Wheels within Wheels

… wed … can eternal lie?

Maybe they could have had a famous author play at the wedding.

In both senses.

This is more focused on a single area needing improvement, and a bit more profane than my rant on the topic, but also more prescriptive.

The British are having to shut down an entire village.

… but I do appreciate tools. Some are beautiful, some are special-purpose, and some are just fun.

And some are beautiful, fun, and strange:

Looking for a job? Be sure to check out a Microsoft education standard you probably weren’t aware of: rating competence in humor.

Second video via Ace of Spades HQ.

It’s been a few weeks since my last update. I’ve been busy, but not really that busy. I went to a wedding in Missoula with my daughter, celebrated the birthdays of a couple friends, got some stuff done at work, gave my daughter one of my ukuleles which she got autographed at the Jake Shimabukuro concert, and so on. The concert was very good (which I’d expected), and Jake finished with a performance of Bohemian Rhapsody (which I hadn’t). It’s going to be on his next CD. I picked up his DVD, Play Loud Ukulele, while I was in Hawaii … I’m enjoying that, too.

In any case, I’ve been saving this link. It’s to part one of a three-part article on trying to locate the diner portrayed in an iconic painting. The painting always reminds me of the Tom Waits song (and album), Nighthawks at the Diner, although the lyrics seem to refer to a diner in San Francisco, rather than Greenwich Village. It’s a good article, and the website as a whole is worth a look. I’ve long been interested in “hidden history” and the like.

Burt Prelutsky’s essay here resonates powerfully with me.

I have an Android phone and love it, so this looks pretty interesting to me. Via Make.

It’s the Tom Swift Centennial. I started reading Tom Swift books one Christmas when my brother and I each received a Tom Swift book and a Hardy Boys book. Now it’s my other brother who collects them. In honor of the centennial, I think that some Tom Swifties are in order. If you don’t like those, you can look here for others.

And, speaking of bad writing, the results of the annual Bulwer-Lytton competition were released during my hiatus. Personally, I’m rather taken with the runner-up in the Detective Fiction category.

For reading little teeny print.

Related info here, as well as a generator.

Post title from the song.

Yesterday evening, Marion asked me to replace the battery in one of her smoke detectors … it had started giving her the “low battery” beep, and she couldn’t manage it herself.

It turned out that I couldn’t do it, either, without the help of serious tools. A few months ago, she had her house painted. When they painted the ceiling, the workers apparently detached the removable part of the detector, painted the ceiling and the mount, and then reattached the main part of the detector without letting the paint dry. Really, they should have not painted the mount, but they did.

The first thing that happened was that I broke off the cover of the smoke detector while trying to unscrew it from the mount. I ended up using a sharp chisel to slice away the various parts of the locking mechanism, and now I have two further tasks - see if the painters did the same thing with her other smoke detectors, and then buy and install replacements.

Airplane! was a remake - who knew?

The Japanese have extended their alphabet. As if there weren’t enough characters already.

The last veteran of The Great Escape has died. I remember reading Paul Brickhill’s book in high school, before I saw the movie.

Everyone talks about using good passwords, but everyone uses ‘password’ or their mother’s maiden name, rather than using something harder to guess.

A comparison of features between the Rosetta Stone and the iPad? I have to believe that there’s a larger market for the iPad, though.

I remember a song from sometime in the 60s with a line in the chorus that went, “Ride, ride, ride the wild surf!” Somehow, I don’t believe that this is what they were singing about.