Monthly Archives: January 2007

Hilarious

This is really long, and I haven’t watched the whole thing yet, but so far it’s awesome.

Credit where credit is due

I almost forgot to go back and give Google props for fixing this. It’s great to know that Google is the kind of company that’s not afraid to acknowledge their mistakes and correct them.

Pizza for pesos

Texas-based pizza chain accepts pesos, takes heat

DALLAS — A pizza chain has been hit with death threats and hate mail after offering to accept Mexican pesos, becoming another flash point in the nation’s debate over immigrants.

“This is the United States of America, not the United States of Mexico,” one e-mail read. “Quit catering to the … illegal Mexicans,” another said.

Dallas-based Pizza Patron said it was not trying to inject itself into a larger political debate about illegal immigration when it posted signs this week saying “Aceptamos pesos”–or “We accept pesos”–at its 59 stores across Texas, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and California.

Pizza Patron spokesman Andy Gamm said the company was just trying to sell more pizza to its customers, 60 percent of whom are Hispanic.

This article is an exaggerated example of the way I see the anti-immigrant crowd. I know it’s not really accurate, but I can’t help but make the association.

Yes, I realize that not all people who are really into opposing illegal immigration are this disgustingly racist, and some of them may not even be racist at all. Most swear up and down that it has nothing to do with race whatsoever, but rather economics and such. While I recognize all that, I also can’t dismiss the fact that the vast majority of racists don’t come right out and say that they are racists either; they usually talk about all the “problems” associated with the particular people group in question (who just happen to be of the same racial background) but attempt to deny that race plays any part in their opinion.

The 4400

I’ve been catching up the sci-fi show “The 4400” lately when I catch a rare window of TV watching time. I’m about halfway through the second season so far.

Brooke recommended it a while back, but I haven’t gotten around to actually watching it until now. If you like Heroes, I’d highly recommend it, as it’s very similar. I’m not saying Heroes copied them, but the concept is really close to the same.

More Gateway Madness

For the last month or so, I’ve been dealing with the latest in the long series of problems with my (now former) Gateway laptop, the M675.
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WordPress 2.07

I’m testing out the upcoming version of WordPress on this blog for now, so please comment if you see any funny behavior.

Normally I wouldn’t run a pre-release version on my live site, but in this case the dev team is looking for as much feedback as they can get as quickly as possible, so that they can release 2.07 as soon as possible. (2.06 had a few nagging issues that we’d all like to forget about as quickly as we can).

More Linux praise

In yet another shining example of the greatness of Linux (and, in this case, Linus Torvalds personally), here is his response to the idea of adding code to prevent loading any non-GPL drivers into the kernel.

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Anyone else want to try this?

Shopping Sabbatical

What would it be like, 10 environmentally conscious friends wondered as they discussed the state of the planet, to go a year without buying anything new?

Twelve months later, the results from their experiment in anti-consumption for 2006 are in: Staying 100 percent true to the goal proved both harder and easier than those who signed on expected.

And while broken vacuum cleaners and malfunctioning cell phones posed challenges, some of the group’s original members say the self-imposed shopping sabbatical was so liberating that they’ve resolved to do it for another year.

[Read full story]

Mattresses

We’ve been talking on and off for a while about getting a new mattress, and I just stumbled across this Slate article today, which pretty much sums up my feelings about most furniture purchasing decisions:

The secret to mattress shopping is that the product is basically a commodity. The mattress biz is 99-percent marketing. So just buy the cheapest thing you can stand and be done with it, because they’re pretty much all the same. And that’s all you need to know. But do read on—the world of sleep products is quite fascinating, and I’d like to share it with you.

From there, it goes into quite a bit of detail about what makes up the various mattresses, and what differentiates them (not much).