brief excerpt: "A new spoofing flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser allows an improperly coded web link to send users to a diffferent URL than the one displayed in the status bar." more info at netcraft.

Here are some interesting details about the famous "hot coffee" lawsuit against McDonald's from 1994. The public image is that the entire lawsuit was frivolous, but McDonald's had record of more than 700 claims from people burned by McDonald's coffee between 1982 and 1992, and McDonald's repeatedly ignored them. It hardly seems frivolous if one person finally decided to sue them.

Furthermore, the public perception is that some shallow, greedy lady decided to sue McDonald's so she could make a few million dollars, when in reality she was awarded $160,000 in compensatory damages (she had 3rd degree burns over 6% of her body, including her genitals) and $480,000 in punitive damages, and only decided to sue McDonald's Corp after they refused to cover her $20,000 in medical expenses.

I would sure as shit not want my privates burned (who would...), and squeezing half a million dollars out of a multi-billion dollar company hardly seems like a fair trade.

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Crank Brothers is finally making a set of cranks (!) with a hollow body. I snagged these pictures from cyclingnews.com's most recent report on InterBike, which includes another photo of a partially disassembled crank arm.

new term from trendwatching.com... life caching: collecting, storing and displaying one's entire life, for private use, or for friends, family, even the entire world to peruse.

Step one: buy a usb data cable for my v300 phone. Step two: get info on how to customize/modify the phone and it's behavior, which is where this page("Customizing the Motorola Vxxx") came in handy. This page is pretty good, too.

T-mobile shipped the phone with a bunch of pictures and ringtones already installed, many of which are dumb and waste space. So they're now gone, and my phone is 1mb lighter, freeing me up to take more pictures with the built-in camera. Yee-haw!

This is just super. After reading a study showing that warmer office environments are directly related to greater productivity in office workers, I came across an article ("Some Cold Employees May Never Find Relief") about most building thermostats being non-functional, merely present to make people feel better about being frozen/baked while sitting quietly at their office jobs.

HVAC experts acknowledge what millions of office workers have suspected all along: A lot of office thermostats are completely fake -- meant to dupe you into thinking you've altered the office weather conditions.

The specialists are unrepentant. Fed up with complaints from sweaty men and shivering women, HVAC technicians install dummy thermostats to give workers the illusion of control. In some leased buildings, even the corporate tenants don't know the thermostats are useless. Other times, it's the companies themselves, barraged with calls from workers, who ask the landlord's HVAC technicians to "fix" things.

Richard Dawson, an HVAC specialist from Homer, Ill., who has several landlord clients, says too many office workers feel their environment is "anything but what they want it to be." He estimates that 90% of office thermostats are dummies.

An ergonomics study at Cornell University ("Warm Offices Linked to Fewer Typing Errors and Higher Productivity") found that warm workers are more productive. They also concluded that it's about $2 less per employee per hour to maintain a higher office temperature (think high electricity bill). The office where I work is very often freezing. Most of us wear long pants, long-sleeved shirts, jackets, and sometimes hats... in addition to portable space heaters that we keep under or on top of our desks. Talk about a waste of resources...

"At 77 degrees Fahrenheit, the workers were keyboarding 100 percent of the time with a 10 percent error rate, but at 68 degrees, their keying rate went down to 54 percent of the time with a 25 percent error rate," Hedge says. "Temperature is certainly a key variable that can impact performance."

hot damn, this is a waste of a post. but i like the graphic, so i wanted to post it. and what're you gonna do about it, huh?! nothing, that's what!

Watched Fog of War last night, Errol Morris' academy award winning documentary. Very interesting movie. Robert McNamara is quite impressive, even though he's nearly 90 years old. I found the entire transcript for the movie on Errol Morris' website here.

A couple were going out for the evening. They get ready, all dressed up, and put the dog in the backyard.

The taxi arrives, and as the couple start out, the dog shoots back in the house. They don't want the dog in the house for the night, so the wife goes out to the taxi while the husband goes upstairs to chase the dog out.

The wife, not wanting it known that the house will be empty for the evening, explains to the taxi driver, "He's just going upstairs to say good-bye to my mother."

A few minutes later, the husband gets into the cab. "Sorry I took so long," he says. "Stupid b!tch was hiding under the bed and I had to poke her with a coat hanger to get her to come out! Then I had to wrap her in a blanket to keep her from scratching and biting me as I hauled her ass downstairs and tossed her in the back yard! And she better not shit in the vegetable garden again!"

Will Ferrell is awesome... whitehousewest.com has this movie of Ferrell pretending to be George Bush (priceless...).

