First off... full disclaimer.... I LIKE these fruit snacks. I BUY these fruit snacks...

But there's something a little disturbing about "Florida's Natural" fruit snacks being made in China.  Most likely made out of fruit from that part of the world as well.  it wreaks of false advertising.  Slap the word "Florida" all over the product and then put "Made In China" in small print on the back.

Furthermore, isn't Florida's Natural's whole sale pitch "support the US cirtrus grower"?  I mean, it seems rather hypocritical to tell me that I need to buy juice that comes from Florida oranges as opposed to Brazilian oranges and then feed me candy from China.

FYI:  Florida's Natural candy is NOT made by Florida's Natural.  A company called Au'Some Candies licenses the name from Florida's Natural's parent company for a good chunk of change.

Speaking of licensing brands, I just found out this morning that Eagle Snacks is back.  Well... they're not really back.  Anhueser Busch doesn't own the brand anymore and the product's no longer made by Cape Cod Potato Chips either.  In fact, this new version of "Eagle Snacks" doesn't even offer potato chips, pretzels and popcorn.  Only "Poppers" and "Bursts".  Looks like cereal.... hmm.....

Apparently, the folks at River West Brands banks on the idea that some big brand names are so memorable that most people don't even realize when they've gone away.  Essentially, River West Brands makes money off of buying dead brands and re-launching them as new, completely unrelated products.  How many of these brands did you know were dead and gone:  Salon Selectives?  Brim (coffee)?  Underalls?  Silkience?  Nuprin (little, yellow, different...)?

These guys also own rights to the "Coleco" brand.  I think this one was a stretch because, as good as Coleco's product was, what really made Coleco what it was?  Arcade quality home games and Cabbage Patch Kids.  Neither are an offering of today's Coleco.  When I first heard about the relaunch of Coleco, I immediately thought we'd see some of the arcade classics that Jakk's Pacific missed on our TV sets.  Alas, we get generic sports games.

These things are great for making grocery lists... and playing with. Uses same voice recognition engine as Dragon Naurally Speaking. I said "squid" three times because I was pretty sure squid was in the dictionary.

So I get to the part of the shed assembly where I have all of the sub-assemblies assembled and now only have to put everything together to form a frame and put walls up.  But then I see this notice in the middle of the manual: 

Doh!  Fortunately, Lois was willing to help and after only an hour we got this far: 

Despite the warnings about high winds tearing up the incomplete shed, I'm throwing caution to the wind (haha) and letting Lois get back to doing what she needs to do around the house.  The shed feels pretty sturdy with four sides up so I'm not too worried. I need to go in and make dinner, so we'll finish this up tomorrow.

So yesterday I thought I'd have the bottom of the shed down and would start building vertical from there.  Turns out that all of the pieces in the shed's kit are "halved".  In other words, there are two 4' pieces of metal that need to be put together to make an 8' piece, there are two 5' pieces that need to be put together to make a 10' piece, etc.  After assembling 15 different pieces, I was done for the day.  And it looks like I don't have that many pieces left so I'm not sure how this thing is supposed to end up looking like a shed, but I'm only on page 14 of a 30-something page manual so....

Today, I decided to get up early, head outside and paint the floor with some outdoor deck paint.  Tonight I might put a couple more pieces together and I'll see if I'm any closer to actually building this thing.

Living up North is funny.  Come Labor Day, everyone puts away their above ground pools, grills and anything else that has to do with "summer".

The stores also put away their pools, grills and anything that has to do with yard work.  Sure, they still sell the yard bags for you to put your leaves in because it's fall and there's lots of leaves to pick up and you're not aloud to put your leaves in a regular trash bag.  No.  You have to use a yard waste bag and adhere a sticker that says you paid extra to the village to have them pick up your yard waste.

So when shopping for a shed to put yard stuff in, I had one reasonably sized choice.  All of the Rubbermaid sheds were gone as was anything else plastic and under $200.  I had to get the Arrow steel shed at Lowes.  Fortunately, I had a $25 off coupon for Lowes and they were running a special where you could buy an Arrow shed and get a free floor kit.  So over all I think I got a good deal and I'll have a shed that's WAY bigger than I actually need (fortunately, I have enough yard to accomodate it.)

