Geek On The Mountain

We got our new computer almost a month ago now. Before I even hooked it up I opened up the box to have a look. When I saw how huge the heatsink was, I just had to take a picture.

This think literally spans the entire width of the case. Mounted to the front side of it, which you can’t see, is a 80mm case fan that blows out into a cavity in the front of the case. The case front is flat, but there are cutouts on each side of the cavity that are about 3″x4″.

It’s been a while since I’ve done anything with newer computers, and I’m sure that heatsinks have only gotten larger, but still, this seems a bit crazy.. (It could be worse and be water cooled I guess… ) In case you were curious, the CPU is a core2duo 6400.

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We were in Target last month and I happened to notice something a bit odd about our cart..

The Target credit card offer is nicely ripped half off so that you can see the child safety warning that it was covering up. Target has placed the value of an advertisement for their credit card over the value of a child safety warning… (Ok, so the warning is a stupid one that’s just common sense and is only there to avoid lawsuits, but still…)

Though perhaps the best part is what appears to be the word “care” scrawled across the bottom. I’m assuming that it says something like “because we care”….. what irony

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Huggies diapers suck.

I mean it. They’re awful. Huggies leak and they hardly absorb anything. I changed one of the girls one time and then fed her. She was sitting my lap as I was feeding her and she ended up peeing all over me. Not cool really…

Although we prefer to use cloth diapers, we have had some issues with rashes and in that case we end up using disposables to help keep the moisture off the babies skin. While the babies were in the hospital, they used Pampers. We’ve generally stuck to those and haven’t had any trouble really. The first week or so they would occasionally fall down below the baby’s butt, but I think that was just us not getting them on correctly as it hasn’t been an issue since. We haven’t had any leaks or anything like that.

Huggies on the other hand seem to leak around their legs. Also, they’re much less absorbent. I’d have to guess they can only hold about half the liquid that the Pampers can, and we’ve had times when they’re literally just been saturated and it started leaking everywhere. And it’s not like they hadn’t been changed in 5 hours or something either.

I must say that the only reason we have Huggies at all is because someone we know had various diapers she didn’t need and she gave them to us. I wouldn’t recommend actually paying for Huggies though..

Really, I assume that, just like bigger people, babies come in all shapes and sizes and probably some brands fit some babies better than others. Regardless of that though, Pampers are far more absorbent than Huggies.

And just to continue my bashing….I went the Huggies website hoping to find some slogan about how great their diapers are (I didn’t find one, though I didn’t look far), but instead I found that their site sucks as well. It literally goes to a big international page that makes you select your country from one of 20 or so selections. Would it really be that difficult to look at the IP and just guess at which version to display? A simple link at the top of the page to see international versions of the site would account for errors. I hate it when websites don’t bother to guess where you’re from..

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Over the past however many months now I’ve been amazed by the kindness of everyone out there. We’ve recieved a lot of different things (baby “supplies”) from different people both before and after the girls were born. Although Milenka knows everyone who’s sent things, we’ve gotten things from people that she hasn’t even talked to in a couple of years. And pretty much everyone is a stranger to me, so it just seems all that much more out there to be getting things from people.

I’m not a particularly emotional person or anything, but I can safely say that I feel rather touched by the generosity of so many people out there. I assume at least some of you stop by here every so often so I’ll take to say thanks here as well.

And if you aren’t someone who’s sent something, feel free to go ahe

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For a long time now there have been two very essential items in my right click context menu when I have a word highlighted. These two things are options to search for the highlighted term using google and to search for it in a dictionary. Firefox 2.0 ruined this.

The search engine option changed with Firefox 2.0. Instead of just giving the option to use google, like it used to (or perhaps this functionality was provided using a plugin… I have a hard time keeping track of what old plugin features have made their way into the browser itself sometimes), it now gives the option to search using whatever site the search toolbar has open. This means that I have to have the search toolbar set to use google if I want to be able to search in the context menu. The trouble is, I never have the search toolbar set to google. I use the google toolbar, which provides much better google access than the plain old search toolbar does. I usually just leave the search toolbar set to wikipedia and it would be completely redundant to leave it on google.

I looked around a little bit and didn’t see any easy fix. I did, however, see others who had the same “problem.” I even tried an old extension for the google search, and it didn’t do anything either (I was actually surprised that it installed at all…). I seemed to remember something that would have worked, and after a while I actually remembered what it was. The Dictionary Search extension was just what I was looking for. I already had it installed for what it’s name implies, but don’t let the name fool you. I remember the first time I saw it thinking that it had more potential than just searching dictionaries. That is to say, you can search anything. It provides a simple form that will allow you to type in any URL and plug the search term into it. Using this, I always have my google search in the context menu. I can’t tell you how many times in the past few weeks that I’ve wanted to search for something and not had the option to do so easily.

On the other hand, I’ve been meaning to just try using keyword searches instead, so maybe what the searchbar is set to is irrelevant anyways.

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