Monthly Archives: January 2006

Great product for a lazy guy like me

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Last Christmas, my wife bought me a Pampered Chef rice cooker for the microwave. I was a little concerned at first that it might not work all that well. Cooking rice in the microwave seemed a bit dubious to me. Anyway, I tried it and was quite pleasantly surprised at how amazingly well it works. The rice is just as good as when I used to make it on the stove. However, because I now cook it in the microwave, I benefit from the microwave’s timer so there is no way I can burn the rice. (Yep, it has happened a couple of times when I used to cook it on the stove.) Even better, the rice does not stick in the microwave cooker so cleaning is utterly easy. Half of the time, I had to scrub the bottom of the pan when I used to cook rice on the stove since some of the rice would stick.

This product gets a 10/10 from me.

Histoire de grenouille

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Pamela Walden-Landry écrit:

Il paraît qu’une grenouille placée dans de l’eau froide qu’on fait doucement chauffer reste là et meurt ébouillantée faute d’avoir perçu le changement progressif.

Malheureusement, cette croyance populaire est fausse. Il ne s’agit que d’une image-choc popularisée par des consultants de pacotille. Snopes a un article là-dessus.

C’est bien malheureux car le message de Madame Walden-Landry à propos du réchauffement de la planète est bien valide.

My next laptop: a Mac?

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It’s all over the place: Apple is now shipping Macs with Intel hardware. If this results in competitive pricing, my next laptop may well be a Mac.

“But wait! Aren’t you a free software (as in “free speech”) believer?”

Yes I am. I’m also a believer in software that works out of the box with as little arcane manipulation as possible. So far, free software has not been delivering in this area and my patience is running out. I’m using Debian-unstable for my own needs. Since this is the unstable distribution of Debian, I normally just deal with whatever arcane manipulation is needed. However, I recently installed Debian 3.1, a so called “stable” version of Debian, for my mother and found that I had to go “under the hood” to get things working properly. Some of the hardware was not usable after a clean install without me having to install additional packages and do some manual configuration. That, I find unacceptable.

“But you can fix it yourself! That’s the beauty of free software.”

Nope, I’m not interested in fixing bugs. That’s why I may eventually decide that the best course of action is to switch to a Mac. Unless I can find a robust and user-friendly free software distribution before I completely run out of patience. (Suggestions welcome.)

The first desktop computer that came into our house when I was a kid was a Mac and it is on Macs that I first learned to program in Pascal and C. (We had other computers before the Mac but the Mac was the first “serious” computer we owned.) When the time came to buy my own computer, I switched to PCs because I could not afford Macs.

Anyway, I welcome Apple’s move to Intel hardware. (AMD too, eventually?)

Louis-Dominique replies to spam, again…

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News just released after the close. Tomorrow is the watch

But now is the delete.

Please observe this instruction

I have observed it and I still don’t understand!

good riddins to thighs

And good riddins to you, sir! Good riddins to everyone!

It doesn’t hurt to check Philip

Nor Laura, nor John, nor Steve… You can check them all.

URGENT PROPOSAL

I want to marry you! NOW!

guess who 🙂

You?

Exclusive benefits

If your benefits are so exclusive, why do you send them to everybody?

Take action now, eliminate the threat.

I’m using a spam filter, doesn’t that qualify?

Increased pop-up ads and SPAM?

Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies.

COMPLIMENT FRIEND

Much better than a compliment enemy.

Unbelievable Investors Alert

Thanks for pointing out that this can’t be believed. I’ll delete your mail right away.