Time waster #3,432

Of no value at all, but if you are familiar with the "force push" featured in Star Wars... worth a chuckle. If not, I would pass on this if I were you :)

And the Sears Tower wins with 1000 dead people voting

Be sure to stop by and cast your vote for the New 7 Wonders of the World. Not sure of the electoral process involved setting the original list, but I am sure half of Florida got confused and voted for Pat Buchanan.

Cool digital radio

Most importantly... the volume goes to 11. You know, one more than usual.

Public service announcement

Secure those home wireless networks.

Woof

One of the better dog-penned blogs out there...

http://spinonedog.blogspot.com/

... "dog-penned"... heh, heh, heh

First life?

A different, and certainly reasonable, perspective on Second Life...

GET A FIRST LIFE!

Too funny. Thanks to Jeff for pointing this gem out.

Clusty and Wii

Now that is a subject line I never would have imagined typing a few years ago.

Looks like one of my favorite search tools, Clusty, is now "Wii friendly". Not exactly sure what that means, but I fully intend to use this lack of understanding as an excuse to pursue getting a Wii at home.

Caveman fun

OK, so this is just brazen marketing by their web folks, but a nice/fun little environment.

Cavemans Crib

(and mildly disturbing too)

101 - Teaching the machine

Thanks to Blake for making me aware of this insightful web 2.o video....

Wikimania

While Steven Colbert continues to torment wikipedia from time to time (as evidenced by his locked page), I wonder how this bad boy fits into the picture...

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Main_Page . (thanks Robyn)

Sort of wikipedia meet The Onion. Hours of enjoyment, seconds of value :)

Check out the McDonald's entry... pretty funny.

Don't mess with the 20th Century Fox

20th Century Fox has issued subpoenas to find out who is uploading some of their content.

YouTube has itself been protected by the safe-harbor provision and as the article states, this provision does nothing to shield the individual uploaders, whose boats are kept outside the harbor, subject to wind, waves, and pirates.

Most people think the worst that can happen is your YouTube content is taken down and maybe your account is suspended. Looks like there might be more to it in some situations.

Imagine the poor soul in the big house who has to explain to his cell mate that he is in for uploading "A Very Special Brady Christmas".

Disco Alice

Can hardly wait for this year's theme for Alice Cooper's Golf event. Disco Alice was kinda scary.

Oh, and... DA BEARS!!!!!!!!!!!

Web 2.0 winners and losers

Some good and bad Web 2.0 company activities.

The Museum of Unworkable Devices

A museum celebrating fascinating devices that don't work.

Missing a link to www.foulballguy.com, but otherwise a keeper.

Text book untruth

This article on how the Israeli army takes a dim view on D&D players is a great example of how something that has no basis in fact can live for years as non-fiction.

Seems like if the story is funny enough, actual facts are not overly important.

P.S. I was a chaotic evil thief in my D&D days and frequently turned on my buddies. Shocking, huh?

e-voting

Interesting article on electronic voting. What I found most interesting is the software company claims their source code can not be reviewed because it is trade secret.

Hmmm. My coding days are fairly distant, but let me try and reverse engineer their code...

IF {vote is for person A} THEN {add 1 to vote total for person A}
IF {vote is for person B} THEN {add 1 to vote total for person B}
IF {no vote} THEN {go to next ballot}

Hope I didn't let the cat out of the bag here

Alice

Ms. Spears, Donald, and Rosie get the headlines... but Alice Cooper is the one doing newsworthy things.

Seek and ye shall find.... nothing

VERY dismaying article that asserts:

In a survey of 1,000 middle managers at large companies in the U.S. and U.K., Accenture found that managers spend as long as two hours a day searching for information and more than half of the data they find has no value to them.

Kinda makes you wonder exactly what you are getting out of those managers :) To further drive this point home (also from the article):

Just less than half -- 42 percent -- of those surveyed said that they accidentally use the wrong information at least once a week.

Yikes Robot

If this is the most human-like robot developed to date, I HIGHLY recommended we keep trying.

Creeps me out on several levels :)

How I spent New Year's Day

About six months ago my niece bought a laptop (with a little advice from her uncle). In early October it began to REALLY slow down at start-up and even clicking a desktop icon was a major time commitment.

So, I offered to look at it over Thanksgiving and did my traditional trouble shooting process:

1. Run PC Pitstop
   
2. Check for spyware
3. Defrag
4. Reboot and hope it is a good karma day

Well, round one made it a little better, but over Christmas it was brought to my attention that the "slowness" remained. It had. Drat.

So on January 1 with the aid of CPU-Z and PC Pit Stop again (and 17 reboots at last count), I was eventually guided to discover DMA was not enabled on her hard drive anymore. Finally! A reason why the laptop could from fast to slow and NOT be motherboard related.

A few more Google searches got me to winhelp.com's DMA info and fix. And wonder of wonders, all is well and MySpace, Sims 2, and IMs galore are whistling through the laptop.

Also learned the "Always On" power profile can help make sure your laptop CPU is running at top speed.

So, why share this thrilling tale? Many others had shared similar tales of woe and their experiences - good and bad. These helped lead me to the promised land of a fixed problem. Maybe some other uncle will be out there some day searching for a solution to a similar problem and this posting will help.