I took these pictures a few years ago at the height of my “tea phase”. I had a few loose-leaf teas, and I was finding that tea strainers were unreliable: they leaked tea leaves, were too easy to overpack, and eventually broke after a few dozen uses. I set out to roll my own tea bags. (more…)

I thought perhaps, I could gain a greater understanding of the direction of oil (and thereby gasoline) prices, if I added a news box for the term “oil” to my Google Homepage.

Not so much.

Weird things happened to me in GTAIV last night.

First, the suicidal taxi. I was finishing up a job at Brucies, and for some reason didn’t feel like stealing a car (that road can get sparse sometimes anyway and cops love it too). So, I called Roman for a taxi. I waited and waited, but the blue dot never got to me. I looked at the big map, and saw that the blue dot was at the end of the docks, about a block away. I walked to the end of the dock and saw the taxi waiting for me, parked behind a container next to the warehouse. I got in, and the drive went into his hating-on-me spiel, as the AI tried comically to back out from the spot to get onto the street. Unfortunately, it poorly navigated the end of the dock, at a point where there’s a short car-length waterway between two piers. The taxi backed up, straddling the edge, then when its rear tire caught on the next pier, the taxi tried to pull forward. By that time it was too late, the front tire caught, and the car slowly tilted off the dock. I bailed from the car, but both me and the car ended up in the drink. The driver was still inside, and still whinging at me, until, I presume, he drowned. I got myself back onto land and walked.

At the end of Russian Revolution, where you have to escape past the cops, I managed to basically just steal a cop car, just as a cop was getting out of it. I’m surprised it wasn’t an auto-arrest at that point. I guess I caught the mechanics at a point where my entering the car and his exiting the car didn’t interact. So, weird, but a good weird.

Getting away from the warehouse, the road curves, which makes it really hard to get out of the wanted circle. So, I drove the police car up the side of the grass hill. Well, I didn’t quite make it, and it slid back in such a way that it ended up tightly wedged between a tree and a container or something. So I had to bail (with Jacob in tow through all this of course) and we hopped on a passing bike. (I didn’t even know you could ride a bike with an NPC; it was a crap shoot, but it works. Nice touch, though Jacob got thrown once.)

After dropping off Jacob, I was going to finish up for the night and head home, so I drove the bike back. As I was coming up a hill, a mack truck came out of nowhere and SMACKed directly into me, throwing me literally like 60 feet. I landed on some grass with barely a thread of health left.

Well crap, I don’t want to get back on that bike if I can help it, and I need to grab some food asap. I went up to a passing taxi and jacked it. Taxis are nice and sturdy and fast, so I figured it was the best option. But then I hear gunshots. I’m like, who is shooting? Wtf? And I hear “I teach you to steal my cab” or something like that. I realize that the damn cab driver I just jacked is packing, and shooting at me! I try bail up a side street but he nails me. That’s the first gun-toting cabbie I’ve encountered in the game.

Does anyone think it’s tacky, or… just plain inappropriate, for Wikipedia’s Featured Article of the Day today to be United Airlines Flight 93? The Picture of the Day is also of the WTC.

Somehow it seems opportunist to me, or somehow demagogic. They don’t usually pick Featured Articles and Pictures that are related to what day it is, as far as I’ve noticed. That’s what the “On this day” section is for.

I note that Google refrained from, say, turning the “L” in Google into the Twin Towers.

Every time I download Dia, I think, maybe, it’s gotten better than the last time I used it. It’s open source, so that means lots of user feedback and stuff, right?

Nope. Not a bit. Dia is the poster child of open source software pitfalls. It’s pretty clear from using the application that the only people deciding how Dia should be are the people who develop it, who have already decided once and for all what Dia’s functional space needs and doesn’t need and refuse to introduce anything else.

Visio is just one of those things that OSS simply can’t (or won’t) come anywhere near close to emulating. Compare with Gimp or Audacity, which are comparatively awesome. Even Visio 4.0, from the early 90s, wipes the floor with Dia. (In fact Visio 4.0, which was the last release pre-MS ownership, is the pinnacle of the Visio line. Everything added to Visio since then has been pretty pointless.)

Unfortunately MS Visio is like $3984765.

Tay Zonday is K-Os meets Busdriver meets Mark Leyner.

All of which are good things, btw.

It could be better only by playing Rick Astley.

Via Lifehacker: WinDirStat is a whiz-bang tool that scans your disk and organizes your filesystem in order of file size. The greatest feature here is that it also provides an incredibly intuitive at-a-glance display of just how your used disk space is allocated among your files.

Above is a shot of WinDirStat showing the disk usage on my system. The large blue area at top left is World of Warcraft (a lot of patch files hanging around there!), the red area in the middle is MP3s, the light blue areas are image folders. The green monsters at bottom left are my hibernate and paging files. Purple files are DLLs and yellow files are executables. Every directory is a rectangle of space, which is further divided into smaller rectangles of space for subfolders and down to individual shaded boxes for files.

Using WinDirStat, you can quickly assess where the big space users are, and delete them at once. It’s a much faster and prettier method than my previous technique, which involved copious manual use of du -h |sort -n in a Cygwin window.

While the new Zune software leaves a thing or two to be desired over the previous one (album info updating, ahem), it does make it a lot easier to explore and subscribe to podcasts. Not only does it provide a searchable showcase of popular pods, it makes it a cut-and-paste operation to add a new one, and from then on, the Zune software will automatically download and sync new episodes.

I suppose this is something iTunes has been doing all along, but I’m happy to have it. Interestingly enough, the Zune actually uses the term “podcast”, a Kleenex moment for a word directly derived from the leading competitor.