Almost Exciting!

My girlfriend has been wanting a Siesta Policy for work. She loves sleep. Well, it looks like the French might get one before we do. Sorry, babe.

A quote:

“The French already enjoy a 35-hour work week and generous vacation. Now the health minister wants to look into whether workers should be allowed to sleep on the job.”

Sorry, with the move into my new apartment and all, I (Almost George) have been on a small break until my internet gets hooked up. The good thing is my modem kit is arriving today - according to the UPS tracking system. (Please don’t stalk me).

Be back in the swing soon!

PS:
Something strange I notice is that the package made it from Atlanta to Memphis in one day, but has been shuffled around Memphis for almost 3 days. That seems silly if you just look at the dates compared to distance. Is there something there that desperately needs streamlining?

Very scary doll. That site displays my favorite, but follow their listed links for more.

Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Limited Numbered Signature Edition

With the recent move to my new apartment, I’ve decided to get the $99 bundle from BellSouth to get my phone/tv/internet fix hooked up as quickly as possible. During the ordering process, you can chat live with an online representative. I realized, after multiple sessions, that the rep was always Jessica.

I decided to be the weird guy and pose a couple of questions. Since the chat applet is done in Flash there wasn’t a way to get a decent transcript (if you know how - ‘hit my clip’), you’ll have to suffice with my Screenshot-scroll-Screenshot-scroll style of relaying you the following information:

[Note: Sorry, WordPress doesn't have the friendliest way to post images, so I'm currently looking for a better plugin. For now, click the thumbnails to see their larger counterparts.]

I’ll definitely be making some of these for my desk at work. Awesome.
From the site:

Readymechs are free, flatpack toys for you to print and build. They are designed to fit on an 8.5″x11″ page and printed with any printer. You’ll need double-sided tape, thick matte paper, and 10-15 minutes for build time.

Although I think this article has been on Digg for awhile now, Fredericksburg reports about an officially developed rail-gun for military ships. If you don’t know what a rail-gun is, the article explains the difference, at least somewhat.

Along the same lines was the recent article at military.com about the DREAD Weapon System. It goes into great detail about the DREAD ‘gun’, although doesn’t have a video. TechEBlog does have a video, though I didn’t watch the whole 4 minutes, nor did I have my sound on, so let me know if it’s no good.

Ah, but those are only for the military. However, here’s something for us consumers. A centrifuge BB Gun. Now that’s almost exciting!

PCIe 2.0 has now been released. PCIe can transfer data at 2.5Gbps, but PCIe 2.0 will transfer data at 5Gbps. That will double the transfer rate and start a new era of Video Cards.

Robert Wechsler is creative. My favorites are the toaster, and the shopping carts.

Oh, and here’s a list of ten name-brand foods you should never eat. Unless you’re me, and your metabolism runs faster than you do. I’m still going to eat what I want, but some of these are surprising.

An article over at NewScientist points out an un-patented method of killing off cancer cells. Yet another of several cancer-killing remedies that the FDA and others (read: pharmaceutical companies) will never approve of or research to it’s fullest potential. I’ll let you guess why.

I probably should have known about this already, but never knew this existed. Apparently there’s an official “clock”, counting to ‘doomsday’ - and it’s keepers are pushing the hands closer to midnight.

I just wonder: If nuclear war breaks out, is there some guy on call who’s official job it is to run in and put it in midnight position? How much does he get paid to wait? Can I apply?

As I just moved into my own apartment (finally!), organization and cool things like this PVC T-Shirt Rack look very interesting. I have so much shelving, I doubt I’d need to make one - but I probably will anyway.

VeriSign’s iDefense Labs has placed an $8000 reward for any hacks that can be duplicated on Vista or IE7. The first six submissions that work will be rewarded the $$.

Ryan Naraine of eWeek writes: 

“The rules are straightforward: iDefense will pay $8,000 for each submitted vulnerability that allows an attacker to remotely exploit and execute arbitrary code on either of the two Microsoft products.

Only the first submission for a given vulnerability will qualify for the payout, and iDefense will award no more than six payments of $8,000. “

I’m not a big Transformers Geek, but I am definitely going to see this movie in theater. I noticed the full trailer was finally up, and I think it looks pretty awesome.

Apparently McDonalds has been testing this for sometime now but McDonalds is now offering DVD rentals via RedBox.

“Redbox, the nation’s leader in automated DVD rental services, and McDonald’s USA, LLC, today announced an agreement to offer fully automated DVD rental kiosks to a growing number of McDonald’s restaurants nationwide. Redbox kiosks will begin appearing in McDonald’s restaurants in select new U.S. markets early next year, offering McDonald’s customers the latest DVD titles for only $1 per night. The agreement follows a two-year test with McDonald’s.”

 Wow, dinner and a movie! Brilliant.

monk and I were talking the other day about what comes after Perfect Picture… Y’know, when monitors have no visible pixels, and the image quality is so great that upgrades are no longer noticable by the human eye. What will they do to innovate video displays?

