I heard of this a few hours ago and I was very skeptical, but after reading New safety rules for children's clothes have stores in a fit from the LA Times, I'm feeling a little angry.
Now don't get me wrong, my wife and I have three children and we wouldn't dare put them at danger, but this law is going to put my wallet in danger and a lot of small stores and manufacturers out of business. The law was signed by Congress last year and begins to take effect on February 10th, 2009.
Read more about the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, or CPSC and the actual act here.
From the act:
The new legislation imposes an additional third-party testing requirement for all consumer products primarily intended for children twelve years of age or younger. Every manufacturer (including an importer) or private labeler of a children’s product must have its product tested by an accredited independent testing lab and, based on the testing, must issue a certificate that the product meets all applicable CPSC requirements.
After having read some of this, it does appear that the restrictions don't fully take place until 90 days after the CPSC releases the third-party laboratory accreditation requirements for that category of product. In short, everything that is government approved will have a special tracking label to prove that it is safe and can be successfully placed in my child's mouth.
I found a partial schedule here, and it stretches into September of 2009, but I don't see clothing specifically mentioned. I'll need to learn more about this.
Sometime I just like the shiny. These little utilities published by Microsoft are real gems. They handle things like automatic webcam snapshots, image resizer, graphical calculator, backup utility and more.
Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP
Take a look, there's probably two in there that you could use.
I spend a fair amount of my day writing, in fact, adding in this blog post, emails and doodling, I spend a lot of my day writing. And I always have questions like, "Should I really start a sentence with 'and'?" or "do you have to put a comma before a quote?" Another favorite is, "should end-of-sentence punctuation be inside or outside of a quote?" These are fair answers, and I am a fair guy, so I have decided to share with you the following style guide for your perusal:
Style guide from The Economist
There are also the Johnson Columns where Stephen Hugh-Jones tackles concepts like "might" and "might have", trademarks and film dialogue.
In short, for the time being, I have adopted the writing style published by The Economist.
I've recently had some nasty DNS problems with my hosting company. Domains and sub domains are resolving to different places all willy-nilly. I've been trying to track it down with pings and trace routes in Windows, but I finally needed to dig down and get a Unix utility like, well, dig.
I found this site in my Google search, and it provided me with some executables that did the trick. Maybe it's just propagation, the DNS server seems right...
Dig for Windows
This is a great recipe for pure and simple bagels that are tasty and filling. It comes from my cubical next-door neighbor and friend, Michael Sanders.
4 1/4 cups flour
1 tbsp salt
3 tbsp sugar
4 1/2 tsp yeast (2 packets)
1 1/2 cups water
- Mix and let rise for 15 minutes
- Separate the dough and shape 12 bagels
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees
- Let rise another 20 minutes while you get a pot of water boiling with 1 tbsp of sugar
- Drop the dough into the water and boil for 7 minutes
- Drip dray and place on a greased pan
- Bake for 35 minutes at 350 degrees
