Potpourri

I have this love/hate relationship with SATA hard disks. Today, my father had this problem again, of his PC not booting. It happens once every few months and the problem always has the same symptoms: the computer slowly crawls through the BIOS POST, has trouble detecting the hard drives, and then ultimately fails at the bootloader.
Every time, I keep telling (and showing) him, it's due to a loose contact in the SATA data cable and fixing the problem is as easy as shoving the plug properly back into it's socket. Yet, every time, I have to get involved in this.

I just found a photo of a can of coke (the real stuff, not that vile diet swill) next to a pile of the ten sugar cubes, supposedly dissolved in it. Gee! Ten cubes? That much? Boy, my health insurance must go berserk if they knew, I drank this. I mean it's ten cubes, that's ... well ... it's ... uhm ... shocking, I suppose... I think, I am totally worried for my health here! That much glucose can't possibly be good for me, right? It's a miracle, I don't drop dead from just looking at it!

Actually, I had intended to keep religion out of my blog, but browsing the web, especially youtube, I see this increadibly stupid argument being made over and over again. It is so deeply annoying that I feel a need to break my own rules and rant about it anyway. The argument, I am talking about, starts with a scripture quote and then goes on rumbling how misogynistic the bible is:

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If a man is caught in the act of raping a young woman who is not engaged, he
must pay fifty pieces of silver to her father. Then he must marry the young woman

Have you ever had that sudden sensation of "why am I doing this?" sneaking up on you? You know, that kind of feeling where some common practice, you were so accustomed to in your daily routine that you never questioned it, all of a sudden seems to be totally absurd and pointless to do? Like, for example, washing your hands after using the toilet, closing the faucet and realizing that you opened it with supposedly dirty hands and now are touching it with supposedly clean hands, potentially picking up again what you deposited there in the first place?

Headline: "Catholic church invests in tobacco, arms and birth control pills".

Sounds too unbelievable to be true? Well, not entirely. According to this article on spiegel.de, the German Pax bank, one of the four catholic church banks in North Rhine-Westphalia did exactly that.

According to the article, the following investments were made:

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Since I had to explain it anyway, I can put just as well write it down here in my blog. The question, I was asked was, how the stock market can magically generate money out of thin air and the short answer is: It cannot, but psychology can be used as a means to redistribute existing wealth.
There is no such thing as an intrinsic value. The value of any object depends on it's scarcity and our desire to own it. By manipulating desire for and the availability of an object, it's value can either be increased or decreased.

Seen yesterday, when visiting friends:

I know, inline skaters love to modify their gear by replacing standard bearings and wheels with all kinds of special equipment, but car tires? This seems to be a bit over the top. What is that kid up to?

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Do you know this problem? You buy a piece of computer hardware and you get a driver CD in a sleeve. You buy a computer magazine and you get a bonus CD in sleeve. You buy washing powder and you get a free movie DVD as special advertising stunt (in a sleeve, of course). After some time, all those loose discs tend to pile up in some drawer of your desk and it becomes a nightmare, finding the one again, you are looking for.

I suppose occasionally, there probably should be a non tech topic even on a tech centric website.

While looking for something to write about the other day, I found an old notebook of mine in a drawer. Flipping through the pages turned up a funny candy recipe, I came up with in those days in order to teach some fellow classmates a lesson. Now, the story behind that entry is probably to sweet no to be shared and likely very inspiring to the mischievous mind and so here it is.