09/29/2004: Is Britney pregnant?  Is Major League Baseball really coming back to Washington DC?  Did Italy really pay $1 million to secure the release of two female hostages?  Will Mount St. Helens blow its top again?  Will the police be able to get to the professor's house before Billy and the Dynamo Boys can seize the professor's zeppelin?  Will Penelope be able to free herself from the train tracks before the 4:15 to Albuquerque?  These and other answers... will come tomorrow!

October 2004
 

10/15/2004: Woo-Hoo!!  Welcome to the newly re-designed jimcofer.com site!  I hope you like it!  I'm not entirely happy with it just yet, so you can expect some tweaking in the near future. Specifically, I'm not too happy with the color scheme and it's "circa 1998 look".  I'm sure long time Ars Technica fans will notice a distinct similarity to my new site and Ars' old one.  I guess that's not an accident, although I honestly didn't plan it out that way.  I had planned to do a complete overhaul of this site early this summer.  And by "complete" I mean "ditching FrontPage and going to CCS" or something else that drastic.  Of course, like many grandiose plans, this re-design kept getting scaled back and scaled back to the point where I had no plans at all for updating the site, yet still had a home page that said that I did.  It was embarrassing.  So I ditched the idea completely.  Until last week, when I was surfing some articles at the Wikipedia and stumbled across an article about Edward Johnston, who is famous for many things, but is most remembered for creating the London Underground font.  I do plead guilty to being an unrepentant Anglophile - especially these days for some reason - but I've always thought that the Underground font was one of the greatest triumphs of Western Civilization.  At that moment, I just *had* to use it on my website.  So I replaced the jimcofer.com text in the upper-right corner of this page with a GIF I created in Photoshop using the actual, licensed P22 London Underground font.  And then I replaced the "Welcome to jimcofer.com" text with the same.  And then... and then.. and then.. And then the whole site was under the knife.  It's sort of like those times when you open a drawer to look for something and notice that it's a mess - and the next thing you know you've dumped everything out of all your drawers and cabinets in a cleaning frenzy - which just ends up being yet another useless drive to stave off entropy.  But I digress.  One thing that really sucks about this website from my end is that I never bothered to use Microsoft's built-in style features (Header1, Header2, Normal text), so to update this site I had to visit each and every page and redo everything by hand.  Which isn't that bad in itself, except that in so doing I found a lot of older pages with wonky tables, clunky sentences and\or really out of date information.  Plus there's what I call the "Microsoft disease" - which is when a page of text that is in one font defaults to Times New Roman when you open it up for editing.  So many pages - which would have taken around a minute to simply change the style - ended up taking 10, 20, 30 or even 45 minutes to get up to snuff.  And not everything is fixed yet!  Having said that, you might want to to check out some pages you haven't seen in a while, as there might be new or updated information on them.  Lastly - with regards to the site redesign - I finally decided to ditch the various Simpsons graphics that have been on this site.  I've been waiting for a cease and desist order from Fox for a couple of years now and hopefully I won't get one now that I've stopped using their copyrighted characters.  Lastly - aside from updating the look of the site and adding the occasional new sentence here and there - I also updated the Useless Fact.

So - what's been going on in the world since I've been busy with the site??  Well, retail giant Wal Mart decided that it wants to sell it's music CDs for less than $10 and is putting considerable pressure on the RIAA to cut prices.  This must have the music industry pissing in their pants - around 20% of all major-label CDs sold in the United States are sold through Wal Mart, yet all those CDs only make up 2% of Wal Mart's totals sales.  In other words, Wal Mart could stop selling music altogether if it doesn't get the deal it wants from the music industry... and this would hardly make a dent in Wal Mart's sales figures but could devastate Big Music.  The story I linked to quotes one record company executive as saying "if they got out of selling music, it would mean nothing to them. This keeps me awake at night."  Serves them right!  In political news, the Electoral Vote Predictor - updated yesterday - shows Bush beating Kerry by a score of 284 228 electoral votes.  That's a cool site - you should check it out!  Speaking of politics, could someone help me out with something??  When Michael Moore makes what is an unabashedly partisan movie, the "usual suspects" (the Garofalos, the Sarandons, the Baldwins) can't lavish enough praise on Moore's "insight" and "courage" for making a fine film.  But when some dares to make an anti-Kerry film, those same usual suspects can't get the FCC on the phone fast enough... Isn't that just a bit hypocritical, folks?  Is some speech more equal than others?  Good news from the FCC though (boy, that's the first time I've ever written that!) - they won't stop the airing of "Stolen Honor".  One last political story - it seems that the new Transportation Security Agency (TSA) is good at at least one thing - wasting huge amounts of taxpayer dollars!

On a happier note, a tiny koala baby has become the star of a Sydney zoo (you just gotta see the picture) after being born at just 11 ounces.  And in China, men don't have to exercise to get a chest that resembles Arnold Schwarzenegger - they can just get breast implants!  What a weird world it is, folks.  So weird that one of the most popular blogs on the 'Net belongs to none other than Adam Curry - the former MTV VJ.  In addition to being one of the first on the block to embrace the newest Internet fad - podcasting (Curry actually wrote much of the code for the open-source iPodder program) - his blog has lots of amusing stories about 80s bands from his MTV days.  Check it out when you have the time!

