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Not in the mood to write…

OK, so I’m still not in the mood to write anything. And with Thanksgiving coming up, I’ll be busy with other stuff any way. So… let’s do the news!!!

As you might have heard by now, the Saudi government has sentenced a rape victim to 200 lashes and six months in jail. Let me repeat: a 19 year-old Saudi girl was gang raped… and now she’s getting 200 lashes and six months in jail. Our “friends” the Saudis explain it thusly: the girl was initially sentenced to 90 lashes for “being in the car of an unrelated male at the time of the rape”, which is a crime in the wonderfully enlightened world of Sharia law. But her sentence was extended to 200 lashes and six months in jail after the victim “attempt[ed] to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media”. Wow! With “friends” like these, who needs enemies?

I’m taking this story with a grain of salt, but, if true, it displays the true sickness of these Islamic nutcases: as you might have hard, former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto returned to her country last month. There have been several attempts on her life since she returned, but the worst was a bomb that killed 170 people. Now reports are coming in that that bomb was strapped to a 1 year-old infant! From The Australian:

Meanwhile, horrifying new details emerged last night of the attempt by suicide bombers to kill Ms Bhutto on her return home from exile last month.

Investigators from Ms Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party said yesterday they believed the bomb, which killed 170 people and left hundreds more wounded, was strapped to a one-year-old child carried by its jihadist father.

They said the suicide bomber tried repeatedly to carry the baby to Ms Bhutto’s vehicle as she drove in a late-night cavalcade through the streets of Karachi.

“At the point where the bombs exploded, Benazir Bhutto herself saw the man with the child and asked him to come closer so that she could hug or kiss the infant,” investigators were reported as saying. “But someone came in between and a guard felt that the man with the child was not behaving normally. So the child was not allowed to come aboard Benazir’s vehicle.”

Ms Bhutto is said to have told investigators she recalls the face of the man who was carrying the infant. She has asked to see recordings made by television news channels to try to identify the man.

Of course, the Pakistan People’s Party has their own axe to grind, so I’m a little bit suspicious of this story. But politicians have been kissing babies for ages, so it’s possible that this did happen. If it did… well, that’s just sick.

Continue reading “Not in the mood to write…”

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Thank you, Nordstrom!

I can’t possibly be the only person disgusted with “Christmas Creep” – the overwhelming tendency of retailers to put out their Christmas decorations earlier and earlier each year.  Well, if you’re like me, you need to shop at Nordstrom:

Nordstrom anti-creep

Thank you, Nordstrom!

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Outlook Maintenance Guide

Microsoft Outlook has gotten a bad rap over the years. It’s a decent program that, as of now, no one has improved on. But millions of people use it on a daily basis. They use Outlook to store their email, organize their phone book, keep on top of pressing tasks, and store all their appointments. In short, Outlook is the electronic version of a personal organizer, and so people tend to lose their minds when something goes wrong with Outlook.

This guide is all about keeping Outlook running smoothly. It won’t help you when Outlook starts misbehaving – the whole point of this post if to keep that from happening in the first place. So if you’re a big Outlook user, read on and take the following advice to heart:

Get Rid Of Any Add-Ons You No Longer Need: There are thousands of “plug-ins” or “add-ons” for Outlook. There are plug-ins that allow you to synchronize Outlook data with your PDA or mobile phone, plug-ins that allow Outlook to download RSS feeds, plug-ins that find and remove duplicate emails, plugs-ins that let you organize mail in different ways that Outlook’s native paradigm, plug-ins that allow you to encrypt emails, plug-ins that send Event Reminders from your Calendar to an email address… the list is almost endless. Some of these plug-ins might cause security holes. Some of them might be poorly written and cause errors or reduce Outlook’s performance. All of them slow Outlook down and make the program use more RAM. So if you haven’t used a particular plug-in in a long time, get rid of it by uninstalling the plug-in via the Add\Remove Programs applet in Control Panel.

