A blog about technology, science, life, and boondogglery.
I was fiddling with a piece of paper the other day and found I can make a surprising amount of shapes out of a rectangle.
I would hardly call this origami. I mean, look, I had to draw eyes before you can tell I was trying to make some kind of animal. If you want to do some real origami, you can buy my friend John’s e-book.
What an inflammatory title, I know. But that’s how I feel at what Redmond has created. Both in terms of lack of security and a distinct lack of oversight on the ecosystem that was built around their flagship operating system. Yes, I’m talking about malware and spyware and the anti-versions of these things which are just as bad. But it goes beyond that to core things about the OS that are just completely broken.
I spent a few hours over my neighbors house last night fixing one of the more difficult problems that I’ve ever encountered. Somehow, some way, my neighbor had associated every .exe file extension with Internet Explorer. This meant that launching any program would simply open up the file download dialog and refuse to actually run the program. This was so insidious that even when I selected “run” and not “download” from the dialog, the dialog came  up recursively!
There were a small percentage of administrative/control panel apps that worked. System restore was not one of them. cmd.exe was not one of them In the end I found that I could create a new user. I made them admin, logged in, and I was in a proper environment again. I issued a system restore to a week prior and that fixed the problem.
When I got back to my house it was 1 1:15pm. My son Giovanni waited all day to watch a science show on TV with me, Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. I had promised him the night before and he was very excited. But it was too late to watch the show at that point. We both had to be up early in the AM. He was really sad. And so was I.
Damn Microsoft to Hell.
WARNING: If you are at all squeemish, do not click on any of these links. Obviously this is not all fun and games. Some of these people are in real pain and it’s not funny… at all. In fact, it’s all rather horrible.
I recently somehow stumbled upon this thing called a Guinea Worm… it’s this crazy parasite that people get when they drink water infected with the larvae of the worm. The good news is that our old friend Jimmy Carter has helped nearly eradicate this scourge form the Earth.
Like an idiot, I went and googled pictures of this worm. Man! Then, like a train wreck I went and googled videos. My god. Watch this documentary for a pretty complete picture. It’s not pretty.
Youtube recommend that I watch videos on human bot fly removal. What can be worse than a guinea worm? Well, nothing really, but a motherfucking bot fly is a close second.
This video opens up, “In 2009, I went on an 8 day hike with a couple of friends in the Bolivian Amazon.” With an opening like that you know how this ends. After you watch the video you’ll agree that he should have stayed home sucking down macchiatos at Starbucks. This video where people try and take it out themselves is even worse. Oh, and this one where they remove it from a little boy (warning: vertical video). It’s huge, and horrible. And here’s another one removed from a young boy. Nate had one removed. And this one is the mother of all bot fly removal videos: three huge mothers.
My friends, it gets worse. If you want more, you’re a sick and need help. But ok:
Sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite.
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