I've always wondered what these warning labels meant: 

"WARNING: This product contains a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm."

Since this is on sooo many everyday products, is it something I should be worried about?  Why does only California know about it?  Why doesn't any other state know?  If it was a legitimate issue, wouldn't the product be outlawed?  Maybe Californians are extra cautious about cancer? 

It turns out it has something to do with a law passed in California in 1986 called the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, or Proposition 65.  This law requires the state to annually update a list of 700+ chemicals that are known to cause health problems.  A group of scientists and industry experts determines which chemicals are added and occasionally removed from the list.  The general qualification for a chemical that causes cancer is that if 100,000 people are exposed to it for 70 years, more than one person would get cancer.  Whether that's a fair qualification or not, I have no idea. 

In my "research" for this post, two things stood out to me:  (1) This information was surprisingly hard to find.  I would think it would be in everyone's best interest for someone to make an easy-to-find, easy-to-understand website with simple yet thorough information about a warning label that shows up on billions of products around the country.  (2) There's no answer as to why California is the only state that created such a list, or why the federal government hasn't adopted a similar list.  This leaves me with two possible conclusions.  Either California is full of extremely smart people who know a lot of stuff about a lot of things and have decided that certain chemicals can cause certain health problems in certain doses and certain situations, or exactly the opposite; i.e. California is full of fruits and nuts.  I'm sure both conclusions are true, but the second one doesn't have much effect on me getting cancer. #products

Raise your hand if you've spent more than $10 on a pen.  *hand raised*

It turns out I'm a bit of a pen addict.  It's not that I spend lots of money on pens and always buy new ones.  It's more like I walk down the pen aisle of office supply stores and ogle at all the cool pens.  If I had a million dollars, I'd probably buy a million pens.  And the weird thing is that I don't write very often.  I don't take very many notes on paper, and when I write something down, I type it.  But when I do write, I like simple pens that write smoothly.  The Bic Clic Stic was my favorite pen, but it seems they've stopped making it.  I'm on the hunt for a new favorite pen because this gel ink one I have at work is scratchy and blotchy. #products

I might've taken my eBay obsession a little too far.  Lately, I've been finding all kinds of cheap stuff on eBay, most of it made and sold by the nation of China.  It's a bunch of knock-offs, but most of it is good enough quality at a low enough price to be attractive.  I got a few lenses for my camera.  Then I got a lens cap.  Before that, I got a few accessories for my cell phone.  Nothing to write home about, but it was fun finding good deals on cheap little gadgets. 

But I found the limit, the line after which cheap eBay products are no longer acceptable.  In this case it was audio equipment, and specifically an FM transmitter for using an mp3 player with a car stereo.  I bought a cheap, cigarette lighter-powered transmitter and got it last week.  I plugged it into my car's cigarette lighter and it powered up, so things were going well.  But as soon as I plugged the audio cable into my mp3 player, there was a god-awful noise loudly flowing through my car speakers.  I wiggled the plug around a little bit and eventually got the noise to stop, but the audio quality coming out of my radio was pitiful.  I briefly imagined I would just have to deal with it as yet another hindrance in the whole audio portability problem. 

I went to a store and happened to see a similar FM transmitter for a similar price, but this one was made by Philips.  I decided to give it a try, wondering if a brand name audio device would have any superiority over a cheap Chinese knock-off. 

It turns out there's more than a slight difference.  The difference in audio quality is unimaginable.  The quality of sound coming out of my car's stereo is equal to CD quality audio.  And this is with an mp3 player, with songs encoded at 128 kbit/s.  There isn't even a comparison.  The "thing" I bought off eBay isn't in the same league.  It barely even qualifies as an FM transmitter in my opinion. 

