This should undo all the confusion that Grand Theft Auto caused…
According to the California Driver’s Handbook
Right Wrong
Free Credit Report
This from the Federal Trade Commission: (page moved to here)
Your Access to Free Credit Reports
Soon you’ll be able to get your credit report for free. A recent amendment to the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) requires each of the nationwide consumer reporting companies to provide you with a free copy of your credit report, at your request, once every 12 months.
…
Q: How do I order my free report?A: The three nationwide consumer reporting companies have set up one central website, toll-free telephone number, and mailing address through which you can order your free annual report. To order, click on www.annualcreditreport.com, call 877-322-8228, or complete the Annual Credit Report Request Form and mail it to: Annual Credit Report Request Service, P.O. Box 105281, Atlanta, GA 30348-5281. The form is on the back of this brochure; or you can print it from www.ftc.gov/credit. Do not contact the three nationwide consumer reporting companies individually. They are only providing free annual credit reports through www.annualcreditreport.com, 877-322-8228, and Annual Credit Report Request Service, P.O. Box 105281, Atlanta, GA 30348-5281.
You may order your reports from each of the three nationwide consumer reporting companies at the same time, or you can order from only one or two. The law allows you to order one free copy from each of the nationwide consumer reporting companies every 12 months.
I found 1 error on my Experian credit report… I had paid off a loan 3 years ago but they had it listed as being past due. It’ll take 1-2 months to fix. Better to do this kind of thing now than when I want to buy a house or something and time is more important.
update 8-8-05 Experian just got back to me and fixed the error. The loan is now “Paid, Closed”. That was easy. :-)
TGIF: a really good humor mailing list
My good friend Eric puts out a mailer every Friday called TGIF. He’s been doing it off and on for several years now. It’s a wonderful time waster while you’re waiting for 4:45pm to become 5pm on Friday.
Check out the tgifhumor Group on Yahoo
and sign up for the weekly list!
To give you a taste, here’s a snippet from this week’s mailer
PETA: People Eating Tasty Animals: http://mtd.com/tasty/
* * *
Rubber Ducky You¡¦re the One: (sound) http://www.niehs.nih.gov/kids/lyrics/rubberducky.htm
* * *
“In November 2004, Microsoft’s second-in-command Steve Ballmer made some headlines by mentioning that Chairman Bill Gates was getting four million spams per day. At the time, I was dealing with a little spam problem of my own - I was getting around a million spams per day. I found it a little comforting that my problem wasn’t quite as bad as Bill’s. However, a couple of weeks later Ballmer corrected himself, saying he mis-remembered the stat and Gates actually gets four million per year. This means I was getting one hundred times as much spam as Bill Gates. I’ve written a tutorial explaining why I get so much crapmail and how I deal with it.”
Tutorial: http://www.acme.com/mail_filtering
* * *
Happy 4th of July (sound): http://www.jacquielawson.com/viewcard.asp?code=1483260750
* * *
Google’s Mirror elgooG - http://elgoog.rb-hosting.de/index.cgi
* * *
HotHotHot The Nets Coolest Net Shop since 1994! - http://hothothot.com It¡¦s not what you think, shame on you, although you should handle with care.
Housingmaps.com
Wow. 
When I went looking for a newspaper to find an apartment in the Bay Area, I came up extremely short. Newspaper listings were very slim and the ones that were in the paper didn’t look very good. That is when I realized that, in the Bay Area, print is dead.
If you want to find a job, a place to live, a relationship, a couch, most things… you go to Craigslist.
Now, taking this whole inter-web thing one logical step further: www.housingmaps.com
It’s amazing. It’s easy to use. It’s…. obvious. After years of nobody thinking to put all these kinds of elements together, this match is (in hindsight) perfectly obvious and perfectly terrific.
The days of print classifieds for a variety of items are numbered.
Groovy real world Half Life 2
Is 
it live or Memorex?
This guy created some amazing CGI/real-life crossover images. He says, “…and anyone with a camera and a relativly fast computer can make this.”
I almost believe him. It’s still astounding that some guy with a computer and a little drive can make these images, which are more realistic than the best movie special effects from 5 years ago.
He goes on to mention
All you need is:
A digital camera
A reflective sphere (which you see in a few photos) to capture the lighting of the real-life scene which you want to composite your model into.
A small program called HDRShop.
Big program called 3D Studio Max.
and finally you need a good renderer such as VRay.
Then of course you need the tools to get HL2 models into 3dsmax: GFScape, a HL2 Model importer, and a texuture and model converter
(He neglects to mention the approximate $5k price tage of the software, but hey)
Just like a real light saber
From Masterreplicas.com describing their high end light saber replica
Durable yet light chrome plated aluminum body looks and feels like a real lightsaber.
Just like a real one, eh?
AIM Video Firewall issues
From the AOL Instant Messenger site:
If either you, or the person you want to Video IM with are behind a firewall and are having problems getting Video IM to operate, work with your Internet Service Provider, your company’s system administrator or modify your firewall software yourself to open ports 1024 through 5000.
Open ports 1024-5000 inclusive?
Yeah. I think not.
I’ll find another way to do a video chat.
update 5-4-05: Yahoo Messenger’s webcam system is excellent. Terrific UI, excellent implementation. And the rest of the Yahoo Messenger system has a lot of nice bells and whistles without too much annoying advertising.
