Author Archives: Frank

Home unimprovement

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I love This Old House’s Home Inspection Nightmares.  This has got to be the best one ever.  Yes, that’s a showerhead.  Yes, that’s an electrical control box.  Yes, all that electrical work is rated for indoor use… as in “not waterproof.”  Bonus points are awarded for running the shower line BETWEEN the other two tubes.  Alas, the photo doesn’t show the smoking puddle of goo that was the last person to use the shower.

All I really want to know is, is that little dome thingy a pool filter or a homemade miniature nuclear containment building?  I suspect the latter.

Rules for writing

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An oldie but a goodie:

26 Golden Rules for Writing Well

  1. Don’t abbrev.
  2. Check to see if you any words out.
  3. Be carefully to use adjectives and adverbs correct.
  4. About sentence fragments.
  5. When dangling, don’t use participles.
  6. Don’t use no double negatives.
  7. Each pronoun agrees with their antecedent.
  8. Just between you and I, case is important.
  9. Join clauses good, like a conjunction should.
  10. Don’t use commas, that aren’t necessary.
  11. Its important to use apostrophe’s right.
  12. It’s better not to unnecessarily split an infinitive.
  13. Never leave a transitive verb just lay there without an object.
  14. Only Proper Nouns should be capitalized. also a sentence should begin with a capital letter and end with a full stop
  15. Use hyphens in compound-words, not just in any two-word phrase.
  16. In letters compositions reports and things like that we use commas to keep a string of items apart.
  17. Watch out for irregular verbs that have creeped into our language.
  18. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
  19. Avoid unnecessary redundancy.
  20. A writer mustn’t shift your point of view.
  21. Don’t write a run-on sentence you’ve got to punctuate it.
  22. A preposition isn’t a good thing to end a sentence with.
  23. Avoid cliches like the plague.
  24. 1 final thing is to never start a sentence with a number.
  25. Always check your work for accuracy and completeness.

Get a leg up

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It only works on the Sopranos: (from the San Diego Union-Tribune) (the link will likely expire in a day or two)

Severed legs found this weekend in rural East County are believed to be from a slaying victim whose head, torso and hand were discovered in late February, San Diego police said.

[…]

A local resident found the first leg Saturday afternoon in the unincorporated area about 20 miles east of San Diego. Police discovered the second leg several yards away shortly after 9 a.m. Sunday.

The other body parts were discovered in San Diego. Hawes’ torso was found Feb. 26 in a tributary of the Otay River near Hollister Street. A day later, his head was found by the side of southbound Interstate 5 near 28th Street, and one of his hands was found three miles away on the side of state Route 163.

The only part still missing is the other hand.

Dual Displays

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I have dual video displays on my computers, both home and at work.  For people who constantly switch between two or more applications, it increases productivity by 9 to 50%.  Those aren’t my numbers; they come directly from Microsoft:

Give someone a second monitor, let them use it for while, and then try to take it away. It just isn’t going to happen. They’ll never go back to a mono display. Researchers in the Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment group (VIBE), found that increasing a computer user’s display space made it easier for them to complete their tasks.

[…]

The research study required users to complete several different tasks, switch from one task to another, and remember data. None of the study participants had used multiple monitors before.

The first study revealed that the users’ productivity increased by 9 percent. Further studies showed even greater increases – at times up to 50 percent for tasks such as cutting and pasting. Mary Czerwinski, the VIBE research manager, is excited about her group’s discoveries, asking, “If you’re able to squeeze 10 percent more productivity out, do you know how much money that will save?”

My own observation is that for programming tasks, where the user has an IDE open in one window and the browser open in the other, 50% is a conservative estimate.

Webcams

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I first got interested in webcams back in the early days of the intartubes when I came across the original Africam.  It was simple: a 24-hour live view of a watering hole somewhere in Africa, updated every few minutes.  State of the art, circa 1998 or so.  I passed the link to a couple of people, they passed it to a couple more people, and so on until it died of bandwidth overload a couple of days later.  The original Africam is long gone, and the replacements are far inferior.

But time and progress march on.  Instead of searching for these cams or stumbling across them randomly, Opentopia aggregates hundreds of webcam feeds into one easy-to-use site.  Here are a few of my current favorites:

Note that while all the Opentopia cam pictures are SFW, various idiots think it’s amusing to add rude comments.  So if looking at bad words and/or stupid racist comments would get you into trouble at work, save this for home.

HDTV

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My tax refund showed up last weekend, so it’s time to spend some money.  Some of the cash is already allocated for a new hot water heater, which I’m going to need very soon.  Aside from that, though, I’m considering a high-def TV.  There is a bewildering array of choices, and darn few good sources of information.  Here’s a guide to what’s what in the HDTV world.  They explain the terms and don’t try to sell you anything, which is refreshingly unusual.

Talk about hucksterism in consumer electronics…. I stopped by my local Circuit City and Best Buy stores last night to look and ask some questions.  Talk about high-pressure sales.  Sheesh.  The Best Buy idiot did everything up to and including maligning my masculinity because I didn’t want to buy the piece of crap he was pushing.  The Circuit City guys (yes, plural; at one point I had SIX of them standing around me!) were basically clueless in terms of technical details and features.  One of them flat-out lied to me about the computer input specs, then told me in front of the floor manager that he didn’t. 

I also stopped by Target.  I bought my last TV from them.  They have a small selection if LCD HDTVs,  but all the floor models were showing a low-def off-the-air signal, snow and all, which makes it pretty tough to evaluate the picture quality.  And the department sales rep didn’t know nothin’ about nothin’, and couldn’t have cared less.  It was pretty obvious that he thought I was just some rich clueless yuppie and he didn’t give a rat’s ass what I wanted.

So, it looks like yet another thing I’ll be buying from Amazon.  I wonder if they sell hot water heaters?