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Dash and the Fruit Bowl Bomb Habit

Aug 25th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
5 comments

DashWithBowl.jpg

All dogs have quirks, and Dash brought a new one into the house with him: When he’s done eating, he picks up his bowl and carries it around. He shows it to us, and if we don’t take it and re-fill it, he drops it from mouth height. When he was three months old (see photo above) he was closer to the floor, and the bowls sometimes survived. Now that his mouth is at adult bichon height, the bowls usually buy it.

In the photo above, Carol had just fed him, and he had bumbled into my office, standing in front of me with his bowl in his mouth, as if to say, “Please, sir, can I have some more?”

We feed the Pack out of a motley collection of small midlate 1950s fruit bowls, manufactured in an era when people ate less, particularly of the sort of fruit you got out of small cans in the 1950s. Such bowls are still made if not widely used, and we bought a couple of Corelle fruit bowls in our Shadow Iris pattern specifically for Pack meals. Supposedly they don’t break if dropped from modest heights. Dash hadn’t heard that, and when he dropped one, it exploded into dagger-like shards all over the kitchen. So the Corelle fruit bowls now await an era when we again embrace canned fruit cocktail (in heavy syrup.) They may wait awhile.

After we were married 34 years ago, Carol’s mom gave us a (mostly) complete set of Joni’s Dixie Dogwood tableware, and we used it for years as our everyday settings. A lot of it is gone now, having fallen from slippery hands at the sink or over the edge of the table, but because we rarely used the fruit bowls, we still had them until recently. That is, we still had them until Dash started dropping them.

He dropped another one yesterday, RIP (Rest In Pieces.)

The only bowls that are safe to give him are genuine Melmac, in our case Mallo-Ware, from Chicago’s now-extinct Mallory Plastics. Again, they came from Carol’s mom, and Carol used them when she was a kid. There are only two of the venerable #52 fruit bowls left, and both are usually in the dishwasher when another Pack meal time rolls around. I think there used to be more, but I don’t know where they went. Like all Melmac tableware they’re essentially indestructable, so they certainly didn’t break. I think I drilled and tapped one for a telescope attachment in the 80s. About the rest, clueless.

Even when the two Mallo-Ware bowls are clean, the problem is that we have four dogs, and after Dash scours out his own bowl, he will go hunting for other bowls to scour. The last one he finds gets carried around, and if it’s a Dixie Dogwood bowl, it’s soon off to rejoin Joni in Crockery Heaven.

So I slid over to eBay yesterday in search of more Melmac fruit bowls, to find that Mallo-Ware has become collectible. Used #52 fruit bowls now go for three bucks each…and up. I searched and grumbled until I found a pack of ten beat-to-hell pastel bowls for $25. That will certainly do the job, but…collectible Melmac? I hear Alf giggling somewhere.

I guess “collectible” is relative, and cyclical. As best I can tell, Melmac tableware was invented to prove to my Aunt Josephine that depression glass wasn’t so bad after all. Alas, Aunt Josephine didn’t get the message. She’d gathered an impressive set of iridescent orange depression glass while a teenager and used it well into the Fifties, but when Melmac came along, her depression glass was relegated to the kids table (and nobody got chewed out if it broke) with the adults dining on indestructable pastel plastic. To my aunt, depression glass was an emblem of poverty, whereas Melmac was totally Space-Age. Eventually the glass all went into the trash, which I suspect my cousins are now regretting.

There’s no real point to this essay other than a reminder that dogs are unpredictable. Mr. Byte used to chew up computer books, but only computer books. Chewy would dance on his toes for…peas. Jack will not eat raw meat, and will pick out the rice or the vegetables and leave the meat for Dash. QBit steals Carol’s ponytail Scruncis and hides them under the pillow in his kennel. I’m not sure these are mutant instincts, but they’re certainly not anything we taught them, and remain the best evidence I could cite that Behaviorism is really quite sincerely dead!

