I began writing this to share what I’ve learned when shopping online, but it turned into a lesson for me instead. I learned how to buy something online, return it because it made you look silly, pay for shipping and a restocking fee, buy another item from a different online company and receive the wrong […]

I need to preface what I’m going to talk about with two things. First, when I was young, I received a number of letters from different companies saying I was almost a winner in their sweepstakes, or even better, that I had already won something. Without fail, I dutifully filled out the forms, pasted the […]

At lunch today someone brought up a meme that I had heard of before, but I began to wonder about its validity. The general idea is that people can read words with jumbled letters as long as the first and last letter are in the correct order. The following paragraph is used as an example. […]

No one likes canker sores, and from my research, no one knows how to prevent them either, so until a remedy is found, we’re stuck with them. I don’t get them that often so it’s not a big deal, but it’s still an annoyance. It was unpleasant enough that I once wrote about having a […]

Unlike Amazon, AT&T seems intent on treating their customers as poorly as possible. Their cell phone service was mediocre ever since we signed up, but it began to progressively worsen and eventually became so bad that people couldn’t hear anything we said. Our conversations were spent yelling into the phone (which was pressed tightly to […]

A 63-year-old man who hasn’t slept for more than two decades has been told there is nothing wrong with him by doctors. Ukrainian Fyodor Nesterchuk from the town of Kamen-Kashirsky said the last time he managed to doze off was more than 20 years ago. “I can’t remember the exact date and I don’t know […]

When I bought my 300ZX, I installed a car alarm along with a stereo. One winter evening I heard the sirens of the alarm blaring and since I knew it had become sensitive to small gusts wind, I trudged out to the car to turn it off. The disarm button on my keyless entry contraption […]

Here is one of the funniest animated gifs (NSFW) animated gifs I’ve seen in a long time. It really helps if you’ve seen the Lord of the Rings movies. (via waxy links) Update: I crossed out the link to the original image because the creator apparently had 150GB of his bandwidth used up. He replaced […]

In the past Windows users have asked me how to resize the photographs they take with their digital camera. It wasn’t until recently, when I learned that the Paint program that comes with Windows has the ability to resize images, that I could provide a useful response, If you send five or ten pictures to […]

In this guide to installing Firefox the author outlines all the extensions he uses. The vast array of extensions is good and bad. It’s good because it allows people to extend the browser to do all sorts of things the original developers never dreamed of, but it also means that if you have multiple machines […]

Frustrated with lengthy advertisements and previews that delay movies and chew up viewing time, a state lawmaker wants theaters to be honest about when a movie actually starts. State Rep. Andrew Fleischmann is proposing legislation to force movie listings to print the time the previews start, and when the movies start. “We’re being robbed of […]

Remember that huge 6-pound burger I wrote about last July? No one had been able to eat it within the 3-hour time limit, not even competitive eater Eric “Badlands” Booker. The 420-pound Booker who has eaten such things as 49 glazed doughnuts in eight minutes and two pounds of chocolate bars in six minutes tried […]

I’ve noticed a recent surge in new search engines, but who can blame them? They’ve seen how successful Google has been and want a piece of the pie. Not only are new ones cropping up, but existing search engines are trying to add new features, like RSS feeds on MSN or Yahoo’s desktop search. I’m […]

When I wrote about the Yahoo Mail Archiver I never expected to be deluged by requests for me to close Yahoo accounts. For some reason people began entering their Yahoo e-mail addresses into my e-mail notification form with the unsubscribe radio button selected. At first I was curious why I was getting unsubscribe requests from […]

If you use Opera and have ever accidentally mistyped a URL that was earlier in the alphabet than the correct URL, you probably remember the annoyance it caused. For the benefit of those who don’t use Opera, the reason it’s annoying is that Opera uses the history to populate the dropdown box. The intent is […]

It doesn’t seem possible, but yesterday was our one-year wedding anniversary. The time has flown by. To celebrate, we stayed in Las Vegas, spending the night on the 17th floor of the Stratosphere Hotel. We had dinner at the House of Blues (here’s a virtual tour) in Mandalay Bay, then walked along the strip and […]

It’s been far too long since I posted some of the strange search phrases that led people to my humble home on the web. You know the drill. The terms that someone typed into a search engine are in bold, my responses follow each one. What do mandarin oranges look like? – Well, they’re round…and […]

I drive through an intersection every day on the way home from work, and I’m almost always forced to stop at a red light, even when there are rarely any two cars going the other direction. When I first see it, it’s usually green, but as I get closer it turns yellow and then red, […]

A few days ago I mentioned to Jason that at long last, comment spam is a thing of the past (hey, that rhymes). The same is true on his blog thanks to WP Hashcash. It’s such a relief to be notified of new comments without the dread of having to clean up hundreds of spam […]

Occasionally I’ll hear a phrase that I’ve heard hundreds of times before, but for some reason I become acutely aware of the literal meaning. For example, hearing that someone had “lost their train of thought” made me begin to question things. Why are your thoughts a train? Why do you only lose a train of […]

When I upgraded to PHP 4.3.9 on this server I would occasionally get an error that didn’t make any sense. The two that I saw were: Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_VARIABLE in (filename) on line 10 Warning: Unexpected character in input: ‘ (filename) on line 20 The line numbers didn’t have anything that I […]