carless!

My car died on Friday. The brakes failed, because left-rear steel brake line had rusted through and ruptured under the pressure. It turns out that all of the brake lines (front and rear) need to be replaced, from the master cylinder on out. The mechanic’s going to be busy for a couple of days (it’s about an eight hour job, apparently; about $600).

We were both astonished; we’ve never seen that level of corrosion on a five year old car. It looks like they’ve been soaked in a salt bath and then fired with a blowtorch! I’ve seen this level of corrosion on cars that have been dumped at the back of the junkyard, but never on a young car! The rest of the underside of the car is in good shape; it’s just the breaking system. Very strange…

The Placebo Effect is weird

Everyone else has blogged about this by now, but what the heck:

New Scientist 13 things that do not make sense - Features

My favourite:

1 The placebo effect

DON’T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

quote

Maintaining badly written code is like trying to solve a crossword puzzle set by someone who can’t spell.

(taken from Simon)

They’re Still Here….

Three weeks later there’s still a raccoon in my attic; She either doesn’t want to come out, or is too stupid to find the trap door on the soffits. At one point we thought she was gone, because there were no noises in the attic for days, but then suddenly there were again.

I’m going nuts listening to animal sounds above my head!

Update: she spent all night Sunday/Monday clawing at the (repaired, reinforced) soffits above my bed. No sleep makes for an extremely grumpy Harald.

snow

My car barely made it to the school and back, but that’s not why I’m writing.

I wished I taken my camera with me today. As I was leaving the school I saw one of our big snowplows (not the truck kind, but the big construction grader style ones).

It was stuck in a large snow bank, slowly being pulled out by one of those industrial tow trucks….

it’s official…

If you go to Winx Club, and read Bloom’s blog, it says that…

My six-year-old just used ‘blog’. In context.

books for books sake

“Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity… We cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance.”

• A.E. Newton

That explains my bookshelf…

quotes

Collected from various sources.

Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.
— Sir Ralph Richardson

Only an “S” separates laughter from slaughter.

I have found a marvelous technique for increasing the size of one’s member, which this subject line is too small to contain.
— Fermat’s Last Spam

They’re Baaaack…

Apparently I never documented how much I hate raccoons. Well, they’re back. A loud clatter in the attic at 2AM made me haul out ladders and flashlights, and sure enough, there was a critter up there. I’m not sure where she got in, since there’s no externally visible holes. Based on the noise, I think she’s not sure how she got in either; she was trying to claw / eat her way out through the siding or soffets or something….

too much crap

Today I’m feeling like throwing in the towel on this web server business: there’s just too much crap to deal with.

A friend’s server was broken into and defaced last week by a script kiddy. I’ve been double-checking my box over the last few days, and I’m astonished at the amount of crap flowing in from the Internet. As a security professional I knew it was bad, but I was fooling myself; I didn’t know it was this bad!!!

another qotd

“We can tell when a technology has truly arrived when the new problems it gives rise to approach in magnitude the problems it was designed to solve.”

• Arthur Chandler, 1997 (quoted at the end of “Morality Play”)
  [http://charon.sfsu.edu/MORALITYPLAY.HTML]

authority

“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.”

• Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)

They’re popular…

I’m used to getting blank stares when I answer the question “What are you doing this weekend”? It’s often somthing obscure and geeky.

The answer today is no different; I’m building a trebuchet. But the response is different! Instead of blank stares, I’m getting “Oh ya, my son built one of those for his science fair last year!”. or “Interesting; I was going to build one at the cottage last year”. or “I saw one of those on Junkyard Wars”. Or even “I read about those on the Internet”.

The Forehead Ticket Trick

What a fabulous idea! Works for airplane tickets and passports and similar items, too…

So, you’re going to a ticketed event, like a concert or a ball game. It’s out of town. You’re carpooling with four other people. How do you ensure that everyone in the car has their ticket with them?

The car doesn’t move until each person takes out their ticket and holds it to their forehead.

(quoted from 43 Folders: The Forehead Ticket Trick)

panvore

Wow, I’m impressed. A search for ‘panvore’ in google returned no hits! We’ve been joking about Brian (the human garberator) for years. Most of us are omnivores (we eat anything); Brian is a panvore, because he eats everything.

Update: two days later, and I’ve been indexed; the search now returns this page…

(Update 2025: Brian Dickson is panvore on Twitter.)

Why does the shower curtain blow up and in instead of down and out?

The Straight Dope: Why does the shower curtain blow up and in instead of down and out?

I always thought it was convection; hot air rising out the top of the shower stall sucks the curtain in. But it turns out that cold showers do the same thing, thanks to the Coandă effect

You learn something new every day :-)

For much more, see Shower Curtain Effect.

(Update: The Straight Dope revisisted this discussion, concluding that the original article was false. )