Just another useless personal blog
I’ve been seeing a bunch of Hummer commercials lately that all follow the same pattern: some man or woman is embarrassed or backs down in a social situation, they immediately march off to a Hummer dealership, point out one, and drive off in smug satisfaction.
I never would have imagined that they’d so blatantly embrace its reputation as a vehicle that people buy to overcompensate for their inadequacies and use it as a selling point in their own ads…
Last night I dreamed that I had somehow ruined the outcome of the World Cup because of the way I was sleeping in bed, and the proof was the second set of legs in the bed. Just legs.
I think I need to go back to the hospital, but to the mental ward this time…
I don’t remember chess ever being this eventful…
In a similar vein to Penguin Baseball, this is one of the strangest Flash games I’ve seen recently:
I was at one of the local malls yesterday, and on the way to the washrooms by the food court I noticed a little video screen just outside the entrance. It was showing advertising, of course, and I guess it makes sense to locate them there since it’s such a high-traffic area.
What I *wasn’t* expecting was the whole row of smaller LCD screens located just above the urinals… Advertising there isn’t all that new either, but the mechanics of this method work out just slightly differently. There’s a certain amount of electronics, framing, and mounting needed to put that LCD screen there, of course, and the end result is that the screen sticks out far enough that it winds up being about two inches away from your face.
At least none of the ads were of scantily-clad women…
(Yes, it’s a news-as-filler day.)
Woman Dies After Six Years On Couch
How the hell do you even let yourself get into that kind of state? Did she just think to herself “Y’know, this is comfy, I think I’m just not going to get up ever again…”? And if the guy living with her wanted to help so much, why not call the cops to forcibly remove her for her own good? Yeesh…
While I was walking to the office this morning, headphones on and the PocketPC playing, a slightly-dishevelled gentleman standing by a bike motioned to me as I passed by. I paused a moment and took the headphones off, mentally preparing a polite apology that I could not help, but instead I was surprised to see him reach into a pack and bring out a CD wallet, which he opened to reveal a number of CD-R discs. He then asked if I had a CD player, to which I mumbled something like “Er, no, not really, sorry…” and then went on my way. I’ve heard of the old cliche of someone selling copied video tapes out of their trunk, of course, but this is the first time I’ve personally run into anything like it, and a bit higher-tech even.
Looking back, it doesn’t even make much sense. If I’m so desperate for cheap, pirated music, I can get nearly anything I’d want easily enough for free. Oh well, it helped make the day a little more surreal, at least…
One of the more interesting links I’ve run across lately: Yamaha Motor Corporation Paper Sculpture
Interesting because, a) it’s amazing what you can do with just paper (and infinite patience, probably), and b) Yamaha???
An interesting read about the whole Killdozer phenomenon.
Looking through the logs, I’ve been seeing some strange queries from Yahoo’s crawler recently:
[19/Jul/2004:21:34:09 -0600] "GET /MadonnaCiconne/parcel-problems/mboic.htm HTTP/1.0" [19/Jul/2004:21:43:14 -0600] "GET /ambush/000122.htm HTTP/1.0" [20/Jul/2004:05:21:00 -0600] "GET /sis/000186/favorpopscandy.htm HTTP/1.0" [20/Jul/2004:07:20:38 -0600] "GET /lokalen_pa_nett.htm HTTP/1.0"
It’s like bits and pieces of legitimate paths on my site are getting mixed in with random keywords. Either their crawler has gone a bit bonkers, or some other site out there is making up random links and it’s trying to follow those…
(found via jwz’s LJ)
From the Georgia General Assembly:
(c) Any person seeking to have an execution performed shall first seek a grand jury indictment against the fetus for the commission of an offense for which the death penalty can be given, including the offense of murder as defined in Code Section 16-5-1, kidnapping as defined in Code Section 16-5-40, hijacking an aircraft as defined in Code Section 16-5-44, rape as defined in Code Section 16-6-1, armed robbery as defined in Code Section 16-8-41, or treason as defined in Code Section 16-11-1.
I tell ya, I was scared at first when I saw the gun in its tiny little proto-hands. But then I looked over at Bob and I knew we were going to be alright when I saw him hide the coathanger under his jacket…
Alas, goatse.cx is no more. See this thread for more information on what happened behind the scenes. (Warning, disturbing inline images.)
What was it? If you don’t know, then consider yourself lucky. And do *not* visit that link above… If you really still want to know, well, it was a very candid look at a particular man’s rectal elasticity capabilities, to put it delicately (nothing to do with goats)…
What was the big deal then? In short, it was a focus of Internet mischief. It was a common volley in wars between people trying to gross each other out. Pranksters of all types would try to trick people into visiting it, through everything from simple direct links to fool newbies who’d never heard of it, all the way up to elaborate scripting to hide the true url to catch the suspicious and wary. In many circles people are now so suspicious that they carefully check each URL they see posted several different ways before daring to click on it. It was a form of punishment, something you would direct people to after you caught them stealing your image bandwidth. It was also a test of mettle, to see just how jaded you’d become to seeing shocking things on the net.
And now it is gone, at least officially. It will live on in various forms, of course. Many, many people have already ‘experienced’ it and it is one of those images that once seen, cannot be un-seen, and will be forever burned into their minds. And certainly some people will have the image cached away, ready to strike from their own private servers. It just won’t be the same, though.
Oh well, there’s always tubgirl…
As I was leaving the Bow Valley Square building after finishing lunch, I saw something a bit on the strange side. A lot of people were walking around holding flat boxes. The exact same kind of box. *Everywhere* I looked — at least half of the people around must have been carrying them. Otherwise they looked just like the regular lunchtime crowd going around their business.
On the boxes was a logo I’d only seen or heard about from news sites and friends in the States before: the logo of Krispy Kreme. Strange, I thought, I don’t think we even have one of their shops here.
It must have been a promotion nearby of some kind, but I couldn’t tell exactly where they were all coming from. All too aware that their allegedly tasty temptations were a threat to my current diet, I fled the area and returned to the safety of my own doughnut-less office.
And then as I was typing this, my team manager leaned in my office door with a familiar-looking box and said “Hey, want one of these?”…