Daywander

Aug 21st, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

We’re at a dog show in rural Greeley, Colorado, a little north of Denver–and right smack dab next to a huge cattle feedlot. Now, I’m a caveman and a realist–manure is the price we pay for beef–but that stuff sure do stack up and make its presence known. We kennelled QBit and Aero to simplify show logistics, but it’s funny not having Aero with us at a show. He’s a champ now, and the spotlight has shifted to Dash, who at 15 months already has 11 points (of the required 15) and one major win (of the required 2) toward his own championship. Aero was always a shy dog, and fearful at the outset. This cost him points early on, but Dash has never had any such problems, and it’s (remotely) possible that he could score a big enough win this weekend to make him a champion while still technically a puppy. (He won’t reach his majority until 18 months.) Master groomer Jimi Henton will be helping Carol make him and Jack look their best, and we have high hopes.

I just finished a dozen Lucerne eggs and I’m still alive to write about it, so the big contaminated egg thing may not be as horrible as some are making it out to be. But half a billion eggs, sheesh–and that from one company. Am I going to give up eggs? Hardly. My sole gripe is that Lucerne’s are the only eggs I can find locally in Medium, and I’ve titrated myself to a pair of Medium eggs scrambled for breakfast as what best carries me until lunchtime without any energy lapses. So I may have to fall back to a single Extra Large until I can scare up a different brand of Medium eggs. And while eggs are on the table here, does anybody see size Small or Peewee eggs sold at retail? (As best I know, these are generally sold to food producers for cakes and such.)

I bought and have been tormenting a new-ish WYSIWYG EPub editor product called Jutoh, from the guy who gave us the free ECub editor. It’s available for Windows, Linux, and Mac, and I’m testing it under Windows and Ubuntu. My first impressions are generally good, though the product still has a couple of thin spots, foremost of which is an inability to import .DOC files. More on it once I have a chance to get a couple of projects through it.

It may sound odd, but I’m pleased that Jutoh is not free software. It’s only $22, which is trivial–I’ve spent more than that just having an indifferent lunch with Carol at Village Inn. I don’t want to see the category of inexpensive commercial software die out. For a long time it seemed that software was going to cost either zero or a thousand dollars, which would mean that few solo software geeks would attempt to field an innovative utility that would not sell for hundreds but might sell for tens. I bought Atlantis some time back for $45 and love it–it generates the best EPubs of anything I’ve tried so far. (Jutoh is still in the running, but the race has barely begun.) Free software can be superb but all too often evolves slowly, if at all. Zoundry Raven, on which I write this, hasn’t been updated since 2008…though I must balance this by citing the free ebook manager Calibre, which is updated every couple of weeks.

We have lost the Star Hustler. Jack Horkheimer has gone off to see what the stars look like from the other side, and as little as I saw of him (I’ve not watched much TV in the last 40 years) I will say that he did a spectacular job making observational astronomy compelling to ordinary people, especially young people–and as goofy as he seemed sometimes, he never made me want to kick his teeth in, as all too often happens with Bill Nye. Science should not be full of itself (nor, alas, full of something else, as is the case far too often) and Jack was not. Keep looking up…maybe you’ll spot the light of the Big Bang glinting off the top of his head.

Odd Lots

Jul 2nd, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

Daywander

Jun 27th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

hatchetman.jpgWell, as a fair number of people have told me, the logo Carol and I saw the other day was the “hatchet man” icon of Insane Clown Posse, a hip-hop duo from Detroit that I’ve never heard and probably won’t. Key to finding the figure online is knowing that what he’s holding isn’t a map or a piece of paper but a hatchet. (In fact, it looks a lot more like a meat cleaver.) There’s also a girl-version of the icon, with a ponytail, but what we saw on the gate of a pickup truck was almost precisely what I show above left.

We had a relatively small gathering last night, but that was all right, as there were few enough of us to all sit on the two couches and talk about everything from dogs to SF to classic aircraft of the Strategic Air Command. We spoke of that lunatic Lt. Col. Bud Holland, whose lifelong ambition appears to have been to roll a B-52. (Detailed discussion here.) He tried, he failed, and you can see a video of the results here. Eric Bowersox and Sabrina Hoyt brought some Mountain Dew Throwback, made with real sugar instead of corn leavins’, and the original product artwork on the cans. There were intermittent thunderstorms all afternoon, but we had enough time between microcells to grill a batch of smoked brats and Ranch Food Direct burgers. By sheer coincidence both Mike Reith and Peggy Sargent brought cream puffs, and it had been so long since I’d had one that I’d mostly forgotten what cream puffs were. That memory came back in a big hurry, heh.

