So Microsoft announced a touch-surface interactive computing device called “Microsoft Surface“—gee, now there’s a creative name!—and practically everyone in the known universe has gone crazy over it. Eh, I don’t know. I might be interested, but only if they can get the proper environment running on it, as pictured here.
Oh, c’mon. You know it’s the first thing you thought of too.
From my comment queue, possibly the first time I feel a spammer is really speaking to me as a person:
Did u ever heard about CSS…? it will help your site.
Do tell, oh random anonymous stranger whose site URL crudely references the genitalia of older females! I wish to learn.
Five minutes after I should have left for the airport to catch my flight to Boston and An Event Apart, I finally got the DSL service back, four and a half days after it went dark. After a few minutes of frantic testing and configuration to make sure it would work for Kat in my absence, I blew out the door.
Guess what’s broken in my hotel room.
I know that you don’t need to be told this, but I’m just going to put this on record for anyone who might be Googling for the information in the future, not to mention the four separate people who got this wrong within the last 24 hours. It’s like this:
My last name is spelled M-E-Y-E-R. No trailing “s”; an “e” to each side of the “y”; no “a” anywhere within its bounds. Got it? Good!
Also, it’s “Eric” with a “c”, not a “k” or even a “ck”. ‘kay?
So how does your name get misspelled, and how much does it bother you?
“Daddy, what old is Bear?”
“Do you mean how old is Bear?”
“How old is Bear, yes.”
“I don’t know, sweetie. How old do you think he is?”
“Sixty two.”
“Sixty two?”
“One.”
“Oh, he’s sixty one, not sixty two?”
“No. Bear is sixty two one.”
“Sixty two one.”
“Right.”
Honestly, the most impressive thing is that she knows any numbers above fiveteen.
It’s been very nearly two years since the last time, and that’s way too long. So: it’s time for another caption hunt!
Leave your caption(s) in the comments. Who knows? There might even be a prize or two involved.
(Update: comments are now enabled. Oopsie.)
Kat and I were watching “Good Eats” the other night, and as Alton slid a dish into a nice toasty warm 350-degree oven, I suddenly sat bolt upright.
“Hey, that’s our oven!” I blurted out.
Kat and I (okay, mostly Kat) recently decided that enough was enough, and that our old oven had to go. It was a Jenn-Air that came with the house, and frankly, it was either not very good in the first place or else had just been beat all to hell. Cramped, dark, and uncalibrated—and with an unreadably worn set of control dials to boot—it was time for the warhorse to go.
After a good deal of research, Kat settled on a GE JK955 electric double oven, which we were relieved to find fit almost exactly into the space where the old oven was, once we removed a couple of drawers. It’s got all kinds of toys and features that would send any food-porn addict straight into overdrive, including a built-in probe thermometer. It even has a nice warm proofing function, which is one of the reasons Kat picked it.
There is one thing about it that cracks me right up, and that’s the Sabbath mode. Seriously. When you put it into Sabbath mode (the display reads “SAb bATh” when you do so), it will help you observe Orthodox Jewish law as regards the Sabbath. Really! See, you’re not allowed to do any work on the Sabbath, which includes things like turning lights on and off. Ovens fall under that restriction as well, which makes cooking dinner a bit tough. However—and here’s the funky part—you get off the hook if you don’t directly cause the work to occur. If the work happens indirectly, then you’re okay.
So when the oven is in Sabbath mode, you input the temperature and cook time you want. Then you press start, and for a random amount of time that ranges from 30 seconds to a minute, nothing happens. Then the oven kicks on. Ta-daaa! Indirect action! Sure, you pressed all those buttons, but the random time delay is enough to get around your religion’s restrictions on Sabbath work. It’s all, pardon the term, kosher. Check out the Wired article about the man responsible for Sabbath mode, if you don’t believe me.
I’m still trying to decide if this letter-of-the-law approach lessens my respect for Orthodox Jews’ conception of religion, or if I have more respect for their pragmatic willingness to hack the problem. I think it’s the latter. Apparently there’s still no progress on a molecular screen that will prevent the insertion of porcine products into the oven, so I guess some things are still up to the individual.
So not only do we have a frum oven, but without realizing it we had settled on the same model that A.B. himself uses, which is about as weighty an endorsement as we can imagine. (Of course, his is the larger unit, but that’s okay—ours fills its space very nicely, thank you.) The degree to which this makes us feel all smug and superior is probably cause for alarm. If you hear our friends are getting ready to stage an intervention, well, that’s probably why.
For whatever reason, I actually prefer Pringle’s “Right Crisps”, which is the lower-fat version of the chip, to the regulars. Still, Kat tries on occasion to introduce me to new things, and one recent attempt was a purchase of Pringles Prints.
Now, I think the idea of printing text on a potato chip is kind of cool, even if it’s in this kind of odd light Windex blue; I have to wonder what’s in the ‘ink’. Disappointingly, the facts printed on the chips were pretty basic, not to mention focused almost solely on dinosaurs and elephants for the first half of the can. I found this kind of funny, but admit it makes sense as I assume the target demographic for these chips is the kids, who love big animals. But I don’t know how the folks at Proctor & Gamble can live with themselves when they’re pushing facts like, “Did you know? Elephants do not live alone — they travel in herds.”
Maybe that’s a major revelation when you’re six, but I have to figure that if you know much of anything about elephants, you know that much. I smell filler text. Somebody was on a deadline to come up with a certain number of facts, and got desperate.
Anyway, I brought all this up because right near the middle of the can, I found out that even potato chip makers have to calibrate their printers.
You can see it in more detail on Flickr.