Into the Void

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 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 expensive than some of its competitors, including the ASUS Eee PC 900. However, the slightly larger 10.2-inch display and the nearly full-size tactile keyboard are what sold me on the HP.

Specs:
OS:Windows XP Home SP3
Productivity: Microsoft Works
Display: 10.2-Inch
Processor: 1.60 GHz Intel Atom Processor N270 with 512KB L2 Cache
Graphics: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 (shared) with up to 128MB Total Available Graphics Memory
RAM: 1GB DDR2 System Memory (1 Dimm)
Storage: 60GB (4200RPM) Hard Drive
Connectivity: 802.11b/g WLAN & Bluetooth.
Dimensions: 6.56 (W) x 10.3 (D) x 0.99 (H) approx.,
Weight: 2.38 lbs.

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
D) A golden tree in an enchanted forest

The Bipolar Planet has made it to the 21st century. Social Networking is all the rage, and though The Bipolar Planet has provided a private email list for over ten years and a web page for 15 years as of May 2009, I’ve resisted wandering. Ok, here we go… Become a fan at the official Bipolar Planet Facebook page.

moar funny pictures

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 people administering single potassium chloride shots and watching the animals die that it is painful. These people have to be serious animal-abusing sadists to continue killing animals using this method.

Simply telling them to stop isn’t going to be enough. Everybody involved, right on up to the Mayor of the township, should have been jailed for animal abuse.

Now, according to the paper Ewing Twp is still catching and killing cats. Unless the program is now being administered by an ethical veterinarian, the horror most likely is continuing. Unless you’re down there watching every procedure yourself, you can be sure it is.

I submit that this is due to Ailurophobia in the administration and that the stated public health excuse is nothing more than manipulative sophistry. I am completely certain that the Township snatches beloved pets and treats them in the same hideous manner that they treat feral cats.

Death at the hands of an underpaid municipal employee isn’t humane treatment of animals no matter what the SPCA says.

Ewing Township needs to get the animal abusing freaks out of the administration and get some enlightened human beings in there.

The ancestry sites like to say that Ellis became a popular baby name after the Crusades¹. 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 Quetzalcoatl², 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 Ælle³, 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 revenge after 9-11. The Crusaders were absolved of their sins if they died in battle, which may have been a contributing factor. Gunpowder didn’t reach Europe until after the 9th Crusade, another contributing factor.

² To make the sound, make the t sound like a cross between a hard c and a t without a syllable break before the l. This should keep you occupied for hours. The English pronounce it as “kl” and leave it at that. A good description of how to form the sound is available on the Gwybodiadur site.

³ Type Æ as alt-0-1-9-8 on a Microsoft Windows compatible keyboard. Code it with the Æ or Æ html entities. This is why the ligature Æ is falling into disuse.

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!

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 looking in the window at me. If the picture were in taken in real time it would be seriously creepy.

I am -*here*-

I spent an inordinate amount of time deciding on a new phone. The iPhone was tempting, but I played with one a bit in the AT&T store and decided that a touchscreen phone needs haptic feedback. In the end I wimped out and bought the Samsung Jack.

So now all I have to do is recreate the information in the old phone.

TinyTube is YouTube for phones that don’t support rtsp streaming media. The Jack doesn’t, so this is a big deal for me!

I had to reinstall QuickMark. The lastest version will Twitter the text after decoding. Very kewl. It’s not optimized for the Jack, however. Remind me to send them a screen shot.

Samsung: Imagine Living in the World of Tomorrow Now

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!