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Morbid dieting
Considering the buzz around the Atkins diet lately, I found this dieting spam I received rather morbid. The subject is pretty tame: "Lose Weight While You Sleep. Here Is How!". It's the sender: "Final Diet".
Indeed there's little need for dieting after a thoroughly executed Atkins diet...
23.08.2003 klo 11:25
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Who wants to be a millionaire?
I went, I saw, I conquered. I was in the last episode filmed yesterday, so I had to wait the whole day at the studio. That wasn't nice - the show is quite boring to watch and the studio was a sauna with all the super-power lamps.
The competition was a bit more interesting. In the fastest fingers -part I lost the first attempt with about one second - the winner was very fast, with a time of 3.3 seconds. Fortunately he didn't do very well and the left the studio with only 2 000 euros.
Second time I did better. The task was to put the letters P, I, N and T in that order, which I did in 2.99 seconds. Talk about fast!
That was the tough bit. The questions were easy. Because I was the last competitor of the last episode, I'm going back next week for the rest of it. I'm starting with a decent amount of money and will hopefully get a little bit more.
20.08.2003 klo 10:29
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Who wants to be a millionaire? Me!
Last Tuesday I was sitting by the phone waiting for a call from Who wants to be a millionaire? quiz show. Ismo was competing and I was his dial a friend -lifeline. The call never came, he was too slow and didn't make it to the show. It was close! He would've called me on question nine, asking for the cause of death of Alexander Pushkin. I would've provided the answer under 30 seconds, easily!
Well, now the roles reverse. My mother and Ismo promised to pay the costs of participating so I had nothing to lose. It took me two attempts - first time was definitely too slow, therefore the second try. Today the called me, I'm invited to the competition next Tuesday!
If I'm only fast enough to get to the hot seat, I should be able to come home with a decent pile of euros. The winnings in the Finnish version are pitifully low, though. The main prize is only 200 000 euros.
It's funny, though: it's not lottery taxed, it's proper income. Therefore it affects my student grants. If I win more than 6 000 euros, I'll have to return some of the student grants I've got this year. If I win more than 15 000 euros, Johanna gets less money for rents. So if I win the 10th step, which is 20 000 euros, I'll actually get something like 7 500 euros after taxes, student grants and all that. Still, 7 500 euros is a huge amount of money from my point of view!
15.08.2003 klo 12:52
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New display
I went and bought a Hyundai ImageQuest L17T 17" TFT display. It's beautiful! Full 17" of display space (my 17" CRT display had less than 16" of actual display), less than 2" thick, weights less than five kilos. In addition of crisp, non-flicking display it features a TV adapter so I can use it to watch TV too. There's simply no turning back - how can I use a CRT display after this beauty?
One funny thing: turned out the monitor is actually too light. Johanna's old computer table has three legs, two in front and one in back. Earlier the weight of the monitor was enough to keep the table somewhat stable, but now even a slight leaning on the front of the table caused the table to tilt. I solved the problem by placing some heavy-weight computer books behind the monitor in the back corner of the table. Now it's stable as ever and I can also reach my Programming Perl easier!
8.08.2003 klo 09:53
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TV treats
Yesterday was a good day, TV-wise. New episodes of Cold Feet have arrived! It's a very good show and definitely one of the best running right now. Of course I'm hopelessly hooked on Survivor, even though the Thailand series they're showing now has started off quite slowly. Hopefully it gets more interesting, but I'm afraid the people aren't as interesting as they could be. Johanna quoted a news article or something like that to me which said the Thailand series is the most boring of them all, but the next one should be much better. Hope so!
6.08.2003 klo 10:06
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New Google operator
Google has a new operator: ~. Add ~ directly in front of a word to search for the word and it's synonyms. For example searching for "~help" finds words like "manual", "guide", "tips" and so on. Sounds like a neat thing.
(From Google Weblog)
5.08.2003 klo 08:16
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