An oven that keeps your food cold?
Ok, crazy as this sounds Whirlpool has come up with an oven guaranteed to keep your food COLD.

Yep...that's right.

However it's not as nuts as is sounds. The trick is you put your perishable ready-to-bake food in the oven before you leave for work. The food stays cool, fresh and healthy till it comes time to cook it, then the stove heats back up and your food is ready when you get home.

It may even be possible to phone the thing and tell it when it's time for dinner to start cooking.

How clean are whistles realy?
You ever heard someone say "Clean as a whistle?"...have you ever SEEN the inside of a whistle, I mean realy, they get pretty nasty in there.

Marketing Spin-Doctors Must Die
Have you noticed the way the Spin-Doctors at various companies keep trying to convince you that bad things are actually good for you? Case in point is my ISP Comcast. I'd been on their cable modem service for awhile and was routinely getting 1.5mbps service with bursts up to 4 mbps, particularly when using their news servers.

Well, one day I got an E-Mail saying that to "improve my service" they were going to put a 1.6 mbps cap on my download speed. I could be wrong, but I don't see how SLOWING DOWN my high speed service actually improves it! Now my newsreading sessions and other big downloads take much longer than they used to.

More recently, they announced that they were going to "improve my service" again. They did this by shutting down their news servers and giving me a "free" account at Giganews. Giganews is a great service, but the problem is that my new "free" Comcast provided account came with a 1 Gig per month cap. The old service that Comcast provided was unlimited. So again they've improved my service by cutting it back!

What makes this really insulting is that after slowing the service down and putting a cap on newsreading, they actually raised the price! To be honest, I think I'd feel better if they sent me an E-Mail that said "Hi, we're about to cut back your service and raise the price, if you don't like it, go find another cable modem company!" instead of trying to convince me that cutting back on service was an "improvement".

Who's the RIAA trying to kid?
Ok, I've tried to stay neutral during this whole song-swapping thing, but one thing is really bugging me. If you read through the RIAA web pages you'll see a lot of things about how their sales are hurting, how much CD's cost to produce and so on. They go to considerable lengths to justify what they charge for a CD. But check this out, had you noticed that you can now buy DVDs of complete feature films (plus tons of extras) for the same and sometimes LESS than the cost of the CD soundtrack from the same film? I kid you not, here's an example from BestBuy.

The Matrix DVD 14.99
The Matrix Original Sound Track CD 14.99

Does this strike anyone else as more than a little crazy? Do they really expect us to believe that the CD costs them just as much to make as the WHOLE MOVIE on DVD?

And the RIAA wonders why everyone hates them and are so willing to steal their music.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. If they made their entire catalog available for a FAIR PRICE online, even in an unprotected format, they would kill off 99% of the song swapping services overnight.

Rewiring and Updating
Just spent a little time wiring up the BLOG to various places in my home page. All the links to the left now go someplace interesting. The BattleTech and Red Planet links are particularly fun and have a lot of pictures of the stuff I used to do. There are still some places around that run these games I helped make, see The Virtual World Site for the most current information.

The main website is in process too and will probably be completely revamped soon.

First Post
Well, here we go...gotta figure out a good way to integrate this blog thing with the rest of my tripod site. Should be interesting.

Web site redesign is underway, look for new stuff soon.