Interesting…

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I had an interesting e-mail yesterday, an offer from a software company:

tap tap tap is back with the top photography app for iPhone, Camera+. And to celebrate the launch of the all-new Camera+ 2, with over 50 awesome new features, we’re giving away a custom engraved “TSA Grope-free Edition” iPad, every day for the next 12 days!

To enter for a chance to win, all you have to do is help spread the word via Facebook or Twitter…

The URL, for the curious, is http://campl.us/#facebook.

First, the name ‘TSA Grope-free Edition’ is priceless, poking fun at the ridiculous TSA airplane security theater while underscoring the fact that an iPad, unlike a laptop, lets you skip some of it.

Second, the marketing idea itself is pure genius. Get people talking about your company, and at least some of them will inevitably look at your products, if only on the page that you’re having tweeted around. Get enough people looking at them, and a certain percentage will see a need for them and eventually buy some.

I sure hope that the company behind the offer knows what kind of marketing genius they’ve got on their hands, and is paying that person accordingly.

Amazing…

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While I was living in Maryland, maybe sixteen years ago, we had a couple really nasty ice storms one year. As in, a long overnight session of freezing rain that coated anything it landed on with a two-inch layer of ice, followed by several inches of snow, the another half-inch ice crust on top. I was still working at the Post Office at that point, and of course this couldn’t happen on a day I had off. That’s when I decided that a garage was a really good idea.

It took me this long to get it, but now I have one. And it’s awesome — in the winter I don’t have to remove ice and snow from the vehicle before I go anywhere, and in other seasons I have a place that’s out of the weather to unload groceries or do maintenance work on it. (Checking your oil or tire pressure in an open driveway in mid-winter is not a fun task, even when the weather is clear.)

I knew about the danger of creeping clutteritis — how if you don’t regularly store a car in the garage, clutter will slowly take it over and you’ll never be able to get it in there. That had happened in the two houses my family had lived in during my childhood that had garages, despite one of them being a two-car garage. So I make sure to store it there often, nearly every night at least. And since the winter storms began, I’ve been putting it there practically every time I come home.

Unfortunately there was something I hadn’t considered: how irritating it would be to have to jump out of the car to open and close a garage door, then back into it to drive in or out. GoddessJ has been doing it when she’s in the car with me, so it wasn’t as onerous as it could have been, but both of us were heartily tired of it. We planned to get an automatic garage door opener as soon as we could afford it, but finances were such that it would be a while before that happened.

Or so I thought. Maybe I underestimated GoddessJ’s ingenuity (or perhaps how much she disliked door duty 😉 ); she decided to get several of our family members to pool their gift-giving money and got one for me for Christmas. Due to circumstances, she told me about it early, and took me along to pick it out.

(After a little research I chose a Genie screw-drive model. Quieter than a chain drive, which was important. Not as quiet as a belt drive, but more reliable, according to reports.)

It had been sitting in the garage for the past couple weeks while I studied the instructions. Earlier this week, I decided to set aside a day from my programming work to install it. Wednesday, i.e. yesterday.

It’s a good thing I gave it that long, too. The instructions said that it would take three to four hours, but between the extra bracing I had to do on the door and “header” area above it, and taking extra time to make sure I was understanding the instructions right, it took me about eight, with at least another half-hour to go for the final adjustments and to install and connect the outside keypad. The extra diligence paid off though; I only made one mistake, putting a part in too soon, which was easily rectified.

I was kind of surprised that I was able to do it at all, let alone as well as it turned out, considering the circumstances and my lack of experience with such things, but it’s pretty much finished. We tried it out last night… beautiful. Simply beautiful.

I hope we don’t have to wait until next Christmas to get a dishwasher. 😉

“Finger may point to solution in Amelia Earhart disappearance riddle”

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The mystery of what happened to the famous and charismatic 1930s pilot Amelia Earhart has intrigued people for more than seventy years. It has been the subject of urban legends, and even worked into fiction — I found eight references to fictional works that mentioned her, four of which included her as a main character, including a Star Trek: Voyager episode (“the 37’s“) where several people, including Earhart and her copilot/mechanic, were found in stasis on an alien planet.

