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Wednesday’s (Almost All British) Roundup

– Remember this post, where I talked about how I always seem to miss anniversaries on this site? Well, Monday was the 25th anniversary of the release of The Breakfast Club. Yes, I’m old.

– The BBC has sent more people to the 2010 Olympics than Great Britain sent athletes! For the record, there are 74 BBC employees covering 52 British athletes at the Vancouver games. Whether this is a commentary on the largess of the BBC or the woeful state of British sports is open to interpretation.

– Last week, Professor Phil Jones – the British scientist at the center of the “Climategate” scandal – flat out admitted that there has been no evidence of Global Warming since 1995. It’s interesting (to me) how this has been such a non-event in the American media, yet has been all over the British papers for months now. Admittedly, the scandal involves British researchers, but still… oh wait – this goes against liberal dogma, so of course the American media haven’t reported on it.

– Yesterday was Shrove Tuesday, also known as “Pancake Day” in the rest of the English-speaking world. Similar to Mardi Gras, Pancake Day is a day when you’re supposed to use up all your rich ingredients – like butter, milk and eggs – before Ash Wednesday and Lent kicks in. Throughout England there is a tradition of holding “pancake races” on this day. At least as far back as 1445, people have run through the streets of English towns and villages holding a pan, in which they flipped a pancake as they ran. But not in St. Albans this year. Health and Safety officers (derisively referred to as “‘Elf n’ Safety” by many in the UK) banned running… during a footrace… because people might get hurt. Somehow, this tradition managed to survive at least 565 years without overzealous safety wonks making a mockery of it… but not now. It’s hard to believe that this is the same country that once ruled the largest empire in human history.

– An e. coli vaccine is now being tested on cows in the United States. If successful, the vaccine could reduce the overall presence of e. coli bacteria by 65-75%. And lest you think you’re safe because you’re a vegetarian, remember that recent e. coli outbreaks involved spinach, tomatoes, and green onions. I do not know if the vaccine would cut down on these outbreaks too (because cow manure was used to fertilize the vegetables) or not (because the e. coli came from another source).

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Restore Points on Demand

I like to tinker with my computer. That doesn’t just mean installing all sorts of programs and utilities from all over the web – it also means changing registry settings, occasionally replacing system files, and other “behind the scenes” tweaks.

I’d normally like to use System Restore to create a restore point before tweaking, in case something goes horribly wrong. Unfortunately, Microsoft made it so that doing so requires drilling through several menus. Sometimes I don’t feel like clicking 19 things to create a restore point for something I might not even need, and one day that’s going to bite me in the ass. I found several Visual Basic scripts on the ‘Net that claimed to offer such “on demand” functionality, but every single one of them generated some arcane scripting error that I didn’t feel like tracking down.

So imagine my joy when I found Quick Restore Maker. It’s a tiny executable that generates a restore point with a single click! So you can keep a shortcut to it on your desktop and easily generate a restore point before tweaking away:

quick-restore-maker

Quick Restore Maker is for Windows Vista and Windows 7 and is free.

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R.I.P. Doug Fieger

Doug Fieger, lead singer of The Knack (of “My Sharona” fame) has died. He was 57:

Doug Fieger was made to be a rock star.

With a keen musical ear and an early love of the stage, Fieger was a student at Oak Park’s Clinton Junior High when he started his first professional band — launching the path that would ultimately lead him to the top of the pop charts.

Fieger, best known as the founding vocalist-guitarist of the Knack, died this morning at home in Woodland Hills, Calif., after a six-year battle with cancer. He was 57.

Read more here.

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Sunday’s Random Stuff

– If you watch a lot of movies, you’ve probably noticed Morley cigarettes, a fake brand of smokes closely resembling Marlboro. What you might not know is how many movies and TV shows the fake smokes have appeared in: everything from Beverly Hills, 90210 and Burn Notice to The Twilight Zone and The X-Files. In fact, the earliest known use of “Morleys” was in that 1963 Twilight Zone episode, when William Shatner pulls out a Morley on a plane and begins to light it, only to be stopped by his wife, who points out that the “No Smoking” sign is still on. Check out Wikipedia’s exhaustive list of Morley appearances here.

