Baby burnt in clothes dryer | The Courier-Mail

What kind of idiot do you need to be to think it’s a good idea to put your kid in the dryer?

Terri and I generally enjoy our horror movies and sci-fi. With the exceptions of The Phantom of the Opera and The Rocky Horror Picture Show we just aren’t terribly interested in musicals. So, when I insisted we rent The Producers the other night, Terri was a bit skeptical.

I’ve been hearing enough about the Broadway production for the last few years that I was very curious about it, and I was in the mood for something light and silly.

I have to say that I was very impressed with it. I wasn’t really expecting a whole lot… My family used to go see musicals at the Chanhassen Dinner Theaters fairly often back in Minnesota – and while it was certainly fun, I just never really got into the whole musical thing. I expected a few chuckles from this movie, but that’s about it. Instead, I don’t think I stopped laughing until the final credits rolled. It was absolutely hilarious.

I finally got a Linux install up and running to play with. You may remember all the difficulties I had installing Gentoo in a virtual machine. Well, I recently saw some stuff about Ubuntu on Slashdot and decided to give it a try again…

I downloaded Microsoft Virtual PC 2004, Ubuntu 5.10, and gave it a try… The install process ran fine, but when I tried to boot into the virtual machine it crapped out. Then I decided to try Microsoft Virtual Server…but that didn’t work either. I downloaded the VMWare Player, and tried to load up the virtual machines that I’d created in the Microsoft products, but it still didn’t work! Finally, I gave VMWare’s Virtual Server a try…and it worked!

The VMWare virtual machine doesn’t seem quite as responsive as the Microsoft one did… But I’m actually able to run Ubuntu through it, so I’m absolutely thrilled. I just wish I had a bigger hard disk, so I could install even more virtual machines. I really enjoy toying around with different operating systems, seeing what they can do… I’d love to try installing Gentoo through VMWare, see if it’ll run or not.

So far, I’m fairly impressed with Ubuntu. It was a very easy install and looks like a very clean OS. I didn’t have any trouble finding all the utilities and programs I was looking for. There is a good selection of software, everything is where it ought to be, and works reasonably well. I think I’d even go so far as to say that my son could probably get away with using it as his desktop OS, if it wasn’t for the games he plays. Of course, 6.06 is coming out very soon and I’m quite curious to see what changes have been made in it…

We just got back from seeing The DaVinci code. I was rather pleasantly surprised. I haven’t read the book yet, but there’s been more than enough press to give me a fairly good idea what I was in for, and I really wasn’t expecting to like it much. Actually though, it was pretty good.

The first half-hour or so was fairly slow paced… I was starting to get rather bored. But once they started running away from people it got much more interesting. The mixture of fact and fiction, intrigue and action was quite entertaining.

More entertaining, however, is the reaction people are having to this movie. I actually saw someone on CNN the other night claiming that the book was “full of lies”. Since when has it been possible for a work of fiction to be full of lies? Does that even make sense?

Obviously a work of fiction isn’t truth…it’s all made up…but how can you call it a lie when the story is being created from someone’s imaginiation?

Slashdot | The Future of Digital Books

I think this is a great thing. Sure, new authors should get paid… There’s no reason why everything should be available free or anything like that. I have no problem paying for new content.

But the old stuff… The classics… And things that are published into the public domain – like Government press releases… That should all be available to pretty much everyone in the world, free.

I love sites like MemoWare, Project Gutenberg, and the Baen Free Library because I can get all sorts of books there completely free. All kinds of older titles that are out of print or have passed into the public domain. Stuff like Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, and Honor Harrington. It’s terrific that these titles are now available to a wider audience. Tons of folks who’d never be able to read these titles can now, for free.

Sure, libraries have always provided free access to older books… But you’re then dependant on the library’s inventory and lending policies. Yes, retail bookstores often have reprints of popular classics, but you have to pay for those.

Slashdot | Korea Unveils World’s Second Android

I just really don’t see the point. It’s basically an information kiosk with a face. It can recognize a few words and play back a response to them…but it doesn’t really do anything on its own. Do we really need a robotic information kiosk? Do we really need something this complex to simply deliver a sales pitch over and over again?

That silicone skin is going to wear out. All the motors and servos will wear out. You’ll need some specially trained technician to do any work on it at all. The clothes will get dirty, dusty, and worn. And at the end of the day you really don’t have anything more interesting than a desktop PC playing back a pre-recorded video when a specific keyword is spoken.

Had a very creepy experience at work yesterday…

We wound up on-site at the AC yesterday – it’s a huge old Adirondack resort hotel out in the middle of nowhere. It’s literally an hour and a half drive out to this place. We do some work for them throughout the season, but it isn’t usually me going up there. Today was different, we had everyone we could spare out there. They’re getting ready for the new season… New coat of paint, mowing the lawns, new lines in the parking lot – you get the idea. Our part of it is to haul all their computers out of storage and set them up again. It was a nice day – warm, sunny – I certainly didn’t mind being up in the Adirondacks. The drive up there was absolutely beautiful.

This place is very creepy at the best of times. It honestly reminds me of the Overlook Hotel – I’m always half expecting to turn a corner and see a couple creepy little girls staring at me. All it’s missing is a hedge maze.

Anyway, I was up on the second floor by myself, up with the guest rooms. This place, despite it’s size and age, really isn’t all that impressive on the inside. Their second floor is basically just one big, long hallway with windows at either end and guest rooms all along it. You can literally look straight down the hall from one end to the other, and there just isn’t anything to look at. No little pictures on the walls, no tables with vases or flowers, just a long hall with windows and doors. I’ve always been somewhat surprised, myself, at how much people are willing to pay to stay there…it just isn’t my idea of a nice place. The windows at both ends of the hallway were closed tight, as were all the guest rooms. I’d be surprised if anyone had even opened those doors since last fall.

I was on my way back downstairs after setting up a computer in one of the linnen closets up on the second floor, and I paused a few feet away from the stairwell to gather my thoughts – figure out what else needed to be set up, tested, whatever.

A very cold breeze suddenly started blowing against my back. Not a heavy wind, but much stronger than your average draft – and it was cold. It felt like someone had just opened a door in the middle of January. I turned around to see what was going on, and there just wasn’t anything to see.

I could see all the way down the hallway to the window at the end, which was still closed tight. The sun was shining brightly through the window, creating a cheerful yellow square on the wall – it certainly didn’t seem like I should be feeling a blast of arctic air. The curtains around the window weren’t moving, and I could clearly see that all the doors along the hallway were still shut.

I was about to turn around and head back downstairs when I clearly saw a human shadow pass by that cheerful yellow square on the wall. It looked for all the world as if someone had just walked past that window – despite the fact that I was looking straight down the hallway at the window, and saw absolutely nobody there.

That was it for me, I didn’t hang around to see what else might happen. I went back downstairs just as quick as my feet could carry me. I didn’t say anything about it to my co-workers since just a week before we’d been making fun of another guy who was always telling obvious lies…one of which involved the ghost of some little girl killing his cat.

At the end of the day we were packing things up and getting ready to go. P, one of my co-workers, made a comment about being glad to get out of this spooky old place. I said I was just glad I hadn’t been working down in the cellar today like he was. He laughed and said “The cellar’s not the bad part… It’s up on the second floor where things get creepy.”