Moving continents!

Lots of depictions of continent movement can be found here. PALEOMAP Project "is to illustrate the plate tectonic development of the ocean basins and continents, as well as the changing distribution of land and sea during the past 1100 million years." Remember when you could throw a stone from Florida…

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Unvarnished horror stories for children

Here's a post summarizing the original versions of seven popular fairy tales. Some gory stuff, indeed: What is creepier than kids, parents, evilness, sorceresses, wolves, and cannibalism? Before the stories were ripped from their horror roots, they were just right for scary, gory films. The early days of fairy tales…

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The financial cost of U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan

As reported by The Raw Story, the U.S. is hemorhaging money into it's Middle East adventures.  The numbers are staggering: The United States is spending about $8,000 per man, woman and child in the country to pursue wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to new estimates that show the wars…

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Knowing when to give the hook to tech support

How long should you let them string you along unproductively before hanging up and trying again?

The trick to using tech support over the phone is to quickly size up whether the alleged tech support expert on the other end of the line actually knows anything.  If not, think of a reason to end the call.  Any reason.  Then call back and you’ll likely get another person.  My recent experiences confirmed the wide disparity in competence among those who allegedly do tech support.  I’ve learned my lesson, I think.   I need to stop being too patient.  I’ve renouced my willingness to sit there waiting for the “expert” to flip through endless knowledge base screens, for instance.

This weekend was a long weekend, tech-support-speaking.  I needed to help my mother install a router and help her set up her new HP notebook computer.  I assumed that these tasks would take about an hour, so I allowed myself three hours.  As it turned out, it took about six hours.  Plus, I had tech support issues of my own when I got back home. Things often aren’t what they purport to be when it comes to upgrading and improving one’s gadgetry. 

The Linksys router came with lots of warnings: “Insert CD-ROM first.”  So that’s what I did.  I put the disk into my mom’s old desktop computer and followed the instructions meticulously until I came upon a screen that requested a lot of information I didn’t have or didn’t understand.  By that point, …

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