It’s really a shame that nose art on military planes has disappeared. I stumbled across this video collage of stills of WWII B-17 bomber nose art intermixed with short video clips of original crew members.
I was lucky enough to go inside the Nine o Nine at the Dayton International Air Show many years ago and I’ll never forget it. It’s a shame that out of over 12,000 Flying Forts that were built only a handful are still flying.
Nine O Nine History
In doing an image search in Google for that Ubuntu logo below I came across this disturbing anime-style logo for Firefox. I cry for the future of humanity. Oh wait, did I mention it’s a naked fox?
I wiped my home file/print server that was running Fedora Core 3 a couple of months ago since I broke my Firefox install while trying to upgrade it. I decided to try another distro and chose Ubuntu version 6.06 (Dapper Drake). I was really impressed at the ease of install and the support in their forums is great.
One thing that drew me to this distro is that the root user is disabled by default. You login as a normal user and then sudo whenever you need to do something administrative.
Yes it’s true, after 12 years we finally retired our old, crappy $350 mattress set. My wife & I bought that set when we first moved in together and just never got together the money to get a new one until now. We finally made the call when we started waking up achy from coils & bars poking us at night.
The best part is the deal we got. We really wanted a Stearns & Foster and decided in the showroom that the Lombard Plush was right for us but sadly the price wasn’t. Luckily for us they had somehow ended up with two floor models of that one so they sold us one at about $700 off the normal price.
Someone pointed me to this page of Amazon product reviews written by Mister Quickly. The way he just zooms off on a tangent cracks me up. For instance in his review of The Anatomy of the Zulu Army: From Shaka to Cestshway, 1818-1879 he somehow works in this:
He laid his Pulsar Quaadrant-Ray aside, relaxing in the security of erotic congress.
Thanks to Pingmeister for finding this Toddlerpede. Even better is the Beinart International Surreal Art Collective site, it’s got lots of great stuff. More stuff by the artist Jon Beinart here.
I am scared that there are now consumer-level kilowatt power supplies. Remember when 250W was plenty? Now you can get 1000 watts of screaming power (and for only $370). To be fair this one has the cool new modular power connections so you don’t have all those useless cables coming out of your PS.
Newegg.com – ENERMAX GALAXY 1000W Power Supply
Holy moly, there are some serious kick-ass computer case mods in this contest. Being a car guy I like the Boss but the BF2142 is cool too and the WMD is just amazing. I don’t know which one I will vote for.
bit-tech.net | Mod of the Year 2006
(Make sure you scroll down to the drop-down list of mods to see details on each one).
Here’s a picture of the BF2142 mod to whet your appetite:
Thanks to Darana for finding this interview with Matt Stone and Trey Parker. If you don’t know who they are then you really aren’t on my wavelength at all.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/116787.html
Like the page says “If Optimus Prime were built of 100% oak instead of that wussy metal of the future, this video would be a teaser for the new Michael Bay movie.”
haha, those crazy Europeans and their stunts. Check out this jump video: http://tinyurl.com/yk4dhy
There were close to 200,000 headers to download for one of the binary groups and it’s taking a long time to get them so I think that means that the retention in that binary group must be much better than before.
/crosses fingers
***EDIT****
Oops, that was counting UP so it’s over a half-million headers for that group. With 64 groups to to full updates for it’s saying it will take over an hour at 350k (which isn’t really that fast but it ain’t nothing to sneeze at either).
Well, almost. Here’s a news story on their site about how they are working to improve newsgroups. I don’t want to pay for a premium news service (since I wouldn’t use it every month) but it was frustrating because Cox’s retention on binary groups was so short (just a couple of days usually). That’s why I was happy to read this:
Cox is working with Highwinds, an industry leader in newsgroup management, to:
* Increase retention by at least 30 days: Retention time for binary newsgroups is being increased from an average of 3 days to at least 30 days. Text groups will have even longer retention.
* Boost transfer speeds by more than 30%: Each Newsgroup user can utilize up to four connections to the server, and transfer speeds for each connection have been increased from up to 384 Kbps each to up to 512 Kbps eachThe new newgroup servers are available to all customer effective October 24, 2006.
Then I read the next paragraph which pissed me off:
All newsgroup users should experience uninterrupted access to all newsgroups and the ability to enjoy all of the new enhancements.
Note: Value Tier Customers will not experience any change to newsgroup speeds. Value customer desiring to see increased speeds for Usenet are encouraged to upgrade to our Premier Service.
Now I had to stop and consider which type of account I have. I’m sure that at $40/month I must be a “Value” customer (translated as “low value”). I don’t see anywhere in my online account what type of service I have so I guess I’ll have to test with my newsreader and see how many concurrent connections I can have. I could have sworn I used to get at least four but it’s been a while.
Fast forward two minutes and I read this on the normal support FAQ part of the site:
How fast is Cox Newsgroup service?
Each Newsgroup user can utilize up to four connections to the server, and transfer speeds for each connection have been increased from up to 384 Kbps each to up to 512 Kbps each
So what gives?
Fast Forward a few more minutes and I’ve fired up GrabIt and am getting four concurrent connections for downloading group updates so it’s looking good so far. Next step: check the binary groups to see how old the oldest posts are.
Wow, the Cox automated IVR system for cable internet kicks ass. I was having very spotty connectivity since Friday. On Monday morning our connection went away entirely and the TV went, too. I called support and got a recording that they had a known outage in our area and had already rolled a truck.
On my way out to work I saw the truck coming around the corner. When I got home that night there was a truck near our house and the tech was on the radio with someone. TV was working now but internet connectivity still sucked.
The next day (Tuesday) our
connection still sucked in the morning. When we walked the dogs at 6pm there was another Cox tech nearby and later that night our connection was back to normal (that as quick as a whip).
Sadly this morning our connection sucked again. Mind you for several days I was power cycling the cable modem and router multiple times per day with no effect. Tonight I called Cox support and it put me into the IVR
system. Amazingly the system couldn’t ping my cable modem so it sent a reset to it, then it could ping. My connection was instantly back to its normal speed and I never had to talk to a human. I am going to have to Google for a way to send that reset command to the cable modem from my side to save even the phone call next time.
Ah, a new extension for Firefox. This one allows me to post sites here using the sidebar instead of the link on my toolbar. I like this better than the built-in WordPress tool/URL that I used in my link bar since that tool pushed you to the posting page, then back to the source page. This made it impossible to reference the source page without opening a second window. Now I can type my post in the sidebar while reading the original page in the main pane. Excellent.
Thanks go to James who posted this story on his blog and to zilch_space who provided the fix that I was pointed to the wrong URL for the extension.
