You may have seen the results of the annual Wacky Warning Labels contest, where entries are judged on their silliness (e.g., a label on a kitchen knife: “Never try to catch a falling knife.”).

On the other end of the spectrum we have the warning at United Nuclear’s (a cool science shop) neodymium magnets page. You wouldn’t think magnets would need a warning, but you’d be wrong.

Our larger magnets can easily bruise fingers and even break finger bones as they attempt to connect together. Always wear protective eyewear or safety goggles when handling the magnets.

[snip]

If you or someone in your household has a PACEMAKER or another electronic surgical implant, don’t even think of ordering these items.

Every now and again I hear people complain about how there were dozens of spams in their Inboxes when they got back from long weekends. Whoopdie-doo.

I use SpamAssassin to stop my spam from coming in, and I send it all to what it calls a “SpamBox” that I can check as a separate e-mail account. While I use Thunderbird for my real mail, I configured Outlook Express to check the Spam account. (I make a quick check to be sure nothing got sucked in.)

Unfortunately, I occasionally forget to check and clean out the SpamBox. In this case, I waited about two weeks. Here’s the result:

ahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!

(Hat tip: Eric)

PS: Hahahahahahahahahaha!!!

A Chicago school district has added a line to its students’ code of conduct saying that those who write about illegal or inappropriate behavior on their blogs could get in trouble.

I’m not going to go into the free-speech issue (who decides what’s “appropriate”?) because others are doing that. Instead, I found something else amusing.

Here’s the line added to the policy:

Maintaining or being identified on a blog site which depicts illegal or inappropriate behavior will be considered a violation of this code.

I would think that members of the school board — the folks who are teaching kids the three Rs — would at least know the difference between — and proper use of — that and which. I guess not.

From the Rosen College of Hospitality Management’s site:

Ron Logan is…

A highly motivated, results-oriented executive who flourishes in a fast-paced, synergistic, creative environment and mentors his people to heightened levels of success; has proven expertise in finding effective solutions to difficult problems by combining creative spirit and strategic thinking.

Synergistic?

At the AAA office and travel store, I spotted a line of luggage. The model: Avenger. Because, I don’t know about you, but when I think travel, I think vengeance.

I got a press release today from the Business Software Alliance about the results of a new survey.

“Thirty-five percent of the packaged software installed on personal computers (PC) worldwide in 2005 was illegal,” it reads, “amounting to $34 billion in global losses due to software piracy.”

Wait wait wait. That kind of logical leap is what the record companies use to come up with crazy-high figures for music piracy. It’s bad.

The problem with the premise is that is assumes that everyone would buy what they got for free. And that isn’t true. Someone who would have spent, say, $100 for Adobe’s low-end photo editor, Photoshop Elements, would be happy to use a pirated copy of the full Photoshop instead, even though he never would have bought it.

The BSA would call that a $600 loss (the cost of full Photoshop). In reality, it’s at most a $100 loss. And it might be less than that. The pirate might have been happy with an open-source alternative — The GIMP or GIMPShop.

That doesn’t excuse software piracy by any means, but it certainly means that the BSA’s numbers are wildly inflated. That’s especially true when it comes to software where there’s a popular free alternative — OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office, AVG Anti-Virus instead of McAfee, etc.

And the same thing applies to music piracy. Saying that pirates cost the industry X dollars per year only holds true if the pirate would have bought the music instead. And not all would.

Here’s something funny.

The folks over at MacDailyNews, always good for a laugh, have a headline: “Research firm: Intel, Boot Camp powering huge Apple Mac sales surge” it gushes.

A huge sales surge in Macs? Interesting.

That is, if it was true. But, typical with MDN, it’s not — it’s hope and hype.

What the research firm’s report actually says is that 33 percent of the computer-industry personnel it surveyed said they would be “more likely” to buy a Mac now that the company has a deal with Intel. (This is up from only 19 percent who said so last June.)

Another part of the survey found that 25 percent of them were “more likely” to buy a Mac because of Apple’s Boot Camp software.

