Archive for the 'Random' Category
If I lost my job at the UW, maybe I’ll look into researching the untapped power of breast motion:
Then one day recently I had an idea. As I rode public transportation to the office, my messenger bag slung uncomfortably across my chest, I thought, “Why not put the girls to work?” Human-powered devices are showing up everywhere, from Rotterdam’s sustainable dance floor to human-powered gyms in Hong Kong. The time seemed perfect—perhaps even overdue!—for a bra that could harness the untapped power of breast motion…
I decided to run the question past some scientists. It turns out that the physics of breast motion have been studied closely for the last two decades by a gamut of researchers, most of them women. LaJean Lawson, a former professor of exercise science at Oregon State University, has studied breast motion since 1985 and now works as a consultant for companies like Nike to develop better sports bra designs. Lawson was enthusiastic about my idea but warned it would be tricky to pull off. You would need the right breast size and the right material, she explained, and the bra itself would have to be cleverly designed. “It’s just a matter of finding the sweet spot, between reducing motion to the point where it’s comfortable but still allowing enough motion to power your iPod,” she said.
I’m sure I’d be very dedicated to the research…
Dinged by a V-string:
Macrida Patterson, 52, alleges that she was hurt last May by a defective “low-rise v-string” from the Victoria’s Secret “Sexy Little Thing” line, according to a lawsuit filed last week in Los Angeles Superior Court. A copy of her June 9 complaint, which does not specify monetary damages, can be found below. Patterson’s lawyer, Jason Buccat, told TSG that a “design problem” caused the decorative piece to come loose and strike Patterson in the eye, causing damage to her cornea.
What was she doing to the panties to cause the “decorative piece” to shoot off of the panties and into her eye?
I’ve started posting on Twitter as an experiment. Wonder if I’ll keep it up? The TwitterFox extension does make it very easy to post and receive other’s tweets.
I only have two followers — I have no idea who either of them are and since they are following tens of thousands of others I don’t really care.
So today at work, on the Techsupport list there was a long drawn out discussion about Calendars and MS Exchange (largely complaints about cost). Near the end of the thread, the MSCA team’s comparison of the features available to the various clients was included. I haven’t done any confirmation of their findings (largely because I have no access to do so and they are theoretically the local experts), but one of the identified differences with the (non IE) Web Client that jumped out at me as noteworthy:
No weekly or monthly calendar view
WHAT!?!?! How do you have a web-calendar product that can’t produce weekly or monthly views of your calendar? There are hundreds of free web calendaring projects and ALL of them have weekly and monthly views.
The entire Outlook Web Access team should hang their heads in shame for being unable to provide the most basic of features that twelve year olds with no development experience are capable of producing.
Currently, we use Oracle Calendar which is a mediocre product, but it does have Windows, Mac, and Linux clients in addition to a web client — and that web client (which pretty much blows) seems to be vastly superior to OWA. Originally, I didn’t care too much that I was going to be forced to use Exchange for calendaring because Oracle Calendar was not too useful, but facing a massive downgrade in functionality I’m none to happy.
I don’t have to use the product (yet) but its inferior vacation messaging is extremely annoying. Today I send a planned outage notice to our internal notice maillist and received two vacation emails from Exchange users that are out of the office — ARGH. Vacation mailers should not notify the sender when the on vacation person is not in the list of recipients. The University of Washington’s Email Delivery Manager (EDM) has had this feature for YEARS. In addition, EDM adds a unique header that signifies that the vacation notice was sent by the vacation program. And one more thing: Why the hell are the vacation notices sent as base64 encoded text/plain and text/html! How about saving everyone the trouble and just send the text without the encoding? Stupid bloated annoying crap. These are small trivial issues that should be able to be resolved with about 2 hours of development time — including unit tests and documentation.
From Gizmo:
Everybody always talks about the booth babes at CES: models hired to draw nerds in with skimpy outfits and heads full of air. But who cares about them? If you want to see girls in skimpy outfits, there are plenty of places other than CES to find them. We’re more into the non-booth-babe babes of CES, the women who are here who actually know about technology and are here to, you know, work. They’re the beautiful women of PR and tech journalism who are a whole lot more than just a pretty face, and we’d take them over some bikini-clad airhead any day of the week. Videographer Richard Blakeley and noted letch Nick McGlynn went out and snapped some pics of some of the real babes of CES.
via instapundit
Wow. Eyeliner is really in fashion. Just walking along the Ave and 95+% of the college girls have noticeable eyeliner — and about half of them seem to have an entire pencil (bottle or whatever) of liner on (in addition to eyeshadow). Anyone know why raccoon eyes are back in style?
So this weekend we’re making the final push to finish the electrical work on the garage. It was slow going in the early afternoon we finished with one exception. It was very satisfying when we were testing the circuits and everything worked. That one final bit is the exterior lights, which have been a pain in the ass. At about 4PM we got back from our 2nd trip to buy parts (the third this weekend), with a possible solution. Of course with our work nearly complete something had to intervene.
