Sanity Regained?

After scouring literally everywhere in town that sells trashcans a month or so back, and finding nothing larger than 4 liters in the way of stainless-steel stepcans, I went to the local hardware store (which was one of the places I'd looked before) to buy some nails and screws, and what should they have on display but 30-liter stainless-steel stepcans! A bit pricey, but a nice impulse purchase.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Last night, we watched "Star Trek: Nemesis." I dunno, but if I wanted to see futuristic dune buggies, I'd go find "Megaforce." If I wanted to see vehicles being shot at and flipping over, I'm sure TNN still has "The A-Team" on at some time of day. If I wanted to see them jumping off hills, there's always "The Dukes of Hazzard." And what's the point of Picard saying "Fire at Wil" when Wesley isn't even in the movie? General consensus: glad we waited for it to come out on video. We ate Burger King food, and I had some peanuts and chips. Then I didn't get nearly enough sleep - or at least, it felt like I didn't. But no, I didn't do anything interesting, fun or nifty this morning. Especially not anything involving passwords.

Social Networking

Friendster - currently in a free beta period, although they'll start charging for some aspect(s) of it sooner or later - is a rather interesting site. Rather than creating yet another dating site designed to help one meet total strangers, they've designed yet another "six degrees of separation" (well, technically, it's only four degrees, but that's plenty!) site.

So what's interesting about it? Well... I know who my friends are already. But I don't necessarily know who their other friends are, or who those friends' friends are, or who those friends' friends are. Nor do I know whether there are people among all those friends who might have interests in common with me, live in my town, or whatever. Or rather, I didn't know. Now I do.

It's also interesting to find out that a friend I've made recently knows someone, who knows someone else, who knows a friend I'd lost track of years ago. It's interesting to find that I'm only a couple friends away from someone my daughter's mom went to high school with (hundreds of miles from where I went to high school). And it's interesting to find cases where three different friends of mine know different people, who know different people, who know another individual.

Anyway, if you're a friend of mine and not on there yet... feel free to look me up.

One by one, the trashcans steal my sanity.

 Like most households, we generate some amount of rubbish. (Not to be confused with compost, which goes in the compost bin my daughter and I built, or recyclable glass, aluminum cans, tin cans, corrugated cardboard, and various papers, which go to the recycling drop-off.) Some time back I got some Sterilite (think Rubbermaid, only cheaper) tubs to lug rubbish to the solid waste transfer station - two of them fit in the car's trunk. Unfortunately, the lids cracked easily, flies were able to get in, and maggots atop one's trash containers are no fun. Plus, they were broader than they were deep, and thus a pain to handle for dumping into a compactor chute. So today, they got ditched. After which I went shopping, and determined that the largest cylindrical, stainless steel rubbish can available in consumer-oriented stores locally (Sears, Macy's, Wal-Mart, Long's Drugs, Ace Hardware) was about 1.25 gallons. Hooray! We'll only need, uh... twenty or so.

A bit of Googling confirmed my belief that there are plenty of stainless cans out there in larger sizes. Some of them are even step-on or pedal cans, with nice tight-fitting lids, and so on. Unfortunately, they're quite pricey; one of reasonable size is typically around $100 or more. (On the plus side, some of them come with spiffy stickers that say things like "Biohazard" and "Infectious Waste." Just the thing to catch the attention of the security guy at the dump. Yes, I said "security guy at the dump." Heaven knows our trash needs to be protected from terrorism. Oy!)

So... I'll check some office supply stores soon. In the meantime, when someone says, "the bathroom trash needs to go out," I just reply, "out to what?"

If this is a cobra, I must be a mongoose.

So I bought that EZQuest Cobra+ 7200RPM 120GB FireWire drive last October or November. Come April and it goes all Tango-Uniform on me. I ship it off to them in May after determining that it's staying dead, it comes back "fixed" (new drive inside, I guess).

The very first time I turn it on, it makes this goshawful noise like it did when it was dying. The next time I turn it on, it's quiet, mounts fine, works fine.

Then my iBook had to go get not-repaired. Once it came back, I plugged the Cobra back in, turned it on, it was nice and quiet... but didn't do jack when it came to interfacing with the computer. The orange "I'm talking to the thing at the other end of this FireWire cable" light doesn't even come on.

Furrfu.

My tax dollars at work

Today, I stumbled across the Transportation Security Administration's official list of permitted and prohibited items in checked or carry-on luggage. I'm sure it took a lot of thought, discussion, and tax dollars to come up with this...

So... I was a little disappointed to discover right on the first page of the list that my taxes went toward determining whether "Transformers" brand robot toys were safe to take on airplanes. Apparently, they are -- presumably, hijackers preferred the short-lived competing brand, "Gobots."

The list also contains quite a few comon-sense things. We all already knew that we were allowed to bring cameras, laptops, mobile phones, PDAs and all those things. And I suspect most of us had figured out that meat cleavers, sabers, swords and spear guns were kapu in the cabin, and plastic explosives and dynamite couldn't even be checked.

Other than that... hmm. The "personal hygeine" category appears to have needed the clarification. Yes, you can bring your cuticle cutters, eyelash curlers, nail clippers, tweezers, and, "in limited quantities," hairspray and deodorant. Looking good will help balance out being crammed into economy class next to an overused bathroom, of course!

But Transformers? 

Lava

When up close and personal with lava, it is critically important to gesture toward it as if one is a game-show model.