atomic_fungus (atomic_fungus) wrote,

#4581: This just in: Obama NOT antichrist, just the last king BEFORE the antichrist.

Potato, potahto.

...actually I don't think Obama is effective enough to be either the seventh king or the antichrist. That would require effort, you know, and he wouldn't be able to vote "present" for that.

* * *

This is not exactly news. Illegal aliens don't get arrested for DUI. That's right! If a Border Patrol agent stops an illegal alien who is DUI, the alien is released, because BP agents aren't allowed to enforce state laws.

Why doesn't the Obama administration just throw open the gates, and get it over with? WTF.

* * *

Most people who use illegal drugs while on welfare are smart enough to say "no" when you ask them if they're using illegal drugs while on welfare. Because if they answer "yes", they know that they're going to lose their government cheese.

This is why you require them to take blood tests rather than a written exam. You can't fake a blood test.

* * *

A real computer the size of a hockey puck. Well, 5.7 inches square, and about two inches thick--a bit bigger than a hockey puck, but not much. Okay, the size of a stack of 25 DVDs?

$180 for a system that will do word processing and e-mail just fine--kind of hard to beat that. You won't be playing WoW or Skyrim on the thing, but who cares?'d want to stick another 2 GB of RAM into the thing, apparently, to improve its performance...but you can upgrade the thing to 16 GB if that's your bag, and once the proprietary SATA cable is available you can also stick a hard drive into the thing. Why not?

I've already got El-Hazard, so I don't need this, but it's still pretty f-ing cool.

* * *

Thanks to the melt-freeze-melt-freeze-FREEZE cycle, we now have a fairly hard crust on the snow.

Several years ago, when we had these kinds of conditions, I missed digging out my old RC truck and hooning it around. I have kicked myself a lot since then; that snow was hard-frozen with smooth ice on top, because we'd had a bout of freezing rain, and it would have been a blast to drive the truck around. It was not be, though, and I missed my chance.

Today, however, I bought four NIMH C-cells, and they are currently in the charger, getting electrons stuffed into them. When I get up tomorrow, I am immediately going to take the truck outside. I'm also going to try to get video of it and post it on YouTube.

Now, the funny thing is, in about 1992 or 1993 I figured out how to attach a camera to it. I took my maternal grandfather's old tripod and removed the screw from it, drilled a hole in the top of the truck's cab, and presto! It could carry my RCA Pro-884HB around, even when I went into the grass. It was kind of cool, but ultimately I shot exactly two videos of it and no more. (I have to wonder how it would do carrying a camcorder 20 years newer. My camcorder's battery weighs about as much as a modern camcorder does, for crying out loud.)

My remote control truck can be found on the lower right corner of page 145 of this Radio Shack catalogue, though mine is the yellow 27 MHz truck rather than the blue 49 MHz truck.

I bought it in December of 1988, after I'd been working in my first real job--head cashier at a new Software Etcetera store--for about five weeks. I'd wanted to get one with digital proportional control, but that was beyond my budget...and to be honest I haven't really missed it all that much.

I don't know how long it's been since I last used the thing, but it's been plenty long.

In 1990, when I was working at a Sears Business Center, I was given a box of NiCd C-cells. I mean, a big box, with perhaps 60 or so batteries in it. They had been taken out of portable Kodak inkjet printers, because the customer who had bought about fifty machines wasn't happy with how long these batteries stayed charged and wanted them replaced. These were generic batteries, with blue casings, so I never knew who made them, but they never failed to work just fine for me.

(It was a big contract for some insurance company. A Compaq LTE-286 with a 20 MB hard drive, and one of these printers. All portable, for adjusters to use when estimating collision damage to vehicles. Clever bit about these printers: the batteries went into the platen.)

I still have some of those batteries, but I would wager that--after 25 years--they are no longer really usable. I probably ought to dispose of them.

Anyway! So today I used my awesome employee discount to get some batteries for the ol' truck, and tomorrow I'm going to have some fun with it. Whee!

* * *

I've got a few days off now, and I aim to enjoy them.

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