Month: October 2004

The Screensavers — Just How Much Suckage Can One Show Tolerate?

There used to be a regular schedule in my house that my wife absolutely hated — 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. was reserved for watching The Screensavers on TechTV. This used to be a great show, but nobody actually watched the channel so gaming cable channel G4 bought it out and merged the two networks. With the exception of X-Play which has remain untouched by the G4 virus, the result is unwatchable.

G4’s main contribution has been to up the level of juvenile, testosterone-fueled crap. I’ve only watched Screensavers twice since the switchover. The first time, new host Alex Albrecht thought it appropriate to reference his testicles during a segment of the show. Thanks Alex, my 7 year old daughter was watching.

The second time, this week, featured mention of a “hottest geek girlfriend contest”. What’s next, “John Romero’s About to Make You His Bitch” sound clips?

Well, the viewing experience of the new Screensavers is very Daikatana-ish, so why not?

(And WTF ever happened to John Romero — oh yeah, he’s designing games for cell phones these days. Guess he needs a new tag line — how about “John Romero’s about to make you a long distance call, bitch.”)

Would You Buy Web Hosting from These People?

This is one of my personal pet peeves and something that should never happen in 2004. I’m visiting a site and most of the files are clearly hosted on a second, specialized web hosting company — in this case the web hosting companie specializes in hosting multimedia files and markets itself as such. So I try to visit the website’s hosting page to see if they have a directory of other sites they host, but it comes up 404. I try it again in case I misspelled the domain name. Again 404.

Then, even though I think it can’t possibly be the problem, I add the www. to the domain name, and it works. Maybe I’m picky but if www.genericwebhosting.tld works, but genericwebhosting.tld does not, I’m looking elsewhere for a webhost. There’s just no excuse in my mind for that to happen, but a surprising number of web sites are configured this way (I have even heard clueless people argue that it is *bad idea* to configure www.domainname.tld to work if the user just types in domainname.tld. Sure, and make sure you add a big ass splash page and lots of Flash navigation to really add to the usability).

Can Bush Win Michigan?

If you’d asked me a few months ago, I’d have said that Bush’s chances of winning Michigan were about the same as the Detroit Lion’s winning three straight road games this season. Ooops.

National Review notes that Kerry is going to be campaigning here on Sunday or Monday. National Review quotes a Bush campaign volunteer as saying internal polls show Bush ahead in Michigan, which they pretty much were guaranteed to say regardless, but Kerry making a last minute stop here is a bit odd given that it should be a shoo-in for Kerry.

Or to put it another way, if Kerry can’t win Michigan he has little chance of capturing the presidency. This is a state that has lost thousands of manufacturing jobs, is heavily union and has a substantial urban minority population. If Kerry can’t win in this state, he’s going to have a horrible election night.

Kerry’s probably coming here late to try to boost turnout. Bottom line — if he can get heavy turnout in Wayne County (Detroit), Kerry’s going to win. If people think he’s faltering or don’t find him that compelling and don’t turn out, he’s going to lose.

And unlike the 2000 election, there isn’t any major contentious statewide ballot issue to drive voter turnout (in 2000 there was hotly disputed school choice proposal). This year the only major statewide ballots are related to gambling and gay marriage, neither of which has caused anywhere near the level of controversy that the school choice measure did.

Someone At NASA Has a Sense of Humor

My wife IMed me a link to this NASA page about tonight’s total lunar eclipse. NASA notes that,

According to folklore, October’s full moon is called the “Hunter’s Moon” or sometimes the “Blood Moon.” It gets its name from hunters who tracked and killed their prey by autumn moonlight, stockpiling food for the winter ahead. You can picture them: silent figures padding through the forest, the moon overhead, pale as a corpse, its cold light betraying the creatures of the wood.

NASA then goes into detail about the lunar eclipse, when the moon will enter the Earth’s shadow, and why the moon appears to be red. And then they add this note,

Warning: While you’re staring at the sky, you might hear footsteps among the trees, the twang of a bow, a desperate scurry to shelter. That’s just your imagination.

Source:

Total Lunar Eclipse. NASA, October 13, 2004.

Seagate Pocket Hard Drive

As regular readers know I’m obssessed with hard drives — show me a new hard drive announcement and I start salivating like a Pavlovian dog — but even I don’t understand what Seagate is thinking with its 5gb Pocket Hard Drive.

It’s not that I don’t like the device. It’s got a 5 gb hard drive in a 3″ diameter enclosure with a nice retractable USB 2.0 cable. But the problem is the darn thing is going to retail for about $200.

Who is going to buy one at that price point? It’s probably overkill for people who are already using those small flash memory USB thumb drives. Seagate says people can use it to store music and photos, but why? For $250 you can get an iPod Mini that will not only store but let you play the music as well, and I’m not sure how many people there are who want to carry around a 5gb drive just for photos.

Looks to me like a product in search of a market.

Source:

Seagate hopes for big splash with small drives. Dinesh C. Sharma , CNET News.Com, October 25, 2004.

Sex In Public Restrooms Legal in Italy, So Long as Stall Door Is Closed

An Italian court ruled this month that having sex in a public restroom is legal in that country, so long as the door is shut.

A couple from Switzerland were arrested having being caught having sex in a restroom at a bar in the Italian town of Como. They were charged with public indecency, but Judge Luciano Storaci ruled that as long as the door on the restroom stall remained shut, that there was no indecency.

The Swiss man was fined approximately US$250, however, for breaking a lock in his haste to get dressed after the proprietor surprised he and his lover.

Sources:

Sex in a bar bathroom — Is it legal? Reuters, October 6, 2004.