Alas, the thunderstorms prevented me from getting any Field Day time in yesterday, and with less than an hour remaining in the contest and yet another thunderboomer passing overhead as I write, I doubt I’ll get any time in this year at all. I created what I had hoped to be a low-profile inverted vee, and in truth, when I told people I had antenna off the back deck, several people looked and just didn’t see it, when when I was pointing right at it. It’s designed to be portable, and is attached to the deck railing with bungee cords. I’ll try to get a couple of days’ contacts with it, then roll it up and put it back in the garage.

There was more bear action yesterday. Late afternoon, our doorbell rang, and it was our new neighbors from across the street. Heather and Glen had gone for a walk with their two small boys, aged two and four, and left their garage door open. When they returned, sho’nuff, a bear was in their garage ransacking their garbage can. Heather asked to bring her boys inside, but about then Glen came back and said he’d driven the bear off by throwing rocks at it, after which it vanished up the street and ran between two other houses. (Glen’s an Army officer. Spend some time in Iraq and bears lose a lot of their mystique.) I’m guessing it was the same bear I saw yesterday about lunchtime, eating dog food down in our gully near our back door. It seems a little too comfortable with people and a little too willing to be out and around during the day to stay here, and if it comes back too much we’re going to have to put a call in and see if it can be relocated.

Lots of leftovers from last night, and I’ll be grilling Ranch Food Direct burgers again this evening if the rain will just stop for half an hour. The West is getting soaked this year. Our local reservoirs are full, and western Nebraska’s massive Lake McConaughy is refilling (after a 9-year drought that the doomsayers warned would be permanent) at a rate of two feet per week. When we first saw it we marveled at the broad sand beaches, which were not in fact beaches at all but recently exposed lake bottom. It was about 30% full when we first saw it several years ago. It’s now over 80% full and the water level is rising fast. (Note the end of the curve on the graph, and then see this graph to get a sense for the insane amount of water flowing into it this year.) We hope to take a long weekend up there before the summer’s over.

This coming week should be fairly peaceful. I intend to do some fiction writing and perhaps even finish an experiment I have on the bench downstairs, concerning how well IN23A microwave diodes serve as AM BCB detectors. What I know of detector theory tells me that such detectors should be socko. We’ll find out–that’s what science is for.

Rant: Eat Food. Not Too Much. And Sometimes Plants.

Jun 7th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
6 comments

ExtraRich Milk Cap.jpgOh me, oh my, oh me, oh my…I’m just such a bad boy. Last year, I violated the Laws of Thermodynamics by eating more calories…and losing weight. Now, since we all know that every calorie is exactly like every other calorie (settled science!) and since we know that if you take in more calories than you burn, you gain weight, well, what other conclusion can I draw? The Laws of Thermodynamics are wrong! And by next week I’ll have this unbalanced wheel spinning away here! Somebody please wire NIST for me; my FAX machine is broken. They can send the Nobel Prize to my Stanwell St. address.

I’ve had to drill new holes in all my belts. I’m not kidding; you can still see the leather shreds on my 3/16″ bit.

Other weirdnesses are besetting me. My blood pressure is down. It wasn’t all that high to begin with (let’s call it high-normal; Carol doesn’t want me to post precise numbers) and now it’s normal-normal. My blood numbers are good, and haven’t changed a whole lot since I gave up habitual sugar in 1997, at which point they abruptly went from worrisomely high to…low-normal. So how did I do it? What’s the magic method?

Simple. Read this very carefully:

Eat food. Not too much. And sometimes plants.

Or, if you’d prefer the shorter, hipper, periods-for-emphasis version:

Eat. More. Animal. Fat.

I eat an egg fried in butter every morning, and I don’t skimp on the butter. I eat full-fat Greek-style yogurt with breakfast. I eat great mounds of several kinds of cheese. I have everybody-knows-are-hideous things like bratwurst for lunch and sometimes supper, especially in good weather when I can toss them on the grill. I eat steak, ground buffalo, pork roast, and chicken deep-fried in lard, when I can find it. (Alas, the poor lards have been hunted nearly to extinction by cruel activists bearing rapid-fire lawsuits and campaign dollars.)

And most recently, I’ve discovered extra-rich milk. It’s not easy to find, but it’s worth the search. Hereabouts, you can get it in half gallons or gallons at Farm Crest milk stores. Farm Crest milk comes from cows not treated with antibiotics or growth hormone, which is why I started drinking their lower-fat versions to begin with. And it is the whitest, creamiest, most delicious milk I’ve ever tasted. 4.5% milkfat, wow.

