Agents of the computer fixing "Geek Squad" wear badges and uniforms and drive black and white cars — a look the California Highway Patrol fears too closely resembles actual police officers.

I need to repaint my minivan to stop looking like a family vehicle. Maybe if I add some flames to the side…

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It’s always been speculated that Microsoft planned on connecting the Xbox and the home PC. Now, with the pending release of the new Xbox 360 and the next version of Windows, it looks like that is finally going to be a reality.

The biggest news which we have heard is that when Windows Vista ships it will be Media Centre enabled as standard. This will also be able to talk to X360 and the enviroment will change.

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Yoiked from Monkey Filter:

Scott Blake is an artist who deals in barcodes. included on his site are some cool java-based barcode utilties, including counters, clocks and the ability to barcode yourself. Here’s my barcode along with the description of it’s sections:

You can even scan the code when done to determine how much you are worth:

And from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research I discovered the "Gender Gap" which states that "Women Average 72 Cents For Each $1 Earned By A Man."

Talk about a social commentary where we are reduced to simple barcodes. Granted, this is a generic code that could represent any person meeting my details, and not specifically me, but who knows where the future lies.

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One of the reasons that I love Firefox is that it’s making a much better attempt to adhere to the CSS standards.

For example, right now I’m working on changing the theme of this blog. The problem is that while everything looks great in Firefox, IE ruins the layout totally. If you are reading this with IE, you’re probably wondering where the navigation parts of the page are? Well scroll down, they are there on the left. IE is improperly rendering the (div) containing the post and it isn’t putting them adjacent to each other. It’s one of the many bugs I’m going to have to track down and create work arounds for.

Also IE can’t display transparent PNGs properly. Another known bug. This means all my cool little icons had to be created with a black background specifically so that you wouldn’t have grey boxes around them in IE. Locks you into design, otherwise if you ever want to change the background, you have to recreate your icons. Firefox.. beautiful… *sigh*. Hopefully IE 7 will fix their standards issues.

In the meantime, bear with this page as I transition the theme into something respectable.

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If it’s good luck to catch a leprechaun, what happens when you back over one with your car?

Since the birth of my children, we’ve had a wave of back luck. Today was no exception. Jean’s first time taking the twins out to the doctor, and she hits something on the A.C. Expressway which proceeds to shred her tire. So some smoke and a few thump, thumps later, she pulls off the side of the road. I get the frantic call and go and meet her. Luckily the ACE has added a emergency truck service in the past few years, so by the time I got there, the tire was already changed.

We switched cars, kids and bags — since I didn’t want her driving on the donut, and headed down to Sam’s Club to get some new tires.

So how’s this for a ’scam’? You advertise that it only takes 59 minutes for service, but you include the phrase “from the time we take your keys”. So then you check the person in, fill out the paperwork and then don’t take the keys!! So you wind up waiting almost 45 minutes for them to call you and then the clock starts ticking. Luckily it wasn’t longer. They could have really waited 8 hours and then called us, and it would still be 59 minutes from the time they took the keys. Talk about pissing me off.

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Wired News Blog
If it was both a Monday and I was drunk we’d have real problems.

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We had family in last night for a vacation to see our new kids and went to Fuddrucker’s for dinner. They aren’t kidding when they say home of the world’s greatest burger. Anyhow, after we order I go back to the counter when the order is ready, and these teenage girls waitresses were all smiling and very sweet. We chatted as I grabbed the food, talked abit about the kids and how small they were, and then I headed back to the table. One of the male waiters runs up to me and hands me a note from one of the girls, saying "she wants you to have this".

My first thought? I’m getting picked up by a 16 year old. I’ve never been picked up in my life, and she’s giving me her phone number while I’m here with my wife!

Nope.

The note reads: "Can you please bring the babies over so that we can see them. –Julie".

I only hope that Connor is as smooth with the ladies, and Alia with the men when they not 5 weeks old.

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Yoiked from Slashdot (full article):

Introduction
On August 8th, 2005 Tim Mayer of Yahoo! posted on the Yahoo! Search Blog that the "[Yahoo!] index now provides access to over 20 billion items" which include "19.2 billion web documents, 1.6 billion images, and over 50 million audio and video files". [1] Two days later, on his blog, University of California at Berkeley Visiting Professor John Battelle reported that Google refuted this claim saying "[their] scientists are not seeing the increase claimed in the Yahoo! index". [2] In order to test Yahoo!’s claims, Matthew Cheney and Mike Perry, two researchers working for the National Center for Supercomputing Application (NCSA) under the supervision of Associate Director Dr. Orville Vernon Burton, conducted a brief study of the indices of the two search engines.

I’ve been using Google since it first became available. I make it the startpage on every computer I use on a regular basis. I make it the start page on every computer of every user at work. I install the Google toolbar on all these computers as well.

Why??

Here’s why:

In fact, in the 10,012 test cases we ran, only in 3% of the cases (307) did Yahoo! return more results. In 96.6% of the cases (9,676) Google returned more results. In less than 1% of the cases (29) both search engines returned the same number of results.

[This item originally posted on livejournal.com]

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