(no subject)

Wanna feel stupid? Take this geography quiz. I sucked at it, and now you can, too. I scored three out of ten. The three that I knew where were: Iceland, Belarus, Laos. (I would also have been able to identify Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, and Thailand due to a recent interest in the Mekong river and surrounding environs because of the John Kerry boat huhu. I checked out a couple of maps of the region to see exactly how much Mekong river was in Vietnam and how much is in Cambodia. All of this was very educational and led to the discovery that the Mekong river delta is pretty damned impressive and that Vietnam looks kinda like a seahorse.)

The seven that I did not know where were: Eritrea, Mauritania, Equatorial Guinea, Macedonia, Comoros, Sudan, Lesotho. Of the seven that I did not know, I knew four of them were in Africa: Eritrea (north of the pointy bit on the right hand side), Equatorial Guinea (underneath Cameroon, deep in the bend on the left side), Sudan (big country underneath Egypt), and Lesotho (the "island" in South Africa). Mauritania I figured was in the Pacific ocean. I thought it was one of those damn island nations. It is not. It's in Africa, on the left hand side. Oops. Comoros I had never heard of. It's a bunch of small islands off the coast of Africa, near Madagascar. So. Of the seven that I did not know, we can judge SIX of those to be located in Africa. My African geography is suck-o-licious.

For some reason, I have always thought that Macedonia was somewhere near China. When I was a kid, Macedonia was the home of Alexander the Great according to an Iron Maiden tune but you couldn't find it on a map. Now, it's a real country, rather further west than I thought it was, above Greece in what used to be Yugoslavia.

(no subject)

I don't have a bike lock. I haven't ridden a bike in ages. However, I did find this interesting bit of bike trivia on the internet today. The video link, just so's you know, is a guy opening a Kryptonite bike lock with the casing of a Bic ink pen. Many "circular" bike locks can be opened this way.

This vulnerability is not news to people who make bike locks, as we can see from the following 1992 USENET post. In twelve years (1992-2004), nobody at the bike lock companies came up with locks that would not fall victim to the evil Bic lockpick?

You gotta wonder.

The nice folks at bikeforums.net broke this story... it's a great way to see how the story spread organically through the internet and became actual news. :) Check out, in particular, the thread that kicked everything off.