Bush admin terminology

"Surge"?  "Way forward"?

Gee, why not just call it like what it really is?  Isn't that a build-up of US military personnel in Iraq?  And isn't "way forward" actually a "change course"?  Just by changing the phraseology I think they're simply kind of trying to cover themselves from the Sun light by raising one thumb up in the air and deluding that this way they won't get suntanned.

Printer ink

My new printer at home, I don't use it very often, yet today I noticed that the large black ink cartridge is down to one third, and the cyan and magenta small cartridges are down to about 2/3.  How come?  Today I turned on my printer for the first time in perhaps two or three weeks.  The yellow cartridge was giving me problems making my computer think that there was something wrong with it, and thus refusing to print anything at all.  All I did was take out and insert again this freaking yellow cartridge --twice--, and the problem was solved.  I also saw that the computer thinks that the yellow cartridge is completely full.  How can that be?

Yes, the print quality is great, but this surprise with the cartridges is a bit disappointing.

Star Wars Episode IV (A New Hope?)

Tonight I watched on TV the original Star Wars, which now is called Episode IV.  I have probably seen reruns of this particular episode almost ten times.  But I'm kind of surprised cause I think this was a bit different from the previous ones.  I got the impression they've redone parts of it... which is quite impressive given the fact that the original release was almost 20 years ago.

Yeah, I think I read somewhere that they were going to remaster or something this film for the re-release.  But if they were going to do that, it kind of bugs me that they left (or inserted?) certain details:

1. Number displays in which the numbers are our beloved Arabic numerals.
2. References to dimensions given in meters (it bugs me because a meter is defined as some fraction of the distance between the Equator and the North Pole, both located on planet Earth).
3. References to time given in minutes (which in its old time definition is also somehow based on the nature of planet Earth).

Pretty good film nevertheless.  It never fails to entertain.

Roll cake and brownie

Today at the grocery store, when I was about to head for the till, I noticed on the refrigerated shelves they have some small boxes labeled as "brownies".  I bought one of those, and one of roll cake.

When I open them at home, the brownie is not a brownie.  It's just a slice of spongy chocolate cake with some hardened chocolate on top of it.  And the roll cake has been rolled with some butter based cream, rather than whipped cream.  Man, I felt cheated.

Adblock Plus in Firefox

Even in my office I prefer to use Firefox, and today that I finally have some minutes of peace, I decided to customize it by adding some goodies.  One of the first ones I put on was Adblock, or so I thought.  Actually what I added was "Adblock Plus".

The nice thing about this one over the plain Adblock is that it can subscribe itself to block lists created and maintained by other people.  On top of that, I can make my own personal editions to this list.  I subscribed myself to a list created by somebody in the States, and found that it's very long.  I'm very pleased.  When I tried to open cnn.com, I didn't see any ads.  It was really like watching TV without commercials!

I'm gonna replace Adblock at home with Adblock Plus!

Misbehaving mouse

Freaking mouse.  I have a wireless mouse which when was new I used to like a lot.  It's not just wireless (not Bluetooth though), but the receiver acts as a battery recharger, so it's really convenient.

Well, it's been a good 2 1/2 years I've been using, and it's kind of getting tired.  One or two days ago I swapped batteries, and since then I've noticed that when I left-click, many times I might get double or triple clicks, which is really annoying.  A few months ago I also noticed that even if nobody's touching the mouse, the receiver will receive something, and the pointer will move slowly on the screen as if somebody were dragging the mouse.

Free Download Manager

Tonight I needed to download several software packages.  Among them the largest one was OpenOffice, which is about 94 MB.  At first I thought that wouldn't pose any problem as I have ADSL at home, so perhaps it would take only one hour.

Wrong!  For some reason all the speed I could get was about 5 Kb/s.  Ridiculous.  I tried several different mirrors, and even download from FTP servers, but it was the same.  Then I remembered I also have in my computer Free Download Manager and thought I'd give it a try.

Wow did it make a huge difference!  Since I got ADSL at home, I think I've rarely ever used again that program because as is, the download is already quite fast.  But this time that program made a wonderful difference.  Most of the time the download speed was about 180 Kb/s.

Annoying voice

The guy sitting in the cubicle near mine has a very high pitched, annoying voice.  Whenever he's quiet there's no problem at all, but he gets so many visitors in his cubicle and also makes really long telephone calls, argh!  I wonder where did he get that voice?  Is that a sign of lack of male hormones or what?

Mushroom bouillon

A few days ago I went to the grocery store, and one of the things I wanted to buy was garlic rice flavored bouillon cubes.  I couldn't find that, so instead I bought --reluctantly--, mushroom flavored bouillon cubes.

Tonight I used one of those cubes, and man, are they good!  I can't believe how delicious, and how strong is the mushroom flavor.  I wonder how much of that flavor is artificial.  I can't believe it's all natural.

Cake with icing

Today I needed to go to the grocery store.  While I was browsing the refrigerated shelves, I noticed that they were selling several pastries that were soon to expire at deeply discounted prices.  So I thought why not?  I haven't had cakes for quite a while, plus it's still new year's holidays.

I bought a small box with two big slices of layered cake with a lot of icing.  The icing was white, so I thought it was whipped cream.  Great!  That would be tonight's dessert.

Now that I try it, I realize the icing is not whipped cream, but some butter flavored shit!  Argh!!!  That thing makes me feel stuffed, and it kind of spoiled my otherwise nice meal.

Next time I shall go for the muffins.