So no one’s buying anything — there is no “huge sales surge.” What there is, is people saying they’d be more likely to buy one. And a minority of people at that — only 33 or 25 percent, depending on the survey.

Ask people, “Would you be more likely to buy such-and-such a car if it came with free anti-lock brakes?” Many will say Yes. But you can’t then say, “Free anti-lock brakes power huge surge in sales of such-and-such cars!!!”

But the MDN folks love their rose-colored glasses.

Of course, spun another way, the survey said that 67 percent of people surveyed didn’t care that Macs were now using Intel chips, and 75 percent didn’t care that Boot Camp allowed them to run Windows programs.

It’s all in the spin.

I have to wonder if Pat Robertson can see the deep end in his rearview mirror, ’cause he’s driven well off it.

Get this: Today he declared that God told him storms will hit America’s coastline this year.

In other news, it will snow in Minnesota, and Phoenix will have days above 100 degrees.

The guy makes a dopey prediction like that and expects to be taken seriously? And you can bet that when storms do hit — as they have every single year for the past who knows how long — Robertson will take credit for having predicted it.

What a crock.

Wait… wait… hold on, I’m getting a message. Ooh, it’s from God. What’s that? OK, got it.

All right, folks, God just told me that as long as false, money-grubbing preachers — the ones who give the real people doing God’s work a bad name — spout off nonsense, there will be serious fluctuations in the stock market. The economy will not be stable until these people stop treating us like idiots. You heard it here first.

And let us not forget that Robertson has used his direct channel to God to make other dimwitted pronouncements — like Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for New Orleans not living life the way he demands it. Yet he remained suspiciously silent about the tornadoes in Tennessee earlier this year (they killed more than 30 people).

Hey, Pat, what did those folks do wrong? Not donate enough money to your cause?

So I did a stupid thing: I accidentally deleted a bunch of photos from my camera’s memory card before moving them to my PC or to disk. I searched for “recover deleted photos compactflash” and found lots of pages with utilities promising to recover the images.

They all cost money, though, and I wasn’t about to shell out $30 hoping it would work. But then I saw a recommendation for ZAR — Zero Assumption Recovery. It’s free, and it’s supposed to recover those deleted images.

It works. Like a charm. The latest version has several other features I wasn’t interested in, and the program implied I would have to pay to use it, but the recover function, according to the company, remains free.

It’s not the prettiest program in the world, but it works. It’s one of those have-it-in-your-toolbox gems.

So this was kinda funny. We were waiting at the gate at LaGuardia, when Karen pointed out that we would probably have to check Sam’s umbrella stroller planeside (we were on a puddle jumper). Not being sure if it needed to be screened, I went to the agents’ desk.

Lo and behold, there was a stack of security tags there that went onto luggage to be checked planeside. They read “Security Screened Baggage Only.” So I grabbed a few and filled one out, attaching it to the stroller.

Of course, there was nothing stopping me from grabbing the whole stack. I don’t know how useful these tags would be, but they weren’t the typical quickie ID tags you can pick up all over the airport. They certainly looked more official.

You can see the stack on the counter:

(This entry has been expanded since originally posted.)

I signed up with E*Trade Bank in the late 1990s, when it was Telebank. (E*Trade later bought the company.) It was great — incredible online banking and easy bill pay, plus, if you were charged a fee to use someone else’s ATM, E*Trade would refund you up to $1.50.

That was then. Since then, E*Trade Bank has gone steadily downhill, culminating in today’s almost-laughable fiasco.

Twice in the last six months, E*Trade lost our deposits. (Because it’s an online bank, we have to mail them in.) When we called, they were eventually able to find them, but it’s kinda scary to have your bank tell you, “We can’t find your money.”

I also learned that the company’s records don’t go back beyond 2000. So when I called to find info about stocks I purchased in 1997 and 1998, I was out of luck. They simply didn’t have my purchase data.

Today, we learned that E*Trade Bank had again lost our money; I had the tracking number of the envelope as was able to confirm it was received.

