Author: DOuG pRATt

A cool experiment

My son wanted a small refrigerator in his dorm room. A freezer compartment was neither needed, nor wanted. Another consideration was compressor noise. I took a chance on Haier’s NuCool, which technically is a cooler, and not a refrigerator, because it doesn’t have a compressor. The NuCool uses thermoelectric cooling, which has limited effectiveness compared to conventional refrigerators that circulate a coolant.

At home, with an ambient temperature of 68 degrees, the NuCool did fine, and even went below 37 degrees, according to a thermometer I had placed inside. But in the dorm, without air conditioning, where the room temp was over 80, the NuCool managed only 50 degrees. This morning it was in the safe region on the thermometer, but considering NuCool’s inability to maintain a constant temperature, my inclination is to return it to Target and buy Haier’s conventional cube fridge.

Follow-up: The NuCool is a success, assuming it holds up. It seems to manage a 40-degree difference in temperature, and when it was up to 50 the room was probably 90. Since then it’s held at 35 degrees, even with the thermostat turned down a notch.

Ad-vanced searching

My “real” e-mail address is on Verizon. Everything sent to a DogRat.com address is automatically forwarded to my Verizon mailbox. Verizon doesn’t provide its own web mail access, but instead uses Yahoo!

Two things about using Yahoo! for web mail are:

  • When exiting Yahoo!, the focus is taken away from the address field, and put on the search field, which assumes the next thing the user wants to do is search. Very annoying and unacceptable.
  • Lots of ads. Also annoying, but accepted.

Many of the ads feature this woman’s face, selling all sorts of different, always questionable, products. Sometimes she’s called Julie, or Candy, or whatever.

Obviously she’s not officially endorsing anything, and her image is being used without permission. She looks French, and she’s apparently a newscaster, so using that Yahoo! search field that I’m always forced into, and entering “french newscaster,” the name Mélissa Theuriau is the #1 result.

All Hail, Beck and Palin

Glenn Beck is an ex-DJ turned talk show host with a gift for off-the-cuff BS, like Rush. He’s a man with a supposedly former substance abuse problem, like Rush. Divorced, too, like Rush. These are people who are calling for a return to traditional values? Sounds like “do as I say, not as I did,” to me.

But unlike Rush, Glenn brings a religious element to his illogical rants. Do the Evangelicals who constitute a lot of Sarah Palin’s base of support know that Beck joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints? [Note: this site is currently being hosted in Utah.] As someone who used to attend an Assemblies of God church, I assure you that Evangelicals don’t consider Mormons to be Christians. If that’s no longer the case, then Mitt Romney is your man, folks. He came up with the health care plan in Massachusetts that was the model for the national plan.

The way Beck talks sometimes reminds me of Jim Jones. Why would anybody find some sort of assurance in his bizarre, disjointed tirades? A return to honor and values? What values? What does that mean? I really don’t get it.