Contractions

So, I just figured out that I can schedule when my posts should appear on the blog. This is good, because now, when I get in a blogging mood, I can post all my ideas and have them appear whenever later.

So this post is about contractions. I noticed something funny with my last post. I made a grammatically correct sentence using three words where the first two or the last two can be made a contraction. I chose the second two... I don't know why.

It isn't

But I suppose I could have just as easily typed:

It's not

or

It is not

but I didn't.

It got me thinking though, what if we combined the entire sentence!

It'sn't

What other three word combinations can be made to be one contraction? There are others, I just can't think of them at the moment.

anti-piracy / anti-theft devices that turn out to be anti-consumer

One of the things that really annoy me about common business practices with consumer items is how the business will make their product so that it can't be used normally without the consumer having to jump through a lot of hoops to use it. An example of which you may or may not be familiar would be regional encoded DVD movies.

Well I've run into one a couple of weeks ago, my car radio. Honda's stock radio/CD player has an anti-theft mechanism such that if it loses power (unplugged, the car's battery dies, whatever) it locks up and you have to get a 5 digit code to unlock. Well, here's the deal, my battery died a couple of weeks ago and now I've lost the radio. No music from a disc, radio, and no clock :(

It wouldn't be too bad if I knew how to get to the serial number on the radio, because that's all I need to give to the dealership and they'll tell me the code. Here's the thing about that. Thieves will already have a way to get that code too. And they'd get it faster. So how is this an anti-theft mechanism? It isn't! It's anti-consumer.

So, here I sit with an unusable radio in my car... but if a thief wants it, they can take it and fix it, heh.

Headline snafu

So, I headed over to FOXNews.com and read one of their articles (well just a few paragraphs). But I found the headline very amusing...



I'm not sure that the rise as more than unexpected. Perhaps the rise was unexpected or it was more than expected. Of course, they had it correct in the first sentence of the article (more than expected) and on the RSS headline. But it is funny to see the mistake in big blaring headline font.

Miss California's stance

Well, how about some good political news for once? Did you you hear about Miss California's stance (and not how she stands with her feet) on homosexual marriage? She's against it! Hallelujah! She stands up for what she believes despite the immense pressure she may have felt from the many openly homosexual people in that audience. This country needs more of her (and she got first runner-up.)

On a pessimistic note, I wonder when the prophet will tell the faithful to flee California because it's going to fall into the ocean? (I hope ya'll know I'm joking)

Rant on politics (again)

What?! A new post? It's only been 3.5 months, hehe. I didn't really want my next post to be yet another political rant, but a topic has been welling up in me, and perhaps I will put it down concisely and organized. Suffice to say, I do not like the current administration's direction. People were hoping for change... this is not the change they were hoping for.

Anyway, Noelle and I were watching The Incredibles this morning. Syndrome, the little kid who became the evil scientist, was "monologuing" and said this:

Oh, I'm real. Real enough to defeat you! And I did it without your precious gifts, your oh-so-special powers. I'll give them heroics. I'll give them the most spectacular heroics the world has ever seen! And when I'm old and I've had my fun, I'll sell my inventions so that *everyone* can have powers. *Everyone* can be super! And when everyone's super ... no one will be.

Now, apply that to taxes.

[Put your favorite socialist liberal here]: Oh, I'm real. Real enough to defeat you! And I did it without your precious riches, your oh-so-special wealth. I'll give them money. I'll give them the most spectacular riches the world has ever seen! And when I've given all your wealth away everyone can be rich. Everyone can be wealthy! And when everyone's wealthy ... no one will be.