10/26/2004: From the "It's NOT Vaporware" department: It seems that OQO has finally shipped the Model 01!  The Model 01 is a full-fledged computer the size of a paperback book that has a 1 GHz processor, 20GB HD, 256MB RAM, WiFi, Bluetooth, USB, FireWire, thumb keyboard, and an 800x480 indoor/outdoor LCD.  It comes with Windows XP and can run any piece of software your desktop PC can.  It's designed to work as a stand-alone computer, not a "tethered device" like a Palm or Pocket PC that require a desktop PC for full functionality. As I reported on this site a year or two ago, it's simply a stunning piece of engineering, but it's not without its flaws.  It doesn't come with any type of optical drive, so you've gotta buy an external USB CD or DVD drive to install programs if you don't have an available Wi-Fi network.  And apparently this thing gets hot!  But like most cutting-edge hardware, the biggest flaw is its price - $1899 for one with XP Home and $1999 for one with XP Pro.  For that kind of cheese you can buy yourself an awesome laptop that can do everything the Model 01 can do - and more - with none of its flaws.  Of course, it will be much larger than a Model 01.  Oh well - at least the Model 01 wins the "cool contest" hands down!  In other news, legendary British DJ John Peel - whose "Peel Sessions" albums were a sure sign a band had officially "made it" in the 1980s - has died while on vacation in Peru.  To show you how HUGE this guy was, British Prime Minister Tony Blair released a statement calling Peel "an extraordinary and unique personality". who "unearthed different sounds and people and made them accessible and popular... he was a genuine one off - and a warm and decent human being too."  That's big - rarely does the head of any government release such a statement - but then again, Peel was larger than life too.  He will be missed!  In other death news, the deceased relatives of Austrian composer Mozart will soon undergo DNA tests to find out if the skull currently held by the Mozarteum is indeed that of Wolfgang Amadeus.  Mozart was buried in Vienna, but his remains were dug up a few years later and subsequently lost.  A skull purported to be that of the great composer was presented to the Mozarteum in 1902; these tests will hopefully prove once and for all if it is indeed his.  And lastly for today's "death news", according to Forbes Magazine Elvis Presley is still earning $40 million a year, even though he's dead.  He tops their annual "dead celebrities" list, beating out second-place Charles Schultz and third-place J.R.R. Tolkien.  In news of the living, it seems that drivers in California are now liable to be arrested for drunk driving after drinking a certain type of herbal tea.  And lastly, members of the general public will now be referred to as "the public" rather than "strangers" in Britain's parliament.     

10/29/2004: It looks like ABC is in trrrooouuubbblleee!!  It seems that the Alphabet Net is scheduling Lost to run from 8:00 to 9:01 on Wednesday nights - which means that Tivo users won't be able to record any show that comes on directly after Lost, namely The West Wing.  You see, most Tivo boxes have only one tuner - which means that you can only watch (and record) one show at any given time.  And because Tivo gets its programming information from the networks - for newbies, that means you don't set a Tivo to record "Wednesday, 8:00 to 9:01", rather you simply tell Tivo to record Lost and it automatically looks up the date and time for the recording - Tivo will give you an error if you try and schedule it to record any show that runs from 9:00 to 10:00 on Wednesdays.  People like me that have Time Warner DVRs are in a slightly better position, as our boxes have two tuners, but this does mean that we cannot record two shows after Lost, only one.  Now, it would be one thing if ABC was "super sizing" Lost, but it's not; instead of adding a couple of extra minutes of content, it's simply changing the published times of the program in order to interfere with other recordings.  Complaints about this "dirty trick" are starting to trickle in from all over the Internet - expect it to gather stream in the next couple of weeks.  In "real" news, it looks like that old bastard Yasser Arafat might finally be on the way out; what's truly sad about the whole thing is that the fucking FRENCH are giving aid and comfort (not to mention top-notch medical attention) to this worthless piece of garbage.  To paraphrase Walt Kelly, "I have seen the enemy, and he is Pierre".  One news item that I meant to post on Wednesday: the first operational F-22 Raptor rolled off the assembly line this week.  This is a truly kick-ass aircraft that you should read up on sometime.  America's enemies should be afraid.. Very afraid.  In stranger news, it seems that a conductor on a British train stamped (and carefully returned) the the ticket of a man.. who wasn't sleeping but was very much dead.  How's that for embarrassing?  Also - and you should certainly take this with a grain of salt - but it appears that a Chupacabra has been shot in Texas.  Sightings of this mythical animal (as in, supposedly as real as Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster) began in Puerto Rico where small livestock began being found mangled to death and/or sucked clean of their blood  - hence the name (chupacabra translates to goat sucker).  Later sightings have popped up in Mexico, Chile and some parts of the Southwestern US.  Although the pictures on that site *do* tend to look like a wolf with the world's worst case of mange, there *is* something creepy about it.  Look at the ears on that thing... that doesn't look like any coyote, wolf or wild dog I know.  Perhaps it's some wild African dog that somehow ended up here?  Who knows?  ON THE WEBSITE FRONT: I added five new reviews to my Rotten Tomatoes movie journal and also updated the Rant and Useless Fact for this week.  In case you missed it, I also moved the "Future of TV" ramble that used to occupy this very space to its own page.  Also, if you know my family, you might know that my sister is a dispatcher for Gwinnett County 911; what you might not know is that you can listen to her live on the Internet at ScanGwinnett.  I gotta tell you, it's sorta weird to hear her say "10-4 on that code twenty, 612 - please proceed to 5211 Breckenridge to check out a four-three" over the Internet.

12/22/2004: So how's this for an odd coincidence?  This past Monday, a UPS driver in New Hampshire was delivering a much-needed replacement part to Cheshire Medical Center when he got into a serious accident that resulted in a head injury.  However, when the ambulance carrying the UPS driver got to the hospital, doctors couldn't run the tests they needed to... because the part they needed to fix the scanner was still sitting in the man's wrecked delivery truck!  Don't sweat it though: someone was sent to get the part out of the truck, the machine was fixed and the UPS driver will be just fine.  It could be worse for you though: you could have been fired from your job at Buckingham Place for selling a Christmas pudding gift from Queen Elizabeth on eBay.  Or you could live in Hawaii, where a shortage of Christmas trees has sent prices to the $200 range.  From the "Somehow This Just Doesn't Surprise Me" Department comes news that Adolf Hitler was a tax dodger that owed the equivalent of $8,000,000 in current dollars to the German government.  It's also not surprising that his past tax debts were forgiven when he became chancellor and he never paid taxes after seizing power, either.  Here's a couple of "cool food" items: America is finally set to get self-heating beverages, almost a decade after the rest of the world had them.  In this case, Nescafe and Wolfgang Puck will be rolling out a coffee drink in a self-heating can; look for it soon at stores near you!  And it looks like there are some happy cows in Iowa now that they're getting the Kobe treatment.  It seems that a beer distributor was stuck with a large amount of beer that they could not sell as it was past its expiration date.  So they called up a feed store and offered it to ranchers for free if they'd come and pick it up.  Kobe beef is legendary worldwide for its tenderness and flavor; cows in the Kobe region of Japan have been given daily massages and beer rations for ages.  The beer is thought to relax the animal and also increase its appetite in the summer months.  Whether you believe that massaging cows and rubbing them down with sake helps make for better beef, beer does contain vitamins, minerals, amino acids, carbohydrates and proteins that help round out the cow's diet.  Given how kick-ass Kobe beef is, I'd like to try some of that Iowa "Beer beef" one day!  Needing a retro-80's kick?  Check out this site, which has a nice selection of downloadable commercials from that great decade.  I had completely forgotten that "Pound Puppies", "Chef Boyardee's Hamburger Italiano" and "C-3POs Cereal" even existed!  I *did* remember the kid from the Encyclopedia Britannica commercials, but man I'd forgotten how annoying that little bastard was!  Twenty years later, it's funny to even *see* a commercial for actual, paper encyclopedias.  Who knew then that we'd be able to insert a DVD-ROM disc into our computers and get the same thing, or even skip it altogether and use the Internet for research?  Lastly, here's some kudos to actor Robin Williams... With so many of our Hollywood Overlords protesting the war in Iraq, it's refreshing to see one of them giving their all for our men and women in uniform over there.  One of those soldiers posted this in his blog, which was subsequently picked up by Fox News:  Got a good look at Robin Williams. He came over here for a USO tour. He ate in the dining hall and was surrounded by Marines. His table was across from mine. He had the four Marines he was eating with laughing. Other Marines would come up behind him to talk or shake his hand. When someone wanted a photo with him he would jump up from the table, put his arm around them and pose. He came over to our table for no reason and shook our hands.  You hear a lot about celebrities complaining about their privacy. This guy flew to Iraq on a C-130 and came to give, and the whole time here he gave. The theater was standing room only. The officers did not go so the lower ranking marines could get it.  ON THE WEBSITE FRONT: I tweaked a couple of things on the My Favorite Things page and also added a new category: "Favorite Things To Add To A Peanut Butter Sandwich".  Also updated the Useless Fact.

