soapbox

send an email to this address:
(sorry I’m breaking it up, I don’t want to fill the account with spam right away)

nathaniel
(at)
paust.co.uk

It’s my new “cultured” email address.

As in, how to disable autorun so you can
(a) rip tracks from a CD
(b) avoid sneaky spyware
with one mod to your registry:

Start Menu -> Run -> type “regedit”.
Click through HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SYSTEM -> CurrentControlSet ->Services -> Cdrom.
Click on the CDRom folder and open the AutoRun registry item, then set the value to 0 (probably is set at 1).
Then, restart, and you’ve turned off the autorun feature for inserted CDs.

… why do you care? (more…)

So, my car is in the shop right now. I waited there for awhile until they diagnosed the problem. The cool thing is, once they looked at it, they brought me out into the shop and led me under the car and actually pointed out where the problems were! Not surprisingly, given the quality of Percy’s roar, the exhaust pipe had completely rusted through and fallen away from the muffler. There’s also a part just forward of the resonator that has come loose, which is probably the rattle I’d been hearing prior to the roaring. Percy also has yet another oil leak, but these people actually told me about it instead of waiting until I came back saying, “Uh, my car’s leaking oil now,” and telling me, “Oh yeah, it was leaking when it came in the last time.”

Bottom line, $345 to fix the exhaust and the oil leak. I highly recommend The Car Store in Norwich (rt. 5 south) for repairs. Nice people there. Even though it’s a Subaru dealer, they fix all kinds of cars. And the guy who was working on the car said it sounds great, aside from the exhaust problem.

Oh, and while I was standing in the lot, waiting for Becky to pick me up so I could get here for my office hour (to which no students will come, I’m sure), I saw a hatchback that I thought looked cute. It turned out to be a 4WD wagon (didn’t really look like a wagon). Then I looked at the fuel mileage. 22 mpg city, 28mpg highway! I think I’ll stick with my 33mpg city wounded pterodactyl Percy.

To complete my lunch-hour hat-trick of posts, I’ll just make sure to direct y’all over to today’s road journal entry of PhD.

I was never much for Valhalla myself, but I do miss the 75-cent draft Shiner they always had.

Congrats to the White Sox for their World Series victory last night over the Houston Astros. So long to their long-standing victory drought (88 years!) and the lingering malaise associated with the old Black Sox scandal and with their status as Chicago’s second team.

I know it’s a heart-breaker for Texas, and Houston in particular. I was hoping the ‘Stros would take at least a game or two, but it seems like injuries and fatigue spelled the end for them when matched up against Ozzie’s Southside Chicago boys, who are essentially an NL team masquerading as an AL team.

Better luck next year, Houston.

One more thing: the best place to celebrate this year’s World Series victory wouldn’t be on Chicago’s Southside, despite the obviousness of that conclusion. My money would be on Caracas, Venezuela.

I hope everyone’s been following the mess happening down in PA over the intelligent design crap.

At any rate, William Saletan’s got a fun, Python-inspired take on the whole thing over at Slate.

If you’re using a cool web browser, you should now notice that dactyl has a favicon!

In case you’re wondering what it is, it’s actually a picture of dactyl, the moon.