Sat, 21 Oct 2006
How to Stop Junk Mail
I think I've figured out how to stop receiving junk snail mail. Unlike Kramer's method to stop the intrusions into his mailbox by the Pottery Barn catalog, which required that he fill his mailbox with bricks, this method keeps the legitimate mail coming. In fact, you probably will still receive Pottery Barn catalogs, but I'm mostly concerned with stopping all of the newsprint advertisements that get shoved in my mailbox. I don't want the ads from Ralphs, Albertsons, Vons, Jons, Food4Less or Vallarta Supermarkets.
The trick is to leave the junk mail in the mailbox. Only take the real mail out. Then, when the postal worker comes to deliver more mail, there's not enough room for more junk. I've only been doing this for about a week, but it seems to work. The junk mail is folded vertically, and the real mail is also placed within the protective shield of junk. I simply remove the envelopes in the center and leave the undesirable outer crust. I'm thinking about stapling all the junk together to make for easy removal and reinsertion, and to prevent the possibility of real mail sneaking in between.
Updates: This passive-aggressive attempt to stop junk mail was unsuccessful, but you can join the fight to stop junk mail by refusing delivery of it. The struggle continues.
Sat, 07 Oct 2006
How to Waste a Day
I've been quite busy with school and work lately, so I was due for a day of unproductiveness. Here's how I wasted a nice Saturday:
Switch from Bloglines to Google Reader - After switching from straw to Bloglines a few months ago, I've tentatively switched to Google Reader as of today. One particularly nice feature is that it only marks posts as read when you've actually viewed them, rather than when you view the feed. It's also easy to create a link blog because you can share posts with a keystroke.
Fix Northern Trust Feed - I fixed my screen-scraped rss
feed of Northern
Trust research reports, which has been broken since around May I think,
when they updated their site.
Start Learning Lisp; Give up - I started reading Peter Seibel's book, Practical Common Lisp online, which
in turn, required that I start learning emacs. I got through about a chapter
and a half of the lisp book, and about half of the emacs tutorial before
deciding it wasn't worth the effort today.
Touch Base with the Housing Bubble - If you haven't heard, housing is
past the peak, and heading down.
I caught up on Mish's
blog, where the deflationary (rather than hyperinflationary) recession
looms large. And if you haven't met Casey
Serin yet, he's a 24 year-old facing forclosure five houses with $2 million
in mortgage debt. Bummer.
Sat, 17 Jun 2006
Left-Handed Pens
A couple months ago on Digg, there was a post about putting a Mont Blanc refill in a Pilot G2 case. Some of the comments indicated that the G2 itself was a very good pen. So the last time I went to Wal-Mart, I tried out the G2, which is a gel ink pen. Unfortunately, it was not designed for left-handed writers. The ink takes way too long to dry, and if you attempted to write with it, you would end up with a page full of smudged ink. If you're one of those lefties who gives us a bad name by turning the paper perpendicular or even upside-down, perhaps you could make it work, but I'm not familiar enough with the acrobatics of that method of writing.
I must recommend that the left-handed stick with Pilot's Extra Fine (0.5) VBall Grip, the ink of which dries quickly enough to cause only the occasional gentle smudge.
On a related note, Mead sells left-handed notebooks which are just regular notebooks with the front and back covers swapped so it opens on left and you write on the page on the left with the spiral on the right. Although I'm a bit ashamed that it took seeing one of these notebooks to come up with the solution to spiral hand, I now open all of my notebooks from the "back" and write on the left page.
Mon, 16 Jan 2006
Schwarzenegger Causes Traffic
I got stuck in traffic on Friday because Schwarzenegger was standing on a pile
of rocks next to the 405 in front of a bunch of TV cameras. He was causing
traffic while announcing funding
for a carpool lane.
Thu, 05 Jan 2006
Good Coffee
So, I finally got a proper coffee machine, a DeLonghi espresso maker. I bought some pre-ground espresso from Caffe Latte on Wilshire since I only have a whirling blade grinder, which I've read is not recommended for espresso. I'll try out the grinder later, but I wanted to make sure that my first cup of coffee was delicious, and it was. The machine also came with some Illy pods, but I haven't tried them out yet.
