Pat Tillman
Yeah, I’m like a year behind on this but jeez doesn’t this make for a PR credibility liability for The Pentagon.
The coldest winter I ever spent
Archive for 2005
Yeah, I’m like a year behind on this but jeez doesn’t this make for a PR credibility liability for The Pentagon.
I had only gone a few times during my Boston years but places such as this are important cultural and personal institutions. I certainly hope that there is follow through to the promise on their website
ManRay will be reopening shortly, at a new location. Check the website for update.
I haven’t followed the Boston scene in a while but when I last left our galant heros, they were slowly losing the battle to Puritanical forces.
[Insert image of Mel Gibson tied down on his back in front of a throng of onlookers]
“FREETRADE!”
I put a new set of random images in the upper right corner of the blog. Click on an image to make it larger. You can view them all here (sorry about the poor interface, but hey). Most of the images on the site are shrunk-down versions. Contact me if you want a full-size version of anything. (If I don’t know you, I may or may not oblige)
Friday the 22nd – Wait most of the day for and then receive the bulk of my stuff via UPS directly to my storage space.
Saturday and Sunday the 23rd and 24th – take a welding class at The Crucible (the class ended up being not as educational as I had hoped)
Tuesday the 26th – Start contracting for Wavexpress.
Thursday the 28th – Help a friend of Vixen’s build an Art Car for Burning Man.
Friday the 29th – Meet Bean’s friend Cate. Help her sign-up for the San Francisco Marathon on Sunday. have a great lunch with her overlooking the ferry (all excepting the part where she nearly choked to death… quite a memorable start to our friendship!). Argue with a housemate who firmly believes that newspaper, paper bags, and white paper goes in the compost bin. walk to the Red Poppy Art House just a few blocks away and hear a Spanish guitar duet.
Saturday the 30th – Fill out the forms to get health insurance in California: it is going to cost 70% less than in New Jersey. I could have paid a mere 50% less and gotten almost exactly the same health plan as in New Jersey. See The Incredibles with Vixen and have an all-around very good evening.
Sunday the 31st – Maybe I will go see the San Francisco Marathon, or maybe The 2nd Annual Burning Man pARTiciPARADE. Oh my, I see that the marathon and the pARTiciPARADE are separated by only 3 blocks. I certainly hope that some planning has gone into this!
I certainly am keeping busy!
More Arcs ‘n Sparks including the NEW record holder for the world’s biggest Jacob’s Ladder.
Thanks to the crew on JWZ’s blog for an amazing show.
Russian spammer murdered
John Leyden, The Register 2005-07-26
Notorious Russian spammer Vardan Kushnir was found bludgeoned to death in his Moscow apartment on Sunday. He was killed by repeated blows to the head, Russian news agency Interfax reports…
I’m moving my Rants over from it’s old home on my site into my blog. I’ll release them gradually, offering time for comments.
You can tell it’s a rant by it being in the Rants Category.
Although these rants appeared before my WordPress blog started, I’m dating them appropriately. So for the time being, you’ll find all my Rants in a pile as the very oldest blog entries. I have not changed the text from the original. I may feel differently now but I haven’t updated them yet… all in the fullness of time…
Don’t take these rants too seriously but don’t dismiss them either. Rants are, by their nature, usually a topic for (heated) debate.
R?nt:
noun:
– Violent or extravagant speech or writing.
– A speech or piece of writing that incites anger or violence
– (Chiefly British) Wild or uproarious merriment
verb:
– To speak in a loud, pompous, or prolonged manner
Cordless phones are a huge disposable industry. How many cordless phones have you owned in the past 10 years? A good phone that is made to last is hard to find.
For corded phones, you lose a lot of credibility with me if you don’t have at least one corded phone in your house… they are reliable as anything. I’ve had the same 2 corded phones for 10 years+ I’ve lost track; they don’t break.
