The Crack Team

You Eat Too Much

archangel — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 04:12:23 +0000

A few years ago, my roommate asked his his mother (a nurse) for a book on nutrition. She got him a book that was basically a pictorial guide to calorie counts, which is not what he wanted. However, I now realize that I should have borrowed that book, because now that restaurants have to tell you how many calories their dishes have, I’m learning exactly how much I’ve been overeating over the years.

For instance, I went to Islands and discovered my usual chicken breast sandwich is 1,000 calories. Nothing particularly evil about it: mayo, Swiss, mushrooms, lettuce, and tomato. Not breaded and deep fried, no bacon, no avocado. That doesn’t even include the 480 calories for the side of fries it comes with. In other news, Islands (like Red Robin) now offers bottomless fries with their meals, and will happily oblige your request for a side of ranch dressing. So with a second helping of fries, you get 2,000 calories in one meal. More if you get the bottomless Coke. That’s all your calories for the day, consumed in 30 minutes. Insane. I made a 5 oz. turkey burger at home, a smaller version of the above sandwich, and it still came to 480 calories.

If coffee shops had to list calories in the pastry case, their sales would plummet. They’re about 500-900 calories and half of that is fat. Plus the coffee, which is probably a whole milk latte with syrup. This time you only had half a day’s calories as a between meal snack.

Bottom line: everything is horrible for you, and twice as bad if you’re sedentary.

We Wuz Hacked

archangel — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 04:05:51 +0000

Sorry for the recent technical difficulties, the site fell prey to some sort of SQL injection attack that appended a malicious script that redirected users to a malware site. The tricky bastard used cookies, though, so you only saw it once. After that, visitors saw the regular site, unless they used “private browsing” in Firefox or IE 8; the lack of cookies causes redirects every time. Anyway, I scrubbed the database and upgraded WordPress to the latest and a few key plugins, so hopefully we’re safe until the next hack hits us. Just the cost of using WordPress, I guess. For full details, see this:

http://wiki.mediatemple.net/w/WordPress_Redirect_Exploit

We’re not hosted by Media Temple, but apparently a lot of the sites they host got hacked and their fix worked for us.

If you see any other problems, don’t hesitate to contact me. And thanks for ZBalance and my buddy Karl for pointing out the problem in the first place (I visit via the admin interface and Google Reader, which weren’t affected.).

zbalance — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:31:45 +0000

Archangel in particular will enjoy this article.

http://www.midwestsportsfans.com/2010/07/video-10-hilarious-stand-up-moments-with-louis-ck/

Google Interviews Conan

archangel — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 08:22:56 +0000

Google, notorious for their bone rattling interviews, puts Conan O’Brien in the hot seat. He is unfazed and very funny.

Getting To Know China

archangel — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 07:25:54 +0000

chinaSMACK¹ is a very interesting website that gives English speakers insight into the minds of the Chinese. They do this by translating the hottest, most popular news and blog articles into English – along with their comments. Granted, they don’t translate all comments (which would be tiring and frustrating for the translators), so they try to choose those that are representative of the whole. Fascinating stuff.

One piece that caught my eye: “Jewish girls with guns.” Essentially, it’s a photo album of attractive female Israeli soldiers (with a few hot civilian pics thrown in for good measure). But the comments (which are similar to another story about guns for sale in American Walmarts) display a belief that Chinese society would suffer greatly through crime and civil unrest (including possible revolution) if their citizens could own guns. They also touch upon the differences in political systems between our countries. Seems like a must read for anyone trying to get into the Chinese market or has an anthropological bent.

In a related note, I am happy to report that The Crack Team is no longer banned in China.

tip o’ the hat to Masterchief

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Aquaman Has Had It With You

archangel — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 06:46:09 +0000

Aquaman, King of the Seven Seas, has fucking had it with you, man.

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Do The Duck Face!

archangel — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 23:07:16 +0000

Funny song with naughty words, but you’ll be safe at work with headphones. What’s especially sad are the girls who went for duck face, missed by a mile, and ended up on, “I think I just sharted.”

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iPhone vs. HTC Evo 4g

archangel — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 04:23:00 +0000

This was made by software from Xtranormal that takes a script and turns it into an animated movie. Naughty language in this one, but hilarious. It’s a bit harsh on those iPhone fanboys (or girls?) who happen to be techno-ignorant, but I think the rest can appreciate it. Sent by iPhone owner Agent Avatar.

