Saturday, February 28, 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
Comforting thoughts...
These could well be the "Good ol' Days" that a future generation wishes they could go back to.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Stupid is as Stupid does...
Here's one for you:
A Colonial "theme" park has a couple of people that operate the mules that pull a barge along a closed-off two mile stretch of canal. The canal doesn't get anywhere even close to anything even vaguely sensitive like a nuke power plant, military base, or anything like that.
So what does the TSA demand? Biometric ID for the muleskinners, under the claim that everybody with any kind of Coast Guard license (the 'skinners have to have one because of the boat) has to have the background check necessary to get the I.D.
Now, you tell me -- does THIS look all that dangerous?
Best line of the article? Has to be this:
A Colonial "theme" park has a couple of people that operate the mules that pull a barge along a closed-off two mile stretch of canal. The canal doesn't get anywhere even close to anything even vaguely sensitive like a nuke power plant, military base, or anything like that.
So what does the TSA demand? Biometric ID for the muleskinners, under the claim that everybody with any kind of Coast Guard license (the 'skinners have to have one because of the boat) has to have the background check necessary to get the I.D.
Now, you tell me -- does THIS look all that dangerous?
Best line of the article? Has to be this:
... the mules could be considered weapons of mass destruction only if they were aimed at something resembling food.Ya gotta love it...
Klewless
See, this is why I named my blog the way I did...
Got a call a little bit ago from the moorons at the Census. Seems that me simply claiming (by writing in BIG RED LETTERS on the front of it) religious exemption from answering their questions wasn't enough. They "had" to call, and explicityly ask me each and every farookin' question on the survey, and then take my verbal response (which was probably politer and less profane that I should have made it).
So, after verifying the basics that I'd filled in on the front of the damn thing, we had to go through the rest of it. After the first time I responded with "I decline to answer that question on religous grounds.", it was sufficient for me to simply reply "Decline" to the rest of them -- all eleventy hundred of them (or so it seemed).
And then the dipshits wonder why Government is held in such low regard...
Got a call a little bit ago from the moorons at the Census. Seems that me simply claiming (by writing in BIG RED LETTERS on the front of it) religious exemption from answering their questions wasn't enough. They "had" to call, and explicityly ask me each and every farookin' question on the survey, and then take my verbal response (which was probably politer and less profane that I should have made it).
So, after verifying the basics that I'd filled in on the front of the damn thing, we had to go through the rest of it. After the first time I responded with "I decline to answer that question on religous grounds.", it was sufficient for me to simply reply "Decline" to the rest of them -- all eleventy hundred of them (or so it seemed).
And then the dipshits wonder why Government is held in such low regard...
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
teh suXXor -- Geek Edition
Well, crud.
My laptop -- an IBM Thinkpad R40 (mine is 2GHz, with 768M of memory, 20G drive) -- has been having "issues" for a while now. Hey, at 5 years old, it still runs like a champ, and a replacement would be a little more than I'd want to spend right now.
First, the USB port in the back came loose; no big deal, there's another one on the side.
Then the display started getting flaky. Specifically, the backlight kept going out on it. I finally got around to taking the thing apart to see about fixing what ailed it.
The USB connector was a piece of cake: just solder the durn thing back into place.
The display was something else, entirely. There was a dinky little surface-mount connector that wasn't making good connection, and the farookin' thing is too damn tiny for me to futz with without (expensive!) specialized tools/equipment. I mean, the damn connector is roughly 5/16 of an inch long, barely an eigth-inch wide, and has 30 electrical connections on what looks like HALF-millimeter spacing. Even with my magnifying visor and the finest soldering tip I've got, that's still just too fine for me to mess with. On the plus side, a replacement for the whole cable (FRU08K4067) will run me less than $10, so I'll be back up and running before too long.
My laptop -- an IBM Thinkpad R40 (mine is 2GHz, with 768M of memory, 20G drive) -- has been having "issues" for a while now. Hey, at 5 years old, it still runs like a champ, and a replacement would be a little more than I'd want to spend right now.
First, the USB port in the back came loose; no big deal, there's another one on the side.
Then the display started getting flaky. Specifically, the backlight kept going out on it. I finally got around to taking the thing apart to see about fixing what ailed it.
The USB connector was a piece of cake: just solder the durn thing back into place.
The display was something else, entirely. There was a dinky little surface-mount connector that wasn't making good connection, and the farookin' thing is too damn tiny for me to futz with without (expensive!) specialized tools/equipment. I mean, the damn connector is roughly 5/16 of an inch long, barely an eigth-inch wide, and has 30 electrical connections on what looks like HALF-millimeter spacing. Even with my magnifying visor and the finest soldering tip I've got, that's still just too fine for me to mess with. On the plus side, a replacement for the whole cable (FRU08K4067) will run me less than $10, so I'll be back up and running before too long.
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