…to come up with such wonderful products as combination blender and telephone, kangaroo crap in a jar, and a Mr. T rubber ducky.
The Best Yard Furniture Ever
I really need to get a Chia Chair for my backyard.
The Grass armchair is self assembled, each pack contains 14 corrugated cardboard frames and 100g pack of grass seeds. You will need about 240 litres of soil, to fill in the frame. First find the right spot, because once the armchair has grown you won’t be able to move it!! You can put up to 20cm of gravel with in the frame then the soil. Spread the seeds evenly using only 4/5 of the bag of seeds. Press them in and water slightly so that the soil is humid. Water the armchair everyday. If it rains cover the armchair until grass has grown, to avoid the chair becoming waterlogged. After 10 days the grass starts to grow. If the grass has not grown evenly use the rest of the seeds to even it out. Once the grass has reached 10cm, cut it to 3cm, and keep it to this height. Now you can sit back and relax!
I doubt the thing would ever survive in Central Oregon (can you imagine what this thing looks like during a winter when all the grass is dead?) but it’d still be stupidly cool to have.
Thanks Cheryl for the link.
Macs Can Now (Officially) Run Windows
There have been folks out there that have tried their butt off (and some have succeeded) in getting Windows XP to boot on the new Intel-based Macs. But now Apple’s going to make it far easier by providing step-by-step directions and software to do it.
A Joke For Tax Season
Thanks to Pat for this one:
At the end of the tax year the Tax Office sent an inspector to audit the books of a synagogue. While he was checking the books he turned to the Rabbi and said, “I notice you buy a lot of candles. What do you do with the candle drippings?” “Good question,” noted the Rabbi. “We save them up and send them back to the candle makers, and every now and then they send us a free box of candles.” “Oh,” replied the auditor, somewhat disappointed that his unusual question had a practical answer. But on he went, in his obnoxious way: “What about all these matzo purchases? What do you do with the crumbs?” “Ah, yes,” replied the Rabbi, realising that the inspector was trying to trap him with an unanswerable question. “We collect them and send them back to the manufacturers, and every now and then they send a free box of matzos.” “I see,” replied the auditor, thinking hard about how he could fluster the know-it-all Rabbi. “Well, Rabbi,” he went on, “what do you do with all the leftover foreskins from the circumcisions you perform?” “Here, too, we do not waste,” answered the Rabbi. “What we do is save up all the foreskins and send them to the Tax Office, and about once a year they send us a complete dick.”
On a related note, despite having to claim my Google income this year, I still manage to get a tax refund this year: $891 from the Feds and $9 from the state for a grand total of exactly $900. That’ll be going right to some bills, savings, to fix some stuff on my car that really needs fixing (like the brakes — those are kind of important) and now some tires on my wife’s car, as one of them is totally hosed I just found out.
KTVZ Has T-Shirt Removed From Local T-Shirt Shop
I certainly don’t know the whole story to this, but either KTVZ thinks they own the rights to Bob Shaw‘s likeness (which they might by contract, but satirical cartoons of public figures, even if it is for profit, is protected speech, as far as I know — it’s been a while since I’ve studied this kind of law), or they are claiming they own the rights to “Have a Sparkling day.” Either way, there’s one less t-shirt available to buy.
Who Was The Winner?
UCLA wins! Oh wait, no they didn’t. Whoops….
Celebrity Quote Of The Day
“One day of our life means a lot for someone. It makes me feel so good. Like, I probably feel, like, better than she does.” Paris Hilton, please just shut up.
Thanks Cheryl for the link.
Why You Shouldn’t Trust The Sales Droids At Best Buy
I was in our local Best Buy the other night. I can’t remember why, but I was in the hard drive aisle, just glancing at prices. An older woman came in, said she wanted to return her hard drive, as it’s given her nothing but trouble and her geek friend said that it was an incompatibility with her hard drive and her motherboard. The Best Buy “Geek Squad” sales droid said that “these are all standards parts and should work fine together.”
For the most part he’s right, until the lady mentioned she was trying to return a Maxtor hard drive. At this point, if the geek knew what he was doing, he would asked what processor she was running — AMD or Intel. Why is this important? Because it’s a very well known and very well documented problem with Maxtor hard drives and the nForce4 chipset that powers many newer AMD motherboards. But the “geek” had no idea about this, despite the fact that this problem has been out there for many many months and only recently has some fixes (many of which still don’t quite work, according to some forum threads).
But since the “geek” didn’t ask this question, the lady started walking out of the store feeling dejected. I walked and caught up to her, explained that the guy was full of crap, and brought her back into the store. I walked back into the store and I found a guy behind the counter that I went to high school with back in the day and who knew I was a die-hard geek. He was one of the “geek” managers. I explained to him the situation, the stories behind the data corruption, and while it was news to him too, he took care of the refund, probably because he was an old friend of mine.
So what’s the easiest way to solve Maxtor hard drive problems? Pick other companies for your hard drives. I’ve always had good luck with Western Digital hard drives, and I know Simone’s liking her system I built for her that has three of them. Just avoid Maxtor like the plague.
That, and don’t trust anybody at Best Buy.
Any PHP/MySQL Geeks Want To Make Some Money?
I’m accepting bids on either eLance or Script Lance on a project that I need a programmer for. You’re either welcome to bid on it over at either of those sites, or you can contact me directly at utterlyboring [at] gmail [dot] com if you want to do this privately or if you have any questions.
Perfect JavaScript Pop-Ups
I’m bookmarking this totally for my reference, as I was redoing some of the image pop-up code for the office site (it was having some problems with MSIE and Opera), but it might be handy to somebody else.