Because Laura‘s the best girlfriend ever, she got me a Roomba for Christmas. It took a while to get here, and I wanted to test it for a while before writing a glowing review.

In short, the Roomba sucks.

And that’s exactly what it’s supposed to do. It sucks without my intervention, except a few times when it got stuck or trapped, and it does a damn fine job of sucking. It sucks up cat hair, cat litter, cat feces, cat barf, cat dandruff, and all the other various parts of cat that are strewn around my house. It sucks up sand-dune sized litter drifts without a complaint, and it sweeps up the gnawed corpses of toilet paper rolls left by the dog. It handles 2/3 of the floorspace of my house in about an hour, and has some battery charge left over.

Remember, kids: Stainless Steel is not for swords.

Ahh, the Rosetta Stone for Unix: need to know how to find the hardware configuration of a Solaris server, and you only remember the AIX commands? Look no further.

Last night some cock-nozzle from the Home Warranty Scam company called.

“Hi, I’m Bob with Home Buyer’s Warranties!!! I just wanted to let you know that your home warranty coverage ends at the end of this month.”

“Oh, EXCELLENT!”

“Uh.. well I was calling to see if you wanted to renew it?”

“Absolutely not. I’d rather be mauled by wild dogs.”

“… Er..”

“MAULED. By DOGS. As in.. EATEN.”

“So you weren’t happy with the service?”

Sam introduced me to Firestarter FX, which is a nice little CD-burning app for OSX.

It supports the following features:

Backs up CDs that neither Apple’s Disc-Copy nor Roxio Toast can backup.
iso and cue/bin support.
Overburning.
iso and cue/bin image creation.
2-click folder backup.
2-click CDRW erase.
Simulation.
Customizable RAM cache.
High speed burning.
Buffer under-run technology.
Multi-session burning.
Paranoia audio-cd ripping, for best error protection copy.
CDDB access to automatically create CD-TEXT data.
CD-TEXT reading and writing with drives that support it.

Given the steady pace of advancements in medical technology, suppose that at some point in the future, deaths due to old age and illness was no longer common, if even possible.

Suppose that technology was then applied to pets. This seems reasonable to me, since people love their pets. Also, a lot of times medicines are tested on animals before humans, so the treatments might be easier to apply to pets.

The Bible, as IRC.

If you read it and laugh, you’re going to Hell.

If you read it, laugh, and understand it, you’re going to do Tech Support in Hell.

A while back, I suggested we paint the bathroom green, because anything would’ve been better than the nasty, soul-sucking blue-grey that the bathroom had been painted in since the early 70s.

At the time, I was joking, but I think it turned out quite nicely. I want to continue the Tiki theme, adding a bamboo print border, and eventually replacing the toilet and bathtub with rattan replicas. Within a few years, perhaps I can make defecating in my bathroom a truly tropical experience, replete with strange diseases and mysterious insects eager to inflict and explore supporating wounds.

For those of you who come here looking for information on “where to purchase Aerogel”, check out MarkeTech International.

It’s about $1000 for a 4″ x 8 x 0.5″ block. Too bad I don’t own the patent.

KeepCash.com is a pretty nice deal-finding site. Plus, it’s run by my pal Jon. Go buy some stuff.