Joost

Yea! I just got an E-mail saying that Joost is "just around the corner"(I had signed up to, eventually, be a beta tester of Joost).

2 Gigabytes of errors

I recently installed linux on an old (2001) machine. I left windows installed as a fallback.
Today I was cleaning out the windows partition (about 8 1/4 GB were used). I did the basics, uninstall old programs, delete temporary files (with Ccleaner), get rid of unwanted pictures and so forth. But when I finished, (I got the hard drive usage down to about 4.5 GB) I opened up WinDirStat and found that there were 2 GB of .CPY files. After a little pocking around, I discovered that they were all in a hidden folder (C:/_RESTORE/temp/). This folder is for system restore points. I had previously set the system restore points to only take up 200 MB. So then I googled: 'system restore cpy'. I found out that they are caused by an error in windows ME, the version of windows that was installed. I tried to delete them, but they were "protected". After a few failed attempts to get rid of them, I resorted to linux. I opened up the terminal window (effectively a command prompt for you windows users) and did: rm *.cpy. Guess what. There were so many files, linux would not delete them all at once. I had to section off the files in groups of about 1,000 (fortunately they were named with consecutive numbers) and finally wiped them all away. Now the windows partition only has about 2.6 GB used.

Pandora

I recently started using Pandora internet radio. It's a music player that choses what to play based on what you've told it you like. The best part is, its free. I like free.
It's helped me learn about some of the current style in music. I have found a lot of good music on there. It's nice to here some of the lyrics of a song and actually have a clue what the song is.

A half million years of video games

Did you know that video games waste a half million years of time per year?
Given some conservative numbers - 4 hours per week of game play, 25 million people playing - you find that video games are played for over five hundred thousand years annually.
To do the math for you:

4 hours per week * 52 weeks per year * 25,000,000 people playing games

---

24 hours per day * 365 days per year

To be precise, that equals 593,607.306 years per year (208 hours per year for one person).
Thats a lot of time wasted on video games.
If you multiply that times ten years or so,....
Now factor in TV usage, which is a few orders of magnitude greater than video games....

"Digg this" button

I'm testing out the "Digg this" button.

Stop motion video

This is the first video I have uploaded to a video sharing site. Its a crude attempt at making a stop motion video.

Update: I changed the video host to you tube. Metacafe was giving me trouble.

Yahoo site badge

Just trying out yahoo site badge thingy.

Links to Site

We live in strange houses

Have you ever thought about how strange the design of houses today is?
I mean, take the roof, for example. Why is it made up of a bunch of little breakable shingles that have to be individually nailed down, when it could be just made out of nice, big, easy panels? You could just have these big - maybe eight by eight foot - sections of generic roof material - some sort of plastic, perhaps - that just bolt or snap into place. Building a roof that way would take maybe just a few man-hours, not a few hundred. After all, who wants little sections of tar paper nailed on to some plywood on top of their house anyway? Its just so inconvenient.
Fixing a leak in a shingle roof takes forever because you have to tear up something that was nailed down with the intention that it wouldn't come up. Then sometimes you have to put down a new piece of plywood, and yours will definitely not be exactly the same size as the one that you took out, so you have to cut it to make it fit. After that you have to nail it down and replace shingles one by one. Not exactly a quick, easy task. If you were using a modular roof system, you could just pop off the right panel (and maybe the ones above it), and put in a new one. done.

And just why do we heat our water in the basement or garage or wherever? That requires two pipes to everything (Hot and Cold), insulation on the hot water pipe, a big heater thing, and lots of energy. If you heated the water right where you use it - say, the sink - then you would not lose energy the whole length of the pipe, you wouldn't need a big furnace, or tank, and you could run hot water without freezing the person in the shower.

Most of the ideas for houses are build today date back to the medieval ages. Drywall is just a replacement for stucco, two-by-fours are really just an improvement over roughly hew planks, and todays asphalt shingles are just an improvement upon wooden shingles. Pluming, electricity, and glass windows may be relatively new, but most of the technology of our houses is still far in the past.

Photo of a... latch

For a high quality version, click here.

10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job

10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job
A very eye-opening look at how we make money. It really makes you take a step back and ask yourself why are you doing things the way you are.
For an example, reason number five (for not getting a job) is: 'Way to risky'. Reason? Someone else can turn off your income by saying two words: "Your fired".
Ouch.