I Like BOB-TV

But more importantly, Alex likes Bob-TV.

Reasons why Bob-TV is better than The Wiggles:

• Although they are both music shows, the Bob-TV is better music.
• Having Bob-TV on in the background is like having the radio on from when I was going to school.
• Most importantly it takes Alex three hours to watch all three Bob-TV episodes in the PVR rather than only the one hour required to exhaust the Wiggles episodes in the PVR.

One of the current crop of Bob-TV episodes in our PVR includes Rush's Tom Sawyer in them.

We're number 7!

Idiot journalist:

But the good news for Canadians is that we are no far behind on the ranking — 7th out of 100 countries.

No, wrong, thanks for playing.

In lists like this your position doesn't matter so much as your distance from whatever you think your achievable score is.

Look, if these countries were in a line up and the first ten countries got something like I dunno a sane politician, then yes being 7th is pretty good. But being 11th is just as bad as being 100th -- all you get for turning up is wasted time.

But since this list we are talking about involves some kind of scoring, what's important is both the total score and the scores of those ahead (and, if you care, behind) of us. Otherwise your "position on the list" is completely meaningless.

Let's consider a hypothetical list of 100 countries where we come last. But the countries are scored on a scale of 1 to 100, and the first 99 countries get 100, and we get 99. So just looking at the list we'd say "we are the last one! boo hoo!" and "we are the only country to score below average! Boo hoo!" But the fact that we are only 1% out of the logjam for #1 means we really did pretty well.

But what do you expect -- the IS the media we are talking about.

(Posted here because the Citizen's signup thing hates me.)

6K on ServerFault

Been a while, but broke 6K on Server Fault yesterday.

Seems to me like the number of questions I can answer is steadily dropping, as so much of the low-hanging-fruit turns out to be duplicates of previous answers. The questions that remain are very incident-specific, and most of then deal with details I don't know about.

But still, 6K is still nothing to sneer at. As of today, I'm ranked #42 on the site.

(Previously.)

Context Fail: Flipped

As in:

A tractor-trailer has flipped on its side forcing police to close the two south bound lanes of Maitland Ave.

To me, a "flip" describes a end-over-end motion which sweeps at minimum 180 degrees. 270 degrees is more like it.

Compare: if I flip onto my back, it implies I went face-first, my feet go over my head, and I end up on my back. If I go over backwards and end up on my back, to me it just implies a 90 degree change in orientation -- in other words, I just fell over backwards.

While I'm sure that someone, somewhere has "flipped" a tractor trailer onto its side, using the terms "flopped" or "fell over" is probably far more descriptive.

Balloons In Spaaaace

Problem: thousands of objects, one square centimetre or larger, in orbit around the earth.

Solution: tie big balloons to dead satellites and let them increase the orbital drag, which should eventually drag them into the atmosphere where they'll burn up.

Problem: how do you tie big balloons to dead satellites?

Solution: An orbital robot, the design and implementation of which is left as an exercise for the reader.

Don't you love science!