A Husbands Prayer

Our wives, who art at the mall
Hallowed be thy charge card.
Thy credit come,
Thy bill collectors are not done,
Calling as it is past due.
Give us this discount our daily rate
And forgive us our late payment,
As we forget to mail the cheques from time to time.
And lead us not into the temptation,
But deliver our goods
To thine kingdom.
And the cash
feels glorious to spend
for ever and ever.
Amen

The Physics of Santa

This isn't my piece, but feel it warrants repeating. There is no credit on who originally published this, but I do so love how crazy this myth is when put to the test.

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1. No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.
2. There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to the Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.
3. Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, and assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of his sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course we know to be false but for the purpose of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
4. The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (refer to point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal load, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
5. 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecrafts re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy per SECOND, EACH! In short, they will burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create a deafening sonic boom in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centripetal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead by now.

I hack my phone

I want to get an iphone just to spite bell. They are so clueless about customer support, they were actually just doing better when they ignored me.
Recently I got a 'courtesy' call from Bell Mobility just to see how I was enjoying their service and if I had any feedback. It went kinda like this, after a courteous introduction, explaining about how much Bell valued me as a customer:

Bell: We just wanted to call and say thank you for choosing Bell Mobility and is there anything we can do for your service?

Me: Well, you really sold me a messed up phone. I bought this expensive 6800 pocketpc phone from you, and it was a nightmare, crashing, bluetooth broken, dropped calls.

Bell: Oh my gosh, that's terrible! You should call tech support to have a look at that!

Me: funny you should mention that, I did. Then it went from a nightmare to all out horror show. Telling me you never heard of these problems (i guess google is blocked there), having me reset my phone, shipping me a new same old broken phone, etc. I just gave up, last entry in the ticket is me saying 'you win, I'm done repeating myself over and over, I just really want to use my phone.' In the course of trying to troubleshoot my own problems, I found a solution. I used information from sites on the internet and hacked it myself, replaced the firmware and fixed my own issues, even though you technically will no longer support my phone anymore on your network.

Bell: So is the phone working?

Me: O yeah, works great.

Bell: Well, thank you for choosing Bell, we appreciate your business.

Me: you got to be kidding me. . .
*click*

But herein lies the problem, how can I leave, I finally have my phone working better than ever? I have turn by turn GPS (no data connection needed, GPS is built into the device), touchflo interface, streams sirius, bluetooth works awesome, no reboots, no dropped calls . . . iphone has nothing on my custom built phone software. The 6800 is a great phone, and with it I can just treat Bell like they should be treated. Nothing but pipe, just give me my connection and leave me alone.

I know they want to sell me more services, like the ones I have already put on my phone, but if you can't keep my phone stable, let alone compete with the apps I can install myself, why bother at all?