Historic 80’s Cars
KITT - Knight Industries 2000 … I can still hear the theme song in my head.
And then Back to the Future
Archive for March, 2005
Unsung engineers
As I was installing new software onto my PC today, I was thinking about the design of a CD drive. Just about every CD drive today has a tray that will close if you give it a little push. Who was the engineer behind that? Why did they add that feature?
That idea, to allow the tray to close if pushed, was a great design choice. I wonder what things would be like if that person designed a few other things. I wonder if their superiors knew that was on the engineering todo list?
Here is to that unsung engineer who made the not-so super important CD-ROM drive do something kind of intelligent.
Rich Dad, Poor Dad? or BS or Not?
A while back (3 or 4 years ago), I was given this book to read called ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’ by Robert Kiyosaki. Although I found the begining to be interesting, little red flags started popping up as I read the book. The story just seemed to good to be true, certain ideas were repeated over and over, it seemed like it was targeting a particular audience, and a few other things. Then I got to the section where he talked about expensing vacations under a corporation and I had to stop. Advising people on corporate fraud will surely get them into deep trouble with the IRS.
So, back then I started doing some digging and I found this great site debunking the guy:
http://www.johntreed.com/Kiyosaki.html
Why do I bring this up now? Because I still see quite a few people continuing to mention this book on blogs as ‘inspiration’. It’s good that google has this guy, the debunker, high up on their search results page. Imagine trying to learn about this from the book store. I doubt that John Reed’s new book, ‘BS Dad’ would be placed right next to such a best seller 
The Real Life A-Team
This was sent as a link from a guy at work to me:
SBC DSL is blocking port 25
You may not have noticed, but I sure did. You can’t connect to port 25 from your SBC DSL connection. So, if for example you have a hosting site and you are trying to send an email from Outlook to your smtp server, the email will not leave the Outbox. I haven’t updated my account profile with SBC in a while, so they didn’t notify me of this change.
Overall, I like it. It is worth the tiny amount of pain here to let the world know that very very little spam will come from SBC’s DSL network. I have no doubt that more large ISP’s will finally do this.
Wolfram’s book is free online
I don’t know how recent this is, but I just learned that Stephen Wolfram’s book, A New Kind of Science is now available here on his site, for free, and all on-line.
I’m going to miss that Uncle Sam guy
Usually, when I did my taxes, I waited till April 15th. One time, I finished it about 1 hour before midnight, and I drove it up to the main post office in San Mateo. It was the main post office for the area and it was open late just for us last-minute filers. When I got there, there was a guy dressed up as Uncle Sam accepting envelopes. He stood outside as a long line of cars drove by. The guy was smiling and having a great time, and you could see people shaking his hand as they delivered their forms. It was awesome.
I’ll miss that Uncle Sam guy.
Have a Netgear USB Wifi Dongle?
I do, and there was a problem when running under Windows XP SP2.
When you use the 1.0 driver, you will get a Blue Screen pretty quickly that will have the main cause as BADPOOLHEADER. When I tried to solve this on my wife’s computer a while back, there wasn’t a solution. On my new computer I found that I had the same problem, as I expected, but I checked to see if there was a new solution for the problem.
Sure enough, they have a MA111v1 Version 2.5 Beta driver on their support site. I copied it to a little USB key drive, installed it on my new computer, and everything came up. (Note, that I’m using the v1 of the MA111, it has an orange led vs. a blue led.) Not bad for a $14 device from Fry’s!