So why am I not dead? Am I some kind of alien fluke, or zombie? (If so, I’m coming for your brains, which are deliciously high in fat.) By all the objective measures that we have, I’m healthy and apparently getting healthier. (And most recently, I discovered during a routine eye exam that my vision is getting better. Not so much better as to obviate the need for glasses, but my prescription went down almost half a diopter. No clue why–even I won’t blame it on a low-carb regime–just tossing it on the table.)

That’s the more. Here’s the flipside: I eat a lot less pasta and rice than I used to, love it though I may. I have refined sugar only occasionally, and then only as dessert after a high-fat meal. And little by little, I’m trying to give up refined grains and starches, though that’s a much tougher climb. I do eat vegetables that don’t make me gag or bloat, admitting that it’s a short list. I eat fresh fruit only in moderation, since fruit is mostly sugar. I snack on peanuts or almonds, chased by a glass of extra-rich milk. Once it goes down, I’m not hungry anymore. (Bet I can stop eatin’ em!)

Like a lot of people, I went on the low-fat, high-carb diet recommended by our all-wise, benevolent Federal government in the 70s, and that’s when I started to put on weight. Middle age accelerated the process, and I’d probably be over 200 by now if I hadn’t figured it out.

So let me beat you shamelessly over the head with it, while reminding you that this is one of my clearly labeled and tightly self-rationed rants:

1. Government low-fat dietary guidelines are bullshit, all of them anchored in the bogus work of Right Man Dr. Ancel Keys, who may well be the most damaging fraud in the entire history of science. He had data for 22 countries. He picked the six countries that supported his hypothesis, that fat is bad for you. Then he attacked his critics until the government raised him to sainthood. Over the next thirty years, humanity gained the weight of a minor planet.

2. We know a great deal less about health and nutrition than we think we do, and as with all science, what we know gets old fast. For a quick catch-up, read Gary Taubes‘ book Good Calories, Bad Calories. Breaking news: Human biochemistry is complicated! Story at 11!

3. You may be the fluke, and thrive without effort on a low-fat diet. Maybe we’re all flukes–human beings are not identical. (I love the word “fluke”! I had it printed right on my VOM!) Makes no nevermind: You have the power to find out. You are the experiment. Do the science. I did.

Good luck. Butter is delicious.

I Plum Forgot…

Mar 19th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

…to tell you that we’d gone to Hawaii. Sorry. Actually, not sorry. But after five years without a real vacation (and by “real” I mean “with a salt-water beach and palm trees”) we just packed up and went, no regrets and little time spent packing. I mean, they have Wal-Marts in Hawaii, so whatever we might fail to bring can be had without much anguish.

No anguish necessary. We brought everything we had to have (like, how badly does anybody need socks in Hawaii?) and Maui suits me just fine: Ten minutes after we got into our room overlooking Polo Beach, Carol was out on the balcony staring at the blue ocean, when she yells, “A whale!” And by cracky, one of them 40-ton bass yodelers had just thrown itself out of the depths and most of the way up into the sunlight. For another half an hour we watched, and they were out there in force, frolicking, flapping their flukes, and finding it all a fine, fine time.

Didn’t expect whales. And after five years, I’d forgotten a certain amount of beach discipline. That blue water looked so damned good after a deep frozen winter that simply won’t end (and still hasn’t) that I just waded in, forgetting I was wearing my expensive titanium-frame prescription sunglasses until a seven-foot wave crested over my head and knocked them off, simultaneously sending twin columns of high-pressure saline solution up my nose. Once I could breathe again I realized that my sunglasses were nowhere to be seen, and Carol and I spent another half an hour examining the ocean bottom during the wave troughs. We found a hotel key card and then somebody else’s sunglasses, as well as a heavily corroded penny and a sea urchin spine, before Carol sang out that she had them. That was a helluva break, considering how the waves were stirring up the sand on the bottom. The lenses picked up a few pits and scratches but are otherwise intact, and that is a mistake I doubt I will make again any time soon.

To celebrate our unlikely victory, I returned to my hard-drinking ways at dinner that evening, and had not one but two margaritas with my grilled walu.