And so, along those lines, here are two articles on “Quad-HD” or 2160p displays. Not the next step I was talking about, but we’re definitely closer to Perfect Picture.

One over at Toms Hardware. Here’s a quote:

The 52″ TV runs a super high-resolution of 2160p (3840 x 2160 pixels). In absolute numbers, the device is running a stunning 8.3 megapixels - four times more than 1080p TVs (1920×1080p) and more than twice the resolution of Dell’s, HP’s and Apple’s 30″ desktop LCDs

And this one from TGDaily.

There’s mention that they’re not intended for consumers just yet, but I highly doubt it’ll take long before we demand it.

More info than I can describe in just one headline today.

First up: Here’s a link to the article about BluRay/HD-DVD’s not working in Vista. Something you should definitely know about.

Here are some quotes from the article:

This protection, known as high definition content protection (HDCP), must be present throughout the entire system — usually the computer, or a television. If it is not, Vista will disable the connection

Almost no computers using digital connections have HDCP, according to computer experts, although those that do are being phased in

Any computer which has an LCD monitor is potentially at risk of not being able to play this content

I absolutely, positively can’t stand this. I think that if I payed to own the movie, I should be able to watch it on any player in my house, especially at it’s intended quality! I don’t want to fight for the rights to make things easy to pirate or steal, but if I own it, I should be able to watch it - period.

In other news:

Intel announces Quad-core. There it is, monk!

Also, a brief mention on BoingBoing.net about Target and Best Buy’s pricing, and how to know if you can get a discount on an item - or if it’s already (or not actually) on sale.

And, have you ever seen a picture of a photo ID, credit card, checking account number, etc., where sensitive or personal information is blurred out? I can’t believe I didn’t think of this: Why blurring sensitive information is a bad idea.

For the arts-and-craft kids, you probably already do this, but I thought that How to Make a Folded Paper CD Case might come in handy. Be sure to check out the ever-popular papercdcase.com where you can make your own PDF with fold lines, artist/track information, etc., if you’re the lazy do-it-yourselfer.

DailyTech reports that Seagate recently confirmed 1TB drives for consumers. Awesome.

It was a while ago, but PC World wrote a cool article on 50 Years of Hard Drives, as the storage medium recently celebrated 50 years of service.

Firefox Cheat-sheet - I know you can find most of this in the Help file, but ’sheets are cool to look at. And I was too lazy to ever know that hitting CTRL+L got me into the address bar, or CTRL+K for the Search bar. Oh-how-I-wish-I-knew-that-before! Don’t miss the link to the PDF version, in case you’re into that.

Weird, entirely unrelated news coming soon.

I always wondered how Firefox generated revenue for Mozilla. I can’t believe I didn’t figure it out. I also find the amount incredible, yet somehow believable.

Here’s the article I found, and a link to the original post on mozillazine.org.

“Military and aerospace customers have been buying so-called solid-state flash drives for about a decade. Some of the drives have capacities of 256GB and are quite sophisticated.”

What else do they have? ScanDisk released Flash Memory Hard Drives to the public today.

I know this is terrible, as I normally like to expound on things, but it’s late and I don’t want to wait until tomorrow - so consider this a draft!

Kottke just posted his Best Links of 2006 and I highly recommend browsing it if you have free time to read. And I expect you do, as you are here.

Bonus points for Kottke today, since I also can’t help but linking to the list of Addictive Little Online Games.

Go read, go play, whatever. That’s a draft.

Anyone going to the beach? Don’t worry, WIFI is there.

Check these out…USB hand warmers… :

http://gadgets.fosfor.se/the-top-10-weirdest-usb-devices-ever/

How cool would it be to have groceries waiting for you when you got home. No going shopping. No messing with crowds. More time to just…..well, do whatever.

I don’t think that they have anything like this in Memphis, and I think that this would go over really well. Plus if you bought the groceries at wholesale and in bulk, then added 20 - 40% and added on a delivery fee of $10-$20, you could really make some money. I guess you would have to put the cold stuff in an insulated cooler with some sort of cold pack or something.

Here are some sites (I am sure there are more):

http://shop.safeway.com/offers/swy/default5.asp?PRMX_GOOG_DFRS_0601 – Safeway

http://www.aulsuperstore.com/ - AUL

I must get me one of these!

I’ve also been very inspired with several related ideas… hmm…

First off, the Palm Treo 700p looks like a cool gadget. If I ever get the money, I would love to get one of these. It can be connected to your laptop for connection to “Sprint or Verizon’s broadband wireless networks”. It has an SD expansion slot and has a 1.3 mega pixel camera. The keyboard looks a little small but I like a lot of the features.

I bought a $10 game from Best Buy last night, Rainbow Six 3, and can not get it installed. It keeps giving me an error when the install gets to the Stream.sso file. It states that file is corrupt and then gives me a cyclic redundancy error. I tried the fixes on the web but nothing works.