This site (and Melissa’s site, and Intersanity’s site) have all been hosted by PowWeb since May 2004. I switched to PowWeb from my previous hosting provider—Hypermart—after they were bought out by Endurance International, moved my sites to a new platform, and changed the available features without warning. Their changes effectiely shut down my website, and it was less work to move to PowWeb than to re-architect the site so it could stay on Hypermart. PowWeb used to be great, and I happily recommended it to others whenever asked. But things changed in 2006 when—cue the broken record—the company was also bought-out by Endurance International.
Year of Global Cooling
Here’s the truth about climate change: The nominal 0.7 degree Celsius increase in mean temperature over the last fifty-or-so years is, at best, inconclusive. The average volume and severity of hurricanes hasn’t gotten worse, despite predictions to the contrary. Much of the world has actually been trending cooler for the last few years. I’m a fan of being eco-friendly, and I’ll be among the first in line to buy an affordable fuel cell or electric car once a usable refueling infrastructure is in place, but the evidence points to Al Gore’s ‘inconvenient truth’—for which he ludicrously won a Nobel Peace Prize—being neither particularly inconvenient nor true.
- Year of Global Cooling (Washington Times) [link no longer available].
- Related: NASA Climate Data Miscalculated . . . Badly.
Columbia Gas: Auto-Terminating Your Account!
So, our new apartment (which we moved to in September) does not have utilities included, so for the first time I had to start an account with a gas company: Columbia Gas. I initiated the account online before moving, and received a bill in late September for the initiation fee and the first 4-days of gas usage. Then I never heard from them again and never received any subsequent bills. I didn’t worry about it because Melissa, who has dealt with Columbia before, said it was pretty normal for bills to come sporadically—even sometimes 2-3 months apart.
World’s Greatest [Fake] Laptop
![World’s Greatest [Fake] Laptop](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/2007-11-29-2d-laptop.jpg)
This is, without a doubt, the best two-dimensional fake laptop in the world (as seen at a local Staples store in Logitech’s display area). Somebody gets paid the big-bucks to build fake laptops like this, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
End of Tackiness Alert
Now that Thanksgiving is over (and a great Thanksgiving it was), it is no longer tacky to put up your Christmas decorations, buy Christmas gifts, or display Christmas products in your retail outlets. The Christmas season begins after Thanksgiving. If you broke this cardinal rule and began your Christmas festivities before Thanksgiving, you can earn forgiveness by removing your Christmas decorations an equal number of days before New Years (when Christmas decorations become tacky again) as you put them up before Thanksgiving. Next year, be more conscientious and keep Christmas confined to the proper Christmas season.
Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.