aubreyturner.org

I keep hearing ads on the radio where fly-by-night financing companies are promising to sell you a “brand-name” computer even if you have bad credit.  It’ll only cost you $29.99 per week for one year.

My handy calculator tells me that this would come to $1557.40.  If someone really wanted a computer and could afford $29.99 per week, they’d do a lot better saving that money and buying the computer outright.  I’d bet that these scammers are making at least $500 in interest on top of selling the computer at an inflated price.  As an example, eMachines has a 2.7GHz Celeron model (T2742) with just about all the features you’d reasonably need for $449.99 (and there’s a $50.00 mail-in-rebate as well).  Figuring in tax (I used the typical Texas rate of 8.25%), it would only require about 17 weeks of savings and would save $1049.65 over the total cost of the one from the scammers (I left out shipping costs, since there are a couple of retail outlets that carry eMachines).

If you’re ethically lacking, I suppose this would be a good business to get into.

I kind of debated whether I should write about this, but it’s been bugging me and this blog is as good a place as any to get it out.  That having been said, given the subject matter I will not give any names.

Back when I was in high school I had a couple of good friends who decided during our senior year to join the Marines.  I kind of lost touch with them after we graduated.  One guy I haven’t seen since graduation, the other I last saw in early 1993.  Even though I haven’t seen them I’ve kept track of them indirectly through other friends.

I started hearing pretty soon after graduation that my first friend wasn’t doing too well.  He had trained as a mechanic in the Marine Corps, but ended up leaving under a medical discharge (which was the subject of some unconfirmed rumors that it was more related to attitude than actual medical condition).  Shortly after that his troubles with the law began.  He got into trouble for breaking into a car and a few other fairly small things.  But in 1998 he got sent away for criminally negligent homicide related to a car accident.  He’d always been a reckless driver (as I can attest from many white-knuckled times as his passenger), so while I was disappointed that he’d ended up in that situation I wasn’t surprised.

My other friend seemed to be doing better, or so I though until recently.  He served his tour as an MP and had been deployed to Kuwait in 1991 for Desert Storm.  All things considered I thought that he had it together.  So I was very disappointed to learn that he is currently serving a 10 year sentence for sexual assault of a child.  I did a little more digging and found that this wasn’t his first time.  In 2001 he got 7 years probation for the same offense. 

It really got me to wondering about things, though.  We came from a small town and there were only about 30 people in our graduating class.  That we would have two serious felons in such a small class seems odd.  Further, they had good opportunities and seemed to have started out on the right path only to end up in such a sorry state.

The school in Forney is going to issue ThinkPads to every fifth and sixth grade student at one of their elementary schools.

As the superintendent of a fast-growing suburban school district, Mike Smith faces a textbook shortage every fall.

This year will be a little different at the Forney Independent School District.

Every fifth- and sixth-grader at Johnson Elementary, 100 to 150 students, will receive a $1,350 IBM ThinkPad computer loaded with digital versions of state-approved textbooks and 2,000 works of literature. If the experiment works, the program will be expanded to other grades.

“We think this is better than simply going out and buying more textbooks,” said Smith, who expected a shortage of 600 textbooks in August. Enrollment is projected to rise 20% or more at the district, and it takes three months to get new books.

It’s an interesting idea, at least in that having them preloaded with the textbooks and a variety of other literature it could eventually be cost effective.  If would also be good if it could reduce the amount of weight these kids are carrying around.  There’s an intermediate school near the park where I walk the dog in the afternoons and it’s hard not to notice how heavy the kids’ backpacks are when they’re trudging home after school.

I just wonder how well these laptops will survive the experience, though.  Even with the technology that IBM is building into laptops to help them survive drops, I’m sure the technology can easily be overcome through the inventiveness and sheer destructive capability of 10 and 11-year-old boys…

A town in Scotland may soon have a topless barbershop.

