Category: Uncategorized

Today as I was watching a Nature program I had recorded, I got a phone call. I answered it and was greeted by a robot voice. Before I could hang up, the robot identified itself as being a fraud alert on my Citibank credit card. It said there had been some suspicious activity on my account and asked me to verify two recent transactions. The first was for $10 at Kroger (which, because robots is so dern stupid, it just called “grocery supermar”). The second was for a couple of thousand dollars at “veterinary specialists” for Katie’s operation. Oooohhhhh . . . I said it was okay, but I’m glad that got their attention.

I was watching an episode of Nature on PBS about animal intelligence. One of the case studies was the Clark’s Nutcracker which lives in the American West (their example bird was at the Grand Canyon, which may be because it made for better scenery). I knew that birds do some amazing things. Migration is no picnic, but there are bower birds that build elaborate houses to attract mates and woodpecker finches in the Galapagos that use sticks to fish out bugs from trees. Anyway, the Clark’s Nutcracker likes to eat pine nuts, but they are only around for three weeks of the year. So apparently it picks as many as it can and then hides them by burying them in the ground and sometimes marking the spot with a small pebble. It seems like it would be easier to store them all in the same place, but it scatters the nuts out over hundreds of square miles, only putting a few in each place. It then has the memory to come back later in the year to retrieve the nut. That’s a good trick, but the amazing part is that during that three week period it will hide as many as 30,000 nuts and retains memory to retrieve 90% of the nuts it hides.

The show was Part 1 of the 3-part series that was done in 2000 but is being shown again. Part 2 is this weekend.

Despite my recent issues with Amazon, I still shop with them and they have some pretty good deals. I was updating my iPod Battery Pack webpage, with some new battery packs and information and noticed I was linking to Amazon a lot for some of the commercial offerings. Why not see if I could get paid for those links? I soon found that Amazon had a referral program and signed up. Now I have links set up for all of the commercial battery packs I had listed that Amazon sells (plus a new one I was going to add anyway), only now if people follow the links and buy anything, I get some kind of commission. I don’t know that it will amount to much, so for now I am asking to be paid in Amazon gift certificates which they will issue when I get to $10 (they issue payments quarterly). I can also get paid in cash, but, like AdSense, only when it reaches $100 (found out later that $100 is for payment by check only and they charge $8 for the check; with direct deposit you can also be paid as little as $10 at the end of the quarter with no fee so I switched to that). We’ll see how this goes.

Unlike AdSense, users not only have to follow the link, they have to actually buy stuff. I think that will be a bigger challenge. Apparently I can get 5% of the cost of items that are ordered and shipped. I wonder if Amazon sells houses?

I watch ABC news almost every night. The Winter Olympics are on NBC, so ABC can’t show video from that day’s Olympics, but they can show still pictures and they give updates every night on the news. Because of the time delay they can give results that haven’t been shown on NBC yet. They preface their Olympic updates by saying “If you don’t want to know what happens in tonight’s coverage, you should mute your television.” Then they proceed to show still pictures of jubilant skiers, skaters, etc. holding their gold medals or athletes wiped out on the snow or ice. I don’t think they’re really very serious about not giving away what happens on NBC’s broadcast.

I was reading through some ingredients today, this time on a can of Sparkling Black Cherry Fresca. I came across one called “brominated vegetable oil”. Concerned after my last experience, I went to Google to find a Wikipedia article about it. Although it is apparently banned in some countries, it doesn’t seem harmful except in their example where a man drank eight liters of Ruby Red Squirt (containing “bvo”) a day and came down with a case of bromoderma which turned his skin red. Given that many servings of Squirt, it seems lucky that’s all he came down with.

Fresca is an amazing witch’s brew of other funky ingredients. Sure there are the regulars: potassium citrate, potassium benzoate, and EDTA, but it also has carob bean gum, glycerol ester of wood rosin, and acacia, though I imagine most soft drinks refer to these only as “natural and artificial flavors”.