Go into the router’s config menu (now found at http://10.0.0.1/, since you changed it) and set it up to do PPPoE with the proper user name and password. Save the config and give the router a minute or two to make the PPPoE connection and you should be good to go.

If not, you might have a DNS problem like I did. My Netgear MR314 wasn’t picking up DNS from SBC through the modem, so I had to manually enter two DNS server addresses as well. After that, no problems at all.

I was just browsing through some of my spam this month when I came across one of those “You just won an internet lotto” scams. Normally, it wouldn’t have interested me at all, but I noticed this in the body of the message:

Remember all winning must be claimed not later than 31st of FEB 2004.

Uhm…yeah. I’ll await that deadline with bated breath.

Idiots. Gimme my two million Euro.

…to me!
Happy half-birthday toooo meeeee!
Happy half-birthday dear meeeeeee-eeeeeeeeeeee!
Happy half-birthdaaaaaaaaaaaaaay toooooooooooooo (big finish) meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

That’s all.

A little thing called Real Life(tm) got in the way of finishing the archiving, mostly because I was working on my writing archives for the past few days. I also had to edit this month’s ATPM and a little surprise that will be showing up over at the Colour Classic FAQ later this week.

Sorry about the delay. The sci-tech category should be finished by tonight.