“Originally designed for a 21-month mission, Pioneer 10 lasted more than 30 years. It was a workhorse that far exceeded its warranty, and I guess you could say we got our money’s worth,” said Pioneer 10 Project Manager, Dr. Larry Lasher.
I’ll say…
“. . . you know frankly, going to war without France is like
going deer hunting without an accordion. You just leave a lot
of useless noisy baggage behind.”
– Jed Babbin, a former deputy undersecretary of
defense in the first Bush administration, on Hardball
I had mistakenly attributed this to my former boss, Ross Perot. As always, Snopes knows better. 
Oy, this guy gives the doves a bad name…
Speaking of which, Peter Bagge had a fantastic cartoon in last month’s Reason magazine about the peace protests from a Libertarian’s perspective. Check out “Observations from a Reluctant Anti-Warrior”.
When I was 11, I had experienced the Blizzard of ’77 in Buffalo, NY. By the time the storm was over, I could walk up the snowbank in the front yard and look into the 2nd story windows. 29 people died, $300 Million in damages. As an example of how bad it was, here’s a car being dug out from above:
A year later, my wife Heather experienced the Blizzard of ’78 here in the Boston area. 54 deaths, $1 Billion in damages, 27 inches of snow. Here’s a picture of the damage done to homes here in Scituate:
Over the past two days, we’ve had the Blizzard of ’03 here in the Boston area. The total amount of snowfall actually beat the the ’78 record by half an inch, but there was much less wind and the coast was spared from flooding.
Kind of anti-climactic, eh?
My work laptop, a Dell Inspiron 8200, has had continuous problems since I first bought it in July. A few weeks ago I rebuilt it from scratch and it’s started exhibiting a new problem – seemingly random freezing and sometimes crashing during the night. I would then be forced to reboot and then it would be fine for 15-20 minutes and then yet another freeze up.
I think I’ve found the solution to this problem.
I started to notice that the crashes/freezes occur while the CPU was fairly heavily loaded (ex. virus scanning, movie playing, etc.) After reading several other posts on the Dell user forums and elsewhere on the web, it started to make sense that the CPU was overheating. I downloaded the Dell Inspiron 8×00 fan control utility and set it to be fairly aggressive as to when it increased the fan speed from low to high. Sure enough, while running a virus scan the CPU hit 45, 50, then 55 degrees Celsius. It then switched the fan from low to high. And then I also realized that I’ve never heard the fan run that loud before!!! I don’t think the fan has ever run at high speed without this 3rd-party utility!
Anyways, I’ve now gone 7 hours with no crashes and/or freezes. That’s a record for the week.
Note that this utility is NOT supported by Dell. Then again, Dell tech support sucks, so this is a good thing.
Wow, it’s really snowing outside…I feel like I’m back in Buffalo again.
I was lucky enough to win (let along find out about) an auction of Eddie Jobson/Zinc fan newsletters from the mid-1980s, just after Eddie released his Green Album.
I’ve scanned the first newsletter and have made it available for your reading pleasure. This first newsletter is especially interesting, as it discusses Eddie joining and then subsequently leaving Yes during the recording of 90125, their hugely popular album from 1983. Eddie even appears in the video for “Owner of a Lonely Heart” (albeit mostly edited out).
BTW, if you’ve never heard of Eddie, he was the keyboardist/violinist for UK, Curved Air, Frank Zappa, Roxy Music, Jethro Tull, as well as other progressive rock bands in the 70’s and 80’s.
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