Not much more to report. You all know what Hawaii looks like, and if I had had the presence of mind to install a photo editor on my new laptop before we left, I might have been able to post a picture or two here. The weather has been perfect, if a little windy. The food’s good, the bed’s great, the company sans pareille. I vacation as men might choose, though if I do get to choose, I choose not to wait another five years to do it again!

Odd Lots

Feb 24th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
6 comments
  • Here’s the best discussion I’ve yet seen on why Flash may never work well–or perhaps at all–on touchscreen devices like the iPad.
  • Most recent laser printers have Ethernet ports, and some older printers (like my Laserjet 2100TN) can accept a JetDirect network adapter. Installing a printer on a network port means you don’t have to worry about whether the machine it’s attached to is turned on. If you’d like to do this but you’re not a network geek, here’s the best XP-based step-by-step on the topic I’ve ever run across. Same tutorial for Windows 2000.
  • Bruce Baker passed me a link to a nice item on the issue of broadening publisher book production to allow all formats to be generated from a single master file. Follow and read the link to The New Sleekness as well. Pablo should take it down a notch; XML is not a markup language; it’s a general mechanism for creating markup languages, and what may happen eventually (perhaps in ten years or so) is a standard book-production markup language derived from XML and built into a new generation of word processors. Still, what nobody in either article mentions is the problem of pages verses reflowable, which is the 9 trillion pound gorilla in the business. If you don’t solve that problem, absolutely nothing else matters. (And it is not as easy to solve as some may claim–I’ve been thinking about it for several years now and see no solution whatsoever on the horizon .)
  • Kompozer 0.8b2 has been released. I just got it installed in a VM and will be poking at it in coming days. According to Kaz, most of the changes are code cleanups, but any progress on the editor is a fine, fine thing.
  • I’ve done model rocketry here and there over the (many) years, and I’ve seen some very odd things lofted on D engines. Back in high school, my friend George built a Harecules Guided Muscle (which was from the Beany & Cecil cartoon show) in the form of a big whittled balsa wood fist on a short, thick body. I’m amazed it flew as well as it did. Well, here’s a fire-’em-together pack of 8 rockets shaped and colored like Crayola crayons. The guy took his time (six years) but he did a great job–and created a spectacular Web page documenting the project.
  • We rarely go to WalMart, but last time we did, I picked up a bottle of Diet Mountain Lightning. It has nothing on Kroger’s Diet Citrus Drop, easily the best of all the Diet Mountain Dew clones I’ve ever had the opportunity to try.

Odd Lots

Feb 17th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment
  • Several people have asked why I didn’t post any photos from the big 4-day dog show in Denver, and I must admit (with profound annoyance) that my camera bag vanished sometime on Monday, and both of my digital cameras were in it. That’s a Canon G10 and a Nikon CoolPix S630, and with the biggish SD cards I put in them, it’s close to a $1000 loss. Neither the hotel nor the National Western Complex recovered the bag, so I can only assume it was stolen during the show, and with it went all the photos we took through Sunday night.
  • Slashdot reports that 80% of all software exploits during the fourth quarter of 2009 were malicious PDF documents. I’ve been a Foxit user for some time, but as Foxit becomes more popular, the bad guys will begin exploiting its flaws as well. (There is evidence that this has already happened.) It may be time to test software like Evince and Sumatra, both of which are available for Linux and Windows.
  • As I write this, you have eight hours to bid on the Compaq II machine that Anders Hejlsberg used to develop Turbo Pascal 4.0. The proceeds from the auction go to the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund. It’s one of those green-screen luggable that I always admired, but bidding is currently at $2025, yikes. (Thanks to the many who pointed this out, with Larry O’Brien being the first.)
  • Something confirming a phenomenon that I’ve noticed: Food expiration dates are conservative, and most food is good for a reasonable period after they supposedly time out. Still, after expiry, your nose is your stomach’s best friend.
  • For whatever it’s worth, here’s a list of the top-grossing movies of all time, with inflation-adjusted values. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.) Unsurprisingly, Gone With the Wind still beats all comers with a mind-boggling 1.5 billion dollars, the though the original Star Wars is right behind it at $1.3B. What’s worth noting is that all but six films in the top 14 were either Disney animation or special-effects extravaganzas. (It’s all but five if you think the opticals in The Ten Commandments were significant, as I do.) Lesson: We don’t go to the movies to watch unpleasant people screaming at one another.
  • Also from Frank comes a pointer to a short item suggesting that we kiss to enforce reproductive monogamy by developing immunities to one another’s specific viruses. I’m not sure I buy it either, but evolution has done far weirder things than this.

