Misc

I think we’ve all seen it. Now you can do something about it. This website lets you post pictures of bad parkers and even print notices to put on their windshield.

(From Digg🙂

This article from cbc.ca talks about how scientists caused atoms in a chamber to speed up light so that it exited a chamber before it finished entering it. The article will supposedly appear in this week’s Nature.

If you’ve got T-Mobile Internet for your phone like I do, you probably also have unlimited use of their hotspots. What’s your userid and password? This is something I forget every time I try to use it, so I figure if I actually write it down, I’ll remember it. Your userid is your 10-digit phone number and your password is the last 4 digits of the primary account holder’s social security number.

Now, don’t forget it again!

Google’s email facility, GMail no longer requires an invitation. Go to their signup page to get an account if you don’t already have one.

There’s a lot of things you can do with Windows RUNDLL32.EXE. Here’s a good reference for them.

Tiger Direct has a Seagate 320GB SATA-300 hard drive for $100, $80 if you don’t mind dealing with rebates. SATA-300 is one of several designations for the 3.0Gbit/sec spec for SATA drives — fast, fast, fast! And the Seagate comes with a 5 year warranty, too.

The rebate’s only good till 1/31. It looks like $100 is their regular price.

My Microsoft Action Pack for January arrived on Friday and with it came Windows Vista Business so the first thing I had to do was install it on one of the unused partitions on my main laptop’s hard drive. I’ve been playing with it for about half a day, now, and have to admit, it’s OK once I get beyond the flashy exerior.

I don’t think I’m gonna rush right out and upgrade all of my systems — matter of fact, I’m not gonna upgrade any of my systems yet — but within a couple of months I’ll probably upgrade most of them. It includes 10 licenses for Vista Business Upgrade which has apparently replaced the 10 licenses of XP Pro. I didn’t see anything in the package that talked about the replacement/upgrade process, though. See, the Action Pack provides licenses that one can use internally to support their business. Unlike the MSDN subscription which provides software specifically for research and development purposes and prohibits its use in production, the software included with the Action Pack is intended to help Microsoft Partners use Microsoft’s software to run their bueiness. So, if one has deployed all 10 of the provided licenses for XP Pro, must one immediately replace those installations with Vista Business? Since the Vista that’s provided is an upgrade, can one upgrade the previously provided XP Pro? I’m sur ethis will all become clear to me onceI’ve made sense of all the material provided in this update, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense right now.

Also in the package was and Office 2007 Enterprise and a few others including the new Office Accounting Professional 2007. I don’t have a link for that particular product because the link on the Action Pack site points me to Small Business Accounting 2006. I imagine it’ll be up soon, though.

When 1 and 1 started hosting here in the States, they offered 3 years of free hosting. Naturally, I signed up! The free contract expires at the end of the month and, if you’ve been following along this whole time, I was preparing to move. Well, 1 and 1 offered to continue my contract for another year for what I consider to be a reasonable price so it looks like I’ll be sticking around for at least another year. If you were holding your breath in anticipation of a site outage, you can breathe again.

A friend sent me a link to Coffee Review. I guess I’m not a child of the Internet cause I never even woulda thought of looking for something like this. Great if you’re a coffee lover.

Well, kinda. There was an article about NewsTrust (make sure you go to the .net site — the .com site is a squatter or something) in today’s San Jose Mercury News. They gather news stories from all over (newspapers, PBS, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, The Wall Street Journal, yeah, you get it, all over!) and their members rate the stories based on their journalistic quality. It’s a good idea but I’m not sure how they enforce the rating system. Anyway, they launched their public beta on November 28. If you like Digg, give it a look.