Poorly designed book

I read to our son every night and recently, my wife pulled out a book called Five Shiny Stars. One day she told me it played music (there was a tag on the front of the book indicating it did), but I never heard it. So lately I've thought it was broken, so I banged the book against my head and magically it started playing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star". Last night as I was putting Aiden to bed and reading the book, the son started playing when I turned to the last page (like it is supposed to do) without me banging my head against it. What was different about last night? It was still light outside when we put him to sleep and the sun was sneaking past the curtains. I looked closer at the book and show that there was a photo cell which triggers the song to start. This has to be the stupidest way to trigger music on a book that talks about going to sleep! Normally people read books about going to sleep when it is dark. I would have expected there to be a pressure type trigger to turn on the song.

DisplayLink First Impressions

Today I received a Sewell Direct USB to DVI adapter which uses the DisplayLink technology. The other day my father received his new iMac and said that I could have my 20" flat panel display back that he had hooked up to his Windows box. At the same time I saw that DisplayLink had released beta drivers for the Mac, so I couldn't resist trying out this technology. I haven't used 2 displays in a long time since I've been using laptops (I don't like using the built in laptop display as a second display as it feels awkward). Installing the drivers was a breeze, but the release notes kind of scared me and I realize that performance is not going to be that of a regular display, but I figured I'd give it a try. I hooked up a Dell 20" display and it was immediately recognized. It seems to work well, but you can definitely notice the lag. I wanted to get it to have fairly static stuff displayed on it like my iChat buddy list, probably some iChat windows and maybe iCal. It won't be very usable to Safari or things that change rapidly. It seems to work OK for mail and even composing a message wasn't all that bad.

I have very high hopes of liking this and if I do, I might have to get another one for a third monitor. Of course, I'll be pushing the limits of USB; I already have 2 USB hubs that are almost filled.

UPDATE: Setting the desktop picture to solid white makes a HUGE speed difference. While this sounds obvious, I just went with the default which is the same picture as on my main display.

Can we end non-binding resolutions?

The US House of Representatives this week apparently passed a resolution saying that China should talk to the Dalai Lama (which, of course, has pissed off the Chinese). This resolution carries no weight and means nothing. However, it took time for our lawmakers to draft it and pass it. Why do our elected officials waste our taxpayer money with this stuff that means nothing? They are lawmakers, not resolution makers.

I'd love to see a law get passed that makes it illegal to propose and pass resolution with steep fines as penalties. There is enough work for lawmakers to do without futzing around with stuff that doesn't do anything.

Working multiple jobs

Whenever I hear that someone has to work multiple jobs in order to get by, my heart goes out to him (or her). These people work hard and nothing I do could ever compare to it. Sometimes I say that I work multiple jobs as I work on a number of different projects at once. While my mind works all the time (I'm currently working on 3-4 different projects right now), I have no idea what it would be like to physically work multiple jobs; I have enough trouble working 8 hours a day. I'm completely exhausted at the end of a day. I'd like to think that there is a better way for people to earn enough to live, unfortunately for many people that are unskilled or don't have skills that are in high demand, there is no other way.