One of these days I'm gonna own an early 70's Oldsmobile like this. Oh yes, and it's gonna be sweet. All my friends will beg me to drive them around, it won't matter where, they'll just be content to sit in the passenger seat and watch the world go by. And my single friends will be especially interested, because women will throw themselves onto the hood as we drive down the street. And when they do, I will say, "I'm sorry ladies, but I am a married man, however, I would like you to meet my single friend..."

Rolling Stone published an interesting article ("Wal-Mart Wants $10 CDs") about the current cost of music cds, and how Wal-Mart is flexing its muscles to drive costs down. Right now, Wal-Mart (and most retailers) buy cds for about $12, but unlike most of the retail world, Wal-Mart turns around and sells each cd to the public for $10 each, thereby eating a $2 loss per disc. Well, it looks like Wal-Mart is tired of eating the difference, and they've told the major record labels that they will no longer buy cds for $12 a piece anymore, so prices had better go down (with the not-so-subtle implication being that if the labels don't play nice, Wal-Mart will just stop carrying their products altogether, which will have very little impact on Wal-Mart, and a huge impact on the record companies). Much more detail in the article, and from the looks of it, I suspect that this is going to have a big impact on the music industry over the coming months. Keep your ears peeled...

Interesting factoid: the independent market-research firm Almighty Institute of Music Retail built this breakdown of where your money goes when you shell out $15.99 for a typical major-label release:

$0.17 Musicians' unions
$0.80 Packaging/manufacturing
$0.82 Publishing royalties
$0.80 Retail profit
$0.90 Distribution
$1.60 Artists' royalties
$1.70 Label profit
$2.40 Marketing/promotion
$2.91 Label overhead
$3.89 Retail overhead

The IsoTruss Bike Frame is one of the most unique designs I've seen for frame construction. The IsoTruss group has used the same technology to build all kinds of things, bike frames are only one. There's no mention of frame weight, so who knows if there are any real advantages for building a bike frame.

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This is one of the best email responses ever from Strong Bad...

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In 4 months of owning a Salsa Caballero frame with a 5th Element rear shock, I have only one thing to complain about. And my complaint has nothing to do with the weight, suspension travel, plushness, climbing ability, frame warranty, or paint job. It's the access to the rear inflation valve on the 5th Element - once mounted on the frame, you can barely get a shock pump on there. In fact, I have only seen one pump that can make the clearance (I think I tried 5 different pumps), because there's almost no room to get in there. Bummer.

After a ton of hunting on the part of myself and friend Barry (we both had the same frame, and thus the same problem...), a solution was found. Barry located these guys on the web, Myers Tire Supply, and found the exact part we were looking for. So I made a quick phone call to their San Antonio location (no Austin stores) at 800-292-1327 and ordered a pair (one for each of us) of "Type C curved extensions, part #22591" for $7.91 (plus shipping). The valve extensions arrived a few days later.

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Once we screwed the extender onto the 5th Element valve stem, we quickly realized that there was no air flow (in or out). It was obvious that the valve extender was designed to work on a slightly longer valve stem than the one on the 5th Element. No worries, that's what hack saws are for. By inspection, it seemed like removing 2 or 3mm of material from the extender would be more than adequate, so I clamped it in a vice and cut very carefully, trying to keep things straight. See the picture for a before and after (yeah, I know the pics are crap quality... sorry). After cutting was complete, I ground and buffed the uneven edges on a grinder, then I cleaned the threads (find anything with a schrader valve, like an old tube, and screw the extender on, then unscrew it.. presto, clean threads). With the modified extender, we were able to put it on the 5th Element valve stem and add air! Success!

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Barry and I talked about removing the valve extender between uses, but we decided it would be fine to leave on there all the time. The biggest risk seems to be losing it while out on the trail, so the last step was to put a few drops of Wheelsmith spoke prep (good substitute for loc-tite) onto the threads of the extender, then mount it on the frame.

Sure, this was a bit of a pain in the ass, but it makes the Caballero with 5th Element a perfect cross-country setup (and at a great price, too).

The World On Fire video did a great job of making me feel like I'm wasting my time writing software...

Here's a Wired article ("Hot Wheels") that's all about Smart cars. Lots of interesting details, including confirmation that we're still more than a year away from U.S. availability... phooey.

Google SMS (Short Message Service) enables you to easily get precise answers to specialized queries from your mobile phone or device. Send your query as a text message and get phone book listings, dictionary definitions, product prices and more. Just text. No links. No web pages. Simply the answers you're looking to find.

Thanks to The Onion for this gem.