Now that lattes don't cost $3, I want to drink them all day, and I'm worried about excessive caffeine intake. The problems of living in modern society...
Sun, 13 Nov 2005
Reunion Recap
My high school reunion last night was a bit disappointing. There were a
handful of old classmates that I remember, but most of good friends from
yesteryear didn't show up.
There were a number of law enforcement officers and teachers in attendance. There were also a surprising number of people still living in Rosamond.
I did get contact info for a bunch of people, so I'll try to get in touch with some of the people who didn't show up. That means you: Lee, Ian, Malia, Elsie, Josh, Chris. (I hope nobody else is insulted by my poor memory.)
Sun, 30 Oct 2005
Rosamond High School Class of 1994 Reunion
My 10-year high school reunion is in two weeks. Yes, 1994 was actually 11 years ago, but I guess it's close enough. I haven't kept in touch with many of my friends from high school, so I'm hoping there's a good turnout.
If you happen to have gone to school with me, please send me your contact info, and I hope to see you at the reunion.
I was a big supporter of the hair gel and optical glass industries in 1994.
Sun, 11 Sep 2005
Pentax S5i
I bought my first digital camera last week. It's a Pentax S5i. I got it at Costco for $300, plus $90 for the 1GB SD card.
I wanted a camera that was small enough to carry around easily, but that takes great-looking pictures. The Pentax fits the bill. It has a ton of features that I haven't figured out how to use properly yet. I'll need to get a book on photography to learn when to adjust the white balance or exposure. Out of the box, it takes very pretty pictures though.
The macro mode allows me to take pictures very close-up.
I'm also enjoying the black-and-white filter and sunset mode.
Works with Linux
The camera plays nicely with Linux. It came with a USB cable, and upon plugging it in, it is detected as a scsi device using the usb-storage module, just like the iPod Shuffle.
Sat, 16 Jul 2005
Smoke Detector From Hell
Apparently, Friends episodes are based on true stories. Do you remember The One Where Phoebe Destroys Her Smoke Detector? My smoke detector must have seen it, and decided to recreate the episode last night. In the middle of the night, it started beeping, loud enough to wake me up, and just frequently enough to almost let me fall back to sleep before beeping again. I got up without putting on my glasses, followed the blurry glowing green light in the dark, and felt around for the button on it. Now, I know the button is to test the device, but for some reason I thought it might also serve as a "shut up, it's 3 in the morning" button. Remarkably, after pushing the button, and pissing off my wife (born without the ability the hear the ultrasonic beeps) with the squeal asserting to the world that smoke detector was still doing its job admirably, the beeping stopped.
Alas, sometime not much later I guess, the beeping resumed. I got back up, twisted the alarm off the wall, and tried to disconnect it from the mains. After struggling for a bit, I put on my glasses and turned on the light, vexing my wife considerably more, and successfully disconnected the alarm. I placed it on my desk, and went back to bed. Of course, that didn't stop the beeping; it has a battery backup so that it can keep beeping in the case of a power outage.
So, I took the alarm to the kitchen, closed the bedroom door, and retired to my bed once again. The little alarm persevered: the beeping was still loud enough for me to hear it. I got up, returned to the kitchen, and disconnected the 9-volt battery. The beeping continued. We have a small apartment. There wasn't anywhere to put the alarm farther away from my bedroom. I considered putting on some clothes and taking it out to my car. I also thought about putting it in the refrigerator. Or, I could leave it out in the hallway of my apartment building. I might still be able to hear it there, but at least I'd be able to share my hell with the guy across the hall whose alarm clock goes off for hours and hours every afternoon.
Feeling pretty clever for 3am, I decided to wrap it in a little blanket and sandwich it between two throw pillows. Finally, I was able to get some sleep. My wife still wanted an apology in the morning.
Thu, 07 Jul 2005
Damn You, Macy's
The secret to a happy marriage is two comforters. Why is it imposible to find twin-size duvet covers by any of the "luxury" bedding makers?
(No, I don't really care, but Denisa is no longer happy with our IKEA bedding.)
