{"id":1691,"date":"2011-03-13T09:41:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-13T15:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1691"},"modified":"2011-03-13T09:41:00","modified_gmt":"2011-03-13T15:41:00","slug":"odd-lots-146","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1691","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Finally, <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/gadgets\/reviews\/2011\/03\/ars-reviews-the-motorola-xoom.ars\" target=\"_blank\">the epic review of the Motorola Xoom<\/a> that we assumed we&#8217;d eventually see from Ars Technica. My only gripe is that somebody over there needs to learn how to take sharp, close-in photos of hardware.<\/li>\n<li>While we&#8217;re talking Xoom, I learned that my Degunking collaborator Joli Ballew is doing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Xoom-Companion-Joli-Ballew\/dp\/1118013778\/\" target=\"_blank\">a Xoom book<\/a> for Wiley. According to Amazon, it will be out on June 7.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.msnbc.msn.com\/id\/41875523\/ns\/health-health_care\/\" target=\"_blank\">Ibuprofen (Advil etc.) may provide some protection against Parkinson&#8217;s<\/a>. It may also tear up your stomach lining, as happened to me in 1999. Be careful.<\/li>\n<li>And damn, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/stories\/2011\/02\/18\/scitech\/main20033422.shtml\" target=\"_blank\">I shoulda gone to Polish school when I was four<\/a>, like my mom wanted. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>Here&#8217;s a list of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.infoplease.com\/ipa\/A0763403.html\" target=\"_blank\">the ten most powerful earthquakes since 1900<\/a>. (They have not yet included the Japanese quake, which has recently been promoted from 8.9 to 9.0.) I remember the stories in the papers about the 1964 Alaska quake. Man, that was ugly. Let&#8217;s be glad it wasn&#8217;t in the Cascades.<\/li>\n<li>My assembly language book is now for sale on both the Kindle and the Nook stores. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Assembly-Language-Step-Step-ebook\/dp\/B004QWZXFA\/\" target=\"_blank\">Kindle: $36.86<\/a>. <a href=\"http:\/\/search.barnesandnoble.com\/Assembly-Language-Step-by-Step\/Jeff-Duntemann\/e\/9781118080993\/\" target=\"_blank\">Nook: $52.00<\/a>. Print: $65.00. (But <em>nobody<\/em> pays cover anymore.)<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve been called a crank for my position on this, but I don&#8217;t care: <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.hbr.org\/schwartz\/2011\/03\/sleep-is-more-important-than-f.html\" target=\"_blank\">Sleep is more important than food<\/a>. (If you won&#8217;t listen to me, maybe you&#8217;ll listen to Harvard.)<\/li>\n<li>Here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.solorb.com\/elect\/misc\/magiceye\/\" target=\"_blank\">a nice page on magic eye tubes<\/a>, which are remarkably little-known (especially among the young) given their off-the-charts coolness factor. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.akh.se\/tubes\/eyes.htm\" target=\"_blank\">And another photo page<\/a>. Some of the miniature types were used well into the 1960s. We had a Grundig tape recorder from 1961 or so, and it incorporated a DM70, which I still have in a box somewhere, along with a 6AL7 and a couple of 6U5&#8217;s.<\/li>\n<li>From the Ideas You Can Have For Free And Are Worth Every Nickel Department: Somebody should start a Wikipedia extension wiki that automatically grabs and posts anything deleted from Big Wiki for that peculiarly intense Wikipedia fetish, non-notability. In this era of pervasive broadband and $50 terabytes, why shouldn&#8217;t the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.radiomuseum.org\/tubes\/tube_6u5~2.html\" target=\"_blank\">6U5<\/a> get its own page? It&#8217;s certainly notable to <em>me<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li>From the Law of Unintended Consequences Department: <a href=\"http:\/\/news.blogs.cnn.com\/2011\/03\/01\/low-flow-toilets-cause-stink-in-san-francisco\/\" target=\"_blank\">Scrupulously green San Francisco is turning brown<\/a> because government-mandated low-flow toilets aren&#8217;t moving solid waste through the system quickly enough to forestall clogging. Be glad you live in New Yawk, Ed. (Thanks again to Pete Albrecht for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>Although I&#8217;ve always known what hops are used for (beer, basically) I realized this morning that I had no idea what a hop looked like. <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Hopfendolde-mit-hopfengarten.jpg\" target=\"_blank\">Now I know<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Classmates.com has evidently been bought out by a nostalgia site called Memory Lane. I haven&#8217;t gotten any email pitches from them lately, so I&#8217;m quietly hoping that either Memory Lane has reformed their fraud-laced marketing practices (telling me of girls who supposedly attended my all-male high school back when I did) or that the whole mess will soon sink into bankruptcy and vanish.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Finally, the epic review of the Motorola Xoom that we assumed we&#8217;d eventually see from Ars Technica. My only gripe is that somebody over there needs to learn how to take sharp, close-in photos of hardware. While we&#8217;re talking Xoom, I learned that my Degunking collaborator Joli Ballew is doing a Xoom book for Wiley. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[33,17,15,39,111],"class_list":["post-1691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-noneoftheabove","tag-books","tag-ebooks","tag-hardware","tag-health","tag-retrotech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1691\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}