A couple of discoveries

Firstly, I was directed to this youtube video of Randall Munroe, author of xkcd, giving a talk at Google. He's quite funny. It's an hour long, but very well worth it.

Today I visited The London Tea Room in downtown St Louis. I'd heard about it from friends (who I don't think have managed to visit it yet). The British proprietors have owned a furniture shop for some while (English Living), and decided that as they couldn't get a proper cup of tea that they'd start their own tea shop. And they also import a number of items from the UK to cater to the longings of ex-pats that are missing things. Anna, the English woman who served us, also said that they would happily take requests and see if their suppliers would be able to get hold of them. Mmmm. The tea was wonderfully brewed, and the flourless chocolate cake thing was simply wonderful. I heartily recommend it if you're in St Louis and want to relax. They have a wide variety of teas too...

Leopard Spaces

I recently installed Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook. I like it so far, but I think an opportunity was missed. I like Spaces, which allows you to have virtual desktops to make things more uncluttered. However, when you add an external display, each virtual desktop increases in size to add that extra real estate. What would have been nice (in my opinion) would have been to realise two of the virtual desktops - one on the laptop, one on the additional display. That way, if I moved stuff to the external display, when I disconnect the display, instead of moving those windows to my local display, thus recluttering it, they just sit in the virtual space. Maybe that's a relatively unusual way of doing it - after all, I am guessing it's a small portion of users that would use a laptop with an external display in such a manner on a regular basis. Still, the option would have been nice.

Car, continued

So, the mechanic explained what's going on. Firstly, the problem is intermittent. Intermittent problems are always the hardest to track down as conditions have to be Just Right for the problem to occur, and it can take just the right amount of Good Fortune to figure out which conditions are affecting the issue. Even then, not all of those conditions may be under your control. Next, they were reasonably sure they had tracked down the problem to malfunctioning electronics relating to the fuel supply, but when they called Ford to get a quote for the replacement part, Ford said "No, that part never ever fails, couldn't possibly be that part, your diagnosis must be wrong".

However, in their investigations, the shop discovered there is a recall on the fuel pump for my car. This may or may not fix the problem, but we can at least get it replaced for free to eliminate it from the issues. So the car is currently with a Ford dealer, as they take care of that.