I got a new jackknife for Christmas. It is a very simple one, a Swiss army knife knockoff with scissors, a Phillips screwdriver, and a blade. I had a mini-Leatherman before that. The Leatherman had a lot more blades, but I found them difficult to get at, and the probability of cutting myself while extracting them seemed a lot higher than with the simple knife. So I chose to "downgrade" to save time and my fingers.
I was reading today about American car manufacturers experimenting with built in PCs and video games in cars. Maybe it's just me, but that strikes me as really dumb. Drivers who talk on their cell phones while driving are already operating as if they were drunk - so let's put a PC in front of them too. Maybe then drivers who are actually drunk will be too befuddled to talk on their cell phones, surf the Net, and drive simultaneously - but I'll bet they'll still try.
Speaking of driving, I was paying particular attention to the feel of my steering wheel as I drove into work today, and observing how much I turn the wheel into curves and the like. First of all, it is amazing how little the wheel actually turns. Secondly, it is a really bad idea to pay too much attention to your driving while driving - it's a good way to screw up your reflexes. But the upshot is that I can understand better why I can hardly keep my car on the road in the racing games I have - I am way oversteering, and of course applying too much throttle all of the time. Maybe an electric shock every time I hit something instead of the wheel jerking in my hands would be an effective training aid. I'll have to look into it. Any volunteers for testing?
I ended up taking one of Tom's suggestions and used the existing Cat 3 phone wiring in my house to run a connection from the basement to the computer room for the cable modem. Since the network only requires four wires for a 10 Mbit circuit, I used the other four wires to continue to support a phone. Now the real trick will be to see if the wiring can handle the network traffic and phone traffic simultaneously, especially when the phone rings (which sends a high voltage (90 volts?) signal for the ringer). The important thing (to me) is that I won't have the cable guy drilling random holes all over the place in the house. Or such is my hope.
Well, the sooner I improve my driving skills, the better I'll be able to dodge the drunken, cell phone toting, Net surfing, video game playing, mini-Leatherman using, American SUV driving, crazy hole drilling cable modem installers on the roads and highways. It's never too soon to start worrying.
You can respond to my ranting here.
Better to rant in hell than serve in heaven.