Black box blues …

There’s another article up about insurance companies wanting to use automobile black boxes in an effort to identify high-risk drivers.

The companies suggest, of course, that in giving up your privacy to a device that monitors your speed and braking patterns, you would make it possible to obtain cheaper rates provided you drive safely.

Unfornately, this device probably won’t lower rates overall, and instead simply be a means for the insurance companies to drop drivers with a higher risk of getting into an accident. That sounds like it should be something the rest of us would be unconcerned with, but remember that those drivers will still be driving, except now they’ll be uninsured, increasing your chances of being hit by someone with no insurance.

Additionally, the devices won’t detect some of the less safe and more annoying driving habits, such as driving below the speed limit, say 25 in a 35 MPH zone, backing up traffic. Nor would it detect people who never use their turn signals, or stop in the right-hand turn lane despite intending to go straight, or any other number of annoying habits.

120 days left in the year …

It’s September already, which means that the 2004 summer-that-never-was is nearly over and the weather here in northeast Ohio will soon start providing us not-so-subtle reminders that winter is on its way.

It’s also time for my annual format and reinstall of Windows XP. At least once a year I find myself wanting to completely blow away everything in my system directory and reload the operating system just to remove all that cruft from applications that didn’t uninstall every last bit of themselves, hardware drivers that didn’t perfectly update themselves on top of older versions and simply to clear out the start menu that I find myself not keeping as ordered as I should.

Things are better than in the past, with the Windows 9x family, in which a format and re-install was needed at least every three months if you wanted to keep your system in top performance form. Windows XP itself would probably last for years without needing a re-install, provided I didn’t upgrade video drivers as soon as new betas were available and didn’t install and delete as many applications as I do.

Still, it keeps things interesting, providing I can find all the CDs for those programs I now have to reload. Otherwise, it simply becomes frustrating.

Big, brown and ugly …

Ha! Going through old boxes and tossing everything I dont need led me to find my old BCGs.

For those that dont know, BCGs are birth-control glasses, given to you during basic training in the military.

Big, thick, heavy, ugly, brown plastic things that can survive anything you throw at them.

Ive been sitting here like a big dork, in fact, wearing them for the last twenty minutes, bringing back memories of my time with the US Army, both good and bad.

Bad, bad, baaaaaad …

The movie Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 received a perfectly-bad 0% rating from the meta-review site Rotten Tomatoes, meaning that not even one of the hundreds of movie critics the site tracks gave the film a positive rating, something increasingly rare in an industry where there’s usually an obscure critic from an even more obscure magazine or newspaper willing to trade a good review for a free trip to the corporate preview. Even stinkers like Catwoman or Garfield rated above a 10%.