The shop, to be called “A Bit Off the Top,” will charge customers £25—about $40—for either a haircut or a private-booth massage. Both will be provided by former exotic dancers retrained to clip locks

Of course, the usual chorus of whiners and wet blankets are up-in-arms about it.

“We are quite shocked about this,” a spokeswoman for Glasgow Women’s Aid told the newspaper. “It’s really degrading for women. It caters for a certain type of immature behavior among men who can’t see women as equal to men.”

I hate to break it to this “spokeswoman”, but most guys like getting attention from topless women.  It’s just a fact of life.  But then I wouldn’t expect a representative of a woman’s group to get it.  If it was really that degrading to women, why would women participate?  It’s not like the women were dragged in at gunpoint, stripped, and made to cut hair.

A Dutch “artist” had surgeons remove a patch of skin from her stomach which she used to cover a tiny gun which was made of plastic.

The 38-year-old, who says her latest artwork underlined her “concern at the rising level of violence in society”, added she had no choice other than to use her own skin for the piece.

“Otherwise it would lose its expressiveness,” she said, adding: “It is easy to shoot someone until you realise it is skin that is being pierced.”

Spoken like the typical GFW who has never really given the topic serious thought.

How much would you like in that cup?

(I came across the link to this poll in the comments to a Slashdot article this morning.  I wasn’t like I was searching for it.  Honestly!)

Someone emailed me over the weekend with a link to Bob Norman’s website, which lists his Fort Worth gun show dates for this year.  I hadn’t listed his shows on my page before, since I didn’t know he had a website. 

I’ve added those shows to my Gun Show page.  I also updated the page to reflect the latest changes made by the various promoters (i.e. Classic Shows moved or cancelled several shows later in the year and High Caliber Shows has updated their schedule page to include their shows for the rest of the year).  Finally, I added an announcement list so that people who are interested can subscribe to receive an email when I make changes to the page.

A survey performed by Jupiter Research has concluded that 1000 songs is about the right size for a portable media player.

One thousand songs is just about the right size for a portable media player, according to a survey by Jupiter Research.

The online survey found that 90 percent of consumers have no more than 1,000 songs on their PCs. And 77 percent of the consumers Jupiter questioned said they’d be interested in purchasing a portable media player with a capacity of 1,000 songs. The 4GB hard drive included in Apple Computer’s iPod Mini, and in MP3 players from some Apple rivals, holds roughly that number of songs.

This is a subject of some interest to me since I have an iPod Mini.  I have been asked a number of times why I bought one, since the regular 15GB iPod is only $50 more (the iPod Mini is $249 and the 15GB iPod lists for $299).  A quick check of my music collection shows that I currently have 5511 songs taking up 55.2GB of space.  And this is likely to grow as I buy more CDs (additionally, my collection is larger than most because I rip MP3s at 320Kbps).  So my answer is that no iPod in existence can store my entire collection.  No matter which one I got I’d have to suffle songs on and off the device.  Since I’ll be managing the music on the device anyway, it then becomes a matter more of aesthetics and of whether there is enough space for my needs.  I made the decision that 4GB is enough given the logistics of managing the music on the device.  With a mix of 320Kbps MP3 and 128Kbps AAC files I can get a couple days worth of music onto the 4GB iPod Mini.  And realistically I don’t listen to my entire music collection so it doesn’t make sense for me to carry the whole collection around all the time.

As of April 19, 2004 Texas has established concealed carry reciprocity with North Carolina.

This brings the number of states that recognize a Texas CHL to 17.  I’ve heard talk that a couple more may be in the works (possibly including Colorado).

I see that several people have been doing this.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

This particular book has a big table on page 23, so there’s little text on the page.  However, there is a fifth sentence that starts on page 23 and concludes on the next page:

The Problem Statement (or Mission Element Need Statement in the military) gets the process rolling and identifies a problem for which a solution in the form of a system (new or improved) is needed.

This is from The Engineering Design Of Systems: Models And Methods by Dennis M. Buede.  It’s definitely not leisure reading…