Posts filed under 'Useless Information'

Useless information for Monday June 6, 2011

Prior to the construction of the Federal Highway between Canberra and Goulburn from 1932-1934, to get to Canberra from Goulburn you had to travel via Tarago, Bungendore and Queanbeyan, a scenic trip which can still be done today.

Samuel

June 6th, 2011 at 10:26am

Useless information for Monday January 10, 2011

Seven-time winner of the Indian National Award for the best male playback singer, Kattassery Joseph Yesudas, does not sing in the Indian languages of Assamese, Konkani or Kashmiri.

Samuel

January 10th, 2011 at 07:50pm

Dry Cleaning

Your useless information for this week.

Dry cleaning was discovered by accident. On December 28, 1849, a tailor by the name of M. Jolly-Bellin, knocked over a lamp containing turpentine and oil. Some spilled on his clothes and he noticed that it had a cleaning effect.

I can’t think of many other industrial liquid combinations which could not only be safely spilled on a person’s clothes, but result in cleaner clothes.

Samuel

January 3rd, 2011 at 09:13am

Disk space usage

A statistic which occurred to me overnight.

This blog moved from Blogger to its own webspace in August 2005, only taking up a couple hundred megabytes at the time (this includes the photo gallery which was moved from a server in my house to the same server as the blog).

By March of 2007 the website had grown to approximately 4 gigabytes. If memory serves, it was about 3.8 GB at the time and grew to over 4 GB quite quickly. I remember this because I moved the website to an Australian server owned by a company which I worked for at the time. I was given the first 4 GB of disk space for free and paid for the rest, and at the time of moving the site, it only just managed to fit within 4 GB.

The site has since moved from Canberra back to the US and is now on a server in Melbourne where it takes up 7,068 MB.

The rate of growth has slowed a bit, probably due to the cessation of regular production of multimedia files (podcasts etc), but still, for what is essentially a personal blog, it is a fairly impressive amount of disk space being consumed. Impressive, that is, until you have to try and move it.

I have no intention of moving the site again, although I’m sure it’ll happen again at some stage as these things do tend to happen. Moving a site this size is not a trivial task as, despite the rapid increase in data transfer rates in recent years, it still takes a considerable amount of time to move this much data, and it is quite frankly a task which I prefer to avoid.

And that’s your dose of useless information for this week.

Samuel

April 26th, 2010 at 05:31am

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Some useless information to start your week. Due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it is illegal for radio stations in the US to play a song within an hour of it being requested by a listener online. Presumably, this is only for radio stations which have a webstream, and for songs which were not already scheduled to play within an hour of said request…but who knows? And who really wants to try it?

More importantly, how the heck do you enforce that law? There better not be a government minion public servant locked in a small dark room ensuring compliance.

Samuel

September 28th, 2009 at 08:06am

Useless Information

Gavin Wood (of Countdown, Hey Hey It’s Saturday and more lotto draws than I care to count fame) was one of the executive producers of Wheel Of Fortune during Tony Barber’s brief time as host in 1996.

Gavin Wood

Samuel

May 26th, 2009 at 11:43am

Useless Information

Poland’s national anthem has the rather pessimistic title “Poland is not yet lost”…

…but we intend on misplacing it tomorrow

Samuel

5 comments May 11th, 2009 at 09:44am

Useless Information

Kenyan cricketer Mehmood Quaraishy took one wicket for 39 runs in his debut One Day International match for East Africa against New Zealand in 1975.

Samuel

1 comment May 4th, 2009 at 10:18am

Useless Information

Back in the days when John Laws was still on the air, he would start his show with a piece of useless information. I quite looked forward to hearing this bit of information at 9:05 each morning, even if I usually forgot it by lunch time. I would also be disappointed when Lawsie was absent as his fill-ins never provided useless information…this, oddly enough, left me filling in for Lawsie and emailing useless information to certain friends.

Last week whilst reading a forum, I was reminded of this (not that what I was reading was even remotely related to John Laws or his useless information) and I decided that I would start providing a weekly (and possibly more regular) piece of useless information here. I was going to start doing this yesterday, but with the public holiday and the amount of people visiting this information about Mike Jeffreys, I decided to leave the Jeffreys story at the top of page, and hold this rather trivial piece of fun nonsense until today. In future I won’t ramble on like this before the useless information, but I thought it would help to put the weekly feature in context if I did so on this occasion.

Anyway, without further rambling and delays, this week’s useless information is…

Dr. Phil has an ISDN phone line in his office.

Samuel

2 comments April 28th, 2009 at 10:19am


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