– Remember the song “Purple People Eater”? It was a #1 hit in 1958 for character actor Sheb Wooley, and the song still appears on compilations of “goofy songs” (think Dr. Demento), children’s albums, and in the Minnesota area (the Minnesota Vikings colors are purple and white, and their defense was called the “Purple People Eaters” from the late 1960s to the late 1970s). But did you know that Wooley is also credited as the voice behind the infamous Wilhelm Scream, a sound effect used in hundreds (if not thousands) of movies and TV shows? Every Star Wars and Indiana Jones film features the Wilhelm Scream at least once, and the scream is also heard in episodes of Battlestar Galactica, Family Guy, Lost, Human Target, Community, CSI: NY, and the films Titanic, There’s Something About Mary, Spider Man, Reservoir Dogs, and more. Who knew?

– The “Havana Brown” breed of cat is also known as the “Swiss Mountain cat”… and it originated in Britain. I don’t get it.

– In 1974, a giant ship ostensibly owned by Howard Hughes headed out into the Pacific Ocean in what was publicly called a “deep sea mining experiment”. What the public didn’t know until later was that the whole thing was funded by the CIA, and the actual goal of the ship was to raise a sunken Soviet sub. Called “Project Azorian”, the mission was a mixed success. It failed to bring up the entire sub as planned, but parts were indeed salvaged (along with the bodies of six Soviet sailors, which the US forces buried at sea with full military honors). Although the project was supposed to be secret, Seymour Hersh of the New York Times and columnist Jack Anderson blew the lid off the (mis)adventure less than a year later. The whole story is back in the news because the CIA has just released an article about the project, which it had published in an internal publication back in 1985. The article seems to agree with the US Navy… who at the time felt that the whole thing was a giant waste of time and money.

– I don’t get this, either:

Gravy Special

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An Anniversary

One thing I hate about having a website is that I often miss big anniversaries. If an upcoming date is 75th anniversary of broadcast TV, or the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, you can bet I’ll find out about it two or three days after the fact, thus missing a chance to commemorate it on my site. Heck, the Steelers win in last year’s Super Bowl made me forget the 30th anniversary of Sid Vicious’ death, something I had been counting down for years!

So this time I won’t forget: today marks the 65th anniversary of the Allies’ bombing of Dresden in World War II.

After the atomic bombing of Japan, the bombing of Dresden is considered one of the Allies’ most controversial actions during the war. Although Dresden was a manufacturing and communications center for Nazi Germany, the Allies didn’t bother bombing the city’s suburbs, where such manufacturing took place. Instead they bombed the city center, allegedly in hopes of disrupting both communications and to cause panic and confusion amongst refugees – something the Brits learned for themselves when the Germans bombed Coventry (contrary to popular belief, Churchill and other British leaders didn’t let Coventry get bombed so as to prevent the Germans from finding out that the Allies had broken their Enigma machines; while the British knew from decrypted Enigma traffic that the German bombers were coming, they had no idea what their target was. Churchill himself thought it was London, not Coventry).

Continue reading “An Anniversary”

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Saturday’s Random Stuff

A lot of this stuff has been building up over the past few days, and much of it isn’t even news:

– English supermarket chain Waitrose recently unveiled a new “super deluxe” brand of toilet paper… that has cashmere in it!

– Contrary to popular belief, Henry VIII didn’t kill all (or even most) of his wives. He famously divorced Katherine of Aragon. He then executed Anne Boleyn on very flimsy grounds. Jane Seymour died shortly after giving birth to his only son. He annulled his marriage to Anne of Cleves, as he found her incredibly ugly. He executed Kathryn Howard (who, unlike Anne, really was having affairs with just about everyone behind his back). He was then survived by Katherine Parr. An easy way to remember the fates of his wives is the rhyme “Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived”.

