Eengstro on September 6th, 2007

StrategyPage has an excellent op-ed today:

The major problem in Iraq is back in the United States. There, many politicians either don’t bother, or don’t want to believe, what is actually happening, and has happened, in Iraq. In a way, that makes sense. Because what is going on in Iraq is so totally alien to the [...]

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Eengstro on August 28th, 2007

I saw this headline today:

U.S. most armed country with 90 guns per 100 people
Reuters – 37 minutes ago
GENEVA (Reuters) – The United States has 90 guns for every 100 citizens, making it the most heavily armed society in the world, a report released on Tuesday said.

That just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Of [...]

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Eengstro on August 26th, 2007

Yet another reason that Norton Internet Security sucks: When a user is logged in to Windows Vista with a “Standard user” account, the Program Control feature of Norton’s Personal Firewall will always block new or unfamiliar programs. It will also always block programs that have been updated (which, since they have changed, are treated as [...]

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Eengstro on August 12th, 2007

Sometimes the way a news story is written pisses me off as much as the events being reported:

Egyptian girl dies in circumcision
Sat Aug 11, 7:50 PM ET
CAIRO, Egypt – A 13-year-old Egyptian girl has died during a circumcision operation, two months after the death of another girl prompted health officials to ban the widespread traditional [...]

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Eengstro on August 11th, 2007

A few weeks ago, my two-year-old Kenmore 35726 vacuum (Epinions here) suffered an interesting failure. While vacuuming, I began smelling a burning odor. I stopped, and took the cover off, expecting a failing belt. However, the belt and brush agitator were fine. I put it back together and resumed vacuuming. A few minutes later, it [...]

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Eengstro on August 11th, 2007

Sit and admire one of the more amusing/frustrating error messages I’ve received from MySpace:

MySpace is an example of what happens when you release a half-assed, hacked together demo to the world instead of a fully-designed and tested product (i.e. something you actually thought through beforehand). You have to keep fixing it, and yet it never [...]

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Eengstro on July 25th, 2007

A couple of weeks ago, I received yet another sales call from Discover Card. This time, they were trying to sell me some sort of “payment protection” insurance. I told them “no, I’m not interested”.
Yesterday, I received a letter in the mail welcoming me to their payment protection program. Those fuckers. Now I remember why [...]

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Eengstro on July 24th, 2007

I went to visit Moleskinerie today, and found a GoDaddy “parked” page in its place. WTF?
Update: Apparently a large power outage in San Francisco has knocked out a major data center. Other websites, including Craigslist and NetFlix, are also down.

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Eengstro on July 7th, 2007

I was logged into my blog with IE (I usually use Firefox) when I noticed the following button at the bottom of every admin page:

This takes you to a page that declares, “Internet Explorer can make your computer unsafe. Why not switch to a browser that’s more secure?”. This button only appears when using WordPress [...]

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Eengstro on June 19th, 2007

Reading the rental classifieds would make you think that every place offered is much better than the student-infested dump you’re looking to move out of. Alas, it just ain’t so! Like all other advertising, the classifieds (and this includes such things as Craigslist) are crawling with euphemisms: soft words chosen by landlords to ease the [...]

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