Back when I lived in New Jersey in the 80s-90s, the friendly suburban town of Middletown had a tank. When I first heard about it, I assumed it was some kind of aquatic assault vehicle for dragging things out of the swamps, but no, it's apparently an armored personnel carrier.

The story behind it, according to one of my coworkers who lived in the town and has seen the thing, was that back in the 70s, when there was a lot of political unrest in Puerto Rico, the police chief (who was trying to live up to his namesake Joe McCarthy) was worried that the Puerto Ricans who lived in the towns along the shore might get uppity and riot and attack the local naval base and steal the nucular weapons, and the town had better be able to defend them. As of the early 90s, Ralph said nobody'd driven it in a while and the wheels had sunk a foot or so into the mud where it was parked, and Joe had had to retire after too many incidents of cops beating up kids.

It's approximately the 10th anniversary of "Get a cable modem, go to jail", Judy Sammel's adventures with having Comcast-based @Home cable modem service, not having television, and living in Maryland where the cable TV theft regulations were apparently written by Kafka's persecutors. There was also an editorial cartoon in an industry newspaper about it.

Apparently Comcast hasn't become any more competent over that time period...

I'd think an oil derrick on the White House lawn would be more appropriate for the current administration - there's presumably no oil to be found there, but that never bothered Bush much back when he was officially in the oil business. Or at least subcontract out some corn to Archer Daniels Midland.

The milkshake that can be drunk through a straw is not the real milkshake.

OK, I guess if you use one of those fat straws from a tapioca-drink place you might be able to make a dent in a decently thick milkshake, but regular straws simply can't, and any company that mass-produces polymerized milk products that can fit through the drinking straws they use for soda is producing things that are almost, if not quite entirely, unlike milkshakes.

Fonera's a nice friendly system for sharing wireless. An even easier to use system is named "linksys" - seems to be available in most cities :-)

I keep my wireless open for guests, and about half my neighbors have open wireless, though not all of them support everything (one of them has an ISP that blocks Port 25, one of them does something with NAT that my work VPN can't traverse), and occasionally when I've had DSL problems I've used a neighbor's access until the telco fixes whatever they just broke down the street. My ISP's policies let me share my wireless, run servers at home, etc., and aren't part of the fear-and-panic flashcrowd that the cable modem companies have been drumming up for years. I've only had a problem with it once, when a neighbor's laptop got virused and started sending spam from my wireless; my ISP gave me a call the next morning, and I shut the wireless down for a couple of days until she could get it cleaned up.

What I'd really _like_ would be open access and encryption, but unfortunately the standards assume you want to either be all open or all closed, as opposed to private but friendly.

Homeopathy is a quack theory supported by 200 years of trial and error, and even without formal scientific methods, it has learned a bit over that time, even if they explanations they give for its effectiveness are incorrect. Some parts of it are obviously bogus - the "really strong" preparations that are too dilute to contain any orginal material. And it's missing a few details like the germ theory of disease that mean it's not safe for treating real diseases.

But that doesn't mean that there aren't homeopathic remedies that are useful for treating symptoms, when all you want is to make symptoms go away. Allergies are a classic example - if I'm sneezing because of pollen,
I can fix the cause by waiting for spring to be over, or take drugs with various side effects (such as drowsiness from most antihistamines), and if homeopathy helps, fine. I've stopped bothering with it now that Allegra's available.

Homeopathic flu remedies are wonderful, and Real Medicine doesn't have much to offer besides prevention and bed rest. I get the vaccine so I don't usually get the flu, but when I do get it, I've found a couple of homeopathic remedies that can take me from feeling totally awful to merely feeling not very good, which is a big win. Is it a placebo or real? Who cares. There's enough herbal content to cause mild stomach upset, maybe there's enough herbal content to be doing something useful as well.

Sure, it's April 1, or at least it was recently, but I'll bite :-)

Libraries have two different reasons for putting books where they do - making it easy to find them in the Card Catalog, and making it interesting to browse the bookshelves to look at related books. The latter function's still relevant, if people go browsing through the stacks (less common in University libraries where occult book collections are likely to be?) But the indexing problem has changed now that catalogs have become computerized; there's no longer a reason to have only one pointer to a given index record, and full-text search on catalog entries and (emergingly) on books themselves means that they can be filed anywhere you want, and the computerized indexes can also provide some of the browse-nearby-books functions.

Some libraries have other concerns with where they file books - creating attractive displays to encourage people to pick up books and read (more common with paperback fiction), keeping people from stealing some kinds of books (whether it's "Steal This Book" or any of the spurious Necronomicons that may be around), or, in some parts of L-Space, keeping the books from fighting with each other or having too much magic concentrated into a small space, and making sure that Things That Mankind Was Not Meant To Know stay occluded in the quieter parts of the stacks, waiting for a susceptible mind on a dark and stormy night...

