hilarious lenovo failboat update

In amusement: The laptop I wrote about earlier is  now for sale, again, on lenovo’s website. Right down to the model number.

If you’d like to NOT purchase this laptop you can click here.

Staggering work of brokeness.

Train travel

This is probably worth writing a letter to your representative to encourage:

House Resolution 6003 - summary here: http://beyonddc.com/log/?p=210

Given everything it seems like 10 years ago would have been a good time for this resolution but it’s better now than never.

planet

The new planet configs from .planet files are now being used. Let me know if you have issues and/or questions about using it. I’ve emailed the 3 people who had problematic .planet files and told them how to fix them.

thanks

wii fit

The girl picked up a wii fit yesterday rather impressively. We’ve been playing with it a fair bit. A few things to be fair:

1. the yoga and strength training will kick your ass

2. the skiing and snowboarding games are great

3. the hula hoop games makes me stomach burn - it’s good.

4. I do wish there was a macro mode so I could say “do the following 20 exercises one right after the other”. That would be useful. There’s a little too much ‘clicky’ than I’d like.

I can’t wait to see what kind of snowboard games come out for it or even surfing. It’s an impressive interface.

idea: thread-scoring routine

I have this idea, maybe someone has already implemented it.

I setup a database of email addresses with a score based on my experience of the value of the content of their emails. Not a spam score, a content score. So I can say that randomuser21@hotmail.com typically posts worthless crap. Then I score them negatively in my db/table of users. Then something reads in my mailbox and adds a score to the subject line of threads based on the scores assigned to the users involved.

Then I can see if a thread goes up or down content-wise based on who posts to it.

I’m pretty sure I can do this with procmail but I’m curious if it has already been done.

fedora 9 for me so far

Here’s what I’ve seen that’s irked me in f9 thus far:

1. bug in yum which is now fixed upstream keeping yum from doing the right thing about conditionally installed pkgs in groups already being installed (silly). It’ll be in an update in testing tomorrow.

2. PK ignoring my preferences and annoying me about updates that I don’t care about.

3. _something_ makes firefox and liferea stall out for a long time. This may not be a bug - it may actually be my hard drive trying to die on me.

Things I’m quite happy with:

1. usb persistence may actually save my butt

2. pybackpack works still. (If you think this is not a big deal please see #3 in the above list)

3. We’re seeing some pretty phenomenal numbers of downloads and a lot of overall excitement about this release.

That’s what I have, thus far.

Overheard in a bar

Customer: Do you have PBR?

Bartender: No, but if you’d like I can piss in a glass of water and sell you that for $4.

greenindex

taking a look at tim’s blog. I took the survey. My greenindex comes out to be 66.

Why Librarians rock

In case it was unclear: this is why librarians rock:

This goes out to Heather and Molly and Thelma (a librarian friend of old):

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/05/internet-archiv.html

and of course:

librarian schwag

industrial retooling

As I think about the need to come up with other plans for US transportation infrastructure to get us away from cars, I immediately think of pushing better rail infrastructure. With that in mind, what would be the complexities with getting the automotive industry to begin retooling their production lines and retraining their workers to produce train engines/train cars/etc? It seems like the skill set to construct a large metal box with many living-room-like accoutrement internally would be similar between automobile manufacturing and rail-car manufacturing. Additionally, in order to provide a large-scale rail infrastructure the US would require a simple MASSIVE number of engines and rail-cars in the next decade.

I’m sure there are difficult things with this idea, but it makes sense, conceptually, at least, to me.