In public restrooms, why do so many people not flush? It takes a mere second to do; it doesn’t cause you any pain to do it. And, it’s polite – no one wants to come in to a restroom to see someone else’s.. well, whatever. Furthermore, I would hope such an act would be deeply ingrained in most people – use the restroom, flush when done. But it would seem that’s not the case. In all my visits to the university restrooms over the past few years, I think I’ve seen two or three “all flushed” restrooms.

I initially thought it might just be an American thing, but Nils confirmed that it goes on in his region of Europe, too. Maybe it’s just a guy thing, then. Would any of the ladies reading like to chime in? Are your restrooms typically nice and clean, or do some women routinely refuse to flush, too?

Hmm… nope. Didn’t work. I kept it short, and that was still pretty peculiar.

1. With the internet, it doesn’t take long at all for a bit of information to go from one place to another. So, what’s the deal with this: my father, who died December 17th, 2005, is still receiving correspondence from businesses in the mail. He also regularly gets phone calls from organizations he was in, asking to speak with him, or asking for his dues. How long does it take for the “word to spread” that someone has died and will not, in fact, be returning your calls? He’s even getting mail from the life insurance company that he was insured with, who paid us after his death! Talk about a case of the right arm not knowing what the left is doing… Has anyone else ever experienced this? It’s really rather odd to receive calls every little bit, asking to speak to someone who has been dead for nearly a year and a half.

2. Yesterday there was a breakage in one of the water mains in town, which led to the water coming and going sporadically. It also led to the water having a fairly gross brown tint to it. In today’s paper, there’s a notice saying that we’re under advisory to boil any tap water we use during today and tomorrow. Luckily, my wife stopped on her way home from work yesterday and bought two cases of water when she saw the breakage. On each jug of water, there’s a notice stating that the water is best sold by November of this year. When I first saw this, naturally, this thought occurred: um, what, is the water going to go bad? It’s not like it’s going to spoil. A quick Google search, however, led to an answer. Apparently, while bottled water basically has an indefinite shelf life, some states require that all foods and beverages, water included, have an expiration date printed on the packaging. Apparently Ohio is one of those states. Furthermore, while the water won’t ever go “bad”, over time, the water does pick up flavors from the packaging, which explains why bottled water which has been around for a while has that slightly unpleasant “plasticy” taste.

I’m not a huge comic fan, so it wasn’t a big deal, but it did strike me as a bit odd. Just out of nowhere, poof, the old comics were gone, replaced with different ones. (I’m happy to report, though, that we now get Wizard of Id.) The oddity doesn’t really end there, though. Today when I checked out the comics in the paper, the oddness increased. In the weekday papers, apparently we still have the old comics. So, we now get one set of comics Monday through Saturday, and then a totally different set on Sunday, but the full set of neither.

Do other newspapers do this, or has the local paper gone a bit loopy?

“Post-it” and the and the color canary yellow are trademarks of 3M.

Heh. So does that mean you have to be careful about using the color ‘canary yellow’? And for that matter, how do you trademark a color? Aren’t colors totally subjective? What I call purple someone else calls lavender, right?

My evening post was posted at 9:39PM. My post from this morning was posted at 9:39AM.

Not planned at all. Neat. Pointless? Yes. But still kinda’ neat.

However, it then turned out that even though my SkypeIn number was in the same area as my landline, calling the SkypeIn number counted as long distance. D’oh #2. So, I requested a refund from Sykpe, and they gave it promptly. Not a huge deal.

I bring this up because I find it interesting that I had trouble with Skype, and now I’m having a different problem with a different VOIP provider: Vonage. A few weeks ago, I started the signup process at Vonage to see if our landline number was portable. Vonage showed that it was indeed portable.

Fast forward to yesterday. We had decided to go ahead and sign up with Vonage, because it’ll let us save quite a bit of money on our phone bill (not to mention unlimited free long distance). I went to Vonage’s website and started the sign up process again. I entered our landline number as the one we’d like to keep, transporting it to our Vonage service.

No dice. Instead, I get this:

We’re sorry, telephone number portability is currently unavailable for your number.

Argh. What gives? It was portable a couple of weeks ago. What happened during that time to make it to where we can’t keep our number?

Anyone know if phone companies are signing deals with Vonage to keep Vonage out of a service area? If they are, I think I may be calling Verizon and raising some hell.

Update: It looks like I’m not the only one experiencing this problem.

Technorati Tags: skypein, skype, vonage, voip

From the Sci Fi Tech blog:

Researchers at Akishima Laboratories have developed a way to spell out words and draw pictures on the surface of a pool by using 50 wave generators. The generators create “pixels” in the water and combine them to create the letters. Earlier versions of the pool had trouble creating straight lines and took up to 15 minutes to input each letter. This latest version, however, handles Ks and Ls with ease and takes between 15 and 30 seconds to input each letter.

That’s pretty damn cool. Having said that, this image is still making me feel a bit.. off. It just looks like something that shouldn’t be possible.

Originally seen here.

Technorati Tags: flickr, weird, odd, invisible