Mostly Harmless

I decided to try one of those fruit cup things with breakfast the other day. (Do not be alarmed, I am not turning into a health nut.) I went with the “peaches swimming in sugary syrup” variety. Mmmm. Sugary syrup.

The cup-o-fruit comes with a tiny, yet utterly ineffective fork. I tossed it aside after it failed to retrieve even a single peach. Continuing with the bad design decisions: the lid is glued on with some sort of industrial strength epoxy, near as I can tell. It opens up easily enough, but if you want it completely out of your way while eating (good luck if you don’t have a nice fork) you might consider ripping the lid completely off — which is where the heavy duty glue becomes a problem.

If you don’t have the cup clamped in a vice, or suitably braced in a similar fashion, there’s a good chance that you’ll spill sugary peach syrup when that last bit of glue gives way. If you’re sitting in a recliner and holding the cup off to the side, so as to not spill it in your lap, there’s a good chance that you’ll dump it into your cup-o-water. As I did.

I was worried that it would make the water taste funny, but it was just peachy.

Wouldn’t it make more sense for the March of Dimes to actually be held _in_ March? Geez.

Kidding.

Anywho, Kelly Clarkson is the first Celebrity Ambassador for Team Youth. Help out the cause by buying a virtual Prematurity Band. All the cool people are doing it.

FYI – Next Kelly TV appearance: Monday 2/16, on “On Air with Ryan Seacrest.”

It’s nice that Comcast has bumped the speed of my cable modem up to 3+ megabits/sec., because I’ve missed a couple of TV shows lately and I appreciate the extra bandwidth when downloading ‘em from the ‘net. For example, a 429 meg file (43 minutes of video) can be snagged in 25 minutes. Nifty.

And yet, at work, I am the champion of bandwidth conservation. I copied 2.5 gigs worth of files over a slow WAN connection over a 14 hour period and the network guy thanked me for “being a friend of network bandwidth.” Oh yeah. I expect that I’ll be getting a commemorative plaque or something.

Here’s a graph of another 1-point-something gigabyte transfer. Note the 50% utilization over the course of many hours from 1930 to 0500-ish. Contrast that with the bandwidth hogging FTP users earlier in the day from 0200 to 0630-ish.

Now, if I controlled the FTP server I’d put a nice throttle on that myself, but I don’t, nor do I want to, so it’s Robocopy /IPG:500 to the rescue (because VSR sucks, and won’t deal with a non-Windows machine on one end anyway).