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Showing posts from June, 2009

Well Known Canadians

To my friends of the Canadian persuasion, here’s a list of Well Known Canadians to help you celebrate Canada Day. And a nice video of the flag. :-)

HP 1035NA Netbook

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HP Netbook New toy! It’s an HP Netbook PC. A Netbook is a tiny laptop suitable for everyday use. Email, online banking, writing letters. It’s so small you can carry it in that duffel bag you call a purse, and it can connect anywhere. Most models I investigated had integrated wireless (WiFi). AT&T and Verizon both offered Netbooks with 3G broadband wireless capability. Some models had Bluetooth for mouse or headphones. I purchased the HP1035NA and really put it through its paces. YouTube videos played without a glitch. I will try Netflix videos in a day for two and edit this… Web browsing, email, and document editing were more than adequate, though if you normally run a high speed machine for engineering apps you’ll notice a difference. I didn’t do any tweaks to speed up the netbook, things like disabling indexing or windows animations. The downside of the HP 1035NA Netbook is that it has less hard drive capacity and is slightly more expensi...

TFTD: The Zen of Bond

Watching a 007 movie on TV… I’ve been watching Bond movies all my life. In every Bond movie except the ones with Timothy Dalton, at least one woman screws Bond then gets killed. What can we learn from this? A) Don’t get involved with jealous guys B) Don’t screw James Bond C) Do A & B but be male

Stoats eat toast

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moar funny pictures

Inhumane Killing of Feral Cats

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There was an awful article in one of the local papers about the township killing feral cats with an injection to the heart. That is so inhumane it takes my breath away. It is utter torture to the animal, painfully stopping the heart but not actually killing it immediately. 12. How does euthanasia of animals by veterinarians compare to lethal injection? “potassium chloride fails to comply with minimum veterinarian standards because the lethal injection protocol does not include safeguards to ensure that the patient is unconscious before the injection of the drug, which would cause excruciating pain if the subject is conscious.” Note that simply administering a paralytic doesn’t induce unconsciousness, it only makes it impossible for the animal to struggle. It is for the convenience of the onlookers. The protocol has to include a long-acting barbiturate to be sure than the animal doesn’t wake up during the killing. It will have been completely obvious to the pe...

Derivation of the Name "Ellis"

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The ancestry sites like to say that Ellis became a popular baby name after the Crusades 1 . Something about the prophet Elijah, a tribute to the Holy Land. Since people were named by who their father was, it became a surname. That might be the case. They also like to say Ellis is a Welsh name. The double ll in Welsh names is pronounced the same way as the tl in Quetzalcoatl 2 , so Ellis probably isn’t an Anglicized Welsh word There’s an excellent site in Glasgow that states the name came from the Saxon King Ælle 3 , who invaded the East of England in the 5th century AD. Another great baby name. That would make Ellis an Anglo-Saxon name. 1 The Crusades, in case you missed that day in history class, were a series of twelve Christian forays into the Middle East to wrest the Holy Land from the Muslim infidels. The Crusades were all complete failures, which is why so many of us objected to President Bush’s use of the word in describing his Big Plan for reve...

Jonathan Richman "Roadrunner"

An oldie but goodie that will probably date me. Roadrunner, Roadrunner, Going faster miles an hour. Gonna drive past the Stop-N-Shop With the radio on!

LOST

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What a freaking nightmare. I lost my phone a couple of weeks ago. Of course, I haven’t been backing it up, it’s only a phone… Then I realized how much of my life I keep in there. I get email from three different accounts, and store the passwords. I have “secret” email addresses or passwords for posting status and photos to Flickr , Facebook , Twitter , TwitPic , MySpace and of course this WordPress blog. All my friends’ contact information is in there. The first thing I did was call AT&T to ask them to physically locate the phone. Maybe it was in the car, wedged up between the seats where I couldn’t see it or hear it ring. The nice lady at AT&T support told me about the AT&T Family Map . It isn’t mentioned on the AT&T website at all, you must have the URL to get to it. Check this out, the account holder can track the rest of the family all day. The following result shows an aerial view of the back of my house lo...

Awesome Japanese Wii Game

Just found this interesting Wii Wii game on Thinkgeek. According to the blurb on the box, “ Super Pii Pii Brothers promotes good bathroom skills and allows women to experience for the first time the pleasure of urinating while standing.” Awesome!