Category: Cool

When I first heard about this on the morning radio this morning, I thought “This is just a case where someone has WAY too much money to blow.” While that’s still partially the case, the show’s audience that day was, for the most part, selected because they or someone in their family needed a new car.

In addition, she also gave away a four-year college scholarship, $10,000 wardrobe and make-over to a young woman who spent her teen years in foster care and homeless shelters. And a family with eight foster children was presented with a new houseful of furniture and electronics plus a $130,000 check to cover their mortgage and home repairs.

So, really, Oprah has my respect for at least putting money to people who could use it. Just the same, I would’ve liked to have been one of those folks, as both of our cars here on the home front are approaching 200,000 miles. Anyway, here’s the Full Story.

Textbooks via BitTorrent. Link via a pile of places, but first spotted here.

I never thought I’d say this, but I’m pleasantly pleased with Microsoft, particularly their Hotmail division (I know, “pleased” and “hotmail” in the same sentence — go figure).

I have a couple of Hotmail accounts. One that I use for spam that comes from search engine submissions and the other for my MSN Messenger account in Trillian. Otherwise, I don’t really use them much. I log into them both weekly to make sure that the accounts stay active so they’ll work in Trillian, however.

Yesterday (Wednesday), I made the attempt to log into the latter of those two accounts, and couldn’t, it was giving me a password error. I know I never changed the password, but OK, whatever, so I went to get their password reminder screen, and it gave me my password reminder question as follows:

@####$$%%#$%546””””””””45^6’456#%^^$&@$&$@&$%^$%^$%g554

Yes, that was it. That was obviously not the question I set up originally. Not hoping for much, I e-mail their support department. I wasn’t really miffed about losing the account, but I was miffed that somebody out there might be pretending to be me (as the account had my name in it, so it’s obviously my account), and also because I had a bunch of people on my MSN Messenger list in Trillian that I didn’t want to lose.

Surprisingly, I got an e-mail from Hotmail the very next morning. I was stunned. I didn’t expect to hear anything from them, if at all, for at least a week or two considering the horror stories that I had read about on Google. After drilling through their 11 questions that they asked to verify my identity, e-mailed back, they reset the account, and I was good to go.

So I am happy to say that my Hotmail account works fine again, I’ve changed my password to something horribly complicated, and everything is good to go. Kudos to Microsoft.

I mentioned GmailFS before, but this actually makes it pretty dang easy, too. gmcp (gmail copy) is a simple tool to use gmail as a backup system. It’s a Perl script so, in theory, it could run on Windows with some work, but it’d just be far easier if somebody would just make a Windows program to do this stuff. Anybody listening? Link via Waxy.

Since county officials wouldn’t listen to his pleas for a storm shelter, one Florida resident, prepping for Hurricane Frances, dug a hole, and lived in aburied a U-Haul trailer filled with supplies.

Muppets Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and his assistant Beaker defeated Dr. Strangelove, Dana Scully of “X Files” fame and Star Trek’s Mr. Spock to be voted Britain’s favorite screen scientists. Full Story.

Now if we could just convince a few more cities to do this (though I’m sure some folks would protest). Philadelphia officials are considering turning all 135 square miles of the city in to a gigantic WiFi hotspot. Full story.

Thanks to Jack for pointing out what is one of the most entertaining specialty-niche blogs I’ve seen in quite a while: The Appliance Blog. It’s the diary of a home appliance repairman in Springfield, Oregon. I might have to use the guy’s forums as I have a couple of obscure questions about my dishwasher that he might be able to help me with.