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Packaged Sandwiches: US vs. UK

In the US, packaged sandwiches – and by this, I specifically mean those that come in the triangular boxes – are the lowest form of cuisine there is. People typically only eat them if there are no other food options. It’s the kind of thing you’d eat if you’re stuck in an airport at 4am and all the restaurants are closed, or if your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, the nearest diner is 50 miles away, and packaged sandwiches are all the service station has to eat.

The sandwiches always seem half stale, are thin on the ingredients, and usually only come in three or four flavors: ham and cheese, baloney and cheese, tuna or chicken salad (and maybe, if you’re in the South, pimento cheese). Honestly, the only people I’ve seen that eat these poor little sandwiches on a regular basis are construction workers and people on the go all the time, like messengers or delivery people. I’m 37 years-old, and it’s always been this way here in the US, at least in my lifetime.

In the UK, on the other hand, people seem to eat these sandwiches all the time. And why not? They usually taste pretty fresh, and they come in a freakin’ galaxy of flavors. Here’s a short list of just a few of the flavors offered by Marks & Spencer, a single British retailer:

Aromatic Duck, B.L.T., British Ham & Cheddar, Chicken & Bacon, Chicken & Balsamic Roasted Tomatoes, Chicken & Stuffing, Chicken & Sweetcorn, Chicken, Avocado & Bacon, Coronation Chicken, Crayfish & Rocket, Egg & Bacon, King Prawn & Bacon Caesar, Poached Salmon, Red Salmon & Cucumber, Roast Beef & Horseradish, Sausage & Ketchup, Seafood Cocktail, Smoked Salmon & Cream Cheese

I can’t speak for the rest of the UK, but in London and Bath you can buy sandwiches just like these almost anywhere. Drug stores (chemists) sell them. Convenience stores (newsagents) sell them. Many department stores (like the aforementioned Marks & Spencer) sell them. And almost any time of the day, you can look around and see someone eating one of these sandwiches.

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R.I.P. Don LaFontaine

Dammit – would people stop dying today?

Voiceover actor extraordinaire Don LaFontaine – who lent his voice to thousands of movie trailers, and even turned “In a world…” into a catchphrase – died today at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center from “complications in the treatment of an ongoing illness”. He was 68.

Read his obit at Yahoo! here.

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RFID and Mythbusters

You’re probably familiar with Mythbusters, a show on the Discovery Channel that tries to debunk urban legends and other myths using scientific experiments. Well, it seems that the show’s producers wanted to do a piece on RFID, the tiny, controversial microchips that are increasingly coming into use on credit cards, passports and other items. According to Mythbusters’ Adam Savage, the show was ready to expose “the weak security behind most RFID implementations but was shut down by lawyers from ‘American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else… [who] absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode'”.

Check out his comments about it on YouTube:

Scary… but why can’t the credit card companies simply take the money they’re giving to their lawyers and give it to their engineers instead, so that they could actually, you know… fix the problem?

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R.I.P. Jerry Reed

Jerry Reed, country music and film star and an Atlanta native, has passed away at the age of 71.

Reed, a talented guitarist, was best known for his movie roles in the Smokey and the Bandit films and Gator, as well his country music hits like “East Bound and Down” and “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot”.

Yahoo! reports that the star died of “complications from emphysema”.

Goodbye, Snowman! You’ll be missed!

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REVISITED: Weave On Your Own Server

Weave is an extension for Firefox that allows you to back up and synchronize your bookmarks, open tabs, passwords and form entries across multiple computers. It’s a nifty little plug-in that takes up the slack for the much loved (and dearly departed) Google Browser Sync. Unfortunately, the Weave extension and service are in beta testing mode, and the backend servers that Mozilla uses to make Weave work are usually overwhelmed, making synchronization as slow as molasses. To make matters worse, the Mozilla servers are frequently taken offline for various reasons, so not only is synching slow, it doesn’t even work much of the time.

In this post from a couple of weeks ago, I linked to an article that showed you how to set up Weave on any WebDAV enabled server. Unfortunately, I was never able to get this working on this very server; apparently WordPress and WebDAV don’t play well together, and I was never able to find the Apache settings I needed to tweak to get it to work.

However, I recently came across this “easy as pie” method for setting up Weave using the free “online disk” service MyDisk.se:

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Ricardo Colclough: Oooooops!

Former Pittsburgh Steeler Ricardo Colclough was arrested for DUI here in Charlotte at 2:35am Saturday morning.

Colclough, who won a Super Bowl ring as part of the 2005 Steeler team, was released by Pittsburgh in 2007 after playing three games. He was then picked up by the Cleveland Browns, who kept him for the rest of the 2007-2008 season. Released by the Browns, Colclough came to Charlotte, where he seemed to be assured a spot as a backup cornerback and kick returner for the Panthers.