12/23/2004: Well, it looks like this will be the last update before the holidays, so just allow me to say... MERRY CHRISTMAS!!  I was going to do my "traditional" thing and change the Rant from the usual bellyachin' to something deep and profound about the nature of man and the desire for peace.  But I actually want to keep this particular rant online for just a bit more for all my Charlotte peeps.  So let me just say this instead: thousands of miles away from us, many, many men and women - our sons, daughters, friends and lovers - are keeping the peace in Iraq.  Since Christmas is one of the only times most of you post-modern hipsters ever contemplate praying, I beg you to keep our loved ones in Iraq, Afghanistan and anywhere else in the world in mind as you pray this holiday.  As British author George Orwell once said, “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”  Kind of puts it in perspective, no?  So God bless you, your loved ones and all the faithful departed.  Magnificat anima mea Dominum: et exsultavit spiritus meus in Deo, salutari meo. Quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae: ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent omnes generationes. Quia fecit mihi magna qui potens est: et sanctum nomen eius. Et misericordia eius a progenie in progenies timentibus eum. Fecit potentiam in bracchio suo: dispersit superbos mente cordis sui. Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles. Esurientes implevit bonis: et divites dimisit inanes. Suscepit Israel, puerum suum, recordatus misericordiae suae. Sicut locuts est ad patres nostros, Abraham et semini eius in saecula. Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.

12/28/2004: I sure hope that everyone had a WONDERFUL CHRISTMAS!  I know I sure did - aside from good food and good times with the family - and of course, getting some great stuff! - my beloved Steelers won their 13th game in a row by spankin' the Ravens 20-7!  The boys from Blitzburgh are now 14-1 for the season - which ties them for the best record in the team's 71 year history - and also have home-field advantage for entire playoffs as well as a first round bye.  So where are the Dallas Cowboys?  Watching this all from home!  HERE WE GO STEELERS, HERE WE GO!!  During the holidays, the missus and I sat around with my family at one point and discussed all the things the Cofer family has in common - being night owls, loving black pepper, being constantly thirsty... so imagine my surprise when I got back to Charlotte and stumbled on this BBC article which suggests that being a night owl is probably genetic!  It's 4 in the morning as I type this... maybe I should call my Dad or my sister and tell them about this article... after all, I know they'll be awake! hehehehehe... Have you ever seen those "fireplace videos"?  You know, the videotapes or DVDs of an actual fireplace with burning logs and everything - kind of like those "aquarium videos"?  Well, it's easy to dismiss them as being a waste of money, but come to find out, "fireplace videos" have a long and (somewhat) storied past.  The phenomenon started back in NYC in the 1970s, when a small independent TV station wanted to stay on the air during Christmas, yet also be able to send everyone home for the holiday.  A quick-thinking staffer suggested pre-recording hours of burning logs in a fireplace for the many NYC residents that wanted the Christmas spirit, yet didn't have a real fireplace in their apartments or condos.  And thus, a legend was born.  I'm sure most of fans of the "burning log" were into it for the "cheese factor", but it somehow struck a chord with someone... after all, the station was inundated with hate mail when it announced that the "burning log" would be retired.  Station management changed their minds and not only did the "burning log" stay on the air, but many other stations picked up on it too.  Which is why I'm telling you this...  Because last year TV station KSTC in the Minneapolis\St. Paul area ran a "burning log" video commercial-free for 24 hours... and it actually beat Dr. Phil in the ratings!  I'm not sure what that says about the population of Minneapolis\St. Paul *or* Dr. Phil, but I found it uproariously funny regardless!  Here's one last holiday-related (well, sort of) story for you: did you know that hundreds of devices are now being "made Kosher"??  You might be aware the Orthodox Jews are forbidden to do any work on the Sabbath.  A long time ago, this meant not creating any fires for cooking or working, but in modern day terms it means that Jews are forbidden from doing all sorts of mundane things - like pressing elevator buttons - since the circuit this completes "creates fire" in a religious sense.  Come to find out though, many appliance makers are taking the Orthodox market seriously by offering models with a "Sabbath mode", which hopes to conform to Jewish law by a variety of means.  For example, a "Kosher refrigerator"  can be set to automatically cycle on and off randomly on the Sabbath as well as automatically turning off the interior light in the fridge.  By not making the fridge turn its compressor on when you open the door (which most models do because of the influx of warm air) and by keeping the light off, Orthodox Jews can safely open the fridge without fear of making God mad.  Check out this article on Wired about it - it's definitely some interesting stuff.  How about an "Anglican refrigerator" that kicks in to "super-cold" mode to get my ale extra cold as mass is ending??  Lastly, if you live in the Charlotte area, you may want to know that the fine for driving by yourself in an HOV lane isn't $100 (as posted on the roadway signage) but is actually just $10.  ON THE WEBSITE FRONT: Updated the Windows Slipstream Page with information about slipstreaming SP2 into Windows XP.