However, all this intrigue and speculation may be on the verge of being disproven, thanks to DNA testing. If so, it’s a sad and very pedestrian ending to one of the twentieth century’s great mysteries.

“Harvard scientists reverse the ageing process in mice – now for humans”

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This sounds like wonderful news at first, but when you think about it a little more, it seems like a disaster waiting to happen — one that only a few SF novelists have even attempted to write about. And of those few, the only one that I’ve read (which, unfortunately, I do not recall the name of) is pretty grim.

Fortunately or otherwise, this research probably won’t turn out to be the human Fountain of Youth. But we’d really better start putting some serious thought into how to deal with it when — not if — it’s discovered. Our biology and psychology ensure that we won’t give up until we find it, no matter how long it takes, or what the consequences might be.

“Study suggests that being too clean can make people sick”

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Food for thought, especially for certain of my readers who have a little one on the way:

“The triclosan findings in the younger age groups may support the ‘hygiene hypothesis,’ which maintains living in very clean and hygienic environments may impact our exposure to micro-organisms that are beneficial for development of the immune system,” said Allison Aiello, associate professor at the U-M School of Public Health and principal investigator on the study. […] “It is possible that a person can be too clean for their own good.”

Studies have been suggesting that for years. I thought I’d made at least one blog entry about it before, but Google says otherwise.

“Stylish cyclist collar hides airbag inside”

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First, read this, and maybe watch the video there.

Then read the following passage from the book Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, published eighteen years ago (1992) and one of my favorite near-future SF novels. One of the main characters is a teenage girl who goes by the handle “YT” and couriers messages by skateboard for her pocket money — often riding it on the freeway, carried along by passing vehicles by way of a magnetic harpoon gun with an unbreakable line, her high-tech board automatically dealing with obstacles and road irregularities with millimeter-wave radar and segmented “smart wheels.”

She has been captured and is being transported by helicopter, but has managed to get out and is presently hanging about fifteen feet above the freeway, being carried along at a speed she estimates to be about 45 miles per hour:

She lets go of the handle and goes into free fall.

At the same time, she jerks the manual release on her cervical collar and goes into full Michelin Man mode as tiny gas cartridges detonate in several strategic locations around her bod. The biggest one goes off like an M-80 at the nape of her neck, unfurling the coverall’s collar into a cylindrical gasbag that shoots straight up and encases her entire head. Other airbags go off around her torso and her pelvis, paying lots of attention to that spinal column. Her joints are already protected by the armorgel.

Which is not to say that it doesn’t hurt when she lands. She can’t see anything because of the airbag around her head, of course. But she feels herself bouncing at least ten times. She skids for a quarter of a mile and apparently caroms off several cars along the way; she can hear their tires squealing. Finally, she goes butt first through someone’s windshield and ends up sprawled across their front seat; they veer into a Jersey barrier. The airbag deflates as soon as everything stops moving, and she claws it away from her face.

That new “cyclist collar” might not have been inspired by Snow Crash — the basic idea is pretty obvious when you set out to solve the problem of a bicyclist (or skateboarder) who can’t or doesn’t want to wear a helmet. But I’d give even odds that it was. 🙂

“How To Stop Your Personal Wikileaks”

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Sit up and pay attention, there will be random pop quizzes later — and if you fail one, your “teacher” will probably steal a good portion of your wealth, with no guarantee that you’ll ever get it back.

(I’ve been on the receiving end of credit card fraud three times myself, and I’m ridiculously careful with my data. In all three cases, the credit card information was stolen from the systems of companies that I bought things from. In two of the cases I managed to get my money back, but it’s still a disquieting occurrence. It’s a jungle out there, be careful.)