Festivus Dec 1, 2005
This website sells pure aluminum Festivus poles, according to the long-standing Costanza tradition.  "A Festivus for the rest of us!" #products
Cell phone keyless entry (1) Dec 1, 2005
Bob mentioned this idea he had heard from someone at school:  If you lock your keys in your car and you have two sets of keyless entry devices (keychains), you can use your cell phone to call the person with the other keychain and have them press the button on their end to unlock your car door.  And this supposedly works because keyless entry devices use radio waves and so do cell phones.  When I heard this, I didn't want to sound too naive, so I didn't believe it.  But Bob seemed pretty convinced, and he sort of convinced me too. 

It turns out that this is an urban legend.  Not only do the two devices work on two very different frequencies (300 MHz vs. 800/850/900/1800/1900 MHz), the idea just doesn't add up:  You can't send radio waves from one device through digitally encoded bits of sound in another device and have those bits magically transform themselves into the same radio waves they were originally transmitted as. 

While I was skeptical at first and am now convinced that it in fact won't work, I'll still try it because I have to prove it to myself.  I'm kinda dumb. #technology
Cingular interference Dec 1, 2005
Cingular phones cause interference in computer speakers, car stereo speakers, and speaker phones.  This interference produces a sort of "galloping" sound.  This has been written about at PC World and Chron.com.  Cingular uses GSM technology on its network (as opposed to CDMA, which is used by Verizon), and this causes interference with unshielded electronics such as speakers.  Speaker cables essentially act as antennas, which makes the problem even worse.  So the next time you hear some buzzing or other weird noise coming from speakers, ask around if anyone has a Cingular/AT&T cell phone. #technology