Geek Drivel

Ah, the infamous duct tape.

How is duct tape like The Force from Star Wars? They both have a light side and a dark side, and they bind the universe together.

A roll of duct tape and a can of WD-40 is all you really need for most household repairs. If it moves and it shouldn’t, use the duct tape. If it doesn’t move and should, use the WD-40.

I could probably find a dozen other humorous (and true!) statements about this wonderful product, but the people at Lifehacker have done one better — they’ve got an entire list of the uses that people successfully put duct tape to, including a number of them that I’d never have thought of — honestly, healing warts?!

(I saw my first roll of actual “duck tape” — duct tape’s ancestor — in a hardware store last week. Neat.)

I hope everyone remembered to update their clocks just now.

(What, you mean you didn’t stay up until 2am today just to do that? )

GoddessJ and I recently visited an Ikea store to get some furniture for our new house. As always, my attention was drawn to the fake computers and TVs they have in their display rooms.

You’ll be as sad as I to learn that one of the manufacturers of such props (I think it’s the one that the Ikea store we visited uses) suffered “a major catastrophe” recently. Fortunately, it sounds like they’re still in good financial shape, and will be making new fake electronics in short order.

(Via Boing Boing)

One of those neat things I’ve always wanted to know but had never had a chance to learn. The ‘net really does have everything.

I’ve seen lots of “squirrel-proof” bird feeders before. In most cases, the squirrels managed to work around them and get the bird food anyway. But this one looks like it just might work. And it’s a lot less expensive than the others I’ve seen too.

Doom, despair, and agony on me!
Deep dark depression, excessive misery!
If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.
Doom, despair, and agony on me!
— Recurring skit from the TV show Hee Haw

This sounds like a great idea. But I have to wonder about it.

I know a woman, a friend of ours, with totally abysmal luck. She suffers minor — and very odd — disasters on a regular basis. And it’s not from anything she does — they’re just random events that could happen to anyone, but that happen to her with far more regularity than mere chance would allow for. On a related note, she loves to complain about her life, and these little visits from the misery fairy seem to give her plenty of fodder. It’s an open question whether the complaints come from the bad luck, or the bad luck comes from the complaints.

On the other hand, I know one person who could fall into a sewer truck and discover a gold nugget, and I can’t attribute that to any particular perspective on his part.

I also know people who technology hates — they get near a watch and it starts gaining time, and woe betide them if they try to use a computer. And others (like myself) who technology adores, and whose mere presence often fixes wonky machines.

It’s enough to make you seriously consider that there might be an element of truth to The Matrix, that the entire universe is nothing but a simulation that we’re all in. Which gives rise to some interesting philosophy, and might explain quite a bit, when you think about it.

I had trouble believing this headline when I first read it, but when you read the entire article, it makes a lot of sense.

This is from yesterday’s Dilbert Blog entry:

A Muslim, a Christian, and a crazy guy walk into a room. The one thing you can know for sure is that at least two out of three of them organize their lives around things that aren’t real. And that’s the best case scenario. Atheists would say all three have some explaining to do. And atheists are the minority, which is the very definition of abnormal.

Hm… is computer software “real”?

I’d tend to agree with this. I have an old battery-powered analog office clock, not so that I can see the time (that’s what I have a watch for), but mostly so that I can listen to it tick while I work… I find it soothing.

But the main reason I wanted to write about that post was to draw attention to the completely awesome picture at the beginning of it. I want a clock like that!

Sheesh… I wouldn’t want to be a drug dealer these days, if this is what they have to go through to get their product. I wouldn’t want to be one of the policemen who had to dig through the crap to find it either. They don’t make a Bunnysuit strong enough that I’d ever feel clean afterward.