Colbert's guts

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Kudos to Stephen Colbert for having the guts to go through with this bit at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner this weekend. Apparently, Bush wasn't too amused. How ironic is it that a fake newsman exposes Bush to more truth than Fox News ever will?

But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!

Because really, what incentive do these people have to answer your questions, after all? I mean, nothing satisfies you. Everybody asks for personnel changes. So the White House has personnel changes. Then you write, "Oh, they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!

Hydrogen: A Red Herring

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While I'm glad that President Bush has stopped pimping for Big Oil long enough to endorse hydrogen as an alternative energy strategy, I have to point out that hydrogen is not an energy source. How do you get hydrogen? Well, that's simple, you run electricity through water and collect the hydrogen, right? Then, you burn the hydrogen in your car. How much energy do you get from burning it? Less than you used to separate it from the water in the first place, quoth Wikipedia:

It is currently very difficult to obtain hydrogen gas without expending energy in the process. The process of splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen using electrolysis consumes large amounts of energy. It has been calculated that it takes 1.4 joules of electricity to produce 1 joule of hydrogen (Pimentel, 2002). If oil or gases are used to provide this energy, fossil fuels are consumed, forming pollution and nullifying the value of using a fuel cell. It would be more efficient to use fossil fuel directly

That said, I think hydrogen could be useful to power our cars, as long as we use nuclear, solar, or wind energy to get it from our water, with nuclear making the most sense. So now, to power our fleet of hydrogen cars, we just need a bunch of new nuclear plants, which most "green" activists won't abide. So now what?

Meet Me In Montana

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I booked a cabin in Montana this week. No, I'm not going to become the next Unabomber, my family is going there on vacation in June. After browsing every area web site, I finally selected the Apgar Village Lodge as where we'll stay. My parents and my sister are going to meet my wife and I there, and hopefully we'll be bringing my grandparents along with us, if they can get away from the farm for a week. We're also going to do some whitewater rafting while we're in Montana, possibly here.

Bad Service

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I had some abysmally bad customer service from Gateway yesterday, I only wish I was able to save the transcript of the online chat session I had with one of their techs. I was helping a student who had to reinstall Windows on his laptop, and Gateway didn't have the drivers on their web site for his network card. He'd managed to lose the Restore CD for his laptop, but had purchased a copy of Windows XP, so this should have been no problem, right? Wrong. Even though I'd already said that I had the wireless drivers working (which are on their site), the tech insisted twice that those were the network drivers I needed. After I made it clear that I was after WIRED networking drivers, he tried telling me that the only way to get those were off the restore CD. So, I asked what chipset was in the laptop, and after 10 minutes he came back and told me it was a Marvel-Yukon Gigabit PCI-Express chipset. I said "I guarantee to you that this laptop does not have that chipset". The laptop wasn't ancient by any means, but it was more than a year and a half old, and sure enough, while the tech was insisting I was wrong, I found that the laptop actually used the Broadcom 4401 chipset, and downloaded and installed those drivers with no problem, though the tech still insisted I was wrong...

Needless to say, "Simon" got a negative rating in the feedback section from me...

Important TiVo News

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TiVo announced yesterday that they're going to be eliminating Lifetimeservice as an option next week, so if you've been meaning to buy a TiVo for someone you know, or a second one for yourself, now is the time to do so, as after that, you'll have to pay a monthly fee as long as you use the service. This has always been the best way to buy a TiVo, as $299/12.95= 23+, so you break even vs. the monthly fee after 24 months.

Amazon has the 80 hour units for $69.99 after rebate.

Or you can pick one up at Best Buy, and TiVo just added Radio Shack as a partner too, so they may have them in their stores soon.

Remember, the Lifetime goes away on March 15, so act quickly, and don't forget to list my e-mail (seth.bokelman@uni.edu) as referring you if you do buy another one, I need a few more referrals for those nifty Bose headphones... :)

If for some reason you find the new pricing methods preferable, they're now including the box in the service plans, but the price varies depending on how long you want to be contracted for:

* The price for a TiVo box and a one-year service commitment is $19.95 a month or $224 prepaid * The price for a TiVo box and a two-year service commitment is $18.95 a month or $369 prepaid * The price for a TiVo box and a three-year service commitment is $16.95 a month or $469 prepaid

I'm not really a fan of this pricing model, but since I'm not planning on replacing my box anytime soon, it doesn't really affect me too much...

Nasty Safari security problem on Mac OS X

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SANS links to details of a nasty security problem affecting the Mac OS X browser that will automatically run shell scripts linked to from web pages. If you're reading this via a Macintosh, do the following ASAP:

The best immediate recourse against such an attack is to deactivate the option "Open 'safe' files after downloading" in the "General" section of Safari's preferences. Alternative web browsers such as Camino or Firefox do not support the automatic execution of files. These browsers can be prompted to automatically download a file by using the refresh command in the HTML source code of a web page. However, the file will not be executed. Since the Finder selects the icon for a file based on its extension, users are advised to verify that the OS is using the proper file type. This can be done through the information window or in column view.