They don't make coffee mug warmers like they used to

No contest

SEATTLE, Washington - I've had my Dazey 1400 coffee warmer since the late 1990s. It's so old that the plastic is all cracked, the metal plate has actually separated from the plastic, and most of the brown marks on it are not dirt or stains, they're burns. Still, I've kept using it as it keeps the coffee at the correct temperature with its 25 watts of power. This warmer was discontinued years ago.

Usually I'm the only person I can find with some absurd loyalty to a humble product like this, but from reading reviews of other warmers looks like I have a lot of company:

...My old Dazey CW-10 (25 watts) is still getting the job done, but I wonder how much longer it can last...

...I agree with the other reviews that the Rival coffee cup warmer barely warms the cup, much less the contents. The Dazey has 25 watts, and that makes a big difference...

...After ten plus years of use, the heating element of my Dazey Corp. coffee warmer died. With 25 watts it has been the best. I wish I could find another...

...I agree with the other person who mentioned "Dazey Cup Warmer" I also have been try'g to find a mug warmer to compare to it...

...We all miss the old 25 watt Dazey warmers...

...I know it's called a beverage warmer, but it barely does that. I wouldn't recommend this at all. I had a cup warmer by Dazey (can't find it now) and it kept my drink HOT, as it should...

Still I need another warmer so I bought the Mr Coffee black warmer. With a pathetic 17 watts of power I did not get my hopes up, and in a side-by-side comparison with my Dazey it's clearly not keeping the coffee as warm.

There's rumor of a 23 watt warmer in Australia so I finally have a reason to vacation there.

UPDATE 2012/12/30: I knocked the warmer off my desk by accident and it shattered into a few pieces. While I could probably try to re-assemble this I think the time has come. I gave it a dignified disposal. RIP. 1998-2012.

Knowledge at your fingertips (if your fingers are 100,000 miles long)

Knowledge so weighty, it has a gravitational pull

VICTORIA, Texas - I was reading an article from a late-1950s issue of Life magazine on microfiche and stumbled upon this ad (click image for full size), another dark reminder of the horrible days before the internet. This was the way things used to be - a massive stack of books, originating in Europe of course, stretching a good bit of the way to the Moon.

If you're looking for something to occupy your time one idle afternoon, head to the library and read the ads in an old magazine on microfiche. Just sitting in front of one of those reading contraptions gives you a veneer of intellectualism, if you want such a thing, and some of the ads are real howlers today. (Assuming you don't mind reading in photo-negative, I inverted the pic above).

Really, can someone not grab all these fiches, scan 'em, and just post them somewhere? And, while you're at it, do it with all the books too. But, oh then, we'd have no need for these big libraries, and where would the indigents hang out all day? Never mind.

Bill Gates wiggles his ass in new Microsoft commercial

SEATTLE, Washington -

Gates shakes his ass at Jerry Seinfeld at the end of this.

iPhone/Apple myopians

SEATTLE, Washington - In New York one of my co-workers whipped out his iPhone. "You have one of these?" I was asked. No, I don't. "Oh, you're waiting for the 3G, huh?"

To these myopians there are two kinds of people, those that have an iPhone and those for whom the purchase of an iPhone is imminent. I'm not buying an iPhone. I have no interest in general in Apple's overpriced gear. I have a years-old, crappy iRiver mp3 player on which I put talk shows.

Bad effects of moronic Daylight Saving Time switch still being felt

SEATTLE, Washington - I wasn't writing online a few years back, but in 2005 when our gallery of morons, the United States Congress, passed legislation to change the dates of Daylight Saving Time to "save energy", I told everyone "this won't save a bit of energy and it will cause all sorts of technical problems."

The law should have never been passed, considering Australia had done a similar shift in 2000 and energy use did not go down. It immediately became clear after the first shift that the United States was not getting any energy savings either. And to top it off, an academic recently did a study incorporating data from DST-renegade Indiana and concluded that DST shifts actually end up wasting energy.

