atomicthoughts.com

Look to the left. Good, he’s wearing headphones.

Look to the right. Headphones, check.

Check the mirror to see behind you. All clear.

Relllllllleeeeease the gas. Ahhhhhhhhhh.

Went to Albertson’s to get some pull ups. We have no brand loyalty between Huggies and Pampers, but have had little success with store brands. Pampers have the best sale going on right now, so I pick those up.

    List Price: 16.49
    Sale Price: 12.99
    Price that came up when I checked out: 14.99

I was at the self checkout. I love self checkout, but that’s a topic for another post. I canceled my transaction and headed back to make sure I had grabbed the right thing. All was in order, so I headed back to talk to the self checkout attendant. I explained what was going on and figured I would check out and he would subtract the difference. “If it rings up higher than the posted price it’s free,” he said. “Huh?” I said, fairly confident in what I heard but not quite believing it.

Clerk heads back and checks it out, and he verifies it’s wrong. *whisper whisper* between clerk and management, and he hands me the pull ups and says “Here you go.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yep.”

“Would it be completely unethical of me to buy 5 more?”. He stared at me like a lot of people who don’t get my jokes, so I just walked out.

I’ve been using Launchy for a few months, and have fallen completely in love with it. I’ve completely abandoned my start and quick launch menu’s. On my work PC and my laptop it’s mapped to alt-spacebar, and when I’m on my fife’s computer I hit the combination *every single time* before I complain and find the program.

Launchy is a utility that lets you launch programs by typing in their name, or just a little bit of it. If I want to open query analyzer I hit alt-space, “que”, and enter. If it happened to be the tool that started with Q that I used the most, eventually I could just type “q” and have it launch.

Launchy recently went to a 1.0 release and introduced the one feature I had wished it had, and another one I didn’t even know I wanted and am in love with.

In addition to program launching it can now launch folders. So if I want to get to my temp directory, instead of finding an explorer window and navigating there I can type alt-enter, “c:” tab, “my” tab, enter, and I’m in “c:\mytemp”.

The other addition was to integrate web searches into the tool. So now to do a wikipedia search I hit alt-space, “wik” tab, “super bowl shuffle”, and I’m there (result). alt-space “imd” tab, “han solo” tab (result). alt-space “g” tab, “nutritional heuristics”. (result) Well you get the idea.

Sure, that’s all functionality I already have built into my firefox, but I prefer to stay on my keyboard as much as possible. And saving even a few keystrokes an operation can really add up over the course of a day.

So if you’re on windows, give it a shake. It’s swell.

A car was rear ended today when they stopped for me to cross a cross walk. I had a green light, but I stopped on the curb and checked to my left just to make sure, as I always do. Then I heard squealing and a crunch. The back end of her 2 day old car had been crushed by a city recycling truck.

They pulled into a nearby parking lot and I headed over and gave her my contact information, then continued on my way to 7-11. Since I didn’t actually see anything I didn’t think I would be much help, but I did what I could. I passed the parking lot on my way back, and there was an ambulance there, apparently her neck started hurting. Normally there a 2 hour wait time at an absolutely minimum for accident reports, but when there’s an ambulance involved and/or a city vehicle, apparently you get bumped up the chain. I waited about another 10 minutes and a police officer showed up.

“Are you the witness,” he asked?
“Sort of,” I replied. I said I was the pedestrian she had stopped for. He asked if I had the light and I said yes. Since I hadn’t seen anything, I couldn’t take my statement.
“That’s what I figured, but I wanted to stick around in case it would help at all.”
“I really appreciate that,” said the officer. “That’s a civic duty that very few people would have done. Thanks anyway.”

I hope the girl’s okay. I can’t shake the feeling she’s milking it since she was out of the car and walking around when I first showed up. But sometimes those things don’t manifest immediately, especially when you’ve got some adrenalin in you.

sourceforge.net, which is an important website for a whole lot of open source stuff, only allows letters and numbers in their passwords. How dumb is that?

When you have nearly all of your music collection digitized, you often run across random songs that make you go “What the hell?”. The song currently playing that made me think of that?

“Solid”, by Ashford and Simpson. The singing and the drum machines and the synthesizers are going to make my head explode.

The source turned out to be the outstanding “Soul Train: Hall of Fame, 20th anniversary” disc set.

Circuit City employees are dumber than their corporation.

A few weeks ago, CC put out a coupon for $40 off any purchase over $199. It was heavily linked to on the ‘Net, of course, apparently highly in the console gaming arena. Lots of folks used it to get their Wii. CC quickly amended the coupon and added bunches of exclusions. It was still too heavily used for their liking, and sometime this week they canceled the coupon entirely. The note on the website says “We’re sorry we’re idiots, but this promotion has ended”.

Fortunately I already had a copy of the coupon, which has a expiration date of 3/31. After CC canceled the coupon, the original places that had linked to it were full of hateful comments about how stupid CC was. You’d think if CC was going to get bad press like that, they would bother to inform their stores they had canceled it. They did invalidate the coupon in the system, but apparently their systems suck so bad that perfectly valid coupons are rejected all the time.

To make a short story long, I finally got the Canon PowerShot A630 that I’ve been eyeballing for a while. Between the coupon and a price match from their own web site it only cost a little more than the cheapest online price, except I got my grubby little hands on it immediately.

It snowed in Tucson yesterday. Snow is rare, but having it hang around is extremely rare. This snow stayed, and was wet and clumpy, and entirely snowball worthy. There was enough snow, and slipperiness and ice, that local schools had half days or canceled altogether.

Here’s a few pics.

First of all, Stephen Colbert and Bill O’Reilly are going to be on each others shows tonight. It could be quite interesting.

Second, here’s a hilarious skit of the writer’s room for the series Lost. If you’re a fan of the show, this is good stuff.

Season 3 gag real for Battlestar Galactica. Some cheesy editing gags, but some really funny outtakes too.