The original Star Trek opening credits, revealed

Bill's Bad Day

`There's nothing unusual about this scathing rant against Windows' sometimes lousy usuability...

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack ... so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.

This site is so slow it is unusable.

It wasn't in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45.

These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.

They are not filtered by the system ... and so many of the things are strange.

I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing.

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying - where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

...nothing, that is, except its author is named Bill Gates.

Drinking age: 55

I can't decide offhand whether Fred J. Eaglesmith is the best country singer in Canada, or just somewhere in the top three[*], but he's definitely the best stage banter artist. Here he is, demonstrating why on an unreleased tune called "Tryin' to Buy Alcohol in Abilene."



[*] The other two: Stompin' Tom Connors and Corb Lund.

I love the smell of rust in the afternoon

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle aside, the man in the brown truck came through today--as did the person in the red-and-white postiemobile yesterday--with like 100 pounds altogether of vintage Henry Ford and/or new-in-box Speedway Motors goodness. As seen in the above pic, I've now got a drilled '40 Ford axle--bought from the owner of a Canadian Hot Rods & Classics cover car, no less!--a pair of split wishbones of unknown vintage, and not pictured, another set of split 'bones, and a brand new pair of rear hairpin radius rods. I'm on the hunt for a set of early Ford V8 or F1 spindles, plus a buncha stuff that I'm probably gonna wind up getting new from the aftermarket:

• spring perches


• kingpins


• a disc brake kit


• shackels


• a front spring

Throw in whatever miscellaneous hardware I'm gonna need--U-bolts, spring clamps and the like, and I'll be ready to mockup a frame with 2x4s, then order the real deal in solid steel. Well, 2x3x.188 wall rectangular tube steel, but you get the general idea...

Stupid shipping tricks

 

I really don't think UPS oughtta be bragging about something called "Quantum View". Are they saying they can tell you the position of your package or how fast it's going, but not both? And that even trying to observe that would change both anyway?

At least I'm not getting a cat shipped by them--I know what happened when Schroedinger tried that...

Shaved dwarf fighting, EXPOSED!!!

YouTube user "Buffalax" takes time off from his usual gig of hilariously mistranslating Bollywood songs to illuminate the hidden truthiness in this Stephen Colbert interview:

This will be a car someday

Now that the weather has retreated from the depths of arctic hell to the relatively balmy area of almost-not-freezing, I decided the day was perfect to play around a bit with mocking up my latest project-slash-white elephant, a '26/27 Model T roadster pickup hot rod. I've got a '52 Ford flathead V8 (not pictured, obviously), matching truck 3-speed, 8-inch rear, and the plan is to build a late-50's/early-60's style rod roughly similar in style to the Don Conley roadster: