So something, at least to my easily-amused mind happened to me lately. I wonder a little why I'm posting this, but so is my life.

[I haven't posted for a while. I've been playing with Tumblr a little bit, for one thing. Being a busy stay-at-home housewife (yes, I'm a dude) is another.]

So this last week, I got a 'commemorative issue' of TIME magazine. Definitely pretty, but when I reached for it to read, something was amiss.

Really amiss. Like 7% off the cover. Just not the price (which would have been less than I usually get with subscribing).

7% was snipped off the side of the cover.

(I have measurements of the missing portion, as well as all of the other photographs of interest from this magazine copy, for the curious.)

Which would make, if I ordered it based on the design in TIME, the Obama birth certificate mug kind of difficult to drink from...

... with a whole side of the mug missing, really hard to use...

... but at least the M&M's weren't destroyed, nor the birth control pills, though it was hard to read the context in which they were included in the issue.

I wasn't entirely sure about all of the issues about Obama and Christie visiting a storm shelter. nor was I about Representative Akin's views, though I did find out from other press sources.

If it were just small shorts that were cut off due to their distance from the margin, I guess things would have been funny. However, it became a comedic routine once I figured out whole parts of paragraphs of the cover article/story were missing.

As funny as I find it, it did make reading the cover story kind of disjointed, if not weird.

Ordinarily, I would not really worried, but this is kind of a really good issue that I would love to frame, being not far from a Michaels, at some stage. Maybe I should try my luck asking TIME for another one. I am kind of not sure, but we'll see.

[Cross-posted at http://ngeru.whare.electric.gen.nz/post/35766549244/reading-an-issue-of-time-with-7-off-everything.]

Or, the one where one finds weird things happening with fonts in various parts of the operating system. (So a slightly public note to self in case it happens to me again has arisen.)

As per the similar http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=2933984, I was having issues with Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4 in Windows 7 (64-bit) making most instances of Arial Regular turn Arial Bold since pretty much the day I upgraded from versions 8 and 3.x respectively. The mental note to myself (and in case any other people else get this) being that even though the forum thread is nearly four years old, the same idea of overwriting the fonts folder with the same errant font files (that is, copy out of C:\WINDOWS\FONTS\ to another folder, and then back to C:\WINDOWS\FONTS\ again; moving not required and probably, I suppose, not a good idea in case someone wants the fonts in the very short meantime) worked. Oddly, the Chrome 11 beta channel I am using was not affected, for whatever reason (which I assume was because of some different way fonts are used).

(Which reminds me: I need to finally write up how I got my home network's PPTP server working in Ubuntu to mitigate Firesheep and Firesheep-like attacks, nervously using unencrypted public VPN servers having finally pushed me to do it.)

I recalled today that a while ago I mentioned that I was going to do a very bad imitation of the Big Mac Index seeing I haven't been scanning books for a little while. Well, to make the short story shorter, it was a fee comparison for marriage licences between Pennsylvania counties. In all the madness about moving, I forgot that I had this for over six months now lying on my computer's desktop. (It's like adding everything one browses to one's favourites and then forgetting where one put the important link to one's university calendar. Somewhat.)

It may well not be complete, and so on, so, yeah, but it's now uploaded.

The main reason this started my interest is that when I got married in Pennsylvania I was told that any county could issue a marriage licence valid for anywhere in the state. (As an aside, the licensed celebrant need not be domiciled in the county of issue or marriage either, I thought I was also told.) Now, of course one is almost certainly going to go to their nearest marriage clerk (which, for example, in Centre County is the Clerk of Orphans' Court and Register of Wills -- a dual elected position -- in Bellefonte, and in Allegheny County is some non-elected office).

Naturally, costs are going to vary by the cost of living (paying the clerks), cost of the office (the rent or whatever) and the volume of applicants (of both licences and certificates), so I'm not berating the counties that are most expensive, I want to make clear. This was just purely for interest.

The short points are the following, as of roughly June last year:

  • Allegheny County (Pittsburgh, and then some) and Philadelphia City at $75 and $80 respectively are the most 'expensive' counties.
  • The counties of Clearfield and Forest are the cheapest, with both charging $25.
  • If one is thinking long term, sealed copies of a marriage licence that are good for women taking their husband's name -- I never checked if a man could do it -- vary greatly as well. For example, Northampton County throws in a free certified copy after the used licence is returned, whereas to me it appears that Bucks County wants $20. (The married couples, at least in one county, get to keep an 'original' in the form of half of the licence that they keep, that said, but that's not replaceable, so a certified copy is always useful.)
  • Some counties have 'volume discounts' of sorts if one orders more than one sealed certificate at a time, in addition to the counties that bundle a free sealed certificate upon the celebrant filing the completed licence.
  • Some also ask for a stamped, self-addressed envelope, while others build the cost in to their fees.

The spreadsheet, to add a further warning to the disclaimers, is definitely out of date already; I get the feeling, for example, that the fee for the first sealed certificate is incorrect for Butler County. That said, I have no guarantees with my busy life nowadays that I will update the list, but I shall attempt to.

As of right now, http://ngeru.info/eUDaxI here at ibiblio is where you'll find the current June 2010 version of the spreadsheet. It's in Microsoft Excel .xlsx, because that's the easiest format for me to manipulate the data with (so no you-should-have-used-OpenOffice.org, please, which I would have used had it what I wanted). The undated .xlsx files are symlinks to the current file, in case I do upload this. [Update: I forgot about the Google Spreadsheets option, but loading the 'last update' symlink in read-only mode on Google Docs gets rid of basically all of the nice formatting from Excel, not to mention the column sorting that Excel does.]

