Category: Blog

If Fry’s opened stores in England, would they call them Chip’s?

Obscure trivia(l) fact of the day:

When I was growing up, I remember hearing that the vowels were “A, E, I, O, U, and sometime W and Y.” W? I know, for example, that “by” and “fly” use Y as a vowel (while “year” for example, doesn’t). But what words use W as the vowel? Other people I’ve asked have only every heard it as, “…and sometimes Y”.

Thanks to Google and today’s bout of bored curiousity, I found this:

The letter W does not normally spell a vowel by itself in English, but it does so in a couple of obscure words like ‘crwth’ and ‘cwm‘, both of which you can find in a big dictionary, and in both of which W spells the vowel of ‘moon’. That’s because these words are taken from Welsh, in which W is *normally* used to spell this vowel.

You’re right – I must be very, very bored.

“Dell dude” arrested for marijuana posession. But the peanut gallery comments are even funnier:

“Maybe he was at a party with Ellen Feiss… ;-)”

“Doesn’t he know that pot is a gateway drug?”

“buying a Dell gives money to “the Dell Dude,” the “Dell Dude,” gives money to his dealer, the dealer gives money to a group of ultra-violent Columbian Communist guerillas, who in turn, kill families and extended families of farmers who refuse to grow for them…”

Open-source idea, since I don’t have a consumer electronics company. (Though I hear the patent office grants patents with almost no review lately.)

Voice-activated telephone answering system. When the phone receives an incoming call, the voice activation circuit comes on, and processes spoken commands.

“Hello?” – answers call, puts caller on speakerphone, sends “Hello?” to caller.
“Who is it?” – reads caller ID; or answers call, asks caller “May I say who’s calling?”, plays response over speaker, waits for response.
“Message.” – direct call to voicemail
“Wait” – puts caller on hold
“Hangup” – hangs up.

Software-upgradable to allow for future enhancements.

My friend Chris sent me a change of address today, and included a vcard – so I went ahead and added a vcard to my address site (Yep, that’s the site I referred to another friend who asked for my s-mail address – and her response was “sheesh, can’t you just copy and paste your address – I had to click through!).

Vcard (or .vcd) is a standard format for addresses. Take a look here and see what your browser does with it. If it’s linked to your address book, it should just add itself.

So this got both of us thinking about addresses – and of course I’m always thinking about phone numbers. Chris’ suggestion was for a distributed .vcd server with multi-level security, sort of like pgp keyservers – so people you had listed would have access to other numbers than spam/telemarketers/etc.

But of course I’m thinking bigger than that.

Have a centralized agency, like icann (that hands out domain names, but hopefully with more accuracy and less hassles!) assign IP address-style identification numbers. You could either pay for a single number (or however many identity numbers you wanted) or a range of numbers (for an organization and its employees/positions)…

…sorry, I’m spending too long arguing with myself about all the problems (as well as benefits) of this approach. Maybe I’ll update this if I work anything else. Write to me with ideas. You know my address!

Got another virus today, in the email box. Except it wasn’t.

Here’s my evidence (addresses changed to protect the sender):
-This was an email addressed to cybertel (at) cybertelcorp.com – an address we don’t use (undefined email addresses at cybertelcorp.com are sent to me).
-It was from someone I don’t know – sounding like something to do with stocks – like “jim@stockagents.net”.
-It contained only a word document with an equally cryptic stock-ish name like sharesissuance.doc. (I didn’t open it to see what it was, of course!)
-There was no message, only the attachment.

On a whim, I went to “www.stockagents.net” (or whatever) and it redirected to “stockpeople.com” (or whatever else) that was a company that sends stuff to our company president. Sure enough, he knew “jim” and had been waiting for a message.

I should have sent the nasty anti-virus response back to “jim” anyway. Grrr.

(By the way, did you also notice that this has nothing to do with my “real job” – database management and billing? Only sucked up half an hour of my day or so, if you include this blog entry.)

“Can you hear that sound? No, it’s not a broken fan, it’s Windows sucking.” When our new “computer guy” restarted our servers this morning (he’s working on email) both came up with a different Blue Screen of Death (BSOD).

This is unacceptable. These servers are fine reliable Dell hardware, running only standard, recent Microsoft software. We haven’t done anything non-standard. This isn’t the first time they’ve done this, either. And moving from the M$ proprietary stuff off to Unix is annoying enough that we haven’t done it. Better bump up that priority.

So now every five minutes someone runs into the office asking, “Are the computers working yet? ‘Cause I tried mine and it still doesn’t work.”

This morning, Apple announced two new powerbooks – a 17″ and a 12″.

The 17 is just gratuitous. Sure, it looks nice – how big a monitor do you need to schlepp around with you? How much can you afford to lose if you drop the thing? Love the auto-adjusting backlit keyboard tho.

On the other hand the little 12 is cool, slightly smaller than the iBook I’m using. I’d still like it smaller, of course, a Mac version of the Sony U3. I’d have one of these by now, if I didn’t have to run Windows on it (shudder). Of course I love my iBook, especially so since I can run the web server, mysql and php for application development.

Oh, and new and improved versions of the iApps. Final Cut at a reasonable price. And a new browser, which I’m using now. And an Apple version of X11 which they didn’t mention but the Unix geex appreciate it.

I bought some Apple stock the other day, for the long term. It’s the only computer company I actually like. In fact, I think they should be making consumer electronics products – VCRs, DVD players, home stereos, clocks, whatever. Heck, most of their recent products look sort of like sex toys anyway (not that I’d know) (not that there’s anything wrong with that!).

Note new link to the left, to Nicholas Corwin’s webpage. He’s been creating trivia at www.trivia-savant.com for some time now; so I set him up a blog, which you may notice looks remarkably similar to this one – non-surprising, since I used the same code (and you can, too!).

Nicholas isn’t a link-blogger; he’s a content-blogger. That is, although there’s the occasional link to some bit of web-based material, for the most part it’s all his own writing (or at least his own quoting!). There’s no flash, no wacky java animations, and not even any pictures (yet!), just the good old written word (5500 years and still going strong!).

Congratulations to John Scalzi (a classmate of mine from Webb) on getting his novel Old Mans War bought, after publishing it on his website! I think it’s still there for the reading, or you can wait a year and shell out for it from Amazon.