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New user? Tuesday, May 25, 2004
Fiesta BBQ False Advertising
We were misled by the manufacturer's packaging to believe it would take 15 minutes to assemble this BBQ in 5 steps with no tools. Completely untrue.
The instructions clearly shows 9 steps. There are 59 pieces. To do this in 15 minutes you'd have to average around 1 piece per 15 seconds. Or, if you spent 5 minutes reading the diagram, you'd have about 10 seconds per piece. That assumes all the pieces are laid out and clearly labelled, which they are not -- they are packaged tightly in a box, in bags, in boxes, and aren't individually labelled.
That said, I really like the BBQ. We haven't used all the features yet, but our first two meals from it were great. It's too bad the initial assembly experience was so negative and misleading, or I would recommend Fiesta to anyone.
Widescale Biodiesel Production from Algae
UNH Biodiesel Group: Widescale Biodiesel Production from Algae
Fascinating!
Monday, May 24, 2004
Iran used Chalabi to dupe U.S., report says
The Seattle Times: Iran used Chalabi to dupe U.S., report says
Rather than Dubya he should be nicknamed Dupe'ya.
CA announces Zope/Plone-based CMS strategy
Finally, the announcements have been made at CA World this afternoon...
Computer Associates: CA and Plone
Bing! That's a pretty major endorsement.
Computer Associates PR: CA AND ZOPE TO BRING OPEN SOURCE CONTENT MANAGEMENT TO MARKET
In related news, Tyrell released the Plone 2.0.3 installer for Mac OS X today. It is available on SourceForge now and should be available from the Downloads page shortly, if it isn't already.
Spin doctors attacking Fahrenheit 9/11
H'wood hot for Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11'
(Emphasis added by me)
Let's take apart those two quotes...
"blatant": adj 1: without any attempt at concealment; completely obvious;
So it's obvious stuff that hides nothing.
"cinematic": Duh, it's a movie.
"2004 campaign pamphlet": So apparently this might help a person make a decision come election time... clearly there's nothing wrong with political statements in land of the brave, home of the free, so why should this be an issue? I don't remember cinemas having any responsibility to be non-partisan or pro-administration.
"fails to provide any hard facts or make any incriminating connections that a reasonably informed person doesn't already know about."
So which one is it? As a programmer I immediately noticed this was a boolean truth expression. An "or" expression is true if one of its operands is true. So he is telling the truth if at least one of the following statements is true:
"fails to provide any hard facts": This remains to be seen. If we could see the movie could find out. I'll give Michael Moore the benefit of the doubt, so I'll disagree with this statement until the White House or someone else proves to me that there are no hard facts in the documentary.
"make any incriminating connections that a reasonably informed person doesn't already know about": That could very well be true since he has written quite a bit about these topics in his books, like "Dude, Where's My Country?" (which I'm currently reading). Not only that, most people are not reasonably informed, because the American media does does not talk about these things, hence the usefulness of Moore distributing this information via the cinema, and therefore, this second statement is true because reasonably informed people (like people who read books or access alternative sources of news and information) already know these things. Hence, his statement is true in whole.
I think what he's trying to say is that people who want to be reasonably informed before the 2004 election should see this movie!
Saturday, May 22, 2004
Announcing the Plone Foundation
plone.org: Plone Foundation Created
This is a big step for the future of Plone. Congratulations to everyone who has made Plone a success to this point and to the board and other participants for getting the Foundation off the ground.
Mac OS X users have to take action to protect themselves
Unsanity: Paranoid Android
Even with Apple's recently security update, you're still vulnerable to attack using various URL schemes, so I recommend that all Mac OS X users install Paranoid Android to protect themselves. I've seen firsthand just how easy it's going to be to exploit these flaws. If you're using NetNewsWire, FireFox, Safari, Mail.app, and probably lots of other apps, you're vulnerable. With all the phishing schemes out there, it's just a matter of time before you get bit.
Protect your computer and your data.
