Archive for October 2007
If you’ve ever tried to look for information about a topic on the web, but weren’t able to find it at sauhard.com, chances are you’ve probably turned to Wikipedia to make yourself a world-renowned expert on the topic.
And if you’re looking something that is frequently edited, or is particularly controversial, you may have seen “cleanup tags” like this one:
It’s not the end of the world when you see that, but what kind of impression does it leave on a first-time visitor who doesn’t quite yet understand the constantly evolving nature of Wikipedia?
It’s a problem for Wikipedia. In order to combat it, some Wikipedia contributors created a spin-off called Veropedia, which takes only the best articles on Wikipedia, and makes the pages completely static and uneditable. So in essence, Veropedia is an “Encyclopedia-Britannicized” Wikipedia. Good or bad?
David’s lifestyle is pretty simple. He works an afternoon shift at a gas station and doesn’t do anything particularly productive for the rest of the day. His job provides him with just enough money to pay his electricity and satellite TV bills, but not much else.
Those being the only utilities he has, David doesn’t take showers very often, he can’t call his friends, and he can’t surf the web (so he can’t even read sauhard.com)! He has no plans to get married either. Yet this is all fine with him — the less of these “unworldly distractions” he has, the more time he has to recline on his couch and watch crystal-clear on-demand movies on his plasma TV.
For many years, David has found this lifestyle to be just fine — there was no reason to change anything. That is, until he heard about the impending screenwriters’ strike. Oh no! If the screenwriters went on strike, then there would be no more movies or shows for him to watch! What would he do then?
Continue Reading “Couch Potato Faces Tough Lifestyle Decision” »
Never underestimate the power of a severely dysfunctional federal government. It could invade a random country without thinking and refuse to leave, it could waste a lot of tax money to build bridges to nowhere, or it could fail to help its hard-working citizens after a natural disaster. Or, here’s the shocker, its emergency management agency could do “a heck of a job” by holding a fake press conference.
These days, it’s so easy to take a jab at FEMA that even I can do it. While they probably do deserve whatever they’re getting for being so blatantly incompetent, I’m not going to join the usual “how-dare-they” and “this-is-unacceptable” bandwagons, because that quickly becomes boring. Instead, I will pull off my own “press conference.”
Meet Daphne, a sauhard.com team member. Don’t worry, I assure you there’s no conflict of interest here. Just take my word for it. Now, normally I ask the questions — but today, she will. She is sitting in her reporter’s chair, and I’m holding a Sennheiser microphone, standing on a podium with some nice, gold embroidery ostentatiously emblazoned on the front of it. That being said, Daphne is going to ask me some really tough questions.
Continue Reading “The Right Way to Pull Off a Press Conference” »
There are two types of apple users. Some are huge fans of a publicly traded company, frequently buying all the products it has to offer at any one given time. But there are other, more “traditional” apple users as well — those who love the wonderful, glycogen-rich fruit for all its nutritional value and sweet juiciness.
Despite having been in existence for a far longer period of time, the latter category often finds itself sidelined by the former. Furthermore, some traditional apple users are not particularly outspoken about their appreciation for their favorite food as a source of life-sustaining energy. After all, when was the last time you walked down the street and heard somebody loudly extolling the virtues of the Red Delicious or the Granny Smith?
A new study out today says that if you are an old man, eating whole grain cereals can cut your risk of heart failure by twenty-nine percent. But for a woman, the effects are somewhat less clear. However, if you are neither a man nor a woman, it follows quite easily that whole-grain cereal pretty much isn’t going to do anything to help your heart. That will especially be the case if you are a robot, since you won’t have a heart.
But robots still can have health problems nonetheless. Technically speaking, these health problems can be effectively prevented by effective prevention techniques.
Let’s discuss the number one health problem that can kill a robot: the dreaded power attack. Now, I’m sure that you’ve all seen lightning. It can be a fascinating sight, especially if it doesn’t hit you. But for a robot, lightning is like cancer. If it hits any source upon which the robot depends for its power, the robot gets an unwelcome load of electricity. This electricity spreads all through the robot, frying its circuit boards until they look like toast made by an amateur. That’s the devastation a power attack causes. Life for a robot is just never the same after something like that happens.
Continue Reading “What Every Robot Should Know About Whole-Grain Electricity” »