Blizza Blizza

Maybe I need an “art” category, although this seems sufficiently technical to fit in sci/tech…

Apparently no less a celebrity than Boris the Red-Nosed Yeltsin has discovered the wonder and glory that is the Sculpture series from Kalamazoo Outdoor Gourmet.

The funny thing is that I had never heard of these guys before today. They oughta be advertising more locally.

(Trendir via Gizmodo)

The top stories right now are the theft of a vending machine and an overly friendly and lost moose.

Of course, the vending machine theft is important because it’s one of five in Michigan’s entire Upper Peninsula. (ba-dum *ching*)

Still haven’t figured out the moose.

They were advertised on when they were babies.

It’s one thing to do this to yourself. Fine, you’re an adult, make the choice, whatever. But this husband has to be the biggest pussy in the universe. There is no way, period, that any wife of mine is EVER using my offspring as a living billboard. Women of the world, take note: if you want to use my children to advertise, look elsewhere for your sperm fix.

Ugh.

Those of you who, like me, are besieged with constant comment spam have probably switched to Brad Choate’s wonderful SpamLookup plug-in for Movable Type. I’ve discussed it before.

The problem with SpamLookup is that it uses the MT Activity Log for its log entries. This wouldn’t really be a problem except for the fact that three or four weeks’ worth of blocked spam log entries bloat the log enough that the server chokes trying to display it.

Under previous versions of Movable Type, you could simply go to

http://www.yourblogurl.tld/path/to/yourblog/mt.cgi?__mode=reset_log

and the log would be reset. MT 3.16 introduces some security features that prevent this from working any longer. Thanks to The Girlie Matters (via Google), we have a new method to reset the log.

Brad Choate is aware of the issue it presents and is working on a fix. Until then, at least the log can be reset again.

I was talking with Eric tonight when the subject of HDTV came up.

Will someone please explain the following questions to me?

1. Why is it that there are approximately 100 different HDTV sets under $5000, not a single one of which can actually receive HDTV signals without purchasing an add-on tuner at an additional cost of approximately $200?
2. If I don’t buy a tuner for TV sets falling into the above category, what’s the point of the set being HDTV-capable?
3. Why aren’t any of the various computer monitor-cum-TV gadgets capable of receiving HDTV signals? If anything is capable of handling high resolutions, it’s a computer monitor. Dammit, someone sell me a 30” Cinema Display with integrated HDTV tuner already.

Northwest Airlines has announced that it’s no longer offering free pretzels on domestic flights as part of a cost-saving measure meant to return the airline to profitability.

NWA lost over 450 million dollars last quarter.

Being stingy with pretzels is expected to save two million dollars per year, or half a million per quarter.

Only 457-and-one-half million to go.

Somehow, I don’t think this is going to help at all.

I need to get a shotglass chess set drinking game.

Betcha I can beat Garry Kasparov now!

(via Dave Barry)

Rexona for Men

(via Leander Kahney’s Cult of Mac, though it’s not remotely Mac-related)

In the immortal words of Captain Steven Hiller, “I have got to get me one of these!”

(via Gizmodo)

Two Britons are now in critical condition in the hospital after attempting a mock lightsaber duel with — and this is the fun part — fluorescent light tubes filled with burning gasoline.

Do I really need to give any further details?

Master Yoda says: “Lead to Darwin Awards, the path of stupidity does.”

Red Forman Dumbass Rating:

(Subject to change to Five Dumbasses in the event either of these morons ends up dead.)

The Superficial is reporting Hayden Christensen may be quitting acting in favour of architecture.

Which can only be a good thing, because he’s a god-awful actor!

Granted, George Lucas can’t write dialouge to save his own life, but Hayden was awful in Life as a House too. Good luck with becoming the next Frank Lloyd Wright, buddy.

This month’s award definitely goes to the pilot behind the yoke of this BAC Strikemaster (representative photograph only; I couldn’t find a photo of the accident aircraft) that ran off the runway in Boca Raton.

From the NTSB report, emphasis added:

The takeoff roll commenced and at the calculated rotation speed (70 knots), he applied back pressure to the control column but the elevator control stuck in position. The takeoff roll continued and he performed trim adjustments, and moved the flap selector without any effect. He then aborted the takeoff by applying maximum braking and the speed brakes, and opened the canopy just before coming to rest. The airplane rolled through a fence and came to rest upright.

Rule Number One of takeoffs, and part of every pilot’s standard emergency brief is this:

Engine failure or abnormality prior to rotation — abort takeoff, throttle(s) immediately closed! Brake as required, stop straight ahead.

Do not try to fix the problem.

