Study Says 'Therapeutic Prayer' Doesn't Work

Los Angeles Times

Hey, you guys spent USD 2.5 million and several years on this study? I could've told you the same thing in 10 seconds. You pay me USD 100,000 and the rest we can use to educate people in the American Bible Belt.

Eagle flies 200 miles to former owner

Ananova

This is amazing and heartwarming. Pretty much the only thing enjoyable today for me. Ah, so many undeserved problems!!!

Supermarket comes to its senses

Sometimes I like to go to the supermarket to buy a meal that is ready to eat.  At the place near my office they sell packs of Chinese dumplins, which I like very much, but are rather expensive.  Each pack contains only seven and costs about 50 US cents.  A few weeks ago I went to this market, and found that now these packs had only six dumplins, but they still charge the same as before!

I like those, but not that much, so I'd quit eating them since then.

Well, it looks like a lot people felt like me cause when I went today, I saw that they were putting seven dumplins again!

Killer soup

Today I was alone at the office, meaning I don't have to make company to the other guys when they want to have lunch in one of those dreadful places nearby.  My plan was to simply have an instant noodle soup that I'd bought at a nearby convenience store, sitting peacefully at my desk while watching some Internet TV.

I'd bought some brand that I've tried before.  It's very nice, it comes (as far as I know) in two flavors:  beef with fried shallots, and mushroom (veggie version).  It's also nice because it comes with its own fork, and it's own cup, so all I really need to fix my lunch is hot water.

So when lunch time comes, I open the package, and strangely, the meat pack is a lot redder than I remember from previous meals.  I read more carefully the label, and horror, it says:  Spicy Beef!!!

What am I going to do.  Okay, I figure today I'll be adventurous with what I put in my mouth.

Big mistake.  It is really spicy hot.  All I can do is when I'm going to have a mouthful let the broth drip as much as possible.  When I'm done with the noodles and the meat, I go to the restroom to throw away the broth.  Incrediby, this deep red broth stained the ceramic basin.  Even though I scrubbed the basin with a dish washing sponge, the red stains wouldn't come off.  Good thing I took off my white shirt when I ate the noodles.  Is this really for human consumption?

Britney controls Kevin's pocket money

Ananova

What a shame Kev. Instead of spending your wife's money, you should earn your own pennies! INMHO.

Shame on you Dick!

I spent this afternoon watching TV and doing stuff at my computer in my apartment.  Today it's not terribly hot, actually, it's rather pleasant, and I can spend the day with the glass doors to the balcony open.  I noticed some birds flying by and singing.  I don't know how many there are, perhaps some 15?  They're all of the same species, maybe half as big as a supermarket chicken, all black except for a white stripe on their butts.  Really nice!!!  I go take a look from my 18F balcony, and they're flying all around like toys, they don't need to flap their wings a lot, and they sing in a way I imagine must sound the same as being in the jungle.  This is really delightful!  What kind of crazy man could think of going out to shoot them down as a way to "relax"?

The sun is going away, but don't panic

Yahoo! News

Yeah, these are the same guys who puncture oil pipelines to steal oil and are surprised when they have an explosion as a result of that.

More Than Half of Americans Reject Evolution, Back Bible

Gallup

Well, then with a population like this then it's no surprise that a guy like George W Bush would be elected as their president.

Granny told to remove hat in pub

Ananova

This is a little bit crazy. But on the other hand, I thought that in Western countries you're supposed to take off your hat or whatever you're wearing on your head when you take a seat for a meal. That's etiquette.

My laptop computer is hot!

Last December I started to notice that sometimes my laptop computer (IBM ThinkPad) gets really hot.  I took it to the IBM service center, and all they did was to clean it up.  I was surprised they'd only do that, but when I took it back home, yes, the problem was gone.

Now almost three months later I start to feel that my ThinkPad sometimes gets hotter than it should be, though not as hot in December.  On top of that, I also hear the fan making a terrible noise whenever it spins.  I'm not really sure this is a very bad thing, but for example, doesn't it raise your hair when you hear your harddisk suddenly making funny noises?

So two days ago I took my computer to the service center again to get the fan checked.  Yesterday afternoon I get an e-mail and a phone call from the girl at the service center's counter (the same one I met the previous day), and she tells me that the technician has informed her that in order to fix the problem, maybe it's necessary to replace the power adaptor and the battery.  I thought this was very strange.  Okay, let's assume the power adaptor and the battery are really in bad shape and need to be replaced.  Once these two are replaced, how does this make the fan run quietly?  Whenever the fan runs, it should run quietly.  So a new battery is going to make the fan noiseless?

So how much would it cost to get a new power adaptor and a new battery?  The girl transferred me to another deptartment (shouldn't she have had that info at hand when she called me?).  Whoever answered gave me the price for both of them.  New power adaptor about USD 45, new battery about USD 750.  I was astonished.  I thought there was one zero too many.  I told the girl I think I can buy a new computer for the price of one replacement battery, and she said yes, that's quite right.  And on top of that, she said they don't have it in stock, so they'd have to order it from abroad.