12/30/2004: Hi Everybody!  Several months ago - around the time of the Madonna show - I  was looking around at available Madonna-centric domain names.  I noticed that one name in particular - ilovemadonna.com - was set to expire on November 15th of this year.  My favorite domain registrar - the people that handle the registration of domain names - is godaddy.com.  That company - like most registrars - offer a "Domain Watch" service.  This means that - for a small fee - they monitor a domain name for you and register it in your name as soon as it becomes available.  So I signed up to snag the name and on December 20th, I was notified that godaddy had indeed snagged the domain for me.  And so - the reason I'm typing all of this out for you - is that you can now reach this site through http://www.ilovemadonna.com.  I'd also like to inform you that my new "primary" email address is jimATilovemadonna.com.  While the old jimATn2madonna.com address will continue to work for at least eight months, I'd prefer that you use the new one ASAP.

12/31/2004: Removed.

01/05/2005: First post of the new year!  I hope that EVERYONE had a wonderful Christmas and a kickin' new year!  Allow me to kick off this new year with a deliciously voyeuristic new Google hack for you... It seems that the Panasonic KX-HCM10 security camera can be accessed remotely over a network and even has a built-in web server that allows someone with access to your site and a web browser to not only see what the camera sees, but allows you to (in many cases) manipulate the camera as well - panning back and forth, up and down, zooming in and out, etc.  So here's where Google come in: search for the following string: inurl:"ViewerFrame?Mode=" and this will return hits on unsecured cameras throughout the world.  This works because any camera connected to an outside network will have "ViewerFrame?Mode=" in its address, so by using the inurl: operator, Google will search for any indexed pages that specifically have "ViewerFrame?Mode=" in it's address.  Thus, you get the security cameras in your web browser.  I was trying this trick this morning and it was *so cool*.  The camera appears to be quite popular in Japan, so I was able to look around (what appeared to be) an outpatient hospital, a laundromat, an QA or development lab and a few other places in the Land of the Rising Sun.  I can't tell you how creepy yet fun it is to be able not only to see inside these places, but also to be able to manipulate the camera as well.  It looked like someone had left a TV on in the waiting area of the outpatient hospital, and I was able to zoom in to try and see what was on.  Some early riser was in the QA Lab early this morning, so I decided to watch him work for for a few minutes.  As he moved around, I followed him.  And the Japanese aren't the only ones you can hack... I was able to check out a security camera at a major American university too!  I won't say which one, but think about "melons".  It's bizarre, it's voyeuristic and it's geeky.  It's sort of Godlike.  And it's fun.  In other news, the Steelers kept their march to the Super Bowl going by beating up the Bills (using third-stringers =, no less!) this past Sunday.  It's SO AWESOME to finally be able to read such gushing articles about my team, like this bit from MSNBC: The NFL playoffs don't begin until Saturday, but the league's best team is already known. It's the only team with a 15-1 record. It's the team that didn't mail it in the final two weeks despite having a nice cushion, injured players and desperate quality opponents on the schedule. It's the team with the best defense of any team in the playoffs. It's the team that can run the ball and control the clock, or strike quickly by throwing deep down the field to a trio of receivers. It's the Pittsburgh Steelers, silly.  Damn right!  HERE WE GO STEELERS, HERE WE GO!  Oh and speaking of hacking, two couples in Tennessee have been charged with defrauding Wal Mart of $1.5 million by printing UPC codes for low-priced items at home and placing them over the valid UPC codes for high priced items at the store.  They would then sell the merchandise or return it to the store for a gift card, which then would then sell for pennies on the dollar.  You might recall that a website offering information on how to do just this was shut down back in 2002; it looks like these folks were able to get away with this scam for much longer.  Brought to light this week is news that 1970s batshit-crazy African dictator Idi Amin once planned a "Save Britain Fund" to thumb his nose at his former "colonial oppressors".  Britain was - of course - deep in an economic maelstrom during this time and Amin thought one of the best ways to humiliate Britain would be to publicly try and "save it".  As you might guess, Her Majesty's government has not impressed.  You should check out that article; it's good for a laugh.  And lastly (for now), I urge you to visit a site called Band Aid Dilemma.  This site was put online shortly after the release of the horrible new "Band Aid 20" single in the UK.  What the site advocates is for people to go out and buy as many copies of the new single as they can afford (to help starving Africans), then send them pictures of you destroying the single in new and creative ways (to help humor-starved Europeans and Americans).  And the single really is that bad.  I should just mention that I found the site through Ars Technica, where a guy mentioned in a post that he had found and downloaded this picture (WARNING: possibly not work safe) to post in his cube at the office.  I have one hanging in my computer room right now - for some reason, it cracks me up every time I look at it!  ON THE WEBSITE FRONT: Nothing new yet, but I am planning to update the BIttorrent page now that several torrent sites have been forced to close by the MPAA.  I also promise to update the Rant and Useless Fact sometime this week as well.  Oh, and sorry about posting the This Mortal Coil lyrics late New Year's Eve night.  I swear, I should take out a court order on myself to keep me away from the computer when lots of liquor is involved.

01/06/2005: This story has to be seen to be believed!  It seems that a 67 year-old Bulgarian man was accidentally knocked down by a car on or around December 20th.  He appeared to be intoxicated, so police gave him a breathalyzer test, which gave a reading of 0.914.  Yes, you read correctly - 0.914.  As you might know, a blood alcohol content (BAC) of .08 will get you arrested in every state in the Union.  Most doctors consider 0.55 to be "life-threatening".  Yet, this guy's BAC was almost twice that!  The cops understandably thought there might be something wrong with their testing equipment, so the man was taken to a local hospital.  Five samples of the man's blood were taken there - and each one reported the same 0.914 level of intoxication.  Police were simply astounded by the event, because "the man was conscious and talked with them", said Col. Angel Rangelov, head of police in Plovdiv.  Wow... just... wow!  It could have been worse for that guy though...  Saudi officials recently beheaded and crucified a man accused of robbing his own mother.  Jesus! (heh) Beheaded AND crucified?  Man, I'm all about me some "law and order" but that's just overkill even for me.  But I'd bet that even the Saudis would be afraid of Nancy Boyd-Porter, a St. Louis woman that has been charged with using a hammer and pliers to punish her son for not doing his homework.  According to the cops, Porter "had her other sons hold down the victim while she hit him in the hand with a hammer. She then squeezed the boy's fingers with a pair of pliers and threatened to break them".  Hey, I'm all for sending any future children of mine to the Our Lady of the Bleeding Knuckles school, but damn - that's harsh.  And the poor kid... how do you ever look at your Mom the same way after she goes Uday Hussein on your ass?  In happier news, the Googling of network security cams goes on.  As I reported yesterday, a certain model of Panasonic security camera can be connected to a network.  If the owners do not properly secure network access to the camera, Google will index the site and add it to its results pages - if you know how to search for it.  I've been sneaking peeks at places all over the world - a few American universities, a garage for racing cars in Australia and dozens of places all over Japan.  This is some interesting stuff for two reasons: one, unlike "web cams" these cameras can usually be controlled via the Internet, so you can move the camera back and forth, up and down and (on some models) zoom in and out.  The other appeal is obvious... unlike web cams - where the site owner usually says "LOOK HERE FOR THE WEBCAM!!!!", these things are supposed to be secret.  Part of the appeal of hacking is getting somewhere you're not supposed to be, and this nails that feeling.  Look down to the next paragraph for more info about the hack or visit this page at the Ars Technica forums for more info and some fun screen shots - including one by yours truly.  Also, (I failed to mention this yesterday) accessing the cameras requires Internet Explorer, as the motion controls are loaded to your computer via an ActiveX control.  ON THE WEBSITE FRONT: Updated the Rant and Useless Fact as promised.