Victoria Duntemann’s Home-Made Beef Barley Soup

Jan 16th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
No comments yet

My mother was not a fantastic cook (as the youngest of eight kids, her older sisters did all the cooking and hence all the learning) but certain things she did very well. One of these was beef barley soup, and in her honor I made a pot of it today, according to her recipe as I best remember it, with only minor tweaks. My sister Gretchen pitched in on the remembering, reminding me that mother used tomato soup instead of diced tomatoes, but having imbibed a little too much of it in the early ’60s, I cannot abide tomato soup.

So here’s the recipe. It works, though it makes a lot, and in dinner-party portions probably serves 10 or 12. Carol and I will feast on it for a day or two and then freeze the rest.

  • 1 pound stew meat
  • 32 oz beef stock or broth
  • 6 cups water
  • 1 cup pearled barley
  • 1 large onion
  • 1 can (14.5 oz) diced tomatoes
  • 2 large carrots
  • 3 large stalks celery
  • 2 tblsp salt

Cut the beef up into small chunks, suitable for spooning. Mix beef chunks in a bowl with flour to coat all pieces. Melt a little butter in the bottom of a suitably large pot and brown the beef. Once the beef is browned, add in the broth, the water, the salt, and the barley. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 15 or 20 minutes to give the barley a good head start.

Add the vegetables. Simmer for another 45 minutes to an hour, or until the barley gets soft enough for you. (If you need to shorten the cooking time, use quick-cook barley, throw everything together at the beginning, and cook for only half an hour or forty minutes.) If you like pepper (we don’t, not that much) grind a little in.

Note that I prefer “hearty” soup, which means you can stand a spoon up in it. The recipe sounds like it calls for a lot of liquid, but barley is half-sponge, and when you’re done you’ll have something about 40% of the way from soup to stew. For thinner soup, add water or cut back a little on the barley. Nothing critical about the recipe; more meat would work, and you can leave out the onion if that’s an issue.

And there you have it. We ate simply but well when I was a kid. The evidence is in the pot.

Odd Lots

Jan 13th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
5 comments
  • We take digital clocks for granted, but this project may give you some perspective on just how difficult a challenge a digital clock really is. Absent integrated circuits, it takes over 1200 discrete electronic components to make a 6-digit digital clock. And you can get a kit.
  • Maybe RCA’s engineers are having a little fun with us. It’s hard to tell sometimes, but I still don’t understand how this thing is not a hoax. I maybe know a little bit about both RF power physics (37 years in ham radio) and Wi-Fi. If there’s a place in the world with enough Wi-Fi hotspots to make that little box generate useful power, please tell me where, so I can be sure never to go anywhere near it.
  • Several people have noticed that my author bio photo on Amazon has been replaced by someone else’s. Most oddly, the photo is of my old friend Jon Shemitz of Santa Cruz, who’s done some very good books on Kylix and .NET 2.0. I’ve been trying to get Amazon’s attention for a couple of weeks now, no luck yet.
  • Classmates.com did it again: They sent me an email asking whether I’d like to reconnect with a girl from my high school class. As I’ve said before, Lane Tech High was all-male until several years after I graduated, so there was no Teresa Mazzerelli in my class–nor does she appear in the alumni directory. One I could call a database error. Two I call fraud. Don’t give these guys your money.
  • Malt is my favorite ice cream flavor, but it’s very hard to come by. Several companies have offered it in the last ten or twelve years, including Meadow Gold and Boulder, but the flavor has always vanished after a few months. I guess I may just have to make my own.
  • Sprint may be partnering with Wal-Mart to put WiMax nodes on top of every single Wal-Mart in the country. This is not the first time I’ve heard this, and have reported on it before, but having had some experience with something a little like WiMax, I think it could be a huge moneymaker for Wal-Mart if they don’t let the control freaks at Sprint ruin it.
  • From the Words-I-Hadn’t-Heard-In-Thirty-Years-Until-Yesterday Department: bildungsroman, a coming-of-age novel. Why, then, does it suggest erecting a shrine to the Emperor out of cow pies?
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