On mobiles

Talking the phone was always distructing to me. I could never concentrate on two things at the same time very well. This is why I am very against the idea of talking on the phone while driving. Today I was proved once again that mixing mobile conversations with any other activities is a bad thing. All I wanted to do was withdraw some cash from the ATM. While talking. 30 seconds after I approached the machine, it informed me that my card was swollen for good and will not come back today. Only when I hang up, I realized that I was typing in the wrong PIN. Stupid me…

Just a thought

One of these days I was talking to a friend of mine. I was very morning slow, but I was surprised at my fast reaction to one of his phrases. It went like this:

Friend: I am downloading Windows Longhorn now…

Me: It’s like saying that you’re getting a 26 inch dildo. You’re free to do what you want, but I won’t be too proud of that, you know.

Now, where did that come from?

Should Microsoft buy Red Hat?

After reading through this post and linked articles, I went ‘Hmm..’ and remembered one of the recent Paul Graham‘s articles ‘Hiring is Obsolete‘ where he mentions that:

There might be 500 startups right now who think they’re making something Microsoft might buy.

Than I thought that if Microsoft is to buy Red Hat, there will probably be a huge wave of Linux people starting up companies and making all sorts of things that Microsoft might be interested in after Red Hat purchase. But Microsoft will probably be busy fighting a bunch of anti-trust cases.

While I understand that the whole thing is a rumor, it feeds some interesting thinking…

New tyres

For the last few month I was thinking about buying new tyres for my car. The old ones were getting slimmer and thinner every day. Considering my driving manners which envolve lots of speeding, driving on old tyres became dangerous. This is how my old tyres looked:

Old tyre

Without waiting any further for the worst to happen, I went to the tyre care today and bought four new tyres. This is how my new tyres look:

New tyre

I’ve tried them a bit driving around the town and I do like them a lot. I can feel the difference driving as slow as 30 km/h. High speed testing will follow shortly.

The new tyres are roughly of the same class as my old ones. I used to drive on Flamingo. The new ones are Runway. They are priced the same – 60 CYP a piece. They are guaranteed to withstand the speeds of up to 210 km/h, which is about the maximum my car can produce. The traction and temperature measurements are at their maximums, but I’ll have to do so reading on that subject as I felt rather uneducated when I talked to the tyre master today. If you have any good recourses about tyres bookmarked, let me know via comments.

I’ll be passing the garage about every 10,000 kilometers to change tyres back to front and vice versa. The procedure will be free of charge.

Anyway, while at it, I suggest you check your tyres and see if you need the replacement. It’s better to change those a bit earlier than forget and cry in pity later…

Switching off the notebook

This must be on of the most hilarious things I’ve heard in some time…

My mother just called me and said that she has a problem with her newly acquired notebook. The bloody Windows XP got stuck while booting up and there is no way to shutdown the computer. She pressed the Power button, but it didn’t work. She did than the next logical step – pulled the power plug from the socket. To her surprise, this didn’t help, because notebook’s battery was charged and the damn machine didn’t react in any way.

It’s been a while since I talked to regular computer users. Most of the people around me are professionals and have other fun problems. This one though reminded me of all those technical support jokes, but in a new, refreshing way. It also reminded me my frastration with ATX motherboards, when I first met them. I remember wondering why the Power button doesn’t work and who was the idiot who came up with this idea.

P.S.: If you came across this post trying to figure out how to switch the damn thing off, it’s actually easy: just press the Power button and hold it for ten or fifteen seconds and it should do the magic.