01/07/2005: Allow me to clear up one thing first of all: this article in the New York Times will back up what I've been saying all along: "Diet Sprite" and "Sprite Zero" are the same damn drink.  Apparently it's passé to to refer to something as "diet".  Diet stuff tastes bad.  It represents repressing yourself.  "Zero" and "Free" (as in Pepsi's "Sierra Mist Free", which was originally launched as "Diet Sierra Mist" only last year) are the new buzzwords.  Diet Sprite has always been caffeine-free, calorie-free and carbohydrate-free.  I just wanted to clear that up.  What in God's name is up with CBS News??  I'm sure you all remember the Memogate scandal that broke just before the election last year.  You might not be familiar with some of the smaller incidents that have happened since: Dan Rather's carefully worded (and delusional) "apology" for the story, stonewalling the report about the incident (we're still waiting for it), possible evidence tampering with regards to the report, the CBS News van with anti-Bush material displayed in its windshield, killing another anti-Bush story a week after the airing of the original Memogate story due to its "inappropriate timing" (apparently a botched hatchet job a week earlier was OK though), running a story about how Bush wants to reinstitute the draft (which is itself a lie) in which Beverly Cocco was portrayed as a "concerned Republican mother" instead of the Democrat and a chapter president of People Against the Draft that she really is,  planned to re-package and re-run a story from 2003 (about the long debunked "missing explosives") as new only three days before the election... and even ran a story accusing bloggers of being paid political operatives. But what happened this week might be a new low.  According to this story at DiveNewsWire (I didn't know that divers had their own PR system either), a company called Ocean Rover Cruises is furious at CBS News for their "bait and switch" coverage of the aftereffects of the tsunami on coral reefs in the area.  The story says that "our Cruise Director Hans Tibboel described one specific divesite in Surin Island with the words: 'it looked like a giant sandblaster was used'. Again, Hans was describing only one divesite and made positive remarks about the actual lack of damage at other places. Of course, the CBS editor used the 'sandblast' soundbite and hardly anything else".  Not only that, but apparently "footage was also arranged in a 'before & after' method that is not consistent with the real situation. All the beautiful 'before' footage shown by CBS was actually filmed AFTER the tsunami".  The story goes on to day that "the news piece [that] came out is 100% the opposite of what was promised to us.... The CBS piece is damaging to our reputation and business. It paints the wrong picture about the true level of coral damage in the Similans AND it makes our own website reports look like lies".  How many more viewers will CBS lose to places like Fox News before they figure out that lying is bad?  Man, I used to joke about NPR running "all the news that fits our views", but it looks like SeeBS now owns THAT crown! In some Geek News that I've been holding back on, three designers at the Royal College of Art in London have invented concrete that can display information.  Apparently you take normal concrete and "mix [it] with thermochromic ink and with nickel chromium wires installed right below or behind" where you want to display something.  When power hits the wires, things can be displayed.  It sure would be cool to have a clock actually embedded in the concrete at a train station (see this link for pics), but I don't know how practical it will be.  Of more immediate use are the many new innovations in compact storage that are flooding out of the CES trade show.  For example, Seagate is rolling out a 5GB Compact Flash hard drive, which will surely fit enough pictures on it to allow you to go on vacation for months at a time.  If only your boss would agree! Sandisk is also rolling out a SCHWEET little SD card that has a built-in USB adapter.  SD cards are typically the size of a matchbook, and this one is no exception.  However, this card is hinged in the middle and a super-thin USB adapter pops out when the card is folded in half.  Lastly - even though I could go on and on about the cool stuff coming out of CES - I wanted to tell you about the Beyond Bread Maker.  This little jewel can bake any bread or cake mix simply by scanning the mix's UPC code.  Open bag, dump into bread maker, add water and\or some eggs, scan bag.  How much simpler could you get? ON THE WEBSITE FRONT: Aside from this update?  Nothing.  Have a good weekend!

01/17/2005: I don't have much in the way of news today.  Some art experts in Germany found what they believe to be the last portrait of Mozart - which a museum purchased all the way back in 1934 but only recently had restored.  And of course, the Huygens probe is sending back some spectacular images from the surface of Titan, one of Saturn's moons.  But the biggest news (to me) is that I've finally entered the world of HDTV.  And it's just amazing!  The level of detail available in football games will just take your breath away - individual snowflakes on Teddy Bruschi's uniform... each tiny clump of dirt that comes off the field when Edgerrin James plants his foot... Being able to make out the faces of everyone in the crowd... Wow!  Just wow!  Of course, HDTV has a downside.  Nicollette Sheridan and Terri Hatcher look pretty damn crusty in HDTV.  Troy Aikman looks even stupider in HDTV.  The Fox Charlotte news team looks more like people you'd see walking around Gaston Mall than glamorous news anchors.  I guess genetics will have to kick "pretty" into high-gear before HDTV becomes standard in 2050, or whenever the FCC gets around to putting its foot down on broadcasters.  Until then, I'll be reassessing the beauty of the "Desperate Housewives". Oh, here's one last thing I stumbled across this morning: the best contact in sports!  It seems that the NBA was only going to allow 4 teams from the old ABA to join the NBA after their merger back in 1970.  The owners of the St. Louis Spirits knew that they'd never make it to the NBA so their attorney came up with one of the best deals ever: in return for folding their team, the Spirits' owners obtained the right to 1/7 of any future television money received by the surviving ABA teams (Denver, Indiana, New York and San Antonio) - in perpetuity.  This wasn't big money back in the 1970s, but when the NBA took off in the 1980's, the Spirits' former owners started to rake in the dollars... by the millions.  So these people - in exchange for shutting down a team that probably would have folded anyway - get 4/7ths of this money!  How can I get a deal like that? Read this article for more.  ON THE WEBSITE FRONT: I updated the Bittorrent page now that Suprnova and Demonoid are gone; I also tweaked some of the recipes on the Recipes page and added a couple of new links to the Links page. I also updated the Useless Fact.  And lastly (but certainly not least): HERE WE GO STEELERS, HERE WE GO!