To complete a bit of work I went down into my basement — It was then that the hippies attacked. I’m not sure what they were planning to do in the basement — drug induced orgy, drum circle, or just looking for something to sate their munchies. The fight was fast and furious, they were armed with with a wide assortment of musical instruments and drug paraphernalia while I was armed only with my tool belt of electrical equipment and a keen understanding of physics. The first went down quickly with a handful of yellow wire nuts he ran away screaming about bees; and the second a handful of staples. I then pulled my 25′ measuring tape to use like a weighted string and was able to take out two more (one armed with a bong, the other a before a hippie armed with a guitar was able to strip it from me, but when I smashed a hole in the guitar with my hammer he fell to the ground crying.
All that remained were the two female hippies: the first wielded a tambourine; and the second a bad acid trip made her freak-out. The tripping hippie went berserk slashing at me with filthy raged finger nails. I was just barely able to deflect her first frantic attacks with my needle-nose and thick pliers, but she was able to knock both from my grip. I then flung a pair of screwdrivers at her, but she was able to dodge the missiles. Running low on tools, I was getting desperate and sent my new circuit tester at her head. The black and red body with flopping probes hit her in between the eyes and sent her into
Unfortunately, I was distracted with the first female hippie, the second chucked her tambourine at me. The projectile hit me directly in the right eye. My glasses prevented the tambourine from damaging my eye, but the glasses where forced back violently and cutting me just under the eye brow. The flowing blood and sudden blow blinded my right eye. I staggered back in shock and pain trying to protect my eye and determine the damage. They took the opportunity to make their escape.
Jim (our neighbor) drove me to (and later picked me up from) Group Health’s Urgent Care where after 2.25, I was discharged with three stitches and a slightly blurry right eye. I would take a picture to document the injury but Aly took the camera with her to Orlando (work thing). So Adam, I’m sorry I didn’t make it to tonight’s Ritual Pumpkin Sacrifice. But at least I’ll have cool scar over my eye from a hippie’s tambourine — and not from a chuck of wood flung from my chop saw that ricocheted into my eye — it was hippies.
We finished the siding for the garage, we still need to do the brick facade in the front and some detail work on the “detail” above the garage doors, but at least we’re done with the hardiboard (which isn’t the most fun material to work with). But that was Saturday morning. The rest of the weekend I:
1) Cleaned the bathroom
2) Fully upgraded my MythTV system: We’re now on 0.20.2 (the backends are Mythbuntu and the frontend is still Gentoo) and I also added the PVR 350 that was sitting idle so we have 5 active tuners. I’m also thinking of getting an HDHomerun to add 2 HD tuners, which would be nice for several of the shows we record (Heroes…).
3) Did the laundry
4) Cleaned and organized the basements — well made a good start at it…
I feel quite good about what I got done.
So the garage work was light this weekend, neither the windows or siding had arrived. Instead of working on the garage on Saturday, I performed a motherboard transplant on Adam’s Macbook. This involved:
1) Taking apart his Sister’s Laptop to get its motherboard, which requires that the entire laptop be disassembled. This was pretty difficult since laptops aren’t really designed to be easily serviceable and Macs are at least 10x harder to work on than other brands.
2) Taking apart Adam’s laptop and removing its motherboard
3) Installing the new motherboard and reassembling the laptop — It is a lot harder to follow teardown instructions in reverse that you would imagine.
4) Making sure the laptop worked.
After 7+ hours, I only half heartedly did #4. I powered the Macbook on and checked to ensure that sound, the keyboard, and the touchpad worked and then powered it down. Thank god that’s over.
Later Saturday, I tried to update my myth boxes. Using an unused hardrive, I tried to install Mythbuntu on my backend because it looked like a cool distribution and I’m not really happy with Mythdora. Unfortunately, my attempts to install 7.10a4 were a complete failure — the install kept barfing. I see that Mythdora now has a script that uses XMLTV and should work with my install of version 3.2. This would allow me to update my myth install later and get the scheduling data for next week, without having to update Myth.
Sunday, we finished papering the exterior of the garage and installed the side doors. After that I spent the afternoon starting to excavate the area around the door to prepare to put in a small landing just outside the door, and level the ground near the garage. The area wasn’t too large, but the soil has a ton of clay (including one massive chunk I had to break apart with a maul) and I didn’t want to damage the new door or tar paper on the sheathing. I also had to transplant the rosemary and hens n’ chicks in the concrete retaining wall between us and the house to the East. Phil (our GC) bought the house and is fixing it up, which includes taking down the concrete block wall that is falling and rebuilding a section of the retaining wall that is bulging out.
Monday, I was fairly ineffective, though I did have to compose an new release of C&C’s version of RT for distribution to the eval server.