As for technical problems, for the third time in the last 15 months (encompassing all three "new" DST shifts) we are getting bitten on the ass at work with data issues.

We would be better off picking Congress by lottery (giving us some random sample of the population) rather than elections, which allows smooth-talking hucksters, charming morons, and pathetic panderers to get into positions of power.

(I won't even bother here getting into how we should not have DST at all, it's a pathetic artifact of the past that should be eliminated, and Arizona deserves some credit for telling the rest of the country to go fuck itself on this issue.)

Today is RSS Awareness Day - so become aware

SEATTLE, Washington - In case you're one of the buffoons that still fires up a favorite news site or blog in the browser every so often, to see if there are any new stories - please note that today is RSS Awareness Day. Switch to an RSS or Atom newsfeed for your favorite sites.

Join the 21st century. Here's the feed for this site, and here's a little secret: for any Blogspot blog, you can use that same URL (just swap out the stuff before "blogspot.com") and you can get their feed, even if the user doesn't publish it on their page. (This assumes they have not explicitly turned off the feed.)

The "I'm not acting guilty, I'm just a genius" defense doesn't work for Hans Reiser

SEATTLE, Washington - Superstar software hacker Hans Reiser was found guilty of first-degree murder on Monday for killing his wife Nina, who disappeared in October 2006 and whose body has never been found.

The most interesting part of this was Reiser's defense strategy, which was reported in the Washington Post in February and for which I have a certain soft spot in my heart. Reiser engaged in all sorts of red-flag behavior in the immediate aftermath of Nina's disappearance, including purchasing books on murder, removing the passenger seat from his car (which also had soaking-wet floorboards), not taking part in the search for Nina, and rolling around with $8,000 in cash and his passport for no good reason. This looks like suspicious behavior to most of us, but according to Reiser's counsel, Reiser is so smart, so disconnected from how his actions may be perceived by others, so wrapped up in his tortured genius, that he didn't think about how all of this perfectly explainable behavior made him look guilty:

"Being too intelligent can be a sort of curse," defense counsel William Du Bois said. "All this weird conduct can be explained by him, but he's the only one who can do it. People who are commonly known as computer geeks are so into the field... He's a very difficult person. It's very difficult to represent a genius."
..
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[in Silicon Valley], Hans Reiser's actions appear fairly reasonable, at least to people who spend much more time with computer code than with other humans.

"It strikes me that a lot of coders have a somewhat detached view of the world, and it's reasonable to assume that Hans might not even have stopped to think about how things looked," said Rick Moen, a local area network consultant in Menlo Park.

Reiser's very smart father chimed right in on this theme:

"His undergraduate thesis is on how if you change the perspective, the reality is different," said Ramon Reiser, the defendant's mathematician father, folding a pair of pants in the courtroom hallway as he waited to testify.
..
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"When you look at it, would Hans Reiser turn a hose on a car to wash it? Absolutely, his mother told him to get that car cleaned up," the elder Reiser said.

"I and my brother -- maybe it's genetic -- have driven our cars without the front seat. It's really convenient."

If I'm ever on trial in the future, I want to say right now - I've been using hair dryers like that since I was 10 years old, Your Honor.

The landmine-infested task of predicting the future of the internet

SEATTLE, Washington - A fast-rising post on Digg today links to a 1995 article in Newsweek that discusses the over-hyped future potential of this "Internet" thing. Predicting the future is rough stuff, and anyone who does it in print has some degree of balls, but this author, Clifford Stoll, was way off.

Most people making predictions then were off in some way; I only choose to post this one because Clifford Stoll is, like me, an alumnus of The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, and one of my professors back then would occasionally mention that Cliff Stoll was an alumnus, and how great it was for Stockton to have such a notable technology guy as Cliff Stoll as an alumnus.

Some bits:

Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney.

Baloney?

The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.
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..What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading.

Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly, and most (like mine) are ignored, but mechanisms have arisen to let people get only what they want, and the best of the best get picked up by many people; Paul Graham touches on this a bit in the "Amateurs" section of this essay. The fact that this article is popping up today is a demonstration of one of the mechanisms (digg.com) that is used in lieu of "editors, reviewers, or critics."

And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

Not only can you tote your laptop (or other device, unimagined by Stoll) to the beach, but Negroponte went on to found the One Laptop Per Child project - usable at many places above and beyond the beach.

Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping--just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet--which there isn't--the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Actually, I think the thing many people like about internet shopping is the lack of salespeople. Guess they're not a "most essential ingredient" of capitalism.

All of this appeared in Stoll's book Silicon Snake Oil, but it's now getting its little moment of sunshine on the internet, 13 years later.

I've made the switch

SEATTLE, Washington - No, I'm not turning gay. Though, maybe I'd be happier gay, and it would certainly be easier to get sex.

No, I've changed my Linux home desktop from Gentoo to Kubuntu. For one thing, there seems to be a bit of chaos at the Gentoo Foundation; Ubuntu has what Linux needs, some corporate backing from a mad billionaire and momentum.

Beyond that, the Kubuntu graphical software installer has been a nice break from two years of compiling all software from source in Gentoo. I wasn't engaging in any optimizations that made compiling from scratch worth it.

And Kubuntu has operated more smoothly in some day-to-day tasks, like plugging in my mp3 player via USB.

Obviously, I chose Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu because GNOME is for losers.

Georgia wants a piece of Tennessee for its water

SEATTLE, Washington - The Tennessean is reporting that there is a resolution bouncing around in the Georgia legislature that would move a boundary with Tennessee by about a mile to the north, giving Georgia more land and giving the water-hungry state access to the Nickajack Reservoir.

Georgia, of course, is not couching this as a hostile action, but as a correction of some incorrect surveying 190 years ago:

The resolution, which has passed early hurdles but has not received final passage, claims that the boundary was erroneously surveyed in 1818 and that Georgia has never accepted it. The resolution calls for the creation of a "Georgia-Tennessee Boundary Line Commission" that would perform joint surveys and change the line to the "definite and true" boundary line: exactly following the 35th parallel.

"We're not talking about sucking it dry," said Rep. Harry Geisinger, a Republican who sponsored the resolution in the Georgia House. "We're talking about augmenting some water needs, and as you know, the Tennessee has got plenty of water in it."

States getting into beefs about water is nothing new. In 1934 Arizona governor Benjamin Mouer assembled an invasion force (40 infantrymen, 20 machine gunners, and one steamer) to hinder construction of the Parker Dam, a federal project that would route water to California. The steamer broke down and ended up being towed away by a tugboat owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

Israeli pilots to get jacked up with Viagra?

SEATTLE, Washington - Israeli doctors have noticed that taking erectile dysfunction drugs results in "improved performance in high altitudes" and might start having air force pilots take Viagra for flights:

"The Viagra family of drugs is considered effective in these conditions because when there is a long shortage in oxygen it leads to high blood pressure in the lungs, and the drugs help fight that," the report quoted military medical sources as saying.

Found via Reason Hit & Run

On putting a supercomputer in a former chapel

SEATTLE, Washington - A Sun employee has posted images of a supercomputer in Barcelona that happens to be located in a former chapel. (Yes, the blog entry is months old but this just popped up on digg.com yesterday.) Using an old chapel to house a supercomputer reminded of me of a passage James Francis wrote in The Double Helix (incorrect construction of possessives in the original):

The book I poked open the most was Francis' copy of The Nature of the Chemical Bond. Increasingly often, when Francis needed it to look up a crucial bond length, it would turn up on the quarter bench of lab space that John had given me for experimental work. Somewhere in Pauling's masterpiece I hoped the real secret would lie. Thus Francis' gift to me of a second copy was a good omen. On the flyleaf was the inscription, "To Jim from Francis - Christmas '51." The remnants of Christianity were indeed useful.