Category: life

Topics concerning that thing known as ‘real life’ and not virtual worlds.

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In the ‘cool stuff’ category

Warning: if you’re not a computer geek and you have no interest in computer gadgets, reading this blog entry will cause your brain to dissolve into a liquid, leak out your ears, and stain your shirt.

Because I’m upgrading from a desktop to a notebook shortly, I found myself with an ickle problem: what to do with my 60GB hard drive? It’s nearly full of vids, music, and photos. I couldn’t possibly squeeze all of that and the 20 gigs on my primary drive into my notebook. Well here’s the answer…

This brilliant little gadget is a drive kit for mounting a hard drive or CD-ROM drive externally. You can mount pretty much any IDE drive inside the box, which plugs into a USB 2 port. For Macophiles, it also comes in a Firewire version.

With a transfer rate “up to” 480 megabits per second with USB 2 and significantly less than that with USB 1.5, it’s slower than an internal drive. Notebooks, however, don’t give you the option of mounting extra drives internally, so this is a nice solution. And it comes in a purty two-colour box.

So now my media has a new home, and if/when I get another hard drive, I can use one of those removable drive trays in it to swap out the drives as needed. Nifty.

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42 days of water left

An article on Canada.com reports that the Greater Vancouver regional district has only 42 days of water left. A hot summer with little rain has dried up the reservoirs, and water restrictions are in effect.

Oddly though, golf courses and car washes, among other businesses, are exempt from the restrictions. City council will analyze the weekend’s water usage sometime next week and decide whether having green golf courses is more important than having enough water to drink.

I think extreme restrictions should have been imposed on everyone early in the summer, as soon as the reservoir level dropped to fifty percent.

But I shouldn’t second-guess the wisdom of city council–they really know the business of running a city. And the mayor has a pretty good swing, I hear.

Link: Canada.com: Water bans eyed for business outlets

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Saiyan wield ways and means

As a technical writer, I always appreciate a concise and well-written set of instructions.



Click to show full image.

In this example from Darren Barefoot’s “Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness“, the warning is clear:

WARNING

1.With appertain rotor of screw setting pre ceiling on the under standing that serew no wield. May wield two-faced, pressboard securing. wield pre to begin with wiping ceiling of bilge dasto.

Ah, this is the standard of excellence in documentation to which we should all appertain!

(Thanks, William K., for this link.)

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Look at the camera and say argh

Just when people started to think that Canadians might be cool, Ottawa implemented a new policy that prohibits smiles and other expressions in passport photos. A photo with any expression will be rejected by the passport office.

“The International Civil Aviation Organization, ICAO, has released a recommendation regarding a new specification for photos in passports,” explained Suzanne Meunier, spokeswoman for the Canadian Passport Office. “What they say is that the facial expression should be neutral … no smiling, no laughing, no frowning — no expressions, basically.” * 

This will make it much easier for customs officers to identify someone from a photo. People will look as grumpy in the photo as they do in the customs lineup.

Link: Canada.com: Don’t dare smile on your passport photo