From the Wikipedia:

But WHY?

Why would you drop the part of the word that actually gives it meaning? Am I supposed to think that anytime you go to phone someone that you're having phone sex with them?

Why not shorten it to something that still has meaning, like eFuck? (Or if it's an Apple Product, iFuck.) That would make fucking sense.

And who gave them the right to turn an adjective into a verb at their own discretion? Stupid people making up their stupid words.

For the record, this has bugged me for years.

Must waste less time playing with this... But it's too much fun.

This was requested by Duck, so I thought I'd post it here, in case any one else cares. All of these are available from the Firefox extensions site.

There are a couple more that should be included on this list, but they're installed on my home computer and not the one at work where I am now.

• Tabbrowser Preferences - Gives added control to tabbed browsing
• Open Source in Tab - Keeps me from having too many windows open.
• PageStyle2Tab - It just looks cool.
• TabFX - More enhancements to tabbed browsing.
• Right-Click-Link - For the link that isn't a link.
• Extended Statusbar - Useful at times. Works like Opera's.
• SessionSaver .2 - "Magically restores your last browsing session."
• PDF Download - Because Acrobat doesn't always agree with Firefox.

Not really fried, but it gets your attention, doesn't it? About a month ago, Alex chewed up the power cord for Homestar, my laptop. Amazingly, she wasn't injured, even though it was plugged in at the time.

I finally got annoyed enough at looking at it just sitting there to try and repair the cord myself. I still don't have the money to pick up another power supply for $65-$75.

Twenty minutes and about two feet of electrical tape later, I have a working power supply again. It's not a long term solution, since I didn't feel like looking for the soldering iron, but it works for now. And there's enough tape on it to hold it together, unless you really want to break it again.

What's the first thing I do with it after getting it running again? Reformat and try to install the lastest Vista build. We'll see how that goes.

I think I'm going to start titling my emails with phrases like "My friend, you..." or "A Special Message", just so that nobody will ever read them.

I built (or rather rebuilt) Satyr a few months ago as a Home Theater PC. At the time though, I didn't have adequate hardware to run Media Center Edition (it requires a video card that supports DirectX 9). The poor box was only running a Duron 700 though.

With the money I got for Christmas, I picked up a GeForce FX 5200 (~$50), the cheapest nVidia card that would support MCE 2005. I also installed an Athlon processor I had lying around, although it will only run at 1100MHz because the motherboard won't support it at full speed. Eventually, the machine will be upgraded more, but I don't have the money to do it yet.

The odd part of the experience was that I'd done something to make the machine fail after switching hardware out. I ended up needing to reinstall the OS to make it stable again, but it's running fine now.

Rachel's computer died on us the other day. It had several possibly unrelated failures. The CDRW died, the video card died (an interesting event in itself) and the power supply died. The video card failure may have been related to the power supply failure, but I can't be sure. Watching the video card fail was interesting though. The card was artifacting horribly. Fun to watch, but bad...

I replaced the power supply and the video card then, but both of them sucked. The card was a GeForce 256, but at least it worked. The power supply (while unknown to me at the time) had a bad fan.

When I went to the replace the video card with Satyr's old card (more on that later), I noticed the power supply (still not properly mounted in the case) was way too hot to touch. After it had cooled, I took the power supply apart and pulled out the old fan, being careful to not electrocute myself. The old fan was hard wired, so I had to tape off the leads I cut and run the leads to the new fan out where the power cords went. It's working fine now, but it scared the crap out of me being inside the power supply.

Griffin (Rachel's computer) is back up and running now with a new (old) CDRW (12/10/32), a working power supply and an ATI Radeon 7000. Also in the process of all of this, I disabled the onboard sound and enabled te SB Live! that had been previously installed. It should run a lot better now.

Sorry, Rachel, this one isn't about you.

I went to Office Depot the other day to buy some DVD-Rs.  I picked up 2 bundles (buy one get one free) and started to browse around the store.  I wandered around for a bit and ended up on the keyboard aisle.  I try to look at the keyboard aisle in computer stores at least a couple of times a year on my quest for the perfect user interface device.

Since 1997 or 1998, I've been using the Microsoft Natural Keyboard Elite almost exclusively.  I've never found anything that seemed as comfortable for me to use.  That has now changed.

There, on that aisle, I came across the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000.  When I put my hands on it, I fell in love instantly.  The picture in that link just doesn't do it justice.

I stood there for a few minutes, then proceeded to put back my DVD-Rs and buy the keyboard instead.  (I couldn't afford to get both that day.)  Now I just have to talk my work into buying me one for there too.

I haven't posted anything lately. Let's see if we can change that. I've got a bunch of boring (for some) posts to make about what I've been up to the last couple of weeks, but before I get to that, I have something else to share.

I received an email with a virus attached (in a zip file). I wonder how many people aren't going to catch the logical fallacies in it:

Disregarding the fact that it's just not proper letter writing, the first thing that I noticed was that it was supposed to be from the CIA. That just doesn't make sense. The CIA doesn't have jurisdiction on this kind of thing. FBI, Homeland Security or Secret Service maybe, but not the CIA. It amused me so I thought I would share.

Last Friday, Goblin, my main computer at home, started flaking out on me. It would boot up for about 2 minutes and then turn itself off and not boot up again for awhile. After 4 or 5 days of working with it (I was sick so it took awhile), I discovered 3 major problems, the biggest of which was trying to hide.

The first problem, and most obvious, was that the grounding in the power strip it was plugged into was broken. Every time I touched the metal on the computer (and the metal on the vga cable when it was unplugged), I would get that fuzzy "I'm an electircal conduit" feeling. Not enough to really hurt, but enough to make it's presence known. When I hooked the computer up to a different strip, it wouldn't happen.

The second problem, and almost as obvious, was that the northbridge fan had gone out. I replaced it, thinking that it was possibly overheating the chipset and shutting down.

Those two steps helped some, but it would still shut down. I booted up to the BIOS to watch the hardware monitor and got to see the CPU temperature rise to almost critical levels. I shut it down again.

The fan was still running fine, so that wasn't it. I noticed a lot of dust buildup on the heatsink though, so I decided to clean it out [1]. I discovered my third problem when I went to put it back in. One of the 4 posts on the plastic retainer clip on the motherboard has broken. The heatsink wasn't making good contact, but just enough to let it run a little. I think the extra voltage going through the heatsink might have hurt it some too, but I couldn't confirm that.

Then it took me two days to get a new retainer clip and put it in (Thanks for the discount, John). It's back up and running fine, but I still need a new power strip before I can put the thing back where it goes (and have my dual monitors again).