It's definitely a good time to be vegetarian, and also not to be eating in public school cafeterias, which are one of the main markets for companies like this. My wife's carnivorous, but tends to stick to the organic grass-fed stuff, which is a lot cleaner.

Wouldn't take much to modify that horse mask into a Unicorn Chaser if you need one....

Amanita can either be fatal, poisonous, or merely psychedelic depending on how you prepare it and how much you can take. It also seems to be one of the many examples where there's an edible mushroom in Asia that looks a lot like a poisonous North American mushroom or vice versa, and immigrant families who go mushroom-picking need to get liver transplants for the survivors. If you don't really really know what you're doing, stick to mushrooms you get from the supermarket or your local growers.

A couple of recent articles have talked about people arrested because urine tests revealed the potential use of banned substances (e.g. the codeine administered by a UAE hospital.) So much for looking at the big silly hotels or doing business with their internet services; I'm not going near the place. Their police are obviously high on testosterone and power, or else they were behind on their arrest quota for the month.

A couple of years ago I was driving back from the dentist here in the US, and I'm glad I wasn't stopped for something random. I was clear-headed, but my speech was slurred (becov my mouf wvn't movn right yet afta da novocaine), and a urine test would have picked up the novocaine (pretty close to cocaine), ibuprofen (false positive for marijuana on common drug tests), sudafed I'd taken to make it easier to breathe during the work (close relative of meth), codeine I'd had the night before the root canal (opiate), and who knows what weird chemicals were in the topical anaestheics. The only actual psychoactive I'd been on was the nitrous oxide, which had worn off before I started driving, and of course caffeine, my favorite dangerous addictive drug, which I'd taken to help wake up after the nitrous. Bad enough to get hit with all that in the US, where you've got a chance of arguing your case; I'd really hate to have to get dentistry in the UAE.

I much prefer the attitude of the customs people in Jordan. We got off the ferry boat, and while our bags got inspected in the foreigners, line, the lines for the locals were a pair of long tables, and in the middle was a stack of confiscated materials, mostly videotapes and hash. The customs people didn't appear to be hassling anybody they took stuff from, and presumably they followed the traditional practice in such places and took the contraband home to sell or use it themselves.

Uncompressed Mailboxes and Anti-virus Software -

I've been using Eudora for email for over a decade. It keeps mail in mbox format for each folder, and if the amount of deleted material hits some threshold it'll compact that folder when you close it, or you can tell it to compact, which I typically do after emptying trash. I've recently been restructuring backups after a disk upgrade, and I'd updated the virus tables on Kaspersky Anti-Virus.

So Kaspersky suddenly started complaining about all my email backup files :-) Some of the complaints were about the Junk and Trash folders (fine, those are expendable) or about attachments, which get saved as individual files. But it was also complaining about the Inbox files, AFAICT because there're deleted-but-uncompressed messages in them that contain virus signatures. And unfortunately, the error messages don't tell me what byte in the file has the signature, just some text around it, which hasn't been reliably easy to find. In most cases I've been able to either use the current version of Eudora to compress the files or dredge up an older version to compress them with (the mbox format hasn't changed, but the index files that keep track of messages might have), but in some cases that hasn't done it. I don't know if there's some message I've missed deleting, or if there's a string of randomness in some MIME boundary that looks like a virus signature, but either way, Kaspersky thinks my old mailboxes look a lot like Mos Eisley.

Red line? Boring. Follow the Yellow Brick Road!

I mean, c'mon now, isn't that the appropriate iconography to use for that kind of display?
Otherwise, use something like a big red arrow for turns you'll need to make in the distance.

In practice, I'd be a bit concerned about how to make sure the heads-up display aligns whatever marker you use correctly for where the driver's head is, since different drivers are going to be looking from different positions. A line (or road) is a little less sensitive to up/down and forward/back alignment than arrows or whatever, but it probably still needs to be adjusted.

I leave my wireless open, and occasionally my laptop will glom onto a neighbor's open wireless or they'll use mine. I've only had a problem once - my neighbor's laptop got pwned and was using my wireless to send spam. Since I use a small customer-friendly ISP instead of a big cable modem or telco, my ISP called about the problem, and we checked that it was the wireless and not my PC, so I turned it off temporarily and contacted my neighbors who cleaned up their laptop. It was interesting that the spamware preferred to use the harder-to-trace wireless instead of her wired connection.

Unfortunately, the wireless encryption protocols are really designed for corporate access control - I'd prefer to encrypt my wireless link but leave the access open for guests.

A friend of mine used to leave his access open until the neighbor's kid discovered file sharing. He didn't think there was a significant legal risk, but it was burning enough bandwidth that it interefered with his own usage. Some routers may be smart enough to do fair queuing on the bandwidth, but at least back then it wasn't common.