I just finished installing a new hard drive in my 2 1/2-year-old 800mhz G4 Powerbook, and I'm so excited that I have to share. Two reasons motivated me to upgrade the from the stock 40gb IBM drive (IBM-IC25N040ATCS04) - speed and capacity. The 40gb drive now lives in an external drive enclosure, and has been replaced by a 7200rpm 60gb Hitachi (HTS726060M9AT00). For anyone considering the upgrade, do it now. I ran Xbench before and after installing the new drive, and it shows that some aspects of drive activity are as much as 3 times faster (!).

Here are the results with the 40gb stock IBM drive:

System Info		
	Xbench Version		1.1.3
	System Version		10.3.5 (7M34)
	Physical RAM		1024 MB
	Model		PowerBook3,4
	Processor		PowerPC G4 @ 800 MHz
		Version		7455 (Apollo) v2.1
		L1 Cache		32K (instruction), 32K (data)
		L2 Cache		256K @ 800 MHz
		L3 Cache		1024K @ 201 MHz
		Bus Frequency		134 MHz
	Video Card		ATY,RageM7
	Drive Type		IBM-IC25N040ATCS04-0
Disk Test	33.50	
	Sequential	40.74	
		Uncached Write	35.52	14.81 MB/sec [4K blocks]
		Uncached Write	33.37	13.66 MB/sec [256K blocks]
		Uncached Read	84.01	13.30 MB/sec [4K blocks]
		Uncached Read	35.50	14.34 MB/sec [256K blocks]
	Random	28.45	
		Uncached Write	17.81	0.27 MB/sec [4K blocks]
		Uncached Write	28.54	6.44 MB/sec [256K blocks]
		Uncached Read	40.85	0.27 MB/sec [4K blocks]
		Uncached Read	40.08	8.25 MB/sec [256K blocks]

This is after I installed the new 7200rpm 60gb drive:

System Info		
	Xbench Version		1.1.3
	System Version		10.3.5 (7M34)
	Physical RAM		1024 MB
	Model		PowerBook3,4
	Processor		PowerPC G4 @ 800 MHz
		Version		7455 (Apollo) v2.1
		L1 Cache		32K (instruction), 32K (data)
		L2 Cache		256K @ 800 MHz
		L3 Cache		1024K @ 201 MHz
		Bus Frequency		134 MHz
	Video Card		ATY,RageM7
	Drive Type		HTS726060M9AT00
Disk Test	72.14	
	Sequential	73.51	
		Uncached Write	83.54	34.82 MB/sec [4K blocks]
		Uncached Write	55.23	22.62 MB/sec [256K blocks]
		Uncached Read	107.72	17.05 MB/sec [4K blocks]
		Uncached Read	66.43	26.84 MB/sec [256K blocks]
	Random	70.83	
		Uncached Write	59.51	0.89 MB/sec [4K blocks]
		Uncached Write	73.89	16.66 MB/sec [256K blocks]
		Uncached Read	80.02	0.53 MB/sec [4K blocks]
		Uncached Read	73.31	15.09 MB/sec [256K blocks]

The campaign organizers for both sides are claiming victory (big suprise). In addition to the standard details on most news sites ("Candidates claim debate victory"), I found this interesting chart showing the results of two different polls. The first poll, from Gallup, shows that the majority of the viewing public (at least those who were polled) thought that Kerry beat Bush. ABC News conducted a poll, too, and also concluded that Kerry beat Bush.

This is the third person to assume the role of U.S. Cybersecurity Chief (heading up the Department of Homeland Security), and he is now the third person to quit ("U.S. Cybersecurity Chief Abruptly Resigns"). Other sources say that he (and the previous people before him) quit because of organizational and structural problems that prevented him from getting anything done (aka, red tape). It also suggests pretty strongly that the Department of Homeland Security might not be useful or helpful, and should probably go away.

News flash! Kids are getting bigger and bigger, and it's not because they're getting older. The National Academy of Sciences says that during the past 30 years, the rate of childhood obesity has tripled among 6 to 11 year olds, and doubled for those aged 2 to 5 and 12 to 19. These days, articles make it into the news on a regular basis ("Panel calls for anti-child obesity effort"), but who says anything is actually changing? If there's one thing we can count on, it's that in another few days, weeks, or months, we'll see another report the states the same findings ("those damn kids are still gaining weight!").

I can't help but think that in 10 or 20 years, our society will be in a much different (and hopefully better) place and we'll have the luxury of looking back on how backward things once were. What interests me is the massive social change required to get from where we are to where we probably ought to be. I want to see the changes coming, see the wave, watch society as it is swept from one place to another.

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Just came across this awesome picture. Even after seeing it many times, it still makes me laugh.