Remove Attachments: One of the handiest things about email is that you can attach files to emails. Likewise, one of the most irritating things about email is that you can attach files to emails. It’s great when someone emails you a desperately needed spreadsheet, but it can be annoying when a friend sends you an email with 20MB worth of vacation photos attached. Save the attachments to a folder and delete the emails to reclaim wasted storage space (and, if you’re using PST files, improve your performance). You can organize the email in your Outlook folders by size by right-clicking the “Arranged By:” bar at the top of each folder and choosing “Size”; by default, Outlook will show the largest emails at the top of the list. If you have several folders, you can right-click the main data store folder and select Properties > Folder Size; the box that pops-up will show the the size of all of your Outlook folders on that store, and you’ll be able to quickly find oversized folders and delete the attchments therein. Lastly, if you want to delete an attachment but save the original email, double-click the email to open it, then right-click on the attachment and select “Remove”.

Continue reading “Outlook Maintenance Guide”

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Writer’s Block!!

Yep, I’m still here… and I’ve got a raging case of writer’s block. I have a couple of ideas going back and forth in my mind, though, so hopefully this instance will go away soon. In the meantime, enjoy these sites and stories:

The BBC is reporting that that scientists are on the cusp of reading brainwaves and translating them into speech. It seems that one Eric Ramsay was left paralyzed after an automobile accident eight years ago. Scientists at Boston University have been scanning the part of Eric’s brain that deals with speech, and they feel that they can accurately guess the sounds Eric is thinking of 80% of the time. The next step is to convert those waves into speech. It’s truly an amazing age, folks!

If you’re in IT, you might enjoy the humor at Worse Than Failure. It’s chock full of real life stories of IT disasters. However, a lot of the stories involve stupid programming (complete with code samples), so if you don’t know JavaScript or C++, the humor might be lost on you.

Papa John’s now accepts orders sent via text message! If you already have a papajohns.com account, just enable the SMS ordering option, then select up to 4 “favorite orders”. When you want to order a pizza, just text FAVx (where x s the favorite order number) to 4PAPA. Check out Papa’s SMS FAQ page for more.

Is anyone else put off by the NFL’s campaign to get NFL Network on basic cable networks? I mean, sure… I signed up for their “NFL Action Network” or whatever they call it, mainly because I want the NFL Network on my cable in the worst possible way. At the same time, I almost have to hold my nose while signing up, since the NFL is a monopoly that has an exclusive agreement with Dish Network to deliver the NFL Sunday Ticket. Pot… kettle… black. ESPN columnist Gregg Easterbrook has a great (if lengthy) article about how the Sunday Ticket came to be. Come to find out, it’s even more complex than what I initially thought. The NFL is the last great “television event” there is, and while most TV shows pull in 8-10 million viewers each week, most NFL games get double that. Advertisers pay huge money for the games, since they know that millions of people from every demographic are watching. Local broadcast networks would lose their minds if Sunday Ticket was available on their local cable network, since that’s millions of advertising dollars down the drain. And the last time Sunday Ticket was up for renewal (and could have jumped to cable), the number of cable customers with digital cable was in the single digits. So even if the NFL wanted Sunday Ticket on cable, most cable operators simply didn’t have the bandwidth to support it back then… unlike now. It’s a fascinating read, although as I said, the article does seem to go on and on…

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Introducing galileegateway.com!

Around a month ago, I received an email from a lady in Israel named Eva. Eva had her own WordPress blog, but she was having all kinds of problems with it. We emailed each other back and forth, and I was finally able to get her all set up. In the past week or two, she’s really started cranking out the content, and I’ve gotta tell ya: it’s pretty good! So why not give Eva some love and check out her blog at:

galileegateway.com

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It’s not just me!

Apparently I’m not the only one that’s sick to freakin’ death of those Chevy commercials with John Mellencamp’s “Our Country”. As this article at Newsweek.com notes, sports fans all across America are sick to death of the commercials, and it’s even tricked up to the columnists at ESPN and other sports sites.

Sadly, though, they aren’t going away any time soon. In fact, Chevy plans to keep running the same nine new spots throughout this NFL season. They seem to be convinced that it’s helping truck sales. John Mellencamp likes them too, as it’s given him time in the spotlight for the first time in years. In fact, the only people that seem to dislike them are us poor viewers.

Thank God for the DVR, no?

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Live.com email addresses available!

If you arrived late to the Hotmail party, you probably got stuck with a crazy email address, like jim22576@hotmail.com. If you’d like to try again, you might be interested to know that Microsoft “went live” with their “Windows Live” services a couple of days ago. Part of those services include Windows Live Hotmail, which is a Hotmail account with a much-improved interface. In fact, it’s really close to Microsoft’s Outlook Web Access product… which really kicks ass!