01/26/2005: Well, this season is over.  My much beloved Pittsburgh Steelers choked in the AFC Championship Game yet again.  It makes you wonder if Bill Cower is one of those guys that "just can't win the big game".  Oh well... I have no excuses; the Patriots just came to the Steel City and outplayed my guys - basically playing the same game to us that we played with them in our earlier 34-20 victory this year.  As always though, there's always next year...  And while we're on the subject of football, I guess the Eagles proved what Tampa Bay already knew: that if you shut down Michael Vick, you shut down the Falcons.  Oh well... while I cheer for the Falcons (except when they're playing the Steelers), I'm not that heartbroken about their loss.  I am *not* - in any way - looking forward to this year's Super Bowl.  I can't tell which team I hate more - I guess I'll pull for the Eagles just to spite the Pats.  IN OTHER NEWS:  you people that use public WiFi beware of the newest danger out there: the Evil Twin.  It seems that certain hackers will go out an buy signal boosters for their wireless routers to flood a public hotspot with a similar-sounding SSID to the actual network, all the while logging everything you do on the 'Net.  Wow - and you thought WiFi was only for downloading kiddie porn!  Those crazy Germans are at it again: it seems that a 55 year-old unnamed woman kept her father's corpse hidden in a rubbish bin for three years in order to keep collecting his pension benefits.  I guess the Germans are used to stories like these, what with Internet cannibals running around and all.  You know those odd bits of advice your Dad gave you that took you years to figure out?  You know, like "never trust a man with two first names".. Stuff like that?  I think I'm gonna tell my kid "Son, don't trust the Germans" in hopes that one day he'll call me when he's thirty and say "Ooooo!! Now I get it!"  And some death news: as you know, American legend Johnny Carson died over the weekend at age 79.  That man changed TV more than any other single person.  He could interview Sophia Loren or the Alabama State Spelling Bee champ and treat them with equal dignity and candor.  He also had an amazing talent for finding comedians... Just about *any* stand-up comedian that got his or her start in the 70s or 80s owes their start to ol' Johnny.  Sure, his material was sometimes stale and always inoffensive, but Carson could crack you up with a single expression like few others ever could.  God bless you, Johnny - and on the way to heaven make sure you look out for... the fork in the road.  Also, Italy's last WWI veteran died this week at the ripe old age of 110.  For some reason, this affects me a lot.  When I was in grade school, just about everyone had a grandfather that had been in the Army or Navy in WWII, and we always had guest speakers talk about storming the beach at Normandy or surviving the Battle of Midway.  It gave us something that the 60s generation turned their back on - everyday heroes.  This was in the depths of the Cold War, so the lines between Good and Evil were quite sharp, something I think kids today don't have. I guess the last WWI veteran dying makes me think about WWII and those soldiers - our grandfathers - and how they're dying off so fast.  Life is short people, make it worthwhile.  ON THE WEBSITE FRONT: I added a review of the Samsung i600 (a Windows Smartphone) to Critic's Corner. I also updated the Rant and Useless Fact.

02/02/2005: What's up, peoples?  Apparently the not all the dead are actually dead in the morgue in Raleigh.  It seems that one Larry D. Green was hit by a car and declared dead by paramedics.  He was then taken the the morgue where the medical examiner noticed the body taking a shallow breath.  Green was then taken to Duke University Medical Center where he is in critical condition.  Unsurprisingly, a $299 holographic plastic disc called the "SmogBuster Fuel Disc" that you attach to the bottom of your fuel tank... doesn't work.  While I can't fault people for throwing down $5.99 for one of those useless "antenna booster" stickers for your cell phone, I can't believe that some people are throwing down $300 for something that allegedly sends "holographic frequencies into the gas tank and changes the molecular structure of the gasoline".  Ummmmm.. yeah.  Right.  "There's a sucker born every minute" indeed.    Also not surprisingly comes news that liberals are racist too! After years of claiming to hold the moral high ground, I'm glad to see someone start calling the Democrats on their hypocrisy.  After all, for a conservative to be against affirmative action is supposedly racist, but a liberal cartoon explicitly calling Condi Rice a "house nigger" is OK.  Right.  And lastly, here's chilling news from the Middle East: it seems that members of a certain Islamic website have begun tracking Christians on the site for purposes of killing them.  Pictures of Christians - including their wives and children - are posted on the site along with as much personal information - home and work addresses, typical schedules, children's schools, etc. - as the Muslim heretics can find.  If it's any consolation, these people seem to be targeting Christians of Middle Eastern decent that debate Muslims, not Western Christians.  These people are the prime suspects in the ritual murder of a Coptic Christian family - yes, even the couple's 15 and 8 year-old daughters - in Jersey City, NJ a couple of weeks ago.  So much for the "religion of peace".  ON THE WEBSITE FRONT: I updated my review of Time Warner's DVR and also added a new review of the Keane concert in Atlanta last week to Critic's Corner.  I also fixed the table on the Critic's Corner page to make it look a bit better in Firefox.

02/03/2005: I don't have time to post any news items today, but I did want to let you know about some updated stuff on the website.  First of all, I changed the "Top Twenty Album List" for the first time in two years.  I took one album off the list and replaced it with another and also swapped the positions of two existing albums.  Lastly, I also tweaked many of the individual entries on the list; there's no major changes there.  In fact, you probably won't even notice any difference.  See the list's intro page to read more about the changes. I also added a review of the newest Emiliana Torrini album to Critic's Corner and fixed some stupid typos in my review of the Keane show. Finally, those of you that subscribe to the RSS feed should notice some GREAT improvements (finally)!