I'm like, huh?  Isn't this IBM?  Am I talking to Congo IBM or what?  At the same time I opened the e-mail they sent me, and it was confusing, it said "maybe", yes "maybe", so I ask this girl if I pay all that much money would I see my computer fixed for sure or just "maybe".  This mother fucker wanted me to hang up and call the other department (???).  With this, I really started to get angry.  I asked her if she just wanted to get rid of me or what.  Somehow she got nervous, and instead of making me hang up and call a different number, she transferred my call to the first girl..  Shouldn't she have done that without requesting me to hang up and call again?  What a moron!!!

Well, I couldn't get confirmation that even after spending hundreds and hundreds the machine would be fixed "for sure", just a "maybe".  Oh man, I got angry.  What the fuck I thought.  But I need these monkeys to do some work for me, so I can't lose my cool with them.  I told her I'd think it over and call her again the next day (today).

This morning very early I got a phone call again from IBM.  This time it was a technician, not the pretty girl from the counter.  This time, the guy was making sense.  He said that the fan is damaged, so it needs to be replaced.  He'll get back to me tomorrow with a quotation.  I hope this time it doesn't cost many hundreds of dollars, nor they need to bring the part from abroad.  Cross your fingers!

Accused: Campus crash was 'to spread will of Allah' - Mar 6, 2006

CNN.com

Funny, if this crime is commited by a Muslim person, then it's branded "terrorism". I bet that if were commited by a Christian or a Jew, or something else, it would probably be called a plain crime or an act of insanity.

OpenVPN and UltraVNC rock!

I'm very pleased with these two guys.  Thanks to them I can work from home with my laptop practically as if I were sitting in front of the desktop computer in the office.  With UltraVNC I can see what's on the screen of the remote desktop, and actually control it!  I can type, move the mouse, etc. and see what happens just the same as if I were in front of this remote machine (actually, a tiny bit slow).  With OpenVPN I create a safe, encrypted connection to the office's computer, so snoopers out there in the Internet can hardly see what I'm doing with that machine.  Awesome!

Oilers' spin doctor

I just saw a documentary on the National Geographic channel about oil extraction from sand.  They said that there's a very large deposit of petroleum in the sands of Alberta, Canada.  The problem is that this sand is not like in the Sahara desert.  The forest has to be torn down to get to the soil, which contains this special sand.

So, of course getting to this oil has very serious consequences for the environment:  logging, river reroutings, poluted air, etc., etc.

But when they show one of the workers from there, he says:  but we're leaving clean sand behind.

Funny.  This is like those Japanese politicians who say that whaling is actually good for environmental balance because whales eat too many fish.

Very odd dream

Yesterday I heard from an old friend who lives in Paris, and in the night I had a dream in which I myself went to visit Paris.  I went to the Eiffel Tower and wanted to go up to the upper observation deck, but I found that from the lower deck the only way to go up (or down) was by a ladder!  Yes, just a ladder, not even a set of decent stairs!  And to make matters even worse, there was only one ladder shared by people who were going up and going down at the same time.  So when two people crossed ways in the middle of the ladder, it was necessary to make some movement like in a circus.  Very scary.

TightVNC, UltraVNC, and dish soap

I need a way to take control from home of a computer at the office, so I went to Sourceforge and saw that they have two incarnations of VNC.  The most downloaded between them two is called TightVNC, so this is the one I tried first.

Once installed both on my laptop and on the office's machine, I made sure that it works.  I was really nicely surprised.  But then when I came back home and tried it, somehow TightVNC got confused with the target machine's screensaver password, gave me an error message, and I couldn't access it.  I was disappointed at this.

So today Saturday I went to the office again to try UltraVNC, and this one did the trick!!!  I don't know, perhaps more people download the other one because the other one runs on more platforms.  Ahhh, but I'm happy now.  Now next thing, is to figure out how to protect this connection.  I think I'll use OpenVPN, but I need to learn from scratch how to use it.

On other news, I ran out of dish soap at home so I went to the supermarket and got a big bottle of a different brand (but same manufacturer) than whatever I had before.  The first time I used it to wash, first thing I noticed was the bottle cap is looser than before, and second the soap is runnier.  As a result of this, even if you squirt the bottle very gently, you end up with a lot of soap on the sponge!

Good trick.  This reminds me of this other thing they taught us in the marketing class in college.  There's this company that manufactures MSG (the food condiment), and in order to increase sales instead of spending more money on advertisement or improving the formula or something like that, they just made the holes in the shaker much bigger.  It achieved the goal, sales really increased.

In video, Bush was warned of Katrina's threat

MiamiHerald.com

This is really disgusting. So is this, or isn't this one more clear case of Bush telling lies? I can't believe we've got almost three more years of Bush. You're doing a hell of a job Bushy!