Anyway, as part of the rollout, they’re offering @live.com email addresses. You can’t “upgrade” your existing @hotmail.com account to an @live.com one, but you can always try and see if your name hasn’t been taken yet. And even if it has, you can possibly “move down the list” and become jim101@live.com instead of jim22576@hotmail.com.

Windows Live Hotmail offers 5GB of storage and also has a nifty Contacts Import Wizard if you use Outlook or Outlook Express.

Sign up for a live.com email address by clicking here. For best results, use Internet Explorer to do the sign up; people using Firefox (and even Firefox with the IE Tab extension) are reporting error messages when signing up.

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It drives me crazy…

People that mangle the English language drive me nuts! There are dozens of ways to use grammar incorrectly, but the one that’s been driving me crazy lately is the whole “loose\lose” thing. If you’re one of those people that seems to have trouble with the two, please enjoy this brief refresher course:

“Loose” is the opposite of “tight”. Something that is not tight (such as a screw) is loose. Clothes that are baggy could also be called loose. “Loose” is also a derogatory term for a woman of weak morals, but that’s not really important right now.

(To) “lose” something is to misplace it. You don’t want to lose your wallet or your car keys. And you don’t want your favorite football team to lose on Sunday. You probably did want to lose your virginity as a teenager, but that too is neither here nor there.

Interestingly enough, it seems that most people don’t use the terms interchangeably (like the whole there\their\they’re mess). I rarely see people use “lose” when they mean “loose”, but I often see people using “loose” when they mean “lose”, as in “I hope you didn’t loose your XP install CD – you’re going to need it soon”.

In any case, please do the world a favor and use the terms correctly. Those of us that actually paid attention during grammar lessons would appreciate it!

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What the hell?!?!

Remember the sentence that Lewis Black overheard at the IHOP that almost made his head explode? You know: “if it hadn’t been for that horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college”. Here’s a police report with a similar sentence:

Wacky 911 Call

Wait – what? The guy was drinking liquor in front of the bird… which somehow makes the dog mad? Do I have that right? I ask ‘cos I read the sentence over and over and am still having trouble parsing it.

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Why “Progress Bars” Suck

If you’ve spent any time at all on Internet message boards, you’ve probably seen the same question asked over and over again. On computer message boards, a common question is “Why do the progress bars (meters) in Windows suck so much?” You’ve probably dealt with this yourself: you want to move a file from one hard drive to another on your computer, so you do the drag and drop thing, and Windows’ progress meter appears… “2 minutes remaining”. It then inexplicably jumps up to “38 minutes remaining” for a minute or two, then drops back down to “45 seconds remaining” before jumping back up to “1 minute remaining”. A similar thing sometimes happens when you’re installing software: the progress meter will slowly move up to, say, “38% complete”, and then stay there for a couple of minutes before suddenly jumping up to “75% complete”.

What’s the deal? Well, the snarky answer is that “your computer can’t predict the future”. The longer answer is the same, only slightly more involved.

Let’s say that you have a GPS system in your car. You’re sitting in downtown Charlotte, NC and want to drive to an address in downtown Atlanta, GA. You enter the address into the GPS unit, which immediately gives you an estimated drive time of 3 hours and 25 minutes (which is based the current distance you want to drive divided by 55mph). So you start driving to the address, and the estimated drive time slowly starts ticking down… “3 hours, 15 minutes remaining… 3 hours, 5 minutes remaining… 2 hours, 55 minutes remaining”. As luck would have it, there’s a massive wreck just outside of Greenville, SC. You’re stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic and are doing around 2mph. Suddenly the estimated drive time jumps up to “16 hours, 47 minutes remaining”. As you creep along, the drive time keeps getting longer: “18 hours, 2 minutes”. You finally clear the wreck, and you figure that all the local cops are busy dealing with the accident… so you floor the gas pedal. Once you hit 125mph, the estimated drive time plummets to “45 minutes remaining”. Your road rage subsides after a few minutes, so you lay off the gas and settle in at a more reasonable 70mph. The estimated drive time is now back to a more normal “1 hour, 25 minutes”.

Continue reading “Why “Progress Bars” Suck”