The University of Nebraska Medical Center published guidelines on holiday decorations for its employees. Some of them are just good sense, such as:
Do not block the view of exits signs or the fire alarm strobes.
Then there’s this one, which I don’t even understand:
Candles are OK as long as the wicks are cut out of them.
Either I don’t understand how candles work, they don’t understand how candles work, or this is a euphemistic way of saying, “candles are okay to display, but don’t light them.”
In searching for tips on not killing poinsettia plants, I found The Poinsettia Pages from the University of Illinois. They provide this helpful bit of trivia:
A study at Ohio State University showed that a 50 pound child who ate 500 [leaves] might have a slight tummy ache.
I’m glad someone finally researched that! I’ve been asking for years. However, how did the study show that, exactly?
As part of my ongoing Christmas travel planning, I’m exploring rental cars.
My credit card has an apparently common feature where they’ll insure any car rented using the card. I can forgo the rental company’s insurance, theoretically assuming financial responsibility myself, but really falling back on the credit card if I’m in an accident.
I wanted to be sure I fully understood the terms and conditions, so I read the booklet that came with the card thoroughly. It includes this passage:
Exclusions. Coverage does not apply to Loss resulting from the following:
- Any dishonest, fraudulent or criminal act of the Insured.
- Forgery by the Insured.
- Loss due to war or confiscation by authorities.
- Loss due to nuclear reaction or radioactive contamination.
- …
Wow. That list went downhill really fast. The bits about fraud and forgery I expected, but then already in the third and fourth items we’ve slipped into war and nuclear reactions!
I admit I’m also struggling to envision what sort of nuclear reaction would damage the car, but would leave the driver intact and liable for the damage.
In pricing Christmas travel options, I contemplated flying JetBlue to Burlington, Vermont. The cheapest flight costs $104, and goes by way of JFK Airport in New York.
It’s a cheap flight, and (believe it or not) the best route available. Unfortunately, the timing is lousy, with a layover for over four hours.
I thought I’d try pricing just the flight from JFK to Burlington thinking I’d make the connection on another carrier. The exact same flight without the leg from Boston costs just $99.
Why didn’t someone tell me sooner that we had $5 flights to New York from here?
CNN Money has a nice retirement planner tool that supposedly takes into account income, expected raises, 401(k) matching, and various other factors. I usually try it out around this time of year when I’m planning my December savings and spending.
I’m not convinced it’s entirely accurate. It suggests (emphasis as quoted):
If you adjust the amount you contribute each year to your taxable accounts to zero, you will have a 99.84% chance to save $450,363 from now until retirement.
Do I have some off-shore accounts of which I was not previously aware? Or have the odds of winning half a million dollars on a scratch ticket gone way up?
Netflix offers this summary of the film Journey to the Center of the Earth (emphasis mine):
Science professor Trevor (Brendan Fraser) has become the laughingstock of the academic community thanks to his outrageous theories. While on a trip to Iceland, Trevor, his nephew Sean (Josh Hutcherson) and their guide Hannah (Anita Briem) find themselves at the center of the planet, having discovered a whole world within our world. Adapted from the Jules Verne fantasy novel, this film (presented in 2D) marks the directorial debut of Eric Brevig.
Everybody knows the Earth is flat. Why would you need more than two dimensions to tell a story about it?
Besides, I never settle for anything less than 4D when I watch movies at home.
Although our entire development staff (including me) thinks it’s utterly stupid, I had to use the Zend Encoder.
[bobbojones@malahide pubph]$ zendenc pubph.php pubph.enc.php
root privileges are required in order to preserve ownerships of encoded files
That’s strange. I own the original file, and I’m running the executable. Shouldn’t I just naturally own its output files? I’ll just play along for fun.
[bobbojones@malahide pubph]$ sudo zendenc pubph.php pubph.enc.php
Cannot stat pubph.php: Permission denied
Wait, what do you mean, “Permission denied?” I said sudo! You know, sudo? As in, “Superuser access that authorizes me to do absolutely anything I want on this machine up to and including destroying its entire contents, your stupid executable included?” Sudo? Sound familiar? Even a little? No?
Blërg.
(As it turns out, the first one worked just fine. The “root privileges are required” reprimand is apparently only a warning, and just I didn’t happen to check the output immediately. Still, I feel as if my authority as a sudoer has been undermined.)
On the Papa Johns online ordering system:
Special
Cheesesticks @ regular menu price
That does sound pretty special, but do you have any coupons that make food cost more than the regular menu price? Those are the only kind I really ever use.
I’m looking for paintings, and although I didn’t particularly plan to commission one, I stumbled upon commissionapainting.com in a search. In principle, and in the abstract, it’s intriguing: find an artist you like and commission a new work. Even supposing I were sold on the idea of commissioning a new painting, I’m underwhelmed by this site.
First, the banner atop the site advertises it as commission.a.painting.com which is a completely different site. It’s a site that doesn’t exist. And it would, if it were actually valid, be a subdomain of painting.com, which Sherwin-Williams owns. So this site doesn’t even know its own web address.
Second, upon hitting the Search page, I scanned the list of countries showing how many artists are listed in each:
Worldwide
Canada (0)
USA (0)
Australia (0)
United Kingdom (0)
New Zealand (0)
In the immortal words of Tom Hanks in Big, “I don’t get it.”
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Other times, it seems the photographer may have largely missed the point. That’s right, they offer a solid white photograph of a solid white object, with a helpful black border so you can tell where the photograph ends and the page begins.