Refenestration Daily.
This “laundry formula testing facility” commercial for Clorox’ Stain Fighter & Color Booster seems to imply that only women do (or should do?) laundry. Even the man-unable-to-operate-a-washing-machine scenes from 1983’s Mr. Mom seem unwatchably dated today. And that was almost thirty years ago.
I expect better, Clorox.
I’m not a big fan of junk mail. In part, I don’t ever order from catalogs; even if I quite like an online company, I’m just going to buy their stuff online (even if they send me a catalog). So, it takes some mental processing to sort through junk mail at the end of a day at the office; I’d also rather not fill up landfills with paper, if I can help it.
Enter GreenDimes (well, now the company is calling themselves Tonic Mailstopper):
For $15 [now $20], GreenDimes offers a series of services that you could probably do yourself, but which become much, much easier if you get GreenDimes to help you. Here’s how it works:
First, you register your address and all the names which receive junk mail at your house. Then GreenDimes goes to work, filing letters on your behalf to the thousands of direct marketers to remove you from their mailing lists. That works for credit card mailings and the like, but not for catalogs. Those you have to unsubscribe from individually, so when you get a catalog you no longer want, you visit the GreenDimes website and select the name of the company spamming you. GreenDimes then tells them to cut it out. […]
It does take a couple weeks to start working—due to the printing lead-times for junk mail—though I started noticing small improvements even within a few days. Now, it’s been a couple months since I signed up and I can say that it's worked a treat. Some days, I go to open my mailbox and simply discover that it’s empty. Bliss.
Along these lines, one other service that may be worth mentioning is YellowPagesGoesGreen.Org. On one hand, it’s an advocacy site for curbing yellow-pages distribution (such as by promoting an opt-in model), but what's also handy is that they have an opt-out form in which you can unsubscribe from the yellow pages.
Though they’re not associated with the various yellow-pages companies, they apparently then contact the phone companies in your local area, on your behalf, and get you unsubscribed from your local yellow (and/or white) pages. Since yellow pages don’t arrive with as much regularity as junk mail, I can’t say with absolute certainty that it’s successful, but I signed up back in September (’08) and I haven’t received a yellow-pages since then.
DealNews is reporting on a combination sale / coupon code at Dell which brings the price of their 24" LCD down to $739 shipped:
Dell Home offers the Dell UltraSharp 2405FPW 24" Widescreen LCD to $799.20 with free shipping. Coupon code “?7VKHB0253GTSM” knocks the total price to $739.20, $60 off our mention earlier in the week and easily the lowest price we've seen. Features include a native resolution of 1920x1200, 1000:1 contrast ratio, 16ms response time, 16:10 aspect ratio, picture-in-picture, integrated 4-port USB 2.0 hub and flash card reader, and VGA, DVI, S-Video, RCA, and component video inputs. […]
Must resist… must resist…
DealNews is reporting a sale on Brondell’s advanced toilet seat for only $474 shipped.
Replacing your old toilet set, the Swash 600 includes a built-in bidet, gentle closing seat, warm air dryer, heated seat, and more, all managed via a remote control. The Swash 400 has most of the 600’s features (no warm air dryer) with push-button controls for $379 after coupon. […]
I don’t know what’s weirder, that someone’s selling a remote-control toilet seat or that it’s made its way up to #2 on DealNews’ Top Reader Picks page :-/.
The other day, I was fiddling with my Nixon watch (yes, that’s the company name with no relation to the dead president). I was just trying to resynchronize its seconds-hand (“seconds-LCD”?) with my computer’s clock which I had just synced with an Internet time server (not literally an atomic clock, but yet kinda in an A-to-B-to-C sort of way). As I was pressing buttons, trying to remember how to get to the time-setting screen, I ended up putting my watch into 24-hour mode. Yeesh.
Thus the saga began. I ended up finding the watch’s manual on their website and I read over about how to set the time. Much of it was fairly straightforward, but the section on setting 12-hour vs 24-hour time simply said “You can set for 12 hour or 24 hour mode while setting the hours”. Well, that didn't really help much. I fiddled with the watch for about ten more minutes until I figured out how to do it.
Most (digital) watches support both 12-hour time and 24-hour time. And, they generally swap between the two modes with a 12/24-hour selector within the time-setting screen. That’s where the Nixon guys decided to be different. Rather than do something that I expected — an explicit 12/24 mode selector — they just built 24-hours time right into the hour-setting sequence. A normal watch might have the hours cycling from 12:00am to 12:00pm through to 11:00pm and, after switching to 24-hour mode, 00:00 to 23:00. But, in this case the sequence was just one long loop: 12:00am to 12:00pm to 11:00pm to 00:00 to 23:00 to 12:00am (and so on).
So, if you have a Nixon watch and you end up getting it stuck in 24-hour mode, don’t worry — just keep advancing the hour and eventually you’ll get back to normal time. Or, I suppose that you could be the type that likes 24-hour time but ends up getting stuck in 12-hour time (which could happen too). Still, you should be able to use the same steps to get back into the time you’re used to.