A couple of the teenagers at our Thanksgiving dinner told me they were going out a midnight just to watch the Black Friday madness. I wondered what could be entertaining about a bunch of shoppers, until I saw this video of the ruckus over $2 waffle makers at some Wal-Mart. As a bonus, it shows what the kids mean by “crack kills”. Here’s an open thread.
Friday Night Open Thread
(Signe Wilkinson via GoComics.com)
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There’s always that one huge container of Well-Intentioned Horror from a dear friend or relative who only meant the very best. In my youth it was anything involving green jello, shredded coconut or miniature marshmallows; today it’s more liable to be a demonstration that producing a low-fat, vegan, gluten-free, no-sodium entree that’s also edible is a task best left to experts…
And How Was Your Shopping Experience?
One of the really nice things about being a misanthropic agoraphobic crank who aspires to be a crazy cat lady is that I never ever ever have to put up with shit like this:
Matthew Lopez went to the Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch on Thursday night for the Black Friday sale but instead was caught in a pepper-spray attack by a woman who authorities said was “competitive shopping.”
Lopez described a chaotic scene in the San Fernando Valley store among shoppers looking for video games soon after the sale began.
“I heard screaming and I heard yelling,” said Lopez, 18. “Moments later, my throat stung. I was coughing really bad and watering up.”
This is why Allah created Amazon Prime (and if you shop at Amazon, click the link below to the left before shopping and this website gets a cut!).
I’m trying to think of what it would take to get me to a Walmart today. I’m coming up blank. There is football. There is basketball. There is hockey. Leftover turkey and fixings. Snuggly dogs. The SWTOR beta test.
Free Toys. Because Everybody likes free, right?
It’s a slow day here at work.
If you guys are like most computer users, you know your way around the programs you use pretty well, but you don’t update them anywhere near as often as you could. This can result in unintended security risks to your PC, conflicts with other, newer software and drivers, file-type mismatches, and other headaches that keep people like me charging you $60 to do 10 minutes worth of work.
One of my personal favorite sites on the internet is File Hippo.
When you install as many free third party apps as I do, you don’t want to just accept the defaults, including the default option to let the application check for updates. Before you know it, you’ve got twenty apps hitting the net every time you logon, slowing you down to a crawl. Instead, select “no” to that option, and download File Hippo’s update checker. Let one program do all the checking for you. It tells you when there are updates available, and links you to a page on the File Hippo site where all the updates it found will be linked. Even if you didn’t download it from File Hippo, if they carry it, the checker will support it.
Some of my personal favorite programs and applications are CCleaner, Recuva, Defraggler, and Speccy, all from Piriform. Many of you have heard of CCleaner–a powerful but simple registry and hard drive cleaner. Recuva can recover–I think they’re from Brooklyn–files that were deleted accidentally. Defraggler is, as I’m sure you can guess, a disk defragger. What makes it really cool is that it can defrag individual files as well as the whole disk. Speccy is a simple but pretty thorough tool to dig the specifications from your system–what processor, chipset, graphics, how many RAM slots, and so on.
When I want to manipulate photos, I use ACDSee. I can do just about everything I need to do, which is mostly red-eye removal and things of that very amateur nature. Obviously professionals and the really serious photo editor people will use Photoshop, but this is free. I also use Paint.NET. More powerful that MS Paint, but still free. I hear good things about GIMP, but I’ve never used it.
One of the biggest security threats comes in the form of Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader. Intentionally mal-formed PDF files are frequently used to crash Adobe Reader on the target system, thereby granting access. My default PDF reader is Foxit Reader. Nothing beats keeping the files themselves secure, so I use TrueCrypt to keep my important data–tax and financial stuff, for example, the safest.
I’ll get into some other programs and applications over the next few weeks, but these should suffice for jumpstarting the conversation. What are some of your favorites, and where do you find them? I know somebody out there uses Linux a LOT more than I do, as I’m only just getting my feet wet with anything deeper than the front end and internet apps. And Mac users–if you really must–please chime in with yours as well. Many of these programs are either cross platform or have analogs in the other ecosystem anyway.
EDIT: Also Too–Open Thread.
Free Toys. Because Everybody likes free, right?Post + Comments (90)
Late Night Open Thread
House is clean, everyone is gone, leftovers prepped for tomorrow, so it is me and three half empty bottles of wine that guests opened but did not finish. I know what I have to do. I already had my daily Little Feat (I listen to Little Feat once a day every day to keep me sane) while cooking, so what should I listen to? I’m in the mood for AOR, so I might rock Yes-Relayer.
Thanksgiving Open Thread
Turkey is out of the oven and cooling, and the sides are going in, so I thought I would stop and wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving. I figure I have lots to be thankful for, I’m healthy, my family (including the piglets) is healthy, and I’m just really lucky to have all the friends and good fortune I have stumbled upon. I’m not even remotely convinced that I deserve it.
At any rate, Happy Thanksgiving, and if you are or have just filled your face with turkey and all the fixings, maybe take a second and send a few bucks to help out some people who are in a lot worse shape than you. There are few places more worthy than Heifer International, or maybe you could just make a mental note to send some money to your local food kitchen.
Football open thread
Nickelback? Really? For my money, those Big Rockstar and Photograph songs are the worst things I’ve heard on the radio in the last ten years.