CRAZ8

I encountered a strange thing this weekend. I commented on a blog entry and disagreed with the blog poster. All comments are moderated on this blog, which is fine, but my entry has not yet shown up. A number of other comments posted after mine have appeared, and these all agree with the original author.

How many other comments that disagree with the author have also been filtered out? This now looks like everyone agrees with each other.

In this case, the subject in question is about the Seahawks, so it’s not a subject that affects world peace, but the blog is run by the King 5 news organization, and now I have to ask more questions about their biases in other areas of their reporting.

The problem I have with this is that, until I experienced it, this was hidden from me. I may expect this on a clearly partisan site, but a responsible news organization should be able to do better.

One thing no-one talks about is how the unlocked cell phone market works in the US.

I bought a pink RAZR for Lisa earlier this year, and I just got a black RAZR for myself. Since these are unlocked, they are not US models of the phone, which makes for some interesting issues.

Lisa’s phone is for an African market (we think South Africa), so the power brick doesn’t fit into a US socket. No matter, we are world travellors and have a handly travel adaptor.

My shiny new phone seems to be from Hong Kong. This comes with a UK style plug. This time, the company selling the phone threw an adaptor in the box. Very helpful.

These phones have a ‘send a quick message’ function – 15 messages you don’t have to type. the first 9 of mine are in Chinese! Sweet.

Both of our phones think they are roaming. We have no idea how to get the phone to indicate it’s not roaming. Cingular tried to add Lisa’s phone to their system a feweeks ago, causing all sorts of fun at the call center (or centre!)

The good news is that phones work really well.

I just received my new Dell Inspiron E1505 laptop. Its got a 1680×1050 15.4” display, Intel Duo CPU at 2GHz, a bunch of RAM, an 80GB disk, and it’s really quiet!

Here’s the Dell web page

The first thing I did was start uninstalling all the crap Dell felt the need to supply me. Wow there’s a lot of crap. There’s also a bunch of stuff running at startup. This stuff is trickier to get rid of.

Did I mention how quiet this thing is?

I got the Media Center version, with an external TV tuner. I will be trying to set this up with our DirecTV HD tuner to watch and record TV with. This should also allow my videos to be viewable by the XBox 360.

Next thing is to install my development tools and move as much of my configuration from my old Toshiba tablet PC.

Last Saturday, we spent about 5 hours in Napa on a trip organized by the Seahawks. We visited two wineries – Opus One and Neibaum Coppola. We had a great time at both. Opus One took us on a tour of the facility and we had a tasting in a dining room that opens onto their impressive barrel room.

At Neibaum Coppola, they took us to a private area and we tasted wine and ate some great cheese.

Here’s where the weirdness begins. After our cheese and wine, a bunch of helicopters started buzzing around. It was quite annoying. It turns out that Christina Aguilera was getting married on a neighboring property.

The other weird thing. Whilst driving there and back, we noticed a house just off the road on a hill. It turns out it was the Napa house from this CNN article

Coincidence? I don’t think so…

I was reading this article on The Post Money Value blog, when I saw a link to Ask Leo.

Strangly, I purchased a house from Leo and his wife back in 1997.

Adam has a serious message here: Speaking Up

The Flying Spaghetti Monster is a more lighthearted way of covering some of the points Adam raises.

Here’s an interesting optical illusion