Refun’

Yay.  The $20 rebate for my 2GB flash drive is finally here, so the final cost is $50.  This takes just a teeny, tiny bit of the sting out of the $1100 it cost to put a catalytic converter and oxygen sensor in my ’98 Accord.

The new SanDisk drives include a system called U3, which is one of several competing systems for loading applications off of flash memory.  At first I was wary of it, but I’ve decided my concerns were unfounded and now I’m excited about its potential.

Here’s a screen shot of the U3 Launchpad, with my selection of applications.  The Filezilla file transfer program is very good, and I use it to push big files up to this blog.  And I really like the design of the Essential Personal Information Manager.  It has a great little graphical HTML editor.

Picture This

Here’s a cropped screen shot taken from the video clip of last night’s Colbert Report.  This is how the image quality should look on your computer, too, when played with the embedded controls; i.e., scaled up smoothly by the media player from 320×240 pixels, without jaggies.  Just checking!  If you launch it from the “player problem” link it’ll be in its original, smaller size.

Colberterrorist

Here’s a segment Stephen Colbert had last night on terrorism and racial profiling, which is now being labeled ‘behavioral’ profiling.  The first part highlights Colbert’s superb comic acting skills.

I remember how immediately after the Oklahoma City bombing the Boston radio talk show wing-nut Howie Carr declared it to have been the work of Islamic terrorists.  By chance, a few months later I came across Carr making an appearance at a New Hampshire mall.  I was going to say something to him about Timothy McVeigh not looking especially like a typical Islamic terrorist, but I had my son with me, and he was only 3 then, so I thought better of it.

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