Steel White Table

I learned a new word today while watching an online review for the film Gone Baby Gone:
Histrionic — 1) of or pertaining to actors or acting. 2) deliberately affected or self-consciously emotional; overly dramatic, in behaviour or speech.
There’s a word I’ll never use in a sentence. (And I disagree with it as a [...]

A Fatwa is a principle or judgment to clarify how an Islamic should behave in certain situations. These laws are created regularly, such as Rushdie’s death sentence. Fatwas are created by a Mufti, someone who knows Islamic law.
FatwaIslam.com claims to be the most comprehensive online Islamic Fatwa guide. Here are some goodies:

…what is [...]

Quick hack: The $1 C-to-D adapter:
You want to power your gizmo that runs on D cells, but all that you have handy are C cells… you can solve this problem by using the C cell and making up the battery length difference with a few quarters– typically three or four.
I haven’t tried it. Will [...]

I’ve been using Windows since it was released 20 years ago (I’m not proud - I’m just sayin’), yet I discovered this today:
Pressing Ctrl+C (i.e. copy) when a window’s message box is displayed copies all the static text within the box.
Go on, try it: Click the Start menu, then Run, then type in “asdf” (assuming [...]

I’m in Flint again, watching too much television; however, I just watched an excellent movie: My Date With Drew. It’s a documentary about a guy trying to get a date with Drew Barrymore:
Don’t worry, it’s not like he’s expecting a relationship or anything. He’s just talking about one dinner here. Heck, the girl’s gotta [...]

Not included in How to Prepare Your Home for Winter is replacing your 30 year old windows that don’t work much better than wire-mesh. We had our first snow storm yesterday, and besides getting the snowshoes out for my trek to work and putting the polar bear traps out (they go hunting for frozen [...]

Jim tried to enter a comment today but it was flagged by my spamming filter for containing “cialis”, which is part of a word he included: commercialism.
I had no idea what cialis was until today.

To display a dash (-) as the first character in a cell in Microsoft Excel (so it isn’t interpreted as a mathematical symbol), prefix the dash with an apostrophe, like so:
‘- This value begins with a dash.
I’ve been programming in VBA for Excel and other products since VBA first came out, but I’m not [...]

Tags: excel, microsoft

I learned today that some “brown” bread (associated with being healthier than white bread) is actually white bread with food coloring:
Brown bread is not always more nutritious than white. In fact, the brown color is often just a marketing gimmick, just white bread with coloring added (like a fake tan). To tell if a [...]

Tags: bread, whole wheat

A friend of mine is the manager of a music store that’s the leader in sales in North America for his company. I asked him what the price markup of CDs are. He said on new releases, they make a dollar or two; they buy CDs from their suppliers for around $15 (Canadian). [...]

111,111,111 times 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321

A lot of HTML references and programs are using <br/> instead of <br> lately, and I didn’t understand the difference between the two because they both do the same thing: forces a break in the current line of text.
<br/> is XHTML compliant, which states that:

Empty elements must either have an end tag [...]

I added the What I learned today category to easily keep track of tidbits I learn about most anything, although it will probably consist of computer-related material.

The bag of Baked! Lay’s Naturally Baked Potato Chips (what would be Unnaturally baked?) I bought today lists Modified Food Starch as its third ingredient. A couple of questions about that:

Modified from what?
What is meant by food? That’s a vague word in this context.

So, typing in modified food starch at google.com gives me [...]