– Gregorio Iniguez, general director of the Chilean Mint, has been fired after the mint produced thousands of 50 peso coins that had “Republica de Chiie” stamped on them. Misspelling your own country’s name is a pretty big blunder… but what’s more amazing is that it took authorities a year to notice the problem!

Continue reading “Saturday’s Random Stuff”

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Bypassing Web Filters

Many companies use some sort of web filter system to keep employees from visiting “time wasting” sites like Facebook, MySpace, eBay, and more. Such filters can be the bane of existence for many employees, and they are hard to get around. You might have heard of “proxy servers”, which act as a kind of “middleman”: your work computer connects to the proxy server, which then connects to the site you actually want to visit; the proxy then sends the content back to your work computer. Such a setup also allows you to access geographically-restricted content; a British computer user, for example, can connect to a proxy server in the US to access Hulu.com to watch US-only content.

The trouble with proxy servers is that most web filters block them too. But chances are those filters haven’t blocked your own home computer, and setting up your very own proxy server is actually pretty easy. This post over at Lifehacker.com shows you how to do it in a handful of easy steps. Once you have everything up and running, you should be able to connect to your home computer from work and access any site you want!

A REALLY, REALLY IMPORTANT WARNING: Bypassing web filters is a fireable offense at many companies. In fact, the more locked-down your work Internet experience is, the more likely your could be fired for trying to bypass their Internet security measures. Although the IT guys won’t be able to see which sites you visit, they will be able to see multiple connections to your home computer via port 80, so they’ll be able to tell that you’re using a proxy. In this crappy economy, you might not want to lose your job just so you can browse Facebook at the office. You’ve been warned!

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Happy Georgia Day!

GeorgiaHappy Georgia Day!

Today is the 277th birthday of my home state! This date marks the day that English general, philanthropist, and Member of Parliament James Oglethorpe landed at Yamacraw Bluff, in what would soon become the city of Savannah. He arrived on this date with 116 colonists on the ship Anne.

Georgia was initially created as a debtor’s colony, where British people in severe debt could start new lives by creating farms that would grow silk, indigo or rice to be sent for sale in Mother England to satisfy their debts. However, there was a considerable delay between the initial idea of Georgia and the granting of her Royal Charter, so that the philanthropic idea was forgotten. In the end only around two dozen debtor families moved to the new colony. In their stead, early Georgia was populated by disaffected people from all over Europe, including Huguenots from France, Protestants from Salzburg … and soldiers. That’s because one of the other reasons the Crown approved of Georgia was for it to act as a “buffer colony” between the newly prosperous South Carolina and Spanish Florida.

Interestingly, liquor and slave labor were banned in early Georgia. Although the “debtor’s colony” idea was quickly dropped, Oglethorpe and other trustees of the colony nevertheless felt that both liquor and slavery would distract people from their goal of building a new colony. As you might guess, the population of early Georgia didn’t grow very much until these bans were repealed in the late 1740s. Even more interestingly, the importation of slaves saved the colony in more ways than one: not only did it attract wealthy Englishmen who wanted to create South Carolina style plantations, it also required the importation of slaves from what is now Sierra Leone, the Gambia and Angola. These Africans had considerable experience with building dams and earthworks and cultivating rice and indigo. It wasn’t until the Africans arrived that those crops took off in the colony.

You can read a digital scan of Georgia’s original Royal Charter here.

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Don’t Copy That Floppy!

Here’s the classic anti-piracy video Don’t Copy That Floppy, complete with awful 1992-era computer graphics and the cheesy Old School rap of “MC Double Def DP” (who appears to be blissfully unaware of the double entendre that “DP” would obtain in the Internet generation):

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOBroA2NPNY

I’ve seen this a hundred times in my day, and I still laugh out loud every time I see it. Sure, you can make fun of the old computers and cheesy effects and music… but what really makes me giggle is how hard the producers are trying to be “hip”, even though this style of rap went out of fashion in 1985… that, and how silly “copyright protection” comes across in a public service announcement. Sure, we get “don’t beat your kids” or “stay off of drugs”, but “respect the intellectual property rights of copyright holder, yo!” just makes me giggle!