Unfortunately, the arrest couldn’t have come at a worse time for Colclough, coming on the very weekend when all NFL teams have to trim their rosters from 76 to 53 players. The Panthers have apparently released Colclough, and mainly because of the DUI. Interestingly, the arrest came less than a day after Colclough recovered a fumble in a preseason game against… the Pittsburgh Steelers. Perhaps he was out partying with old friends? Couldn’t someone have picked up the tab for a taxi?

If you’re bored today, why not head over to this Mecklenburg County website and look up his arrest record, complete with the mug shot shown above. You can search using his name, or PID #: 0000364673  JID #: 08-069265

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COOL APP: Folder Guide

If you’re like me, you spend an awful lot of time moving back and forth between a certain group of folders in Windows Explorer. I spend a lot of time in my “Music” and “Video” folders, in addition to server shares and temporary “download folders”. Going back and forth between them can be a pain, and that’s why I just love this new program I found called Folder Guide:

You simply install the Folder Guide software, then right-click on any whitespace in a Windows Explorer window. Choose the “Folder Guide” option and then choose “Settings”. From there, you can choose any folder on your computer (and an alias for it) to add to the Explorer context menu. Once you’ve added a few folders, all you need to do is right-click on a whitepace and choose Folder Guide > FOLDER to switch directly to the folder alias in question.

If you think that Folder Guide works a lot like the “Save Image in Folder” extension for Firefox, you’d be correct. Moving from one folder to another is as easy as pie with Folder Guide. Best of all, the program is free and doesn’t have a tray icon. In fact, Folder Guide only runs as a separate EXE file when you have its “Settings” window open.

I’ve been using Folder Guide for almost a week now and I love it! I especially love that it works within the “Open\Save” dialog box too… just right-click a whitespace in the dialog box and choose your folder with FolderGuide, then save the file just where you want it!

Read more about it (or download it) here.

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Firefox Extensions Revisited

Just over a year ago, I wrote this post, which talks about some of my favorite Firefox extensions (plug-ins). A year has passed and Firefox 3 has come out, so let’s take another look at some of my favorite extensions:

AdBlock Plus – My all-time absolute favorite extension, AdBlock Plus blocks 99% of the ads you’d see in your web browser. Unlike a lot of other ad blockers, AdBlock also re-renders the page without any kind of “placeholders” for the ads, so all you get is the content you want. It also has an automatic list update feature, which keeps new ads at bay. I’ve gotten so used to this extension over the years that it’s jarring to use a browser that doesn’t have AdBlock.

Save [Thing] In Folder – These are the handiest Firefox extensions ever!  There are two versions of this extension, “Save Image In Folder” and “Save Link In Folder”. Both work the same way, but on different objects. For example, you normally save image files in Firefox by right-clicking an image and choosing “Save Image”, then selecting a folder using the standard Open\Save box. With “Save Image In Folder”, you choose which folder(s) you want to save your pictures in. You then give each folder an alias, like “Default”, “Data Drive” and “Server”. When you see an image you want to save, simply right-click the image and choose Save Image In Folder > Default or Save Image In Folder > Server to save the picture. Save Link In Folder works the same way, but with hyperlinks. You simply right-click a link and choose Save Link In Folder > Desktop or Save Link in Folder > Server to save a linked file. It’s so much faster than the default way of doing things that I can’t believe that this isn’t the default way of saving files in Firefox!

LinkAlert – Firefox (still) doesn’t play nicely with PDF files. Clicking on a PDF link can slow Firefox down to a crawl. Thankfully, this handy little extension changes the cursor in Firefox when you hover over a certain type of hyperlink. Although it was originally created solely to warn you about PDF links, LinkAlert has been updated to include all kinds of icons, such as icons for music, image, compressed and script files. It’s not a vital plug-in, but it sure is nice.

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It’s Finally Happened!

How bad are things in the airline industry? So bad the regional Canadian airline Jazz has decided to ditch life vests as a cost-saving move. Jazz can get away with it because Canadian regulations say that seat cushions are sufficient if the planes stay within 50 miles of the shore.

Jazz spokeswhore Manon Stuart said: “We used to carry both the flotation device, which is the seat cushion, as well as life vests. The nature of our operations doesn’t require that we carry both”. But Newfoundland politician Woody French disagrees: “They are going to save about 50 pounds [per flight]. Taking off 50 pounds is not going to make a hell of a lot of difference to the fuel consumption”. Mr French has been trying to get the Canadian parliament to pass a “passenger’s bill of rights” for beleaguered travelers in our neighbor to the north.

I can’t say that I disagree with him on this one. I just hope the American carriers don’t hear about this. The next thing you know, they’ll be taking out the oxygen tanks too!

Read the sad, sad tale here.