Going Nokia 920

It's official, I'm tossing my stupid iPhone, abandoning Android, and going Windows Phone 8 via the Nokia 920. iTunes has aggravated me from the beginning, while Amazon Prime has rocked. Android feels like it was developed by a bunch of stoned hackers, which is probably close to the truth.

It's time to make the leap to something new. I used to run Linux 100% (Gentoo, not stupid Ubuntu), until Windows 7, and I haven't run Linux at all since Windows 7. Sure, I miss my bash shell and multiple virtual desktops, but it's a small price to pay. Windows 8 looks really cool and that's good enough for me.

I remember having a look at the Nokia 900, with high expectations, but I was disappointed. Low-res screen, Windows Phone 7, not good enough. But now the time is ripe. 

Nokia 920 and Windows Phone 8, bring it on.

The Fudge Guide to Opening a New PayPal Account

Do NOT open a PayPal account. PayPal is evil and deserves to die a horrible corporate death. Should you disregard this warning here are the steps you must take to ensure that PayPal doesn't keep all your information forever when they decide to lock you out of your account for reasons beyond your control:

1. DO NOT use your primary personal bank account. Don't do it! Open a crap bank account at some banking institution and use that account ONLY for transacting with PayPal.

2. DO NOT use your personal credit cards that you like and use for other purposes. Get a separate credit card, preferably associated with the institution holding your PayPal bank account.

3. DO NOT use any phone number or email address you care about. Only use contact information you can walk away from without any grief on your part. PayPal never calls anyway, so get a pay as you go phone and its associated phone number, and then toss it when the minutes run out.

4. DO NOT use your home address! PayPal doesn't allow post office boxes, but they have no way of blocking your UPS Store mailbox etc. Suppose your box number is 221, then in your address simply refer to it as "unit 221" or "#221" or whatever.

5. DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT give PayPal your social security number. Don't do it!

If it's already too late and you have a PayPal account that uses any of the personal information listed above, and your account hasn't yet been locked, there's still hope! Just go through steps 1-5 above and update your PayPal account accordingly. Once your account is locked out you are toast and you'll never be permitted to change any of the information, including your banking information, ever. EVER.

And you might want to check out the Ebay Stealth Guide: http://www.auctionstealth.com/

Let that be your last Internet forum

After spending a fruitless hour trying to find an answer to a question on several different online forums, I now believe that any semblance of actual human thought is just an illusion created by an evil programmer who has unleashed an evil spambot, the sole function of which is to infiltrate Internet forums and flood them with barely-literate posts.

The evil programmer's Machiavellian algorithm produces the prose equivalent of a raisin loaf baked by the prince of darkness, himself: the batter consists of extreme run-on sentences, to the point of entire paragraphs with no punctuation whatsoever, no capitalization, frequent misspellings (including impenetrable textspeak), and overall poor grammar; contained within this hideous batter are few shriveled little raisins of vital information, the only reason you claw your way through all this wretched prose in the first place. Desperate for this information, you go through loaf after satanic loaf in these forums until, exhausted and broken by the effort, you begin to suspect that you and the evil programmer are the only conscious entities existing in an infinite and otherwise empty universe that even God has abandoned in disgust, and you and he are doomed to a bitter and meaningless struggle until the end of time like those two black-and-white guys in that old episode of Star Trek.

Either that or public schools really, really suck, and have for the last 20 years or so.

For the Star Wars geek who has everything

Check it out: Star Wars coins as legal tender.



Get 'em now. It's only a matter of time before George Lucas swoops in, ruins the design, and reissues them as special editions.

Is this a joke?

For real? Really? Seriously?



One of the YouTube comments:

Yes, it is the same one used in Revenge of the Sith. This is getting completely out of hand now. George simply isn't going to be happy until this movie is practically unwatchable, it seems.

Exercise and moods

A twofold warning for anyone who does intense exercise and is experiencing negative moods.

Beware Blood Sugar Drops

After a long hiatus, I got back on a regimen of intense workouts; but to my surprise I began suffering severe post-exercise feelings of agitation, depression, and fatigue. Never had this problem when I was a competitive athlete, but for whatever reason it's a big problem now. The Senior Fudge, who is a personal trainer, immediately recognized this as a blood sugar problem. I was always working out on an empty stomach, and it was causing my blood sugar to plummet. I started eating half of a banana and an ounce or two of lean meat one hour before working out, and then the other half of the banana and another couple ounces of protein immediately after exercising, along with some water. That completely cured me of the post-exercise symptoms I was experiencing.

Beware (Certain) Protein Drinks

I experimented with using protein drinks (Muscle Milk) after exercising, but found that the stuff was having an adverse affect on my mood. For days, I experienced nonstop feelings of intense agitation and rage, seemingly out of nowhere. My poor husband suffered through these berserker rages until one day when I skipped MM after a workout, and my mood immediately settled back to normal. A quick Google search revealed that other people have experienced the same problem after consuming MM. I don't know, or really care, what the causal link is, but it seems wise to just stick with fruit+meat from now on.

Obama happened

Linton Weeks at NPR.com asks, "Whatever Happened to the Anti-War Movement?" Weeks cites Celia Cook-Huffman, professor of "conflict resolution" at Juniata College, who suggests the reasons may be as varied as lack of a draft to incite people to protest, guilt over the way Vietnam vets were treated, and the squelching of bad news from the war fronts by the military.

Well, lessee. There was no draft during the Bush years, protesters and media alike felt no guilt over calling the men and women in our armed forces murderers and brutes, and there was no end to the bad news coming from war fronts even with the "chill wind" of dissent-crushing blowing from the Bush White House.

To his credit, Weeks also cites David Boaz from the Cato Institute, who identifies the real reason:

[Boaz] concludes that the anti-war activity in the United States — and around the world — a few years ago "was driven as much by antipathy to George W. Bush as by actual opposition to war and intervention."

To buttress his assertions, Boaz cites a recently published study of anti-war protesters. The research was conducted by Michael Heaney of the University of Michigan and Fabio Rojas of Indiana University. It concludes that the anti-war movement in America evaporated because Democrats — inspired to protest by their anti-Republican feelings — stopped protesting once the Democratic Party achieved success in Congress in 2006 and then in the White House in 2008.

"As president, Obama has maintained the occupation of Iraq and escalated the war in Afghanistan," Heaney, an assistant professor of organizational studies and political science, said in a news release. "The anti-war movement should have been furious at Obama's 'betrayal' and reinvigorated its protest activity."

Should have been, but weren't. I'll give props to Dennis Kucinich, who is calling for Obama's impeachment for pretty much the same reason that he wanted Bush impeached. But everybody else in the protest movement? Partisan hacks, no principles. Hey, NPR, we knew this all along. You didn't?