Nobrainer’s Think Tank

The FoxIt reader is good to have around, but is not ready to be the star of the PDF world. It is light and agile. Unfortunately the find feature is unreliable and some characters don’t get printed correctly. It’s probably a good default PDF reader as long as you aren’t reading a lot of scientific papers.

FastStone Capture can be used to do screen captures of almost anything: windows, window contents, any user-defined shape, the full screen, or even a scrolling window. It’s got some other neat bits as well. The bad news is that FastStone recently removed it from the freeware category. I have version 5.3 which was free. Now, if you want the new version 5.5, you have to pay.

Pidgin 2.0 is what used to be GAIM. With the new name comes a new logo and much less confusion for me when I’m trying to open the correct program (GAIM or AIM) when the icons look virtually identical. I haven’t used the new Pidgin much yet, but it seems to be the old GAIM with mostly (needed) cosmetic changes.

Safari for Windows. I’ve seen various reviews and saw little reason to feel inspired, but I figured I would give it a try since I generally keep around just about every available browser.

My current browser rankings are as follows:
1 – Firefox 2.0.0.4
T2 – IE7
T2 – SeaMonkey 1.1.2
4 – K-Meleon 1.02
5 – Opera 9.10
6 – Maxthon

Having used Safari for a little while, I’m not exactly sure where to rank it. It does seem to render pages faster. The in-page find function is nice. And I like that I can re-size a text box (although it seems to allow this to an obscene and detrimental degree as I was able to drag this textbox under other page elements). But in most other regards, it seems a bit clunky. Bookmarks are hard to handle. It uses a ton of RAM (230MB right now). Windows are difficult to re-size. And what may be the worst thing of all, the keyboard shortcut for switching tabs is Ctrl-{. In reality, that is Ctrl-Shift-[. What the fuck were they thinking? And why on Earth are the dialog boxes animated? How do you brag about having the fastest page-rendering speeds and claim to have a browser that “gets out of your way” and then go and program in a piddly-shit animation that slows people down?

And of course it doesn’t have any of the handy extensions that have made Firefox so valuable. And it has something that says “check spelling while typing” but it doesn’t pick up anee speling missteaks. On the upside, it is perhaps the best piece of Apple software that is on my computer, not that it says very much. I think it may see some additional action on my computers, but probably less than IE7 and SeaMonkey.

I still think the Daily Questions (and answers) series is good. I just haven’t been keeping up. It seems every time I have a good idea for the blog, real life gets in the way. Anyway, on with the show.

How much to Americans spend on beer? Beertown.org offers up some numbers from 2006 about craft beers in the US. In ’06, the craft beer brewers made more than 6.7 million barrels of beer and sold them for 4.7 billion dollars. It seems craft beers account for 3.2% of US beer sales by volume and 4.99% by sales. After a little math, that indicates totals for the US of about 210 million barrels of beer produced per year with sales of about 95 billion dollars.

What does that look like on a per-person basis? After dividing by the US population of approximately 300 million people in America of all ages, annual beer spending per capita is over $300 and buys 230 12-ounce servings.

I’ve got some simple lessons for 5 Charlottesville area drivers that I encountered yesterday.

Foul language ensues: (more…)

Wow.

Last night I was driving home. I flipped through radio stations until I got to John Tesh’s radio show. I wasn’t looking for it mind you, it’s just where I stopped. I will admit that on many occasions I have listened to bits of the show where he does these kind of “did you know” segments.

Anyway, last night I turned it on and I caught him mid-sentence. It was something about co-workers coughing and it being and indicator that they would call in sick the next day. Duh!

I realized with some additional context that he was talking about employees who fake being sick. Apparently they frequently spend the day before making up symptoms. So you can spot them because they’ll be coughing and complaining of a sore throat. Although I have no idea how you’re supposed to know the difference between people who are actually sick and the loser sons-of-bitches that fake it.

He goes on though. He says something about how workers took 5.5 sick days last year, as compared to 6.5 the year before. The reason for the drop? “The high unemployment rate.”

Jesus Christ, John, what world do you live in?

Just for everyone else’s knowledge, the unemployment rate in the US for any given month in 2005 was between 4.9 and 5.4%. In 2006 the unemployment rate for any given month was between 4.4 and 4.8%. In other words, the worst month of 2006 was better than the best month of 2005. Furthermore, 2005 was better than 2004. And 2004 was better than 2003.

High unemployment rate my ass.

[What's the proper grammar for that last line?]

Before you think that I may have misheard John, here’s the text of the report from his website:

According to a recent Harris poll, one in five North American workers have pretended to be sick to get out of going to work. In fact, 64% of sick days are really just mental health days. But those un-sick days are costing companies $654 per employee every year.

If you have a hunch that someone at work uses this ploy, look for the #1 sign the day before. Your suspect will cough and complain of a sore throat, just to make it more believable when they call the next morning. Men and women are guilty in about equal numbers. It’s estimated that employees took an average of 5.6 sick days last year. That’s down from 6.2 days the year before. Why the drop? The high unemployment rate makes people nervous about losing their jobs. Oh, here’s a tip for you fakers. Quit faking and just ask for a mental health day. In poll of employers done by Business Week magazine, you’ll get more respect from your boss.

And before you think that this must just be some old, recycled clip from years ago, a search of the site says the note was posted on 5/22/2007.

Stupid John Tesh.

It turns out that doesn’t happen in real life.

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