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Category Archives: Technology

Say It Ain’t SO… PA

Hopefully, most of you are aware of the monstrosity of a potential legislation that is SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act. No? You aren’t familiar with it? This video explains it quite well:

I’ve never seen The Cynical Brit’s videos before, so I can’t speak to his normal presentation style or what his videos are generally about, but that one is superb.

As he also points out, having people vote on a bill who most likely have either a) never read it or b) have no fundamental understanding of the ramifications of said bill is absurd. It’s also an egregious tramping on the Bill of Rights and a spitting in the face of due process. Hopefully Congress will hear the voice of reason and shoot this thing down, and we’ll all look back on it as one of the many attempts at policing the Internet that failed

USB Flashy Goodness

Today while I was out at Staples getting some supplies for work, I decided it was about time that I get a new USB flash drive. Why? Well because the first one that I’d been using with any regularity, my SanDisk Cruzer Micro 4GB had an unfortunate accident involving a falling laptop, a set of keys and a mini-blowtorch.

Shall I explain? Yes, I shall. I had the drive attached to my keys, as many people are wont to do. No big deal, right? Sure…

Enter the one day two weeks ago when I was working with the drive, needing to get some files off of it for something I was doing at work. Since I already had something on top of the laptop stand (read: monitor stand that I’ve adapted for my laptop), I rested it on my laptop bag. Fair enough, I thought. Of course it was bound to happen, I stepped over my laptop to try to go around it and get something else I needed. Right then, my foot kicked the top of the monitor and over it went. Along with it went the flash drive that had been plugged in.

I put it back upright and check out the drive. It’s pretty mangled, having had the USB connector bend up at an obscene angle. The funny thing was, the LED indicating it should work was actually still lit up. But, being that it was so trashed looking, I figured I’d at least attempt to straighten it first. Yeah, bad idea. Ended up pulling one of the pins off the board, though three of the four were still soldered nicely. This resulted in some fantastic non-working action of the thing lighting up when I plugged it in, and doing exactly nothing else. Rawk!

Ended up getting one of these bad larrys to replace it:

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