jpreardon.com

I awoke this morning to the sound of helicopters hovering overhead. This means one of several things: We’re under attack, the U.N. is in session, or, it’s the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I was happy that it was the latter. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday by far. Mostly because it has not been tainted with the excessive marketing that has become Christmas. For some reason, Thanksgiving remains a day of enjoying the company of family and good friends with the only excess being the food. Let’s all enjoy it while we can, one day they will turn Thanksgiving into an occasion requiring some sort of gift giving. Who are they? They are the same people that have convinced a portion of the American population that deep frying is the preferred method of turkey preparation.

All joking aside, I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving. I will be taking today to remember what I have to be thankful for. Family and friends are at the top of that list. I won’t name names here, I wouldn’t want to embarrass anyone by association, besides, you know who you are. Without you, anything else I might be thankful for is meaningless. Happy Thanksgiving!

P.S.

I’d like to let my friends in on a little secret. I slept through much of my culinary school experience; what little knowledge I might have picked up through osmosis has been long forgotten. It is quite embarrassing for me when someone asks how long a turkey should be cooked for and I draw a complete blank. After a short conversation last night, I decided to do some research, I have found Butterball to be a seemingly endless source of holiday cooking knowledge. If you find yourself in the kitchen asking “what do I do next”, check out these First Timer cooking tips. They include the answer to the all important question: how long will the turkey take to cook?

Remember that old joke about Microsoft manufacturing a car? It looks like the joke is becoming a reality. Bill Gates predicts that in three years 30% of new cars will have Windows CE on board. Let’s just hope that the airbag doesn’t ask the driver if it is OK to deploy before it does so.

Hydro-Québec is testing a high speed Internet access service that they plan to offer over their existing power grid. A similar service is offered by Scottish Hydro-Electric, but another company went out of business trying to do the same thing in Germany. Critics claim that Internet signals on the power lines will interfere with television and radio reception. Hydro-Québec maintains that there will be no interference. If the tests go well, the service might be available in a few years.

via Slashdot

Sprint PCS will start offering an SMS like service soon. It’s about time, I know of at least one customer who dropped their service due to Sprint’s poor SMS implementation, which requires logging into the Sprint website to compose messages.

via Textually

In random order:

• Album Covers That Never Were
• Mini-copter stars at robot show
• Spam Sandals [via BoingBoing]
• Middle Earth Shuttle
• Truth In Guerilla Marketing

By the way, does anyone know what’s going on with BoingBoing???

Slashdot points to a service that lets you send some final thoughts via E-Mail after your death:

Mylastemail.com has been created to allow you to leave a final personal message to your family, friends and loved ones after your death. It allows you to say all the things you wanted to say but couldn’t; it allows you to say all the things you intended to say but didn’t, and it allows you to just say goodbye.

Creepy…

The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know, an excellent article in FastCompany, shows a side of Wal-Mart seldom seen by its shoppers. No, it doesn’t discuss Wal-Mart’s recent problems with illegal labor, although the contractor those immigrants worked for probably felt the squeeze just like any of Wal-Mart’s vendors. In order roll back prices suppliers are forced to slash costs or lose Wal-Mart’s business. In many cases this forces the suppliers to lay off domestic workers and move operations overseas. These manufacturing jobs are being lost in the same communities that Wal-Mart serves.

via BoingBoing

Update: Dan Gillmor points to an article claiming that a cashier working at Wal-Mart would not be able to supply a their family with basic necessities if they were to shop at their place of work.

I appreciate when the press runs a positive story about baldness. So I was happy to see Richard Sandomir’s story in the Sunday Times this week. Sandomir decided go for the big shave after Charles Barkley asked him if he was “thinking of coming home.” Aaron over at 601am also shares his story of when he decided to shave it all off. He was much bolder than I, not only did he seem to reach the decision on his own, he actually did the shaving on his own as well. You truly are a brave man Aaron.

The Sunday Times article really hit home since I had the exact same conversation before I decided to go for a more aerodynamic look. No, I didn’t talk to Charles Barkley, but I asked a friend about shaving, and he responded with “it’s time to come home” as well. The next morning I found myself in the barber’s chair with three barbers asking me if I really wanted the number 1. In hindsight, I think they might have been a bit more worried about loosing a customer than how I might look without what little hair I had left. In the end I compromised and went with the slightly longer and somewhat less bold number 2. I was a bit nervous at first but I was happy with the results. In a few weeks, I was back at the barber shop insisting on the number 1. More recently, I decided to invest in my own clippers since the barber shop would not give me a frequent flyer discount, sorry guys.

Why am I boring my three irregular readers with a story about my most recent hairstyle? Well, first of all, this post can’t be any more ridiculous than the last one about Bender and the Robot Hall of Fame, I’m really reaching here folks. Seriously though, any man thinking of shaving his head should have free access to positive stories about doing so. So guys, this page contains links to two of those stories, and I’m here to tell you I’m not going back either. If you’re on the edge about it, go talk to one of your bald friends, I’m sure you have at least one. As soon as they tell you it’s time to come home, you’ll be ready.

For those of you who are already sporting the get up and go look, you might want to check out the HeadBlade. I’m sticking with the electric clippers for now, but a friend of my swears by it and it is one of the coolest shaving devices I have seen.

The Mars Pathfinder Sojourner Rover, Unimate, R2-D2, and HAL 9000 were inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame yesterday at the Carnegie Science Center. Conspicuously absent from the list of inductees was Bender (pictured left) of Futurama fame. How could the jury overlook the work of Bender the robot? I can’t help but think that it had something to do with his abrasive personality. Does this mean that we can expect only robots that are soft spoken or emit useless beeps to make it to the hall of fame? Bender might not be as lethal as HAL 9000 or as cute as R2-D2 but he certainly deserves a place in the robot hall of fame. Don’t let this happen again next year, nominate Bender now!

The BBC is running a story to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the computer virus. The first documented virus was created by Fred Cohen as an experiment while studying for a PhD at USC. Cohen described a virus as “a program that can ‘infect’ other programs by modifying them to include a … version of itself”. CBSNews has a virus timeline that mentions Mr. Cohen’s research near the beginning, two years after the first undocumented Apple II virus was found in the wild.

via Slashdot