A student working for us this summer had his xbox die on him while he was home in CA visiting his folks. He opened it up to try and discover what the problem was and found this:
Under the power supply. Too damned funny! His guess is the little bugger crawled in because of the warmth and then electrocuted himself against the power supply. After he scraped it out and took a metal brush to the board the xbox returned to normal. Too funny, he’s lucky it still worked though.
The folks at lockergnome have pulled together an incredibly useful collection of categorized rss links for a ton of the categories of stuff amazon sells. Want to keep an eye on the paperback bestsellers list, or know when a particular computer game is in stock? Just subscribe to the appropriate RSS feed. Kudos to lockergnome for building such a useful index of these things.
I’m mildly obsessed with bargain hunting. I probably spend a half hour to an hour a day digging through various online forums and websites looking for deals on tech equipment. Today I found a new site, techbargains.com that has a great selection of deals and links to stuff. It’s better organized than most of these kinds of sites too. Worth a look if you’re digging after deals all the time like I am.
One positive thing that’s come out of this recent health business – not eating for almost 3 days led me to lose another 5-6 pounds. I got on the scale this morning and was 158. I cannot remember how long it has been since I weighed that much, I think I was around that weight or just over it when I graduated from high school almost 20 years ago. That completely blows my mind. Now to keep it off 😉
The latest in my seemingly endless series of health issues seems to be basically done. Here’s what happened. I woke up Monday morning feeling pretty nauseous but forced myself to eat a normal breakfast. By the time I got to work I was starting to have a bit of a stomach ache but nothing serious. I had to give a brief presentation at our staff meeting and went to get coffee before the meeting. As I started the presentation my stomach was starting to really hurt. After about halfway through I stopped sipping the coffee because I thought maybe it was causing the problem. I soldiered through the presentation but basically couldn’t wait for it to end, by the end of the meeting my stomach was absolutely killing me. I left work shortly after this.
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Out of the blue last night Lisa called me. I haven’t spoken to her since the night we said our goodbyes in (February? January?). Nothing too remarkable about the call really – she had heard I was looking to buy a house and she’s losing her apartment in October and wondering if I would pass the lease on my house on to her if I move out. I will if I actually manage to find a house by October. What’s funny though is this morning I woke up at like 5:30 from a nightmare. In the dream, I woke up to the sound of clanking plumbing noises and ran downstairs to find lisa on a stepladder removing plumbing from the cieling in the bathroom. Scattered around the living room, kitchen and bathroom were most of the houses plumbing in a wet dirty jumbled pile. Lisa was flustered – she climbed down off the ladder sort of apologizing….right as I woke up.
What the hell that meant I have no idea. Too frigging wierd aye?
So…I’m not a praying kind of guy. But my sister’s beloved dog is critically ill. Kirsten is very attached to her and so it follows that she’s pretty upset about it. If you can spare a moment of your day to offer up a positive thought or two for the poor poot, please do.
They’re not sure what’s wrong with the dog. It’s some kind of bacterial infection, possibly (probably?) attacking her heart. Apparantly the dog has a 50/50 shot at making it at this point. She’s only about 7 so hopefully her constitution is still strong enough to help her pull through. I have to admit that I didn’t like the poot when she was a puppy, but she’s mellowed as she’s aged and I like her well enough now. Keep your fingers crossed, if we’re lucky she’ll be giving me cat turd kisses this weekend 😉
(don’t ask)
Check this out. Are you sick of the same endless drivel on your radio? Have you heard the same Aerosmith tune 3 times on 2 different stations during your morning commute? Do you wish you could wander in to the ClearChannel world headquarters and pummel the fuckwit executives responsible for the mess that is commercial radio? This project may appeal to you. There’s a slight ‘loophole’ in FCC regulations about radio broadcasts that allows anyone, without a license, to broadcast FM Radio from their homes, provided it is at .01 watts/200 foot radius restricted. What good is that you ask? Well, if you apply the same mesh network principles that activists are using to provide free internet access over 802.11 networks in urban areas, you can build a radio mesh network from these .01 watt microtransmitters, thus bringing fresh radio to the huddled masses who crave something beyond 24×7 Brittany. And it’s very cheap to do, $40 or so and even less if you’re handy with a soldering iron.
Is this a practical idea? Ha! Still, I love it. Anything that tweaks Clearchannel is ok in my book. Of course if this project achieves anything near minor success you will see the FCC fall all over itself to amend the laws that govern personal transmitters.
It’s Friday so it’s time for a fun and completely useless link. Today we’ve got cool fonts that look like people for your computer. Ever wanted to punctuate a sentence with a superhero throwing a punch for an exclamation point? Now you can 😉
As most of you probably know, the layout of the QWERTYUIOP keyboards 99% of the eastern world uses were designed with the keylayout they have because of a need to keep the original manual typewriters from jamming and not from a usability standpoint. Those of us who are not accomplished touch-typists would probably agree that the layout is not the best. There have been attempts to modernize the design of keyboard, with approaches like the Dvorak layout and novel approaches like the vertical layout and the chording keypad. I’ve investigated most of these at one time or another (ok, aside from the vertical one) and am still interested in a better way to get text into the computer. I found a new one today, the frogpad. The basic premise is similar to the dvorak keyboard – make the layout based on your finger’s proximity to the most frequently used letters in us english, but it also combines aspects of the chording keyboards in that some characters require the press of more than one key.
I’m interested enough in this one to want to try it. The one downside with all of these though is price – since no one buys these solutions in significant numbers, they cost $$$, most of them cost more than $150 and some are as high as $250. Now I’ll confess, I once dropped $150 on an Apple Extended (the old, excellent model) but I don’t want to drop so much cash on a Frogpad without being able to try it first, so I’m stuck with keyboard envy and the hope I run across one of these on someone’s desk. Anyone else using a novel keyboard?