Um, so, yeah. Enjoy!

Missing DC...

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One sign that I am missing the District of Columbia would be other people's photographs of cherry blossoms and random buildings like the Jefferson Memorial. Oh, Flickr...

This would be the photograph of both the abovementioned things in question, the Jefferson Memorial and some cherry blossoms.

The photo, of course, isn't mine. But it is nice.

Of interest in the last few weeks I noticed pretty much all of the books I scanned for PGDP have appeared in Apple's iBooks store. So far, of all of the major e-book booksellers I've tried, they seem to be the ones that implement the books in the best-formatted way.

Also, I have been putting off mentioning this for some years, so I'm sure someone else has mentioned this now. At http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/kids/presidents/ulyssesgrant.html on the NARA archive of the 43rd president's website, President Grant is said to have been President Jackson's Secretary of War. That would have been quite an achievement, given he would have been between the ages of six and fourteen, and yet to enter West Point.

Of course what the students who wrote the quick biography meant was that he was Acting Secretary of War (give or take) for a similarly-surnamed President Johnson (they even shared the first name Andrew, adding to the confusion mix), but for some reason I found the minor (?) mildly amusing.

(Yes, it's a coincidence my previous entry was about the White House.)

Finally, my next entry I'm currently researching very slowly, but it's a list inspired by the Big Mac Index. I'm almost done with the raw data.

So, apparently the White House's Apple App Store-listed app is rated 12+ (albeit in the United States version of the store) for the reason of 'Infrequent/Mild' references to or use of 'Realistic Violence[,]... Alcohol, Tobacco or Drug[s]'. Overall, I am rather amused by this! I doubt, however, such a government institution would be encouraging illegal drug use or underage alcohol use.

Seriously, I would have thought that such ratings would be thrown out for clearly educational apps such as something from the White House, like with nature documentaries in some countries (otherwise said documentaries like Nature would basically be rated for sex scenes). Maybe I'm too sensitive, but I support the US Government -- the White House in particular -- for making the app, but not the rating they got, presumably from Apple, for their efforts. Anyway, the obligatory screenshots (the first of which is also uploaded to Flickr for some reason):

So, here's the screen shot of the apparent, albeit possible madness. And you're probably not bothered enough to zoom in on the screen shot, so this is the requisite bit.

(There's almost certainly other bizarre examples in the iTunes store, mind, but this one seems rather odd to me.)

And, in other news, I'm looking at getting the 1986 report of the Royal Commission on the Electoral System on PGDP fairly soon, as I now apparently have the clearances lined up for that with their copyright people.

... It is, well, snowing, right now, still:

Or, earlier this morning, it was this bad.

It is, now that it is the early evening, far worse.

In the meantime, I am still mesmerised by the Sirocco Kākāpō incident:

My original post: http://www.jessicalind.org/blog-posts/windowsvistacontinuestosuprise-unboundlimit at jessicalind.org (or the one where the spouse talks her way on to her husband's online diary slash journal slash blog thing)

I have been suffering with my computer lately with my screen going black and then claiming that my drivers are having problems. My husband says this is probably from something called "kernel panic". All I know is that my C:/ drive had started to fill up rapidly. I take lots of pictures so I thought it was my fault but it was starting to get ridiculous. My C:/ drive went from about 100 GB to only having 2 GB left at 287 GB. I tried to figure out what could possibly be wrong. I had a feeling that it had a problem with the System Restore points but I couldn't be sure. So we logged onto my computer's dos prompt and found a startling issue:


I felt like Strong Bad in the virus episode on Homestarrunner.com, "Holy Crap. That's a big number!" What this means for those who have no idea what this is: Vista system restore had filled up my computer with 120 GB of restore points. I had heard on the internet about this problem that Vista should naturally have a 15% of drive limit. My computer had no such limit, thus being unbounded. It could have potentially gone on and on if there was unlimited space. This makes me think of my calculus courses where I could make a word problem about this. I wonder though if I get the award for most storage space used up by the system restore points.

How could this have happened? Thank goodness I have IT knowledge and knew to look for this but this was difficult to figure out what the problem was and it was making my computer crash in kernel panic. 

I want to thank How to Geek for his recommendation for solving this problem at http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/reduce-system-restores-disk-usage-in-vista/

OK, so Gmail and Gmail-hosted domains can now send e-mail via an external SMTP server if it supports authenticated SMTP.

There is just one very, very small detail someone missed out somewhere: this only seems to work with Gmail's webmail interface (including their iPhone/iPod webmail interface), as far as I can tell so far. If one sends their Gmail or Gmail-hosted domain e-mail messages to Gmail via authenticated SMTP, Gmail does not then on-send it via that external SMTP server; the message is sent directly from Gmail. That and the address in the Sender: header you were hoping to completely hide ends up in the Return-Path: header instead.

Oh well. It is a start, somewhat.

So, tonight I look back at the directions that I wrote to the venue for my wedding (the Catholic ceremony, that is, for those who must know), which included a Google Maps pointer for the church, naturally.

To cut a long story short, not only is the smallest incorporated place (population 29, that is) in Ohio now in Google Street View's coverage (all five or so streets and two intersections in the town limits, albeit just an intersection view of side streets from the main road of the town), the said church can be seen. And there's the church hall across the road, too.