Bring your kids in, in costume, and get a free 8×10 taken at the store and printed before you leave. Good for Friday and Saturday only.
There’s some evidence that suggests there may be reduced immunity to H1N1 if you’ve received seasonal vaccines in the last couple of years. Suddenly those innocuous little needle pricks don’t seem so purely helpful! Note that everything is still unclear as the findings are only seen in Canada and the paper is not yet even peer-reviewed and published. So just hold off until things get a little more clear.
I was just made aware of Frogbox: a neat business idea brewing in Vancouver – provide a service to people that includes reusable moving boxes, a dolley, and pick-up/delivery at your house.
They even have a sustainability-related conservation message/donation policy!
If you’re moving in Vancouver or Seattle, I’d suggest checking them out rather than looking around for old carboard boxes. They’ve taken the sustainability idea all the way, including bio-diesel powered trucks to deliver and pickup the empty boxes.
From the article:
Young children who spend more than two hours glued to the TV every day double their subsequent risk of developing asthma, indicates research published ahead of print in Thorax.
So let’s see … prolonged TV viewing is now associatd with asthma, obesity, diabetes, promiscuity and smoking.
This blog post lead me to 4 great new top-like applications: htop, iftop,iotop,apachetop
Someone recently asked me what the right way is to dispose of old drugs – either drugs that you no longer want hanging around your house or that have expired. I wasn’t really sure. So I found out, and wanted to share. Hint: don’t flush them down your toilet.
In reading my daily dumb quotes calendar this morning I came across a brief story of Engineer Charles Steinmetz. I’ll quote another site that has done a write up:
Here’s an interesting anecdote, as told by Charles M. Vest, President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, during commencement on June 4th, 1999. “In the early years of this century, Steinmetz was brought to General Electric’s facilities in Schenectady, New York. GE had encountered a performance problem with one of their huge electrical generators and had been absolutely unable to correct it. Steinmetz, a genius in his understanding of electromagnetic phenomena, was brought in as a consultant – not a very common occurrence in those days, as it would be now. Steinmetz also found the problem difficult to diagnose, but for some days he closeted himself with the generator, its engineering drawings, paper and pencil. At the end of this period, he emerged, confident that he knew how to correct the problem. After he departed, GE’s engineers found a large “X” marked with chalk on the side of the generator casing. There also was a note instructing them to cut the casing open at that location and remove so many turns of wire from the stator. The generator would then function properly. And indeed it did. Steinmetz was asked what his fee would be. Having no idea in the world what was appropriate, he replied with the absolutely unheard of answer that his fee was $1000. Stunned, the GE bureaucracy then required him to submit a formally itemized invoice. They soon received it. It included two items: 1. Marking chalk “X” on side of generator: $1. 2. Knowing where to mark chalk “X”: $999.”
Now other sites have him asking for $10,000, while others have him simply pacing around the machines for a few moments and figuring it out. I prefer the quoted version because it feels the most real to me.
A nice little story about the value of knowledge. Note that he lived from 1865 to 1923.