02/04/2005: What a CRAZY world we live in!  It seems that a defendant was running late for court in London... so the judge sentenced him over his mobile phone!  And after weeks of protest, it seems that the Vermont Teddy Bear Company will *finally* stop selling its infamous "Crazy Bear".  Ah, well... it could be worse.  As in, these two crappy products - some of the worst I've seen in ages!! First off, we have this nice, hand-cranked paper shredder.  Who, exactly, has paperwork so sensitive that it needs shredding, yet is so cheap that they won't buy a motor-powered shredder? Damned if I know.  Then there's the Neuros MPEG-4 recorder.  At first glace, it actually looks like a nice piece of kit, able to record from your TV, cable box, DVD player or other sources without using a PC and all for only $129.  But then there's the fine print: it has no built-in storage capacity, so you have to bring your own SD or CF cards to the party. Not only does this add a significant cost to the box, it also means that recording football games or longish movies is a no-go.  I wonder what focus group thought THAT up?  Oh, speaking of movies, it seems that the James Bond franchise is going back to its roots!  The next Bond movie is reported by the BBC to be Casino Royale, which was Ian Fleming's first James Bond novel and was made into a spoof film starring David Niven back in 1967.  The Beeb reports that Goldeneye director Martin Campbell will helm and that Dougray Scott, Clive Owen and Hugh Jackman are finalists for the role of Bond.  LET'S GO CLIVE OWEN!!!  He's slick, he's cool and he already had a test run of sorts making those BMW Films.  And finally for this fine day, why not check out your knowledge of British history with this quiz at the BBC. Being a nerd, I - of course - got 10 out of 10 correct... How about YOU?  ON THE WEBSITE FRONT: Do you use My Yahoo?  If so, did you know that you can now add jimcofer.com's RSS feed to your My Yahoo! page?  All you've gotta do is right-click on the orange RSS button to the left hand side of this page and select "Copy Shortcut" (Internet Explorer) or "Copy Link Location" (Firefox) and then go your My Yahoo! page and click on Add Content > Add RSS by URL and paste the link you copied into the text box.  Presto - you've got me on your My Yahoo! page!  Firefox users take note: I've also added support for Firefox's "Live Bookmarks" RSS system to this site.  Just click the orange icon in the lower right-hand corner of your browser window then check your "jimcofer.com" bookmark for the latest RSS feeds!  Man, after several months of publishing craptacular RSS feeds, I'm finally getting on the stick and tarting it up right!  Enjoy!  And lastly, I've been meaning to mention this for a couple of weeks now, but have forgotten it EVERY SINGLE TIME I've updated the site.  So here it is finally: I posted a bunch of new reviews on my Rotten Tomatoes site.  Please go there and check it out!

02/05/2005: Once again I don't have time to post any news, but I did want to let you know about a couple of updates to the site.  I updated *and* expanded my Madonna Obsession page and my review of the Samsung i600 cell phone.  "Updated" means that I corrected some typo or grammatical error, but "expanded" means I added a fair amount of new content to these pages, so if it's been a while since you've seen those pages it's worth your while to check them out again.  I also linked the Madonna Obsession page from Critic's Corner for easy access (hitherto you could only get to the Madonna page from the link near the bottom of the About Me page). Lastly, given all my talk about RSS lately I thought I'd link to my What is RSS? page for those of you that still don't know what RSS is.  So that's it for today.  I'm entering "Super Bowl lock-down" mode, so don't expect any new content until after Super Sunday... and possibly not even on Hangover Monday.

02/08/2005: Wow - I've got a slew of news for you today! First of of all we have the Welsh rugby fan that cut off his own testicles to celebrate Wales' win over England in the Six Nations rugby tournament.  Hats off to you, my friend... it's often that a sports fan says "if [insert team name here] wins, I'll cut my nuts off!", but this guy actually had the (errr) stones to do it.  A bit extreme, sure, but given the man bonus points for following through on a bet! Since we're talking about the UK, I *must* mention the British Army pilot that's in trouble for commandeering a Lynx helicopter.. to deliver a pizza to his girlfriend.  Amazingly, the pilot was reprimanded but did not lose his pilot's license over the incident.  This - coming from an army that used to have the death penalty for striking an officer - is somewhat surprising.  One thing that might have flown under your radar is the controversy over "homophobic reggae" music.  It seems that reggae artists have been writing songs about gays for the past few years that would make the "White Power" crowd blush.  But now an agreement has been reached with many record labels and concert venues, banning any artist that advocates the "killing or assault of gay and lesbian people".  Progress indeed!  But while killing and assaulting gays and lesbians is no longer "cool", it's apparently still OK to grope or even molest woman on Japanese trains. Last year, Tokyo women reported 2,201 incidents, which is three times the number from 1996. Amazing, given how the authorities in Japan have jacked up the fines for such nonsense.  As bad as that is, it still doesn't top the behavior of Florida firefighter Bruce Coates, who wins jimcofer.com's very first "Jackass of the Month" award for biting off the head of a Quaker parrot at a drunken party.  Few people - well, hopefully no people - would bite the head off a dog or cat... why was this poor bird any different?  Jackass! As far as pure criminal behavior goes, that doesn't top the Ohio man who's in trouble with the law for stealing a house. Exactly how he was able to pull this off is somewhat of a mystery, but it's a good read nevertheless. Here's a mystery worth solving - according to astronomers at Princeton University, the surface of some planets might be covered in diamonds. As luck would have it, there aren't any of these Tiffany planets anywhere near us, so the cost of bringing some home would be astronomical.. plus DeBeers is set to launch probes any day now to blow up those planets, just to keep their racket going.  And lastly, check it out! Burger King is now giving away handheld Activision games with every kid's meal!  As much as I hate their food, it might be worth it to be able to play "Kaboom!", "Grand Prix", "Barnstorming" or "Tennis".  Wow - and to think that 20 years ago, these games needed the latest and greatest computer hardware.. and are now being given away as trinkets!! ON THE WEBSITE FRONT: I added a new article to the Geek Stuff page (yes, that's the first update to that page in over six months!).  I'm also working on a review of a new restaurant in Belmont.  I hope to have it posted this evening on the Critic's Corner page, but it should be up by tomorrow at the latest.

