Non-tech people shouldn't write tech stories

I feel bad for this girl, I really do. She posted a picture of herself online, a porn company hijacked it for the cover of one of their DVDs and then even had the nerve to blame her picture for poor sales. I think the porn company should be busted for using a pic of someone underage even though she's not nekkid in the picture.

What I find irritating, though, is this:


By posting a picture online, aren't you not only giving permission to download it, but in a way requiring it of just about everyone who visits your website? Aren't reporters supposed to be wordsmiths of a sort, conveying ideas through the precise use of language?

Holy 5h!7!!!

Now THIS is why we live in America. Because you don't hear stories about getting fined for wearing offensive t-shirts here, unlike in the UK.



T-shirt Hell must be running scared.

Go Jeep Go!

Wal-Mart promotes the sexualization of babies

In a hurry today, I picked up a ten-pack of girl-oriented bibs at Wal-Mart. I should have flipped through them before I bought them, because this was in the middle of the pack:



Does ANY conscientious parent think it's a good idea to advertise their baby daughter as a prostitot? Who in the marketing department at Baby Connection (the baby department for Wal-Mart, and the brand name under which these bibs are sold) thought it would be a good idea to associate the clearly sexual term 'hottie' with a bib sold in their baby department and obviously made for infants and toddlers? Did they really think that parents would want to buy this, and if they did, how do they feel about turning babies into sex objects? Do they think that even joking about a baby being a sexual being is funny?

Iraq wins Asian Cup championship

It's amazing what being rewarded instead of being tortured will do for the morale of a sports team. I hope Uday Hussein is spinning in his grave, and I hope the IOC are duly ashamed of themselves.

I shouldn't be laughing about this...

By now I'm sure you've heard about Oscar the Cat, who lives in a nursing home and buddies up to dying patients. Yeah, that's not funny, it's touching and warm and fuzzy.

THIS is funny, although my finding it funny just shows how bad my taste is.

Did their map artist go on strike?

Flattop/Hallett Hike

These pictures are from hiking Flattop Mountain and Hallett Peak on July 15. Click on the thumbnail for larger photos.


Morning sun on Hallett Peak






This is the sign at the Dream Lake viewpoint, about a third of the way up.


This is Dream Lake.


Long's Peak from the Dream Lake viewpoint


This is either Chiefshead or Thatchtop Mountain from the Dream Lake viewpoint


Stepping back a little from the sign at the Dream Lake viewpoint


McHenry's Notch from the Dream Lake viewpoint


It's amazing to me what lengths trees will go to to grow...especially at altitude.


This is not the top of Flattop...but by this point I was kinda wishing it was.




Longs Peak from about halfway up the Flattop trail.


About halfway up the Flattop Trail, you can see the parking lot. It was very encouraging to see how far I'd come. Unfortunately, the second half of the hike took about twice as long as the first half.








They really don't want you to miss this cairn. It's about four feet tall.


Do not descend, huh?


Like I'm gonna try descending to THAT. From the Emerald Lake viewpoint, you can see from Longs Peak to Emerald Lake in one sweeping view.












Suddenly, Hallett Peak appears over the top of Flattop.






The top of Flattop Mountain is uneventful. I wasn't even certain I was at the top, other than a 'go back' sign that said, "Bear Lake 4.4 mi".


The other sign attached to the 'go back' signpost.


Tyndall Glacier is the big snowpatch on the side of Hallett Peak.


It's the Howdy Marmot!






Cairns mark the top of Hallett Peak.


Longs Peak from the top of Hallett Peak


God glued a rock back together.

Read this.

Then read this.

Then go vote here. (You'll have to provide your age to get to the voting page.)

Tech support tip

When doing tech support by phone for someone several hours away, before having them Fedex you their laptop, be sure to make sure they actually know how to reboot the laptop and are doing so when you tell them to.

Attention loose changers...

But of course fire never gets hot enough to melt steel...

Having your eyebrows plucked is un-Islamic

I'm going to use this as an excuse to FORCE my husband to consistently have his schnauzerbrow groomed. Probably by the same gal that does my eyebrows.

CU sticks their foot in it again

The University of Colorado, the Front Range's bastion of free speech, had a student suspended arrested for making comments sympathetic to the VA Tech shooter - namely:

“If anyone in here says that they’ve never been so angry that you wanted to kill 32 people, you’re lying,” Karson said to the class, according to a police report. He also stated that he was angry about the “mindless droves” on campus.

and

According to witness reports, Karson, a psychology major, allegedly said there were aspects of CU that "made him angry enough to kill people" and expressed sympathetic views toward the Virginia Tech University assailant during a class discussion.

Given what I understand about Max Karson's history with CU administration, I have to wonder how much of this is an attempt to shut up the kid any way they can. I'd be interested to know if the CU campus cops discussed the statements with administration prior to the arrest, and how much gleeful chuckling came from the chancellor's office when the campus cops were sent to pick up Karson.

Not to mention, Karson's got a track record of over-the-top satire, which I'd link to but he's apparently taken his website at yetipaper.com down.

Political correctness is going to take away every last bit of free speech we have. I hope this kid ends up owning the CU campus for this. I don't agree with what he said, I think it's tacky as hell in light of recent happenings, but if tacky were enough to get arrested then any number of Hollywood A-listers would be behind bars.