First, more megahertz doesn’t equal better phone. That is a STUPID idea that people apparently willingly buy into. That’s like saying you’ll get better reception on a radio station at 107.9 than a similar station at 88.1. To use another analogy, it’s like saying that a Miata will get you across town faster than Cadillac during rush hour. Additionally, every 5.8 Ghz phone I’ve seen so far isn’t really a 5.8 Ghz phone; it’s 5.8 Ghz from the base to the handset and either 2.4 Ghz or 900 Mhz from the handset back to the base. This means you get the worst of both worlds; each of these technologies has certain problems with reception… maybe it’s trouble going through concrete walls or bouncing off a refrigerator. By using both technologies in one phone, you’re guaranteed to have more trouble.
Excellent phone: Uniden Digital Spread Spectrum 900Mhz phone with answering machine model exs9800. This phone was a new model in about 1999. Excellent and adjustable handset speaker sound quality, people tell me they hear me perfectly, good heft to the handset (I like very much that it feels like a “real” phone in my hands, I’ll save the ity bity phone for when I want to put it in my pocket on the road), digital spread spectrum keeps radio snoops out as well as the best encryption, excellent sounding answering machine, easy to use answering machine (big, simple buttons et all), excellent range in a concrete and steel high-rise building.
Crap phone (that masquerades as an excellent phone): Olympia / Wave Industries OL2400 2.4 Ghz phone Pluses: stylish looking, good interface to a lot of features. Minuses: hard to hold with your shoulder, hard to hold handset speaker to your ear (the speaker only pushes sound out of a tiny opening so you must place it precisely or not hear your party, only moderate speaker sound quality, only moderate microphone, the case creaks loudly directly into your ear as you hold it up to your ear and move about (this drove me INSANE), received some interference in the form of lower sound quality and occasional pops when within 10′ of my 2.4 Ghz wireless network router.
Good phone: I only used this phone for a few weeks before moving away from it but it might qualify as an “excellent phone” Radio Shack 43-3570 2.4 Ghz Expandable Cordless Telephone System. First, it was less expensive than many of the $200 double handset phones I’ve found. $200 for a phone?!?!?! Good interface, excellent sound quality, expandable to 4 phones in $40 handset increments, useful “voicemail waiting” blinky light, though when I hold the Radio Shack phone closer than 6 feet to my laptop running wifi (IE, sitting at the computer while on the phone), the wifi bandwidth suffers a bit and the phone crackles a bit for about 15 seconds (I assume the phone is switching channels or something). It’s kind of annoying. It would take getting a 900MHz phone to fix that issue since wifi is 2.4 GHz. I tried switching wifi channels to no avail. It has enough heft to hold it comfortably. And it has this nifty feature where the phones can work as walkie talkies without the base being nearby. I haven’t given it a real-world test but it sounds neat enough.
I have so far purchased (and returned) 2 CRAP double handset 5.8 Ghz phones. The most amazingly stupid problem I had with it was that you could only have 1 handset off the hook at a time. I’ve spoken about this before.
Ok, enough ranting about phones.
I clicked on one of those stupid SPUR-M spam emails. The ingredients are claimed to be:
Each tablet contains:
Salabmisri 130mg, Kokilaksha 64mg, Vanya Kahu 32mg, Kapikachchhu 32mg, Suvarnavang 32mg
Extracts:
Vriddadaru 64mg, Gokshura 64mg, Jeevanti 64mg, Shaileyam 32mg
Since I had never heard of these ingredients, I googled for them. I was suprised (and impressed) to find 6,400 google references for Salabmisri. Then I checked on Kokilaksha and again found 6,400 references. It seems that every ingredient has just about exactly 6,400 references. And they all say exactly the same thing. Google went so far as to offer me only 30 unique results out of the 6,400 hits.
Jeez, what a job, going to all manner of web sites and pushing your shit on them all day.
PS. (emphasis mine)
FDA Disclaimer:
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration (although our pills are produced in state of the art pharmicitual laboratories, using the latest technology, fully in complient with stringent WHO standards). This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
update 9-23-05 The page you are looking at is ranked as the number 1 site for “Kapikachchhu” in the world in Google. That’s pretty funny.