Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from November, 2004

Supersize me

Just saw this documentary on the weekend. Scary stuff. Being from Canada I can't believe the sizes of food there, and how American's can consume so much. Really opened my eyes to the excesses we all go through.

New cars

I'm not in the market for one yet, but a thought occurred to me as I watched one of many car commercials which interrupted my regular Sunday night programming. Why do cars have options? Why can't they just sell cars (and trucks - virtually any vehicle) with all the options. Then, if someone doesn't want, say, air conditioning, it could be removed, and the price lowered. Why does everything else have to be added on? It really bugs me when I see a car commercial. They show this really nice car and say "Prices start at X" but in small print they say "model shown is Y" usually many thousands higher. It reminded me of the movie "Tucker" (and of course the history of the man) in which the idea was to bring the most advanced car available (with all the options of the day) in one package, for one price. Of course the big 3 didn't like the idea, so the Tucker never got off the showroom floor. Too bad, because he would have shaken up the indust...

Linux again

So I am feeling more comfortable with linux. I was able to install Wine to run windows programs, and even got a demo of VMWare on which I currently have windows 98 running (winxp is next). Yesterday I set up remote access into my home computer from work, and can even use my desktop (via VNC). I also found a java based SQL manager, so I can now do some simple DB admin. This is part of my longer term strategy to get more into PHP and web programming. So far I have to say that I am impressed. I've done the updates that are required and haven't had to reboot once! My computer has been running for a couple weeks straight now and I haven't rebooted yet it runs as if I have. I also was able to convert my NTFS drive to fat32 (using another computer with windows and partitoin magic on it) so that I can better access the data on it. My next step now is to figure out why I can't seem to burn discs. I put in 700 M discs and it says that even with 650 M data I have too much dat...