Do not try to fly the plane using only trim and/or flaps.

Do not pass go.

Do not collect $200.

ABORT THE TAKEOFF IMMEDIATELY BY CLOSING THE THROTTLE(S).

I’ll give 100-to-one odds that the NTSB’s findings in this investigation are “pilot’s failure to promptly abort takeoff. A contributing factor was the gust lock being activated.”

Attention, RSS Feed Publishers:

Stop making every single article in your feeds show up as “new” when the only thing you changed was the text (or presence) of an advertisement in the feed.

I’m looking squarely at you, MacMerc, and everyone at Weblogs, Inc., all of whom are about *thisclose* to getting tossed out of NetNewsWire Lite for good, because I’m really damn tired of having to read the same 15 articles every day when you decide to do a manual ad rotation and call them “new.”

We now return to your irregular and entirely unscheduled blogging.

I heard this on NPR’s “All Things Considered” this afternoon and about drove off the road from laughing so hard. Star Wars Home Health Care Products (requires RealPlayer or WMP, heaven forbid).

CNN’s RSS feed:

PETA accuses lab of punching monkeys

Apparently no one told PETA the scientists were clicking on banner ads, which Mark Gibbs wisely refused to do.

Coming up at 11: video of PETA activists collectively spanking their monkeys. Think of the children!

If the Sanyo DVR-H200 digital video recorder is any good and costs less than $400, I’m throwing out the VCR and never looking back. Not only does it have a 160 GB hard disk (allowing for up to eight straight days of recorded TV), but it can record to DVD-RW and DVD+R, and it can read DVD, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, Audio CD, Video CD, SVCD, MP3, JPEG, and Kodak’s PictureCD formats.

And it looks cool.

(via Gizmodo)

I hesitate to even remotely associate the concept of Creationism “intelligent design” with science, but it seems some folks in Kansas can’t leave well enough alone. Choice quote from the article:

Stephen Meyer, a senior fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which supports intelligent design, said changing the schools’ definition of science would avoid freezing out questions about how life arose and developed on Earth.

The current definition is “not innocuous,” Meyer said. “It’s not neutral. It’s actually taking sides.”

Yeah, Steve, that’s right. It’s taking sides. It’s taking the side of science, which is by definition neutral, rather than the side of one narrow view of theology, which is by definition the opposite of neutral.

Side note: this is not the first time I’ve noted what crackpots the Discovery Institute folks are. “Discovery,” indeed. How about you guys discover a better way to waste public resources?

The upgrade to Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” has been mostly flawless, but there’s one huge annoying problem with Eudora.

Under 10.3, you could type the first couple characters of a menu item and the OS would select that menu item. It worked wonderfully, and was a very logical extension of the ancient (System 7.5-era) behaviour of the OS in a dialog box.

Being a keyboard type, I prefer to avoid the mouse where possible, so when moving messages around in Eudora, I would click the Transfer menu, then type the first couple letters of the mailbox where I wanted to move the message(s), and then press return. Boom goes the dynamite! — my messages would go where I wanted them.

The problem, as the other five Eudora users left in the world may have noticed, is that Eudora uses the “-> ” (dash-greater-than-space) prefix for mailbox names in the Transfer menu, ostensibly to signify to the user that something is going to happen to that message. This is all well and good, and I didn’t mind it at all until Tiger came along.

Tiger’s menu selection via the keyboard now respects (for better or for worse) non-alphanumeric characters in menu items. This means whenever I type some letters, every single mailbox is ignored and the menu selection jumps straight to “New…” or “Other…”, which is something I want approximately once out of every thousand or so transfer operations.

This wouldn’t be a big deal at all except for the fact that <x-eudora-setting:7411> refuses to allow me to set an empty prefix string. To be honest, I don’t care whether or not I can change that string or not. Qualcomm needs to fix it so a little graphical arrow displays there, lets the power user turn it on or off via setting 7411, and dispense with this nonsense of putting typable characters in the menu item ahead of the mailbox name.

Rumour has it the entire Eudora application is being re-written in Cocoa (hopefully for version 7), so perhaps this problem will go away by then. There is nothing that would make me happier right now.

Having noticed this evening that TransparentDock has not (yet) been updated for Tiger, and not wanting to install haxies (such as Cleardock), I discovered that the old hack at ResExcellence for doing transparent docks manually no longer works (rather unsurprisingly, really).

Unfortunately, after thorough perusal of the contents of Dock.app and lengthy consultation with Google, I’ve been unable to find any solution to this problem. Perhaps some of my readers are smarter than myself and could give everyone a few pointers.

