My cousin is applying for his apprenticeship to be a pipe fitter/welder and requested a letter of recommendation from me. I've never written one, and don't know how to go about it without sounding like a brown-nosing relative.

My cousin is really good. He's a good mechanic, a good welder, and will make a hell of a pipe-fitter. But how do I say that in writing to compelte stranger without the guy going 'this is jsut the guys cousin, he has to say that'.

A few weeks ago I bought a old jeep cj7. I took the hard top off because it's hotter 'n hell out. I decided while the top was crushing my skull, fusing my spine, and otherwise shortening my body and lifespan that I never want to put the thing back on.

So off to craigslist I went to attempt to hock it there and get some of the money needed to get a fancy-pants new softtop.

I put it on there for $700 fully expecting to be negotiated down to $500 (for the top and doors). I get an email from some guy who wants to mail me a certified cheque for the $3500, enough for the $700 I'm asking and the cost of a mover to pick it up. OK now I'm suspicious. Really REALLY suspicious. I'm convinced it's a scam. The guy has my address because I thought he would want to come look at it (he didn't seem to want to, he'd essentially be 'buying' sight unseen).

So, I have a few options.

1> call the bank the check is drafted on and ask.
2> drop the check off with the police as soon as it arrives (or FBI if crosses state lines (is that how that works?))
3> play with they guy and see what I can make him do.

I can guarantee you that top is NOT getting on a moving truck of any kind -- unless for some strangely odd reason #1 pans out and the banks says it's valid (which is extremely unlikely).

What would you guys do?

And they say the US is messed up.

Frontpage story about the dood getting fined for using veggie oil prompted me to ask this tengently-related question.

I will soon be buying a new (to me) Jeep. One of the things that has always driven me crazy about older (non-fuel-injected) Jeeps, is that you tend to stall out when going up hills that are too steep for the gravity fed carburators to work properly. So, I've been thinking of alternatives. I don't want to go the veggie route. I won't have a deisel engine anyway, so my only alternative is some kind of hydrogen conversion.

Storing hydrogen in the gaseous form seems too dangerous. I'd like something that converted it on-board and fed the hydrogen directly to the carb. I'd be saving money on gas (by supplying my own salt water, and some alloy), and could still run regular gas when needed.

Any mechanics or Chemistry majors out there with ideas on how to home-brew something like that?

I cannot seem to find an easy way to calculate chars per inch. Anyone know of a unix utility that does that? I've found a lot that can convert to a set limit (for sending to printers etc...).

mod this up please. Funniest thing I've read in a long time.

Earlier one of our offices called and asked for instructions on how to add sites to the proxy's blocking list (specifically myspace). I emailed the instructions back, but tested them first to make sure I had it right and that I wasn't blocking too much.

During my test I ran a whois query against myspace and got back the following.

======================
Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.

MYSPACE.COM.ZZZZZ.GET.LAID.AT.WWW.SWINGINGCOMMUNITY.COM
MYSPACE.COM.IS.N0T.AS.1337.AS.WWW.GULLI.COM
MYSPACE.COM

=====================

I'm not some kind of super admin, but I have been around the block a few times, and have never seen anything like it. How does one accomplish this strange trick?

I'm hoping there's some electronica-audio geeks here that know how I can make those robot voices used in all those ancient break-dancing songs (and more recently in rehab's "bump").

Seems like it would be something cool to use in home-made video's etc...

Ok ok I give up resisting! Noticing the dearth of JE's lately I went over to look at some peoples multiply sites, and found them. All.

So, I'm forced, reluctantly, to sign up. My name was already taken so I'm listed as 'sparctacus' (yes there's supposed to be a 'c' in there).

You jerks!

Pt 2 of seeing the unseen has finally come.

Written by Robert Kagan. It's an excellent book. I'm going through it for the second time.

I think Americans and Europeans would benefit from reading it. Even if you disagree with a lot of the points it helps a lot to at least understand the perspectives of Europe vs U.S., and UK vs both of us.

Anyone have an idea as to something that can be used to quickly store/view/edit documentation and also output these to PDF's or printing.

Currently we're using phpgroupware and the built-in wiki, but we kind of want to move away from the groupware aspect. I've thought about another wiki, but one of our documents is how to fix the groupware server....uhm if the groupware server is broken we can't get to that document.

So we're thinking of keeping paper records in addition to the electronic.

Idears?

OpenBSD has an emacs-like clone called 'mg'. One of the OpenBSD devs submitted a patch to make it work more like vi. People starting applying the patch (which actually seemed to mostly work) and it took 2 days for people to catch on.

Ok, I've had this copy of warcraft sitting on my shelf for months now.

I'm going through the install now, any tips? I've seen somewhere that there's certain worlds you can pick? or something?

What's a good one?

My son turns 10 today and he wants an electronics kit for his b-day. Anyone have any good recomendations? I had one when I was little but none of the diagrams worked. I was particlarly dissapointed with the 'lie detector' schematic that pretty much assumed you had just run a mile is liquid copper to work properly.

What are some good kits that are out there now?