Matt’s Blog > 2008 > July

Have you heard about McCain’s new ad? It’s on his main page, though there seems to be no way to direct-link to it. Somewhat bizarrely, it starts off with video of throngs of cheering Obama supporters, and calls him the biggest celebrity in the world, flashing images of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. (By the [...]

A few things I’ve learned about batteries lately:

Rechargeable AA’s are 1.2V, whereas normal alkaline AA’s are 1.5V. I didn’t believe this at first, but it’s usually printed right on the battery (in unreasonably small print). Where this generally matters is things that take many batteries (in my radio that takes 4, it’s the difference between [...]

Do you remember standardized tests, especially in grade school and middle school, where they’d have you read a passage of text and you’d have to identify the “main idea” of the writing? Most of the choices were things that were in the passage, but only one of them was plausibly the main idea, whereas the [...]

I keep hearing people on the right reiterating that “the surge worked,” so that withdrawing from Iraq would be surrendering. To me, this is a non sequitur.
First of all, there’s the simple question of why we’re at war. We went in as a pre-emptive strike against Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. We took [...]

As the massive thunderstorm came in, I flipped on the scanner to listen to local public safety, as there are often interesting things going on.
I don’t know the background, but here’s what I heard:
“Engines 2 and 3, you can cancel… The caller stated that he thought he had been struck by lightning, but he has [...]

Rapper Nas has a new song, Black President [obscene lyrics, NSFW]. I don’t give it high marks musically, but it’s interesting to me for two reasons. The first is that rap music actually addressing contemporary issues is rare. (Though it’s not entirely unheard of: Changes, for example.) The seconds is that the song is about [...]

As I research candidates, I keep coming across a past proposed (U.S.) Constitutional amendment to ban flag desecration.
Now don’t get me wrong: I’m hardly for flag desecration, and would be appalled if any American did so. But do people not see the irony that the flag represents our freedoms as Americans, especially our First Amendment [...]

I’d posted before about my interest in picking up a low-capacity SSD card for my laptop, to drastically speed up disk access. (This actually has nothing to do with my recent posts about slow hard drives…)
Newegg seems to have a 64 GB SSD, 2.5″ SATA disk for $240 after rebate. Interestingly, from the specs, it [...]

I think I’ve alluded earlier to the fact that I’ve been trying to speed up some systems at home, and how some of them are really slow. (I’m starting to suspect Norton, actually, but more on that when I find out more.)
I just came across this spiffy application, which will write and then read a [...]

It is better to do something average than to wait until it is too late to do something spectacular.
I actually made that up, and I don’t mean to imply that you should aim for mediocrity. It’s certainly best to try to always do something spectacular. But sometimes I find myself spending forever trying to get [...]