LOL @ wanted: meat stick thieves

Where’s the beef? If anyone around you is munching on a suspicious number of pepperoni snacks, police need your help.

Lloydminster RCMP say on the night of Feb. 27, thieves broke into a locked delivery truck and stole more than $500 of snacks, including a case of pepperoni sticks, a case of beef sticks, two tubes of beef sticks, a case of beef jerky, and a case of dill seeds.

dill seeds.  O.O

... is an internet computer museum relic ;o

The Victor 9000 / Sirius S1 was conceived by Chuck Peddle who also designed the first Commodore PETs. This machine was quite innovative and superior in many points to the original IBM PC. It met a certain success in Europe as the IBM PC was not yet available there, whereas the Sirius S1 (european name of the Victor 9000) was. ACT sold a lot of these systems in UK, and their first “homemade” computer, the Apricot PC, borrowed a lot to the Sirius S1.

The mechanical keyboard is very complete and has its own 8035 cpu. The 12’’ monochrome monitor is equiped with an anti-relflection filter and can be adjusted horizontaly and verticaly. Contrast and luminosity are controlled directly from the keyboard. The computer can display text ranging from 80 x 25 to 132 x 50. But the best feature is the high resolution reaching 800 x 400 pixels!

The Victor 9000 is equiped with a Codec which can sample and replay sounds in telephone quality. There are two V24 / RS232 ports and one parallel connector which can also be used as an IEEE-488 interface (to connect measurement instruments for example). There is also an optional light-pen, which is in fact a touch pen using resistive mesh on the CRT.

The two 5.25” disk-drives are single-sided and offer 600 kb each. But double-sided models were available as an option and offered 1.2 Mb each.
The Victor 9000 was perhaps best known for how it was able to achieve such high density on it’s floppy disks. It used variable speed disk drives; there were 9 different speeds used. As the drive head moved outward the speed would increase. It was really neat to hear the speed change as the drive head moved.

The Victor 9000 could run with MS-DOS or CP/M 86. Many languages were available: Basic 86, C-Basic, Cobol, CIS-Cobol, Pascal, Fortran, PL1, PLM, etc.; as well as some software: Wordstar, Spellstar, Mailmerge, Multiplan, etc.

but collecting links.  try these:

atheistic forum —some good stuff

the 9/11 norad tapes

the national debt chart —scaaaarrrryyyy

op-ed on presidential candidate responses to recession

rogue trader may have caused fed to cut interest rates

op-ed by caroline kennedy, endorsing barack obama—ted and patrick have now also endorsed obama

background story on obama’s church—some people seem so concerned

and for today’s bizarre story: In the U.S. south, is Canadian a new racial slur?—canadian is beautiful?

“He convicted Mr. Sosa of a double intoxication manslaughter, got a weak jury to give him 12 years in each, and then convinced Judge Wallace to stack the sentences,” Harris County assistant district attorney Mike Trent wrote in an office-wide memo. Then came the odd part: “He overcame a subversively good defence by Matt Hennessey that had some Canadians on the jury feeling sorry for the defendant and forced them to do the right thing.”
...
It is unusual that a seasoned attorney like Mr. Trent would not have wondered how a Harris County jury came to be stacked with Canadians. (There were no Canadians on the jury but there were some black members.) “The only way that there could have been Canadians on the jury, was if they were born in Canada and then became U.S. citizens, and then became citizens of the county in which the case was tried,” Mr. Vinson noted.

desktop of the moment: 

finally, i seem to have broken my ‘inability to stay focused’ issue.  thank god :s my reading list was suffering due to it, as i couldn’t concentrate on reading long enough to actually finish a book.  as much as i enjoy reading, that was becoming increasingly annoying.  how did i work this miracle?  vitamins, exercise, and cutting back caffeine, i think.  only things i really increased/changed.  whatever it is, it’s working :D seems to be helping my depression as well (yay for less anxiety), though my sleep pattern is erratic again.  as long as i ~get~ sleep, that’s okay with me.

just finished reading , which was absolutely a hilarious read.  it’s a collection of bizarre experiments actually done.  elephants on acid.  medical clowns used to increase the chances of pregnancy among women having invitro fertilization (it worked!).  chimps raised as humans.  some of the experiments seem to have served absolutely no purpose other than to show the odd things that scientists can come up with to study, others were extremely valuable:

read on...