Crumbs In My Keyboard

Famous Last Words

2010-06-20T04:50:01-07:00

John

Little-known government service

2010-06-20T03:12:11-07:00

Snohomish County runs a free recycling program for household hazmat in South Everett. They take items such as old motor oil, bug spray, old cans of shellac and stain, etc. So people aren't tempted to try to sneak it into the regular trash stream, I guess.

But they don't actually KISS it. At least, I didn't see anyone kissing it. Check with your county officials, maybe they have a similar program.

Good Advice: Expectations

2010-06-16T13:05:23-07:00

Going through the File Awhile (then promote!) pile, I found I had written down this bit of good advice from somewhere:

"Never desire anything you do not expect,

and never expect anything you do not desire."

Cast your facilities to the wind

2010-06-03T12:52:12-07:00

The "Muzak" that I get when I call certain work numbers at my night job is kind of out of date. Last time I called it was playing "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" (The Peanuts theme). It made me crave Dolly Madison cupcakes.

No Geocaching fun today

2010-06-02T13:49:45-07:00

We were going to try finding a geocache or two today, but we seem to have done all the good Geocaches around here. We have established a few rules to prevent disappointment...

No Micro-caches (What fun is a cache with no "prize"? And I can't leave a "round tuit" in those)
Nothing over 20 miles or so round trip unless we were going that way or "Sunday driving"
Nothing that hasn't been found by someone else recently; I hear that some clowns have been purposely stealing caches in the name of "saving the enviroment". I guess they don't realize that Geocachers often remove trash from the trails. I think they care more about being jerks than the environment. They will probably get bored with that soon.
We don't do "puzzle caches" where you have to like add President Taft's shoe size and hat size, multiply it by the number of letters in the street name and divide by 3, to get the last part of the coordinates. Those cannot be properly imported into a goecache program, plus they give me a headache.

Guess I will have to resort to household chores {sigh}

Now I wunna collect matchbooks.

2010-05-31T04:29:07-07:00

AWESOME 1957 Book Matches, including “Alcoholics Unanimous” and “Infernal Revenue Service”! I was born too late, now gotta live in a P.C. world – You can’t even smoke inside a bar in this state. I like to keep my lungs deteriorating at the same rate as my liver, thank you very much. See them at The Tiki Lounge

Android slash and burn

2010-05-29T09:12:14-07:00

It's a constant battle to keep from overloading my Android with applications. This morning I deleted the following...

3Banana (note app) - I use Evernote for that.
Astro (file manager) - Not sure what use this is. Seems to put all the stuff on the phone in folders. So?
Cartman Soundboard - My coworkers are sick of this.
Epic Fails - Sadly, I don't need an app for that.
Papaya Farm - I have no time to tend Papayas. Furthermore, note to Facebook friends: I don't need any cows or tractors. I have no aspirations to farm, Green Acres reruns scarred me for life.
Sex Positions - The stick figures and animation was confusing and umm, uninspiring. Some of them look sort of dangerous anyway.
The Great Land Grab - Another GPS game, this one is too complicated and not enough participants around here.

So there's room for seven more applications. Every once in a while I find a keeper (Like the addictive game Wordup!) So I gotta keep the lesser stuff out of there.

iDailyDiary first impression

2010-05-28T18:01:29-07:00

ALWAYS TRYING SOMETHING NEW: Last night I downloaded the free tabbed diary program, iDailyDiary, from splinterware.com - Of course there's a paid version, but I'm still figuring out the bells and whistles on the free version.

One thing that's nice, there are lots of options for exporting a blog post. This post is being sent as HTML with CSS, it should come out with a lemonchiffon paragraph background, per this expiriment. spellchick is in the paid version, sad to say for such an essential element. It's really handy for keeping track of my pointless projects and the important stuff too. I'll post again if I get the free version, don't want to pay $30 for it, hoping there will be a sale.

P.S. I guess it will be easier to just copy and paster to my blog software... DUH

Flat screen TV Screen sizes are smaller!

2010-05-09T12:03:20-07:00

Most people probably already knew, but I'm sort of dense sometimes - I was googling to determine the cost per square inch of a TV I bought, and ran across this chart at ScreenMath.com:

Old Screen Size (Diag., Inches)	Screen Height	HDTV Screen Size (Diag.)
21	12.6	26
27	16.2	33
29	17.4	35
31	18.6	38
32	19.2	39
34	20.4	42
36	21.6	44
40	24.0	49
42	25.2	51
50	30.0	61
55	33.0	67
60	36.0	73

Above: If your old TV has a 34-inch screen, for older programs like I Love Lucy, Seinfeld etc. to be the SAME SIZE on your new HDTV, the new TV should have a 42-inch screen.

What the hell are they watching here? Anyway, after reading an article at NiceTaco.com, of all places, which goes into great detail about screen aspect ratios, Pythagorean Theorem, and why Jennifer Aniston looks fat on some TV sets, I finally concluded that comparing the screens between old and new TV's is an apples and oranges thing.

BUT they DID have a handy calculator at the bottom to determine the area in square inches- This is what I wanted, I was able to determine that a $350 basic 32" TV costs 80 cents per square inch, and the $500 42" one we wound up with, ran 66 cents per square inch.

Unfortunately, there is one thing I did not consider. The animals on the screen apparently do not look "real" - anyway, my dog doesn't bark at the TV anymore. YMMV.

Dolphins on LSD buy more weedkiller than the control group

2010-04-19T15:18:54-07:00

“We learned quite quickly when we began this research that if anybody working with a dolphin assumed that the dolphin was stupid, then the dolphin would act stupid. If you went at the dolphin the way you would at a rat, and tried to get him to perform, he'd perform very well for a short period of time. If the criteria were too strict, and you put him down in too narrow a slot, so that you bored him, he would break the apparatus and throw it out of the tank. We have had several psychologists who came to the lab expecting to work with the dolphins the way they would with rats, and the dolphins won't put up with it. It is very dramatic when the system breaks down. We explain this to the psychologists, and say, "Get in the tank with them. Make friends with them, and maybe they will put up with it a little longer".

Dolphin-Human Relation and LSD 25.

Isn’t this what the “marketing experts” are trying to get companies to do by engaging in things like Twitter and Facebook? They would probably try the LSD thing too if they could. Can you imagine being on a LSD trip to Home Depot? I would come home with black curtains, a wood chipper, and three copies of a certain book about landscaping because of an obsession with Junipers.