Author: tony

And you won’t believe what it is. See the comment after the picture for details.

I’ve not been a fan of BMW since Chris Bangle redesigned the formerly-understated German vehicles to the ugly, bloated, over-angled excesses that we see in them today. Fortunately it would seem that as time goes the cars are less and less Bangled (as it were) and look more and more like they actually have some BMW heritage in them, with the ultimate example being the new 1-series unveiled in Frankfurt. Could it be that BMWs of the future will look more and more like, well, BMW’s? Only time will tell.

If you’ve been going around Montreal since about mid-August, you’ve no doubt noticed enormous numbers of wasps. The normally woodland-dwelling insect seems to have found itself a new home in the city.

Continue reading 2007: Year of the Wasp

Meet Michael Ledeen, “Iran Expert” and “Freedom Scholar” at the American Enterprise Institute. I’m not an expert on Iran myself, but wouldn’t you expect someone who claims to be such an expert to speak Farsi, and perhaps to have actually been in Iran at some point in his life? That’s too much to ask of the extreme-right-wing AEI, apparently, who have decided to put this raving insane fucking lunatic in charge of the dossier. After all the Institute’s “wisdom” is what got the US in Iraq in the first place…

The REAL Rudy. Rudy Giuliani has been lying his head off about his own record and about the decisions that ended up compounding the effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, causing countless needless deaths as a result of his relentless pursuit of self-publicity. Don’t believe his lies…

A colossal ripoff — mobile data in Canada. I used to think the telcos were screwing themselves by pricing themselves at such unaffordable rates, but they’re not. They rely on the customer having no alternatives, but credit enough left on the credit card. The similarity in the cost of the service across providers HAS to make you wonder about the issue of collusion and price-fixing, which would be easy strategies to pull off in a market where only 3 providers exist.

Woman sees own heart on display. The 23-year-old woman had developed a life-threatening heart condition and undergone a heart transplant; she describes seeing the original organ as “an emotional and surreal experience”.

New Uvex super-goggles change tone depending on light conditions. Now you can go ahead and ski well into the evening with confidence — but note that the goggles won’t otherwise help your skiing skills…

Hanzi Smatter – dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in western culture. A good counterpoint to “May I take your order” (below), this site with its tattoo focus does raise an interesting question — why would someone write something on themselves permanently without knowing what it means?

I’d love to use nothing but Linux on all my computers… if only I could. Unfortunately I regularly work from home using Windows-only software, and Linux support for games is barely there at all — it is completely missing for the newer games, and DirectX10 will only serve to compound this issue. In short I have to use Windows more often than I’d like. And unlike with Linux Windows bugs are very tough to identify and even harder to correct. Recently I had to deal with an internal Windows system called DirectShow that was downright broken. Continue reading A cure to Directshow weirdness