Ok, here's another one. Catgut? It's that string stuff that we had in tennis rackets which we often found in the back of the gargage. It was on old guitars. But is it made of CAT? YUCK!

The answer is no. If you believe this source.

Catgut or Gut, cord made from the intestines of various animals (especially sheep and horses, but not cats). The membrane is chemically treated, and slender strands are woven together into cords of great strength, which are used for stringing musical instruments such as the violin and the harp.

"Hail the size of grapefruit".

Today a co-worker reminded me of this phrase which I had heard on the radio just this week.

It is such a cliche, but is it true?

Well, a simple web search found this information about hail the size of grapefruit.

This quote explains all:

Smaller hail tends to fall in large batches near the heart of a storm. Larger stones, which are fewer in number, typically get centrifuged toward the edge of a storm. The biggest hailstones are aggregates of smaller stones, which gives them a spiky, irregular shape.

They do exist. You can see these photos.

Google Desktop Search

I installed this new tool which is free and from the people at Google.
http://desktop.google.com/
It seems well behaved, but I do have some comments about it.

It is certainly cheaper than the stuff from X1.
http://www.x1.com/
That product, which does most of the same thing, is aimed at the business user. Or the user who doesn't mind putting things on their credit card.
It's $75. It has excellent preview and other features. But it did seem to bog down my machine to an absolutel crawl.

All this is similar to the promise from Bill gates to include google-like desktop search in the next version of windows, currently called 'Longhorn'. Microsoft has removed features from Longhorn most particularly WinFS in order to move up its release date.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35006-2004Oct15.html

Hopefully, right here, I can tell you what is right and wrong with Google Desktop Search. We'll see.

OK, how should I put this?

The other day, my friend Dave raved about some new music over on his Blog. I clicked through, listened to some sample songs, and I was sold. So today, I was thinking of getting this debut album from Nellie McKay.

But I pop over to borders.com (which is really amazon.com for some stupid reason), because I have this old gift certificate (which is really a just plastic card) and see that there are actually two choices for her latest album:

Get Away From Me

Get Away From Me (Clean)

Who knew I'd have a choice?
Now, I have a small child, McKay's pithy lyrics are sprinkled with expletives,
so I wonder... do I choose the model with purer filthy lyrics or do I select the cleaner one?
Am I am compromising myself? Will I be missing something? Is this a common experience shopping for entertainment nowadays?

What should I do?

OK, I figured it was now time for me to join this whole Blog thing. So here I am.