July 3, 2008
Speaker info
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July 2, 2008
This is your brain. This is your brain on a cell phone.
http://www.koreus.com/video/telephone-portable-mais-popcorn.html
Yikes.
Categories: misc Tagged with: brain_cells • cell_phones • humor • misc • mobiles • pop_corn
June 26, 2008
Embarrassing Idiot Moment
I was having breakfast in the lobby of the lovingly eccentric Fox Hotel in Copenhagen this mrning, wondering why the staff didn’t answer the particularly loud and annoying phone that rang the entire time.
When I heard the same electronic ringing tone in the elevator, and then in the hallway outside my room, I thought that perhaps one of the hotel alarms had been triggered.
When I got into my room and heard it I realized I’d set the wake-up alarm on the cellphone strapped to my hip.
My only question is: On whom can I blame this? I’m thinking Dick Cheney, and I’m open to suggestions for possible causal chains.
June 13, 2008
Oil prices: The spreadsheet
Here’s a table of oil prices since 1984, day by day. You can also download it as a spreadsheet, and then you can graph it, in order to get a visual display of quantitative information that confirms that gas prices have pretty much gone up overall.
Alternatively, you could take your car in for a fill-up.
June 12, 2008
Alps ‘n’ Balcs
A couple of centuries ago, people traveling through the Alps used to pull the curtains on the windows on the carriages because the scene was just too terrible.
I wonder if the same sort of thinking explains why so few New York City hotels have balconies. Did the architects think the street scenes were ugly, scary, or uninteresting? Or was it because of something more mundane, such as weather or concerns about plummeting martini glasses?
Oh well. Too bad. I’d love to be sitting on a balcony now, watching the sun redden the Empire State Building.
June 4, 2008
Unfortunate subject line
I received an email with this subject line
Jewatch 2008
Wondering how I got on this particular spam list, I clicked on it. Turns out it’s spam for the Je-Watch jewelry exhibition in Saudi Arabia, under the patronage of HRH Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd Bin Abdul Aziz, Governor of the Eastern Province.
Whew.
June 2, 2008
Shell game
Goosh.org is a text-only interface to Google and Wikipedia that will make your inner unix geek giggle inappropriately. It looks like a unix shell, but it isn’t (which, as Zouden at slashdot points out, means that you can’t do unix-y, pipe-y things with the results you get back).
Alas, it doesn’t work on my Blackberry’s ultracrappy Web browser. On the other hand, Google’s mobile client works pretty well.
May 29, 2008
Verizon’s crank
It turns out that if you’re a Verizon cell phone customer, you should dial *228 every month or so. It updates your software and the list of available towers (or something).
Given the totalitarian control Verizon and the other carriers exert over “your” cell phone, I don’t see why they can’t just do that automatically. Go figure.
Actually, figuring is probably just a waste of time.
Unuttered famous quotations
Hmm. I went to confirm the source of the famous quotation “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,” and found at WikiQuote that although it’s commonly ascribed to Edmund Burke, he didn’t actually write it. In fact, as far as we (= Martin Porter 1 2) can tell, no one did.
Well, play it again, Sam!
May 13, 2008
Bluetooth celebrity encounters
I’m in Las Vegas, and my Blackberry just tried to do a bluetooth pairing with “Brenda Lee.”
Do we now have a whole new — and easily spoofed — type of Celebrity Encounter? And how many degrees from Kevin Bacon does that make me?
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