Live from Austin!

LCD panels are expensive. The bigger the panel, the harder it is to make, and yields are low—which is why laptop screens can have up to three “stuck” pixels visible before they’re considered faulty. If only perfect LCDs were acceptable, prices would be incredibly high.

This being the case, a number of companies are looking for ways to glue together multiple small LCDs to make one really big one.

So imagine: You’re the CEO of a technology startup supposedly working on a revolutionary new way to tile LCDs to make big screens, called “Grout-Free”. The annual general meeting is coming up, and the shareholders are asking to see some evidence that the technology you’ve been working on for so many months will actually work. What do you do?

Answer: You quickly head down to the local electronics store, buy a huge plasma screen, write some demo software, add some fake join marks, and hope nobody will notice.

As I sit here, two chickadees just landed on the windowsill of the office window, and peered in at me.

(They’re the official state bird of MA.)

The best part of my day was having a meeting with the IS group first thing this morning.

That probably gives you some idea what the rest of my day was like.

31 celcius 65% humidity.

Bleagh.

I like the smell of finely-roasted coffee even more than I like the taste of coffee.

If only someone could discover a food that tastes the way coffee smells.

I’d often wondered why nobody in the USA uses TCP. Well, I did some research and I think I’ve found out the answer.

TCP is 2,4,6-trichlorophenol. It’s a flaky yellow solid substance, which in the UK is sold in suspension in small quantities for use as an antiseptic. It’s great for cuts and bruises, and as a last resort against particularly evil throat infections. It’s also more effective at killing bacteria than toilet bowl cleaner. Practically every UK bathroom cabinet has a bottle of TCP in it.

Anyway… It turns out that 2,4,6-TCP has a close relative—2,4,5-TCP. 2,4,5-TCP was one of the main ingredients in Agent Orange. It was discovered during the Vietnam war that the process of making both kinds of TCP tends to produce a particularly unpleasant toxic dioxin, 2,3,7,8-TCDD.

Hence 2,4,5-TCP was banned in the USA in the mid 70s. Dow Chemical still made 2,4,6-TCP for a while, but gave up because (a) demand was low, and (b) the cost of eliminating the dioxin meant it wasn’t very profitable. As of now, nobody in the USA makes 2,4,6-TCP.

It also turns out that 2,4,6-TCP is a carcinogen. (Then again, what isn’t?)

Oh, and the EPA considers it subject to reporting and record-keeping requirements… So yes, at this very moment English people are gargling with a chemical that the EPA considers a hazardous material.

You know, when a LiveJournal user attempted suicide live on webcam, I was fairly sure LJ would get lots of (unwelcome) publicity from the story. I expected to see it on WIRED news, and cited as an example of the evil (or value) of the Internet in paper publications of all kinds.

But no. It seems that merely committing suicide live on webcam isn’t enough to engage the attention of a jaded public these days. “Webcam suicide? That’s, like, so 1999.” Apparently to get publicity these days you need to drown five children in a bathtub. Now there’s an idea for a reality TV series.

HomeRuns made my life just that little bit more pleasant. I bought groceries from them all the time. Then they changed their web site so you couldn’t show fat or sodium content, and couldn’t sort the lists of items, so I switched to Peapod. Now they’ve gone bust. I wonder how many other customers their boneheaded redesign drove away?

Russian experts have identified a serious flaw in Microsoft database software used to track nuclear warheads, which results in gradual data loss. The buggy software has been in use for over ten years. Los Alamos uses the same software, and has destroyed its paper records. Locating the ‘missing’ warheads will require a full inspection of all US nuclear sites, at an estimated cost of $1 billion. In the mean time, terrorists wanting to steal warheads can pick one of the ‘missing’ ones, and nobody will notice…

Needed to grab coffee between meetings this morning. Starbucks was closest, so…

For those who don’t know: Starbucks coffee has around 3x the caffeine of filter coffee you’d make at home. That’s one reason why I generally only have espresso drinks there. (And given other options, I generally don’t go there at all.)

Except today. So by 11:00, my ears were ringing. And that was the mild blend.