The floor kit's a joke.  It's "universal" to work for sheds from 7x7 up to 10x12.  It turns out that when you put the floor together for an 8x10 shed, the floor is 6x9.  I ended up buying 8' long 2x2's to go around the outside to make the floor the full 8x10 size of the shed.  Despite the "free" floor kit, you still have to fill the areas between the steel studs with sand.  I went with pea-size pebbles (Shown above.  It's cheaper than sand and IMO easier to work with).

Then you have to put plywood over the studs.  I ended up putting two layers of 1/4" plywood together because the steel studs had too much torsional flex to build a sturdy floor.  I'm thinking that I could've built something better with just wood studs and a single layer of plywood.   It probably would've ended up costing less too.

So now the floor is down.  Next step is for me to sort out all of these damn pieces and put the base down.  Hopefully that'll be tomorrow.  We'll see.

So yesterday, I unknowingly bought two sheets of Chinese plywood.  Err... I mean... I knew I bought plywood... just not Chinese plywood.  I needed two more sheets, so this time I went to Lowes.

Lowes had Chinese 1/4" plywood, but these sheets said "Made In China" right on the barcode sticker.  The sheets were also $15.29 each as opposed to the $18.44 I paid at Home Depot.  But unlike Home Depot, Lowes had more than one brand of 1/4" plywood.  Half way down the aisle there was sheets of Georgia Pacific 1/4" plywood made in the U.S.A.  The price?  $18.20.  $0.24 less than Home Depot and NOT made in China.

For what it's worth, 1/4" 2X4 sheets were $6.40 at Lowes and $7.90 at Home Depot.  A whole $1.50 more.  So the lower price at Lowes is not just a fluke.

Even though I have to drive an extra two miles to get to a Lowes over a Home Depot, I think I'll go ahead and make the trip just for the lower prices and the "oh by the way, our plywood is made in China" surprises.

I was at a Home Depot to buy plywood with a 10% off coupon in hand. 

When I got home, I noticed something on the edge of the boards...

What???  "MADE IN CHINA"????

So, is the US out of trees or is the wood from China SO CHEAP that they can justify shipping it half way around the world so poor slobs like me can build storage sheds in the backyard?

Like any responsible web nerd, I Googled Chinese made plywood and found what I expected I would find... toxic glue, illegal harvesting, lost American jobs....

WHEN WILL IT END??!?! 

America, land of opportunity, has high taxes, high wages, excessive government restrictions and controls.... Look, I love America and wouldn't want to live anywhere else.  And I honestly believe that American labor should get paid as much as we can afford to pay them without being ridiculous (unlike what we pay bank and insurance company CEO's), but what's worse?  Not making as much money as you'd like so you can be competitive against Chinese manufacturers or being out of a job and broke?  Something's got to give.  We're failing at almost everything not because we're stupid or don't have the resources, but because we're greedy.  First bicycles, then electronics, then toys painted with lead pain and now plywood with toxic glue.  Where's it going to end?  When China annexes the U.S. or when we all have to move over there for our jobs? 

Marketing works completely differently in Japan.

From Akiba Keizai Shimbun

Antecco, Antec's "mascot" in Japan, is a 14 year old girl, just under 5' tall, that enjoys surfing and listening to death metal.  Those are cooling fans in her hair and, yes, the TPQ 850 in her right hand has spikes so it can be used as a flail.  Why not?

A couple weeks ago, prices on Asus Eee PC's dropped $50 to $100 at MSRP.  Yesterday, Asus dropped their prices AGAIN!

Below is a spreadsheet showing pricing for 901 and 1000 as of Monday:

Also, Asus will be releasing their 160GB 1000's on October 7th:

But that's ok.  I've learned from my mistakes, recovered using the recovery partition and now my 900 is better than ever.

It turns out that if you change your sources.list to retrieve packages from the 701 repository, you can't properly do updates that actually pertain to the 900.  My Eee was still running, but some how the file that stored my password got corrupted and I couldn't back in to remove or replace my login password.  So I've learned to change the repository listings back and forth accordingly by editing "/etc/apt/sources.list".  Since, I've added a start button to Easy Mode and have gotten a little more daring at editing configuration files.

Just a word of warning before you run out and buy a Linux based Eee PC:  You need to be willing to hack to get the PC just the way you want it.  And you also have to be willing to fail and learn from your mistakes.  If you don't think you'll have fun working with it, you should consider a regular notebook with Windows Vista.