I’d really like to see someone write up a thorough description of the various transparency features of TransparentDock. It’s written in AppleScript, but the scripts are run-only and I can’t get at them. (On a side note, I’d also be very interested if someone knew a way to read run-only AppleScripts.) It seems like this ought to be fairly simple to implement, but I must be missing something really obvious.

CNN has a transcript of their interview with Air National Guard Lt. Col. Tim Lehmann, one of the two F-16 pilots who intercepted the Cessna 150 over Washington yesterday.

A DHS advisor (a retired Air Force colonel, I think) made an interesting comment on NPR today, something to the effect of “Catch-all solutions [like evacuating everyone from buildings] aren’t a solution.” That’s pretty much exactly what I was thinking when I first heard about it yesterday. A single-engine Cessna can’t hold enough explosives to be dangerous to more than about one average American house. The real threat from a small single-engine aircraft would be from a biological agent, and in that case, the last thing you want is hundreds or thousands of people running around in the streets.

Another excellent point the advisor made is all the more intriguing in light of Lehmann’s comment:

I’d like to assure your listeners that that airplane would not have penetrated — it would not have hit anything in D.C. And it would have been dropped from the sky before that would have happened.

Yes, dropped from the sky indeed.

On top of what? The thousands of people running around outside in the streets?

Any small aircraft is going to be a whole lot of little pieces of burning shrapnel after being hit by an air-to-air missle. Those pieces aren’t going to hurt a building, but they’d certainly be a significant hazard to people on the ground who happened to be underneath the blast.

It seems as though the emergency response plans need to be re-evaluated a bit, and perhaps altered to include differing degrees of response based on the potential hazard posed by the threatening aircraft. Obviously, a large transport aircraft with full fuel is a much greater hazard to structures and concentrated assemblies of people than a single-engine GA bird. Dispersal and evacuation seems like a prudent step in such a case. But running everyone outside when a potential biological attack is imminent seems incredibly dumb.

How the hell a flight instructor managed to be entirely ignorant of both the ADIZ and the no-fly zone over D.C. is another matter. Memo to the FAA: don’t pull his certificates for violating the ADIZ and no-fly zone. Pull his certificates for being criminally stupid. He gives the rest of us a bad name.

Idiot.

I couldn’t decide which one was worst, so as they say, “We report, you decide.”

Our first candidate is a 25-year-old man who trapped himself inside his pickup truck after losing control, hitting a fire hydrant, bouncing off a parked car, and then impacting a garage. The truck ended up on its side, and the man — who was not wearing a seatbelt, and was drunk — was taken to the hospital for treatment.

Red Forman Dumbass Rating:

Candidates number two through four are the three adults who thought it would be a good idea to take a two-year-old girl with them canoeing. The canoe, which was likely top-heavy and overloaded, capsized in Jordan Lake. This would ordinarily not be any big deal — haven’t we all intentionally tipped a canoe over at summer camp? — except for the following minor details:

• None of the four occupants could swim.
• None of the four occupants was wearing a life jacket.

Someone should bring up the two surviving adults on charges of child endangerment.

Red Forman Dumbass Rating:

Finally, we have numbers five through 17. A student at a Battle Creek middle school brought several ounces of mercury to school and managed to break the container. Key quote from the article:

[S]ome of the students and school employees in the room walked in the mercury, while others touched the substance.

[…]

Ten students and two employees were decontaminated as a precaution. Some of them had the mercury on their legs, while others had it on their arms.

Uhmmmmmm…what part of “DO NOT TOUCH HAPPY FUN LIQUID” did these kids’ parents not teach them when they dropped a mercury-filled thermometer at the age of six? And for adults to think touching mercury is a good idea? Absolutely inexcusable.

Red Forman Dumbass Rating:

It’s been a long night and I’m probably not entirely sobered up yet, but here goes.

Do not mess with the master.

There was a small, erm, “dispute” between two of my friends earlier tonight regarding, well, several things.

To make a very very long story very short, I don’t trust either one of them with any car keys any time in the next six hours or so. So I did a five-minute field job on my buddy’s car so our other friend — who has the keys — couldn’t move it anywhere. Because last time he had the keys, the car showed up the next morning with random dents in it that weren’t there before that.

The starter relay, starter fuse, and fuel pump fuse are in my pants pocket. That car isn’t going ANYWHERE until I say it is.

Like I said.

Do not mess with the master.

That is all.

A 14-year-old Illinois boy has died after catapulting himself through the sunroof of a “stolen” car and hitting overhead power lines. Who knew the Giant Bug Zapper of Doom concept from Locusts would actually work?

Red Forman Dumbass Rating:

(via Jalopnik)