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Monthly Archives: June 2006
More fun with optical illusions
June 11, 2006 – 11:03 pm
Bargain Hunting
June 11, 2006 – 10:25 pm
Today / tonight at the Vons by our house they had another one of those awesome charity book sale things, where people donate a whole bunch of books and you can pick them up for really cheap ($1 for all soft covers, $2 for hardcovers).
The stock at the one today was the largest I’d ever seen: many regular size cardboard boxes full of books of all varieties (like they usually have), and then several huge (probably 6′ X 6′ X 3′) filled-to-the-top bins of random books that I didn’t take the time to literally dig through, since the books were just piled up inside those.
Here are some gems I scored:
- Running Linux - O’Reilly - cover price: $34.95
- Javascript Bible - IDG - cover price: $49.99
- Javascript, The Definitive Guide - O’Reilly - cover price: $39.95
- Core Java 2 - Sun Microsystems - cover price: $42.99
$168 worth of books for $4; not too shabby. These are the same books that are still sitting on the shelves at B&N, etc. at full cover price.
I probably won’t even get much use out of them, in terms of learning new stuff (especially on the Java and Javascript ones), but I just couldn’t resist that price, and they may be useful to keep around for future reference or lending out to other people.
Net Neutrality? We need congress neutrality!
June 9, 2006 – 10:02 am
Last night the house struck a blow against net neutrality by a 3 to 1 margin.
The truly outrageous thing about this is that polls show that most Americans (70%) are “concerned about providers blocking or impairing their access to Internet services or sites”, which is exactly what net neutrality laws are meant to prevent.
IMHO, this is a blatant illustration of congress members choosing to represent the interests of their lobbyists rather than their constituency, who they are charged and elected to represent. It would seem that it’s going to be difficult to ensure net neutrality when the large corporations battling against it already have achieved congress non-neutrality via corruption.
“Forget” your password?
June 7, 2006 – 2:17 pm
Don’t you hate those sites that make you register in order to see the content on their sites? A lot of newspaper sites specifically do this, and it really annoys me.
There are several workarounds for this, such as extensions like BugMeNot, which will allow you to use an account from a pool of free accounts submitted by other users, but there are some cases in which no one has created an account via that plugin, and you don’t want to be the first. Also, popular sites probably (or at least could) regularly check these extension databases and deactivate those accounts.
Today I saw a clever workaround for this: be Google!
The concept is that these sites still want their content indexed, since they know that people find pages by searching, but they also want real users to have to register (and give them an e-mail address, etc.). The catch is that the only easy way for them to make that distinction is also fairly easy to work around. Extensions like the User Agent Switcher make this a breeze.
New Glasses
June 5, 2006 – 6:00 pm
I just got new glasses today. My old ones were kind of loose, so I had to adjust them occasionally, and now I keep reaching up to adjust the new ones and finding I don’t need to, which just makes me realize how often I was doing it before, out of habit without even realizing it.
Good ol’ Best Buy
June 1, 2006 – 9:57 am
Couple’s Supposedly Destroyed Hard Drive Purchased In Chicago
A year ago, Henry and Roma Gerbus took their computer to Best Buy in Springfield Township to have its hard drive replaced.
Henry Gerbus said Best Buy assured him the computer’s old hard drive — loaded with personal information — would be destroyed.
“They said rest assured. They drill holes in it so it’s useless,” said Gerbus.
A few months ago, Gerbus got a phone call from a man in Chicago.
“He said, ‘My name is Ed. I just bought your hard drive for $25 at a flea market in Chicago,’” said Gerbus. “I thought my world was coming down.”
Gerbus and his wife had good reason to worry.
A total stranger had access to the couple’s personal information, including Social Security numbers, bank statements and investment records.
Through information listed on the hard drive, the man in Chicago was able to contact the couple.