Incompatible Technologies

This from one of my favorite tickets lately.

This is why you don't put transparencies through a laser printer:




You see, laser printers use this concept of 'heat', which, in certain circumstances, causes some things to melt and stick to other things. When one of the things is toner and the other thing is paper, the process goes as planned. However, when one thing is a sheet of plastic and the other thing is the roller from the printer's fuser, things do not go so well.

When is an MP3 not an mp3?

Okay, I haven't been blogging much lately, and I don't usually blog on the weekends, but I saw something earlier this week, and research dictates that it is deserving of a post-haste.

On the way home from...something - don't remember what - I saw someone riding what looked like a standard street bike, except it had three wheels in the front. I have been wondering for a while why no one has bothered making three-wheelers with the two wheels on front, so this caught my attention and curiosity. With a little bit of Googling, I found the following:

Piaggio 3 Wheel MP3 Scooter

Piaggio launched the first Vespa model — and with it the scooter phenomenon — in the spring of 1946. The scooter revolutionised personal transport, giving Europeans a sense of utter freedom. Sixty years on, Piaggio has come up with another revolutionary product: the PIAGGIO MP3, a totally innovative three-wheeler with two front wheels. The PIAGGIO MP3 provides safety, road grip and stability levels that no two-wheeler can match. Power, performance and ease of use make for a very entertaining ride.

...

The front assembly, with two independent tilting wheels, is far more stable than any scooter. The PIAGGIO MP3 grips the road even when tailing other vehicles, providing top performance in total safety.The full extent of this three-wheeler’s stability can be tested on wet asphalt or tough riding conditions that would sorely challenge a traditional two-wheeler.

In town and city traffic the PIAGGIO MP3 has no equal in terms of safety. It takes on cobblestone streets, patchy asphalt and tram tracks with the greatest of ease, remaining safe and stable all the while. With its compact super-scooter size and exceptional manoeuvrability, the PIAGGIO MP3 is at home in town traffic. It’s a cinch to park: an electro-hydraulic suspension locking system means there is no need to put the vehicle on its stand.

...The Piaggio MP3 is type-approved as a standard two wheeled motorcycle.

...The three-disk braking system and exceptional front-end road-holding reduce braking space by 20 per cent compared to the best scooters.

...

The PIAGGIO MP3 is available in two engine displacements, 125 and 250 cc, both up-to-date 4-stroke, 4-valve, liquid-cooled units in line with Euro3 emissions standards.

The 125cc engine offers an excellent power output of 15 bhp/11kW, the legal limit when riding with a car licence. The 250cc, equipped with electronic injection, delivers a 22.5 bhp/16.9 kW power output, making the PIAGGIO MP3 capable of comfortably taking on long-distance rides.


So, for those of you with plenty of money who are wondering what to get me for Birthday or Christmas, you can add this to the list. It's probably not as much fun to drive as the Carver, but it's certainly not as expensive either.

Wizard Wednesday: Google Analytics

In an effort to try and track some traffic (all 4 of you who read my blog) I have set up a Google Analytics account, and I have to say that if Google ever does become the next MicroSuck, it will be with good reason.

Google Analytics is like a hit counter on steroids. It gives you daily breakdowns of how many hits your site got, how many unique visitors you got, where those visitors hit you from (by country, state (if applicable) and city) as well as a bunch of other statistics I don't understand or care about at this point.

I'm playing with getting it to register my RSS hits, since I probably get about 10 times as many of those as I do actual site hits. For now - if you want to help out my ego - click the link at the bottom of this post so I can track you.

To sign up for a Google Analytics account, go to http://www.google.com/analytics and create an account, and it will walk you through how to copy the script code into the page(s) you want to track.

This could be the one...

For the past while, I've been lusting after ROM 'backup' units for my Nintendo DS, and I might have finally found the one I'm thinking about getting. Today I came across the CycloDS Evolution. In all honesty, I probably won't be able to afford one for a couple of months at least, and then I have to figure out how to get my games on it, but it would be cool to be able to cart all (4) of my games around on a single cartridge.