Something I didn't know you can do with Google Maps

HyLoft shelving doesn't suck

As a matter of fact, Hyloft ceiling shelving does more than doesn't suck. I think I'm in love with these shelves. This place did the opposite of what my digital camera did as far as their instructions - it was just a few pages, and everything was explained out so well that I think my husband could have even assembled it. They must have had some clueless idiot go through and try to put together their shelving from their instructions, and then rewritten the instructions based on the idiot's feedback, because every single time I had a question about where something went or how something fit together, it was RIGHT THERE. I'm gonna cover the entire ceiling of my garage with these, I swear.

This is not my garage, by the way. This is a picture I swiped off the Hyloft site. My garage is entirely too messy to post a picture. This despite having done a complete cleanout last summer - my husband doesn't understand that the garage is not for discarded box storage, and he doesn't seem to understand that the best place to store boxes of old papers is not next to the furnace, which is why I was installing shelving in my garage at 11:30 pm on a weeknight.

I would KILL to be able to write instructions as clear as whoever the technical writer for Hyloft did. If they're not paying their tech writer oodles of money, then they don't know what a good thing they have.

Information overload

Does anyone actually read this much documentation?















That's 18 ounces of documentation. That's right, over a pound of docs for a camera that weighs 5.5 ounces.

7 ounces of that documentation is in Spanish. Separate books that are Spanish, that is, not books that are split between multiple languages.

Shades of Fargo...

Above are the google ads that came out when I sent a gmail out with a picture of Geiger after MadLibs fed her lunch.

This is why I drive a gas-guzzling SUV with four-wheel drive - so in weather like this, I can at least get to the store to get baby food, which is the item I forgot to stock up on before the storm hit. The baby fruit, anyway, which Geiger* has come to expect at the end of every meal. Last time we had a storm like this, diaper rash cream was the forgotten item, and Mad Libs* ended up with the worst case of diaper rash I've ever seen.

We're twelve hours into a thirty-hour storm. By tomorrow, I bet we can't get out of the house without snowshoes, which we don't have. They're on my Christmas list, but I don't think anyone took me seriously enough to actually buy them for me. After we took this picture, we had to break out the snow shovel to get the door closed again.

That's my Australian Shepherd, Bella, peering over the snowdrifts that have piled up to our doorknobs. At two o'clock this afternoon, the snow in the front yard was above my knees. When I went out to run the few errands that seemed really urgent, such as picking up baby food and going to the bank, visibility was down to a few car lengths, and there was at least a foot of snow just sitting on the roads.

*Mudbug and Boo have earned the new nicknames of Geiger and Mad Libs. Mudbug has always liked it when I click my tongue, and about a month ago she started doing it herself. I can sit in my office chair and she swims around the room (she doesn't quite crawl yet, but she can swim rather quickly) and all I hear is *click*click*click*click*click*. Boo has started interjecting odd words into his sentences. They're the right part of speech, for instance, ordering his vanilla steamer with no foam and no belly buttons. Thus the Mad Libs moniker.

Caveat emptor - Dillon Millsap is at it again

A year ago, my husband preordered an Xbox 360 from Alliwire.com, a company that seemed to have a decent reputation - references were listed on the site, there was an active forum that seemed to have customers posting on it, etc. Shortly before the launch date, the owner of the website, Dillon Millsap, announced that his seller for the 360s that he had promised to ship had disappeared with everyone's money. He kept promising to refund everyone's money, and some refunds were issued (including my husband's, after I called the sheriff in Denton County, TX and started inquiring about pressing charges). All the while, he's posting on his forums about various Xbox 360 games that he's playing. During all of this mess, he announced that he was a 17-year-old high school student and that he could just bow out of paying for any of this - a notion I think he was rather quickly disabused of when disgruntled customers started calling his parents and threatening small claims suits against them.

As far as I know, there are still people who have not received a refund - a quick bop around Google shows people posting as recently as September that still are out their cash. The people I feel really sorry for are the people who told this kid that they'd hang in there for their systems, and that they were confident that he would eventually come through. He also was delisted from Ebay at about the same time, although whether the two events were related I don't know.

Alliwire.com has been down for a while. I was doing some research on where to find a PS3 or a Wii, just in case I happened on some poor soul that had one for sale and didn't have the connections to advertise it well enough to run up the price. I came across a post on Cheap Ass Gamers from a year ago that mentioned that alliwire.com was doing PS3 preorders. I started wondering whatever happened to Dillon Millsap - I knew he'd been NARUed from Ebay, and that he'd closed down most of his contact information. A Google search turned up this post from someone posting as Dillon Millsap - with a homepage of entertainextreme.com. The kid's advertising that he has four years experience in selling game consoles. I don't see any mention that one of those four years was spent not delivering $40,000 worth of preorders. He's also relisted on Ebay - although I see that he's sold two items and one of the items never reached the buyer.

Oh, and guess what - on entertainextreme.com he has a section for preorders! Get yer ice-cold ripoff here!

I wonder if his parents are aware that he's back in the Internet fraud business.

Oh, and

The last eight weeks have been about as stressful as life can get without someone dying. More later. I've got a stack of stuff I've been planning on writing about, but haven't had time to. I even had a post in my head for Thanksgiving mentioning that I was thankful that we had so much paying work that I hadn't had time to think about blogging, but I didn't have time to post it.