A Singer, A Song

Following hard on the heels of a story that my wife capitalized on earlier this month, here’s another one about another man in the UK whose inordinate trust in his GPS landed him in the middle of trouble. Granted, the dude was as drunk as a skunk, but still….
C’mon, folks. The windshield is there for a reason. There’s no such thing as an IFR rating for driving your car.

After having put it off for far too long, I recently admitted that the little voice in my head was right: I needed to back up the user data on the upstairs computer. That’s the one with all of my MP3s and digital camera images… the one that, were something to go wrong, I’d probably seriously consider hari-kari. So I trekked off to BestBuy and came home with a 1 TB My Book World external drive (a network-attached storage device).

I jumped through all kinds of hoops trying to get the included free WD Anywhere Backup software to work. After repeated failures over several days of use, I found out that the combined file name and path had to be fewer than 256 characters long. That limitation may not be a problem for some people, but I’ve gone to a LOT of trouble structuring my MP3 collection into multiple nested folders to keep everything organized, so the suggestion from Western Digital Support to start renaming folders and moving files around was unthinkable. I uninstalled their unhelpful little piece of software and started looking around for a replacement.

That’s when I found Cobian Backup. This amazing application is FREE to use and is far more robust than the offering from Western Digital. If you’re in the market for backup software, I’m convinced it’s as good as anything you might find to spend your hard-earned money on. Check it out!

I know this isn’t exactly breaking news. I’m linking to this video in the hope that it might nudge people to more carefully listen and consider Powell’s noble words, especially the anecdote beginning at the 4:30 mark.

These are the generations of Lego.

In the beginning was Godfred Kirk Christiansen. And he begat ducks and clothes hangers and stepladders and ironing boards and stools and all manner of wooden toys in the land of Billund. And Godfred named it Lego, and it was good.

And Lego begat a plastic injection-molding machine. And the plastic injection-molding machine begat all manner of recreational folly, of Bilo-fix and of Duplo and of Terapi I, II and III.

And a great fire befell the children of Lego, the wooden toy warehouse of its fathers, and production of wooden toys was discontinued entirely. And Godfred Kirk Christiansen resigned as chairman of the board of Lego. And the children of Lego rent their garments in anguish.

But behold, the the house of Lego was granted the title “Purveyor to Her Majesty, Queen Margrethe of Denmark.” And there were fashioned great churches and cathedrals of Legos, and of Speed Slammers and of decorative foam and of Bionicles and of Clickits. And Lego begat video games about Legos of Lego Star Wars and of Lego Indiana Jones and of Lego Batman. And those were pretty good, too.

And now… now there are Bible stories illustrated with Lego.

Usually Engrish.com is only worth a chuckle, but today’s offering is laugh-out-loud funny:

First I’m blogging about this. Then I’m going to write AIG a letter.

According to this story on ABC News:

Less than a week after the federal government committed $85 billion to bail out AIG, executives of the giant AIG insurance company headed for a week-long retreat at a luxury resort and spa, the St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, California, Congressional investigators revealed today.

“Rooms at this resort can cost over $1,000 a night,” Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) said this morning as his committee continued its investigation of Wall Street and its CEOs.

AIG documents obtained by Waxman’s investigators show the company paid more than $440,000 for the retreat, including nearly $200,000 for rooms, $150,000 for meals and $23,000 in spa charges.

“They’re getting their pedicures and their manicures and the American people are paying for that,” said Cong. Elijah Cummings (D-MD).

“This unbridled greed,” said Cong. Mark Souder (R-IN), “it’s an insensitivity to how people are spending our dollars.”

Appearing before the committee, Martin Sullivan, the AIG CEO until June, said the company was overwhelmed by a “financial global tsunami,” and that “no simple or single cause” was to blame.

I am completely unable to wrap my head around this absolutely disgusting behavior. It’s plain to me that a company with executives at its helm capable of this kind of outrageous, reckless greed, this clueless irresponsibility do not deserve my support. I may not be able to yank my hard-earned tax dollars out of their filthy fingers, but I most surely do not have to hand it over to them voluntarily. When my two auto insurance policies with AIG are next up for renewal, I’m taking my business elsewhere.