02/09/2005: I begin today with news from the IT world... it looks like HP's CEO Carly Fiorina - one of the few female CEOs out there - has been forced out of her job. In retrospect, the HP-Compaq merger was a bad idea, huh Carly?  Told you so.  Google this week announced a new service - Google Maps - that threatens to kick the ass of every other map site out there.  I'm guessing that the similarity of the maps to Microsoft's Streets and Trips is no accident (both apps use NAVTEQ's map database), yet Google's site performs almost as well as Microsoft's version and is more legible and prettier to boot (check out the drop shadows from the pushpins).  You should really check this site out - it's getting raves from all over cyberspace - although certain Arsians are reporting that the actual directions provided by Google can be... ahhh.. well, wrong. Although the guys at Engadget love TiVo (the gadget) they too are starting to see the writing on the wall for TiVo (the company) and have started their own TiVo Deathwatch.  I'm telling you people that it's only a matter of time... And lastly (for the IT stuff anyway), users of Outlook 2003 should be aware that a new Junk Mail filter is available for download today from Microsoft.  I've downloaded and installed it, but haven't gotten any junk mail since so I dunno how well it works. Here's something just for my hunny: Slate magazine has reviewed a slew of slow cookers (i.e. Crock Pots) and posted the results here. It seems that the Washington Post got ahold of a "routine internal memo" from the "Los Angeles C.T.U. office" and posted it on their site (I saved it as a PDF here).  That's some pretty funny stuff! And while prank phone calls can be funny, it's not so funny when your name just happens to be "William Clinton" and you live in Little Rock, Arkansas.  It seems that this poor man (obviously of no relation to the former president) suffered from a prank caller using "CallerID spoofing" to phone police and tell them that he (Clinton) had a gun to someone's head.  Poor Clinton's home - he was asleep at the time, his son actually answered the phone - was then besieged by armed police officers.  No one has been busted yet for the "prank". Lastly comes a "stranger than fiction" story from the world of soccer.  It seems that Barbados and Grenada were playing for a spot in the finals of the 1994 Shell Caribbean Cup.  Barbados was winning 2-0 when Grenada scored a goal at 83 minutes.  Because of the arcane rules of soccer, Barbados needed to win the game by two goals to advance to the finals - anything less and Grenada would go instead. Realizing that they probably wouldn't score another goal in the last couple of minutes, Barbados kicked the ball into their own goal to tie the score at 2-2. The Grenada team figured out what was going on and then tried to score goals at both ends of the pitch.  Eventually the game ended as a tie and the game went in to overtime where Barbados scored a goal and won - according to the overtime rules - by a score of 2-0.  Nope.  I'm not making this up - check it out here. ON THE WEBSITE FRONT: I added the review of Grand Buffet yesterday, but didn't post anything about it on the front page.  So I am now. I also chopped the Blog Archive page into months for easier navigation.

02/12/2005: It's 4:30am on a Saturday morning and I'm much too tired (and drunk) to do any news today.  However, I *do* want to let you know about two new articles I put online - one is a review of New Order's new album and the other is an "All About HDTV" article. Read and enjoy!

02/14/2005: Happy Valentine's Day!  Wow - there's a lot going on in the world, so I'll get right on it... First of all, it seems that British school children are now being FORCED to add the letters "pbuh" any time they refer to the "prophet" Mohammed in their comparative religion classes.  This article at LGF explains it all: "Religious Education" is taught in most schools in the UK; there are six statutory religions for the class, and the law says that Christianity has to be the dominant religion taught in the class, although 4 religions must be taught altogether, so schools then choose amongst Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, Hinduism, and Buddhism to fill out the curriculum.  Any school teaching Islam is now required to have students put the initials "pbuh" (which stands for “peace be upon him”) any time they mention Mohammed.  This is tantamount to a prayer.  And before you go all "multicultural" and "diverse" on us, keep in mind that this is the same as requiring students to cross themselves any time they mention the Trinity in class or in a paper.  When will Europe grow a backbone and stand up to this political correctness garbage? I know that it'd be a cold day in hell before my kid ever writes "pbuh" in a paper; after all, Mohammed is the only founder of a major religion who was himself a ruler, conqueror, enslaver, bandit, polygamist and pedophile.  In medical news I'm just not comfortable with, scientists are considering using a "harmless" form of the HIV virus to battle cancer. Maybe I'm stuck in the 18th century - when people were scared of being infected with cowpox as a means of acquiring immunity to smallpox - but this just scares me. In some "lighter" news, actor Tom Sizemore - who has played military types in Black Hawk Down and Saving Private Ryan - was caught using a fake penis to pass a drug test, as required by his parole stemming from charges of methamphetamine possession and beating his former girlfriend - famous Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss. What a sordid story that is! A Bank of America branch that was robbed so often that it banned customers from entering the bank... was robbed this past Friday. It seems the robbers simply waited for one of the two tellers to leave and pulled a gun on her as she returned from a errand.  Far out! The embarrassment for the TSA continues... an airport screener at Newark airport was removed from her job after missing a butcher's knife that a passenger had in a handbag.  According to reports, the passenger - a woman from (where else?) North Carolina - had gone on a blind date earlier that week and put the knife in her bag for safety.  She had forgotten about it until after she had passed the screener; she then altered airport security personnel.  The passenger will not be charged with any crimes. And lastly for today.. would you pay over $18,000 for a handheld electronic game from 1981?  How about if it was the legendary Atari Cosmos - a holographic 3-D game console, of which only 5 were made? How about if it doesn't even have any electronics inside?  The person hosting this auction on eBay hopes you will, although the price is steep - especially for a mark-up box - even if only 5 were ever made.  And don't you love his location: Montreal, Canada, United Kingdom.  Oh well.  Good luck to you, man! ON THE WEBSITE FRONT: I added a review of Jaipur Indian Restaurant today and updated and expanded the HDTV article over the weekend. Oh, and I also updated the Useless Fact.

02/16/2005: I've no time to mention a lot of news today, but I *did* want to let you know that I got whooshed (sort of) regarding the thing about British school children and the "pbuh" thing.  It seems that it's not a requirement for anyone in the Islamic branch of Britain's Religious Education classes - it was simply a recommendation in the style guide for the class.  It is *not* required, but if school kids feel the need to add something like this to a paper, this is apparently how they're "officially" supposed to do it. My bad.  But I still stand by what I said about Islam and Europe refusing to see it as a threat to their way of life.  If you actually start reading stuff, you'll find a lot of scary things out there.  France allowing anti-Semitism to run rampant ('cos there's more Muslims than Jews in France), villages in Sweden where normal Christian people are harassed and beaten daily by the Muslim near-majority, Dