Thursday, March 24, 2005

Human finger found at San Jose Wendy's

A diner at a San Jose Wendy's found a human finger in their chile! Gad! After seeing the movie Super Size Me I've pretty much given up on McDonalds (it was the segment on where McNuggets come from that did it...) and for years I've strenously avoided Jack in the Box (E. Coli kills 3) and Burger King. So where am I going to eat now? I guess it's nothing but In 'n Out Burger for me.
UPDATE: So the current theory in the press is that the victim made it all up. The finger most likely came from a zoo incident about an hour from where the alleged victim lived in Las Vegas. And evidently she dropped her lawsuit, her lawyer quit, had her house searched by the police and has a track record of filing law suits against various businesses. Wendy's will you ever forgive me? Er... maybe I'll still stick to In 'n Out.

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Failures of Two-Factor authentication

Security guru Bruce Schneier has a post on the appropriate uses of two-factor authentication and when it doesn't work as intended. Apparently Microsoft plans to ditch passwords in Longhorn in favor of Two-factor authentication - Techdirt has more coverage of this.
UPDATE:Apparently E*Trade is planning on using Two-Factor as well.

Jon Udell takes a tour of del.icio.us

I've been using del.icio.us for a while to manage my links and as a linkblog. The tags allow you to slice and dice sets of your links (and every one elses links) in a very natural way and subscribe to an RSS feed of the result. Infoworld columnist Jon Udell takes a lap of del.icio.us in a screencast if you haven't had the "Ah ha!" moment yet. Flickr supports the same kind of operations for photos and now FeedTagger is going to do the same thing for RSS aggregation. This is more useful than Technorati tags which the feed author bakes into the content (which seems like the meta tag all over again) - I care more about what other people think the content should be tagged with. I expect most online aggregators to support this in the future.

The Last Nail

The Last Nail is an amazing blog about the process of completely renovating a fixer-upper house. The guy is a professional construction worker so don't go off and think you can do it but it does show some of the trials and tribulations. For example, hiring a lumber supplier, how to not use an architect and what happens when you shoot a roofing staple through your finger. And who can resist prose like this:
Yeah, well, I really didn't feel like posting anything but my fiancee told me to "go shit out a post so we can play Silent Hill Two." So here it is.
Via Biz Stone

Dating Depot

Via Gothamist - Apparently Home Depot is the new place for singles (which I very gladly am not!) to meet. The secret is that everyone at Home Depot is wandering around in a catatonic stupour trying to figure out where stuff is in the byzantine Home Depot taxonomy. Excellent news for singles but what about me? I'm just looking for stuff! Don't even think about asking the staff - for the most part (if you can in fact corner someone) they won't know. Home Depot - please do one or more of the following:
  • Post a frickin' map of the building with the categories where everything is - not just broad categories like Paint either.
  • Make it so I can look up where items are online before I go and at the store. If you really cared you'd have online forums with common problems and a way to ask questions so I don't have to constantly go back to the store.
  • Make the parking lot spaces bigger - since 90% of the people who drive to Home Depot 1) have enourmous Pickups / SUV and 2) could not park straight if their lives depended on it, they just end up parking across several spaces anyway. And for the love of god, clean your parking lots every once in a while. Yes, it's your customers dumping trash but it's your parking lot
  • In California, EVERY Home Depot has a line of day labour waiting out front. Home Depot enforces people soliciting for work on their parking lots so where do they go? The sidewalk out front. Since this problem clearly isn't going away - you should just have a designated area of the store / parking lot for people looking for work. You could even give them coffee / water and some shade. I don't hire day labourers but apparently a lot of your customers do or they wouldn't be there

Sonic Devastator


Via Gizmodo - The Sonic Devastor is a DIY kit that allows you to induce "intense pain and discomfort in humans and animals”at a range of 20 feet from a company called Future Horizons. From the Future Horizons Product page these are some other kits you can buy: You get the idea...