E*Trade’s excuse, courtesy of “Tom”: We just bought two banks — HarrisDirect several months ago, and Brown more recently — and we’re really busy. He also suggested that the Post Office lost the deposit, until Karen reminded him that we had used Express Mail, had a tracking number, and had confirmed delivery.

But he wanted us to excuse our bank for losing $1000 of our money because it bought two other banks. As if banks are so forgiving if you get bogged down in other things.

But then, the kicker: Tom the E*Trade Bank rep told us that we should open an account at a local bank. He wasn’t blowing us off; he wasn’t saying “Go somewhere else.” He was suggesting that we then link that local account to the E*Trade Bank account.

“Why would we do that?” asked my wife. After all, if we had a local account we wouldn’t need E*Trade. No answer.

Another brilliant idea from Tom the E*Trade rep: Tap into my mother’s brokerage account, of which I am an authorized user. But it’s not our account! said Karen.

Then Tom tried to convince Karen how wonderful E*Trade was because of its great CD rates.

So the idea is, E*Trade Bank might lose your deposits on a regular basis because it doesn’t have the staff to handle the acquisitions it made, but boy does it have great CD rates!

The original reason we loved E*Trade was it’s sophisticated online banking. But now that’s not unusual. The banks we looked at — Bank of America and Wachovia — have equally slick systems. And I bet they won’t lose our money.

It’ll be a bit of a hassle transferring our checking, savings, securities, and IRAs, along with my mother’s brokerage account. But heck, finding a local bank was E*Trade’s idea!

This will mean nothing to someone not from New York, but one stop on my trip was my old public school, PS 163. I even got to walk around inside for a bit, and took this shot of a doorknob.

“A doorknob?” you ask. All the NYC public schools have (or had) these cool brass doorknobs. I’ve never seen them anywhere else (e.g., “Roanoke County Public Schools”) and always thought they were very cool.

After a trip to NYC and a very busy few days, I’ll be writing more starting later today. I hope. :)

So Tom Cruise wanted Katie Holmes to give their daughter a silent birth, because one of the beliefs that Scientology cultists have is that sounds of pain are bad for the kid. (She’s got enough problems — Cruise also believes her body is invested with the souls of dead aliens. Seriously.)

Anyway, comes this news story about California banning the sale of ultrasound machines to anyone but licensed medical professionals — a law that came about because Cruise revealed he had bought and used one to watch his baby grow.

The guy is worried about Katie grunting during birth, but uses a machine that inundates the fetus with sound waves?

Interesting article in the Boston Globe the other day about Presidential power.

Bush is the first president in modern history who has never vetoed a bill, giving Congress no chance to override his judgments. Instead, he has signed every bill that reached his desk, often inviting the legislation’s sponsors to signing ceremonies at which he lavishes praise upon their work.

Then, after the media and the lawmakers have left the White House, Bush quietly files ‘’signing statements” — official documents in which a president lays out his legal interpretation of a bill for the federal bureaucracy to follow when implementing the new law. The statements are recorded in the federal register.

In his signing statements, Bush has repeatedly asserted that the Constitution gives him the right to ignore numerous sections of the bills — sometimes including provisions that were the subject of negotiations with Congress in order to get lawmakers to pass the bill. He has appended such statements to more than one of every 10 bills he has signed.

”He agrees to a compromise with members of Congress, and all of them are there for a public bill-signing ceremony, but then he takes back those compromises — and more often than not, without the Congress or the press or the public knowing what has happened,” said Christopher Kelley, a Miami University of Ohio political science professor who studies executive power.

Examples of signing statements:

Dec. 30, 2005: US interrogators cannot torture prisoners or otherwise subject them to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.

Bush’s signing statement: The president, as commander in chief, can waive the torture ban if he decides that harsh interrogation techniques will assist in preventing terrorist attacks.

And…

Aug. 5: The military cannot add to its files any illegally gathered intelligence, including information obtained about Americans in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches.

Bush’s signing statement: Only the president, as commander in chief, can tell the military whether or not it can use any specific piece of intelligence.