Follow-Up

There are 521 posts filed in Follow-Up (this is page 50 of 53).

Chinese switch to cadmium as poison of choice

Remember how I said there was no Chinese word for OSHA? It turns out safety-conscious Chinese toy manufacturers continue to poison our kids, this time with cadmium:

In the study, the AP analyzed cadmium content in commonly available children’s jewelry and found most of the pieces had significant cadmium content. One of the pieces contained 91 percent cadmium. That’s not parts per million; that’s percent. That’s toxic waste.

This just goes to further my view that Chinese culture encourages one to cheat, just as long as one doesn’t get caught.

Snow stopped short

In spite of the massive snowfall predicted we wound up getting two inches last night – and even that stopped after 9 PM. After that the precipitation switched to sleet which pounded the house until mid-morning. The snow was only 1 1/4″ deep when the sleet hit it.

We woke up with snow-crazy kids, so when we had stuffed them with as much breakfast as we could (which wasn’t much), we turned them loose outside. After a while I wandered out and shoveled the back steps but quickly opted not to shovel the driveway as it looked like a losing effort.

Instead, we headed to our local Lions Park with our sled in tow, picking up a few neighbors along the way. We spent the next few hours sliding down the hill near the tennis courts, outlasting all of our friends.

After some lunch and naps, we hung out inside as the snow and sleet on the ground turned to ice. Then it was dinner and bed. Overall, a pretty fun day.

The other end of larceny

My recent Hechinger post brought to mind one other tale worth sharing, one I didn’t know how to weave into the rest of my narrative.

One of the part-tome guys who worked at the store was much like me: a clean-cut middle class young man. He was the son of an IBMer and probably never wanted for much growing up. He was pretty friendly and though he worked in a different department we would always say hi to each other.

Then one night my image of him changed completely. We were at a party thrown by one of our coworkers. I took him up on his offer to check out the stereo in his red Mustang. Seeing how impressed I was, he offered to get me one just like it for $50.

What, I said? He then casually explained that he knew some people who could get him “hot” stereos and radar detectors and could hook me up if I wanted.
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Hey man watch this!

After going a year without wearing my watch, on Friday I finally got the band fixed. I took it to a jeweler right outside of my neighborhood. Not only did I get my best watch fixed, I dropped a bag of watches needing batteries on him, too. Those will take longer for him to fix, as he’s slammed with holiday business at the moment.

It’s weird having a watch after not having one for so long. It sure looks nice, though!

(The title comes from a redneck’s last words, of course).

“Premium” doctors

I’ve been thinking more about the MDVIP program that my former doctor ran off and joined. The program is pitched as a way to be seen by your doctor much easier than in a traditional medical practice: for the annual fee of $1500 over and above your other healthcare charges.

What’s been bothering me is the ridiculousness of it all. Why should a patient pay extra for something that the doctor should be doing all along: being responsive to his patients (otherwise known as “customers”)? Why don’t doctors already accept only enough patients that they can comfortably deal with? If you load up on thousands of patients where you can only spend 10 minutes with each, you’re doing it wrong!
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Cheap Thoughts: The “Boss is Coming” screensaver

Yesterday’s Bluetooth screensaver idea gave me an idea of a great way to extend its functionality: the Boss Is Coming feature. Your laptop will automagically display a boring spreadsheet whenever your boss approaches. Then once she’s gone you can go back to playing QWOP.

BlueProximity is open source and thus changing it should be easy. Right now the user selects one device out of a list and triggers the screensaver (or other script) based on that device. A Boss Is Coming feature would require being able to trigger different scripts for different devices.

Ok, geeks. Get coding!

Update 1:24 PM: It looks like BlueProximity already supports multiple devices! Just select the “New” button next to the “Selected Configuration” box, select the desired device, and create your script.

It remains to be seen what happens when a device is selected which has not been paired with the laptop. I doubt one’s boss will let her mobile phone be paired without permission.

Phone bill rises 25%

vitelity

Last summer I bragged about our cheap home phone bill of $8 per month. I did the math today and was alarmed to see our bill has risen a steep 25%. That’s right: it’s now $10 per month!

It seems the addition of e911 service is the main culprit. It added $1.50 per month per DID to our bill. It’s a small price to pay for the convenience of 911 service, though, so I’m not complaining!

Another mystery bot example

Here’s another example of bizarre hits. Two hits for this six-year-old page coming in within 30 minutes of each other:

138.162.8.57 – – [15/Oct/2009:12:12:16 -0400] “GET /2003/07/28/blimps-and-other-things-bizarre/ HTTP/1.1” 200 5094 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)”

[snip]

138.163.106.72 – – [15/Oct/2009:12:44:33 -0400] “GET /2003/07/28/blimps-and-other-things-bizarre/ HTTP/1.1” 200 5094 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)”

The first resolves to gate2-jacksonville.nmci.navy.mil and the second resolves to gate2-bremerton.nmci.navy.mil. It looks like there’s a full-scale botnet attack going on behind the DoD firewalls right now.