Interesting Music Service
There are some serious privacy concerns with the MusicMagic Mixer but it looks very interesting nonetheless. (the company gets to see all of the music on your hard drive. Their current privacy statement implies that they keep all that info forever but they’ll never share it with anyone (unless, of course they are under a subpoena))
The web based search-thing looks pretty cool. It’s a “similar music” engine.
Other People’s Inventions: self balancing transportation
Trevor Blackwell built his own balancing scooter (ala Segway). He made some very interesting comments on it’s ridability.
Then he went on to build a balancing unicycle!
This self balancing 2 wheeled electric skateboard is a marvel.
Constant innovation!
Evil Sabotage Plans
WBZ News
Century-old New York City subway gets a computerized facelift
“They’re going to be sending signals via radio waves,” said Councilman Lewis Fidler, a Democrat from Brooklyn. “I don’t want to find out that someone hacks into the system and makes a train disappear and another train rams into it.”
Such a scenario is unlikely, said Tom Sullivan, an independent transit consultant with Transportation Systems Design in Oakland, Calif., who helped design the L-line upgrade.
The data carried on radio waves are encrypted, so only an internal leak could compromise its security, he said. Though it’s possible to jam the radio signal, he said, that would only make the train stop.
So a bad person with a couple (or a couple hundred) $50 jamming radios in the right locations could completely paralyze the NYC subways system. Cool… err.. that’s awful! err… kew1.
Make Backups
You should backup all your data. I know that’s what I’m doing at this moment, after reading these stories of woe on engadget.
I was going to quote all of the horrible stories for you until I realized that it was almost 800 kilobytes of stories. 582 entries in total. A lot of folks apparently used the writing experience as catharsis.
So I’ll just give you a couple of the best ones and you can get the whole thing in this RAR archive.
Check below the cut…
(more…)
Yow! Shredding!
This really freaks me out.
SSI Super Duper Shredder. Shreds all that ails you, from washing machines to 55 gallon steel drums.
Check out a local copy of the video that freaks me out the most.
Jeez…. I might just have nightmares about this thing… So why am I blogging it?!!?
Fuckin Record Industry
This got me really mad and really sad. I think I’ll go steal some music off the internet and then send the bands I actually listen to donations in small, unmarked bills.
Here’s an exurpt, just to get you in a pissy mood.
You have to pay them [ASCAP and BMI] even if you only play music by non-RIAA artists. This because SoundExchange (the non-incorporated subsidiary of the RIAA who collect the fees) is authorized to collect on behalf of all copyright holders, even non-RIAA members. If you want to avoid these fees, you’ll need a waiver from every artist/publisher you play (in other words, it’s impossible.)
Groupware BAD
Since the first time I heard the word “groupware” in…. I think it was ‘91, referring to Lotus Notes, I have wondered what it was supposed to be. Like, in an ideal world where opening up a Notes database didn’t take 2 minutes. Recall that in Notes, each email you received was stored in “The Database”, so just the act of opening 5 emails would take 10 minutes. It sucked.
In a couple of the companies I’ve worked at, I was asked if I could help design a groupware infrastructure to, in pre-dot-bombeze, “optimize knowledge-flow”. My answer every time, partially in response to some careful review, but more out of visceral instinct, was to stay as far away from those slow, poorly written, hard to maintain, poorly supported, unscalable, unchangeable, non-interoperable, did I mention slow, proprietary “high concept” systems as possible. Good old POP3, SMTP, FTP, HTTP, SMB and maybe that new-fangled IMAP were, in my mind the only systems that worked reliably enough to trust a business’ information to. Exchange? Notes? Domino? Expensive poopie-ka-ka in my experience.
(To be fair, my last review was in 2001. Groupware might have changed since then… might have.)
Why am I telling you this? Because JWZ has written a blog entry that talks a lot about groupware that hits the nail right on the head! Thank you JWZ!
(the entry is below the cut for posterity)
(more…)
Holographic Versatile Disc
How about a 1 terabyte CD? I could put all my war3z, movies and music on one disc. kewl.
It’s not science fiction.
From eWeek
…the Tapestry HDS-200R, is expected to hit the market this year. The new version will be a 200GB recordable drive…
The laziest person in the universe
From Jon Udell’s blog… He’s talking about how the Tivo SDK was made available (for you non-geeks, SDK stands for “Software Developers Kit”. It means that normal every-day people will be able to fiddle with the internals of how their Tivo works. He quotes an interview with Arthur van Hoff, an old-sk00l uber-geek:
I have an X10 home lighting system, and I’ve written a Java application that runs on a Linux server in my closet that the TiVo discovers. So I can now control all the lights in my house, and turn on the fountain in the back yard, and stuff like that.
While sitting in his Barkolounger, this guy can control his backyard fountain with his TV remote control (!!)
How cool is that? Errr. How lazy can this guy be? Err….. That’s freaky frickin awsome… errr…
The Gates in NYC
The Gates, Christo’s latest crazy-giant art thing opened today in New York City.
From SignonSanDiego
“It’s a waste of money, but it’s fabulous,” said student Shakana Jayson. “It brings happiness when you look at it.”
Well then, it wasn’t really a waste of money then, was it ;-)
