Remainders: Siesta Edition

• Memo to the guy sitting next to us at the Interlude Café yesterday when we were discussing the price of RAID storage: the 'one dollar per gigabyte' truism you quoted at us doesn't apply if you want to access your data all at once and not one discount IDE drive at a time.
• Went to Baba's last night with the other guys from work, one of us had just gotten back from a trip to Europe and had a few funny little tidbits.
• It is ridiculously expensive to do business in England. Just to rent office space and pay people enough to live decently already puts you about 50% more expensive than someone in Toronto doing the same work.
• Every time a new mobile phone ring tone comes out at 50p or whatever it can be certain to sell at least 500,000 copies.
• TV in Europe is completely without limits. On regular cable TV they have porn channels where you send text messages from your mobile phone that show up on a display in a room, and the girls in there do what you tell them to. Most disturbing is that this particular show came on right after a discussion show talking about the nature of religion and human conflict.
• Madrid has a wicked traffic monitoring system with in-car systems to guide you to your destination and escape traffic jams. 10 years ago to get into downtown Madrid you had to go along a winding trail, through someone's backyard and behind the goat, now they have a really cool ring-road system where you can exit into exactly the part of town you want to go to.
• The guy behind the bar at Baba's was showing some music videos to the couple of other people there. He had his Apple laptop hooked into the room's sound system, and neglected to turn off MSN messenger. All of the sudden I was back in residence walking through the halls and hearing people message each other across the hallway. It was funny that we all instantly knew it was a Mac because of the 'plink plink' sound it made when he adjusted the volume.
• People were actually really interested in my rants on the world currency market... weird.
• Ikea furniture is nearly as fun as Lego to put together, but I'm still kind of disturbed that someone made a web shrine to the Jerker desk.
• I'm beginning to suspect that half the time you order a lobster sandwich at Cedar's you won't actually find any lobster among the lettuce and mayonnaise.
• There's some kind of conference going on at the Atlantic Technology Centre this week. They wanted to look impressive, so they brought in huge flat plasma displays to direct people to where the conference is. Apparently they didn't think to somehow secure them to the floor and a couple disappeared the first day. Great going, guys. Putting the things on wheels must have been a great help.
• My new hobby is downloading audio books off of suprnova and using the Slow Me Down Winamp plugin to speed up the narration and get through them really quickly. The audio book of Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them is great, Franken reads it himself and does all the voices he quotes as impersonations. Franken's acting really adds another dimension when he reads his own book. You can tell how pissed off some of the stuff he writes about makes him.