So, in conclusion, eBay isn't the best place to buy everything, especially in terms of the third definition of fidelity:  "The degree to which an electronic system accurately reproduces the sound or image of its input signal." #products

I just discovered the world of retractable cords (they roll up into themselves or into a holder, like a tape measure), and I don't understand why all cords aren't retractable.  All cords are longer than they need to be, which is good because otherwise we'd have to use extension cords or link similar cords together.  But since normal cords aren't retractable, there's a pile of loose cords behind every major electronic device and near every outlet.  It's stupid.  What the world needs is more retractable cords.  That's my platform; vote for me. #products

Whenever I buy a new gadget, I make a product comparison matrix.  This might be one of the geekiest things I do, but it's also the best idea any human being has ever come up with.  It turns out I'm not alone:  One of the guys I work with does the same thing for camping gear.  I got Wendy into it when she was thinking about buying an iPod.  What can I say; it works. 

The system is simple.  All products have features, and all features have some sort of value.  Size, weight, megapixels, LCD size, storage space, price, etc.  Depending on the device and the user, each feature will have a different weight.  For example, I might place more emphasis on LCD size and less emphasis on megapixels.  So a 5-megapixel camera with a 3-inch LCD will be rated higher than a 10-megapixel camera with a 2-inch LCD.  The rating system is sort of fuzzy, or at least it can be.  Technically, ratings should have numbers, so the final choice will be as simple as picking the highest number.  But unfortunately, things don't always work that way.  It's hard to quantify my desire for a bigger LCD versus my desire for more megapixels.  I'll often make my final choice based on an array of time-sensitive and hard-to-explain reasoning, such as, "This one's the better camera, but that other one is $100 less for the next two days.  I'll get the other one." 

It turns out this is actually something I learned in college.  It's a way to choose a final design based on several choices.  I didn't realize I was using something I learned in school until I learned it again in another class.  Damn my education!  It stuck with me! 

It also turns out this method can be applied to choosing political candidates, as Wendy has figured out.  It's really the same idea, but with different "features".  Each candidate has a position on each issue, and each issue has a relative weight depending on the voter.  I might value government subsidies for poor, homeless, illegal immigrants (I don't) while another person might want to nuke the moon.  My point is not that politics is a big stupid waste of time (though it is), but that you can choose a candidate as easily as you can choose a digital camera. #products

I like reading the first few words of lifetime warranties.  They usually say something like, "This product is guaranteed to last for the entire life of the product."  Wikipedia clarifies:  "This is not to say that the product is guaranteed for the lifetime of the consumer ... A lifetime warranty is a guarantee on the lifetime of the product."  So in other words, a lifetime warranty says a product will last as long as it lasts.  After it dies or ceases to work, it'll no longer last.  Ah, lawyers. #products

Introducing the Babykeeper. 
Finally, a way to hang kids from walls.  (via Presurfer) #products

Most misleading game title ever:  Travel Trivia Challenge.  It's not travel size, it's about travel.  Boo. #products

Is it bad that this makes me drool? 
8.1MP, 5x optical zoom, 3.5-inch widescreen touchscreen LCD, image stabilization. 

Even though it's a Sony and I dislike everything Sony, I can't help but be amazed by this camera. #products

I'm a geek.  I buy gadgets.  Before any major gadget purchase, I look for product reviews.  Most times, Google doesn't do a very good job of finding product reviews.  It usually finds a few comparison shopping websites where Average Joe writes about his terrible experience buying it online and the subsequent time it took to collect the number of pieces formed when the product was dropped off a tall building onto a rock.  Average Joe is an idiot.  I don't drop my gadgets off tall buildings onto rocks.  I'm good with my gadgets, so I usually want a product review with a little more intelligence.  A great place for good online product reviews is CNET.  They usually have a pretty thorough writeup done by someone with more than half a brain.  The best part about it is that they'll say if a product sucks.  They're not the kind of company that's just happy to get free products from manufacturers so they'll give a good review no matter what.  CNET is big enough to not care about giving a product a bad review, and I've often found that I'd rather know why a product sucks than why it's great. #products