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Java 4-ever

archangel — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 22:08:25 +0000

If you are a Java or .NET developer, or just lived through the Sun-Microsoft war, you should find this very amusing. Lots of little touches. There are a few seconds that will not be work appropriate, but overall it’s safe. It’s also in HD, although the embedded player may not show that.

Update: As pointed out in the comments, the original video went private, so here is another in HD. However, the few naughty seconds (no nudity) require you to sign in.

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Attention Stupid People… please leave.

Assassin — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 20:15:35 +0000

I subscribe to several different woodworking periodicals and I also read several woodworking blogs and view several woodworking pod casts. Never before have I been so angry at the stupidity of a fellow woodworker. A couple of months ago a man in Boston was awarded $1.5 Million dollars by a jury (even though he was only seeking $250,000) for nearly chopping off a few fingers while using a table saw. Does anyone remember when someone won a law suit against McDonald’s for spilling hot coffee in their lap? Did anyone else get angry about that one? Well, that’s how I feel about this.

The argument was that the saw by Ryobi was poorly designed and inherently unsafe because it did not incorporate flesh sensing technology. About 10 years ago someone developed a pretty good idea whereby the saw would detect that something other than wood had contacted the blade and would move an aluminum block into the path of the spinning blade. This stops the blade in milliseconds and prevents the separation of your fingers from your body. It does destroy the mechanism and the blade and is also expensive to incorporate into saws but it does protect the user. Apparently the inventor of that technology tried to sell it to all the table saw manufacturers with no success so he decided to create his own company, aptly named Sawstop.

As a new table saw owner myself, I quickly became terrified of the fact that I was using a tool with a 10 inch blade spinning at high RPM and the thought that my fingers would have to be in close proximity to that blade. Table saws have been around for a very long time; Longer than electricity and the electric motor have been around. I knew that somehow all those woodworkers who came before me had found a way to mostly avoid disaster. After looking more into it I discovered there are numerous safety features in all recent saws and several tools and techniques all intended to keep your fingers safely away from the spinning blade. The problem is that many people disable or remove the safety features because they decide that they are inconvenient. I purchased my saw used from craigslist and when the guy dropped it off he gave me the blade guard separately and said he had never used it. The blade guard prevents your fingers from hitting the blade while it is spinning. It can’t be used in all situations and rather than take it off and put it back on a lot of people (including professionals) take it off and leave it off. It also blocks camera views so woodworking shows on TV and magazine articles frequently show these essential safety accessories missing.

So, back to our story… Did the moron in question have the stock blade guard installed on his saw? No. Did the moron in question have the rip fence installed on his saw? No. Was he using a push stick? Unknown, but from the extent of his injuries I will go out on a limb and say No. Does it take a genius to know that a spinning saw blade sticking up 3 inches out of a flat table is dangerous? I should hope not.

It gets better! Apparently, he was having trouble getting the saw to cut properly and felt a lot of vibration while trying to use the saw. He shut down the saw and cleared away all the dust and debris and started up again with the same problem. Rather than try to figure out what was wrong he just decided to push harder to get the wood through. This is when he slipped and his fingers hit the exposed blade.

I should qualify my opening paragraph a little bit. I am not really angry at this guy who was too stupid to have any self preservation instincts and ended up getting bitten by his saw. Even people who use all the right safety techniques occasionally get hurt. Table saws are dangerous! My only lament there is that he didn’t damage anything that would have prevented him from contributing to the gene pool. What I am really enraged over are the people of the jury who not only found for the plaintiff but also awarded him such a ridiculous amount of money. When, if ever, are people going to be held accountable for their own actions in this country? Why do we constantly reward people for being so dumb? It’s getting unbearable. I almost expect BP to file a suit against the United States government because they feel they weren’t watched closely enough to prevent the current situation in the Gulf of Mexico. If they could get the case heard in Boston it seems like they might have a shot and shirking their responsibility in the matter.

If the housing bubble bursting has taught me anything it is that this country treasures its stupid people. That was another situation where the people who were too stupid to realize they could not afford a $1M house on a $20,000 a year salary got rewarded by having the laws changed to try to help people refinance rather than get foreclosed on (I know I am exaggerating here but as someone who has been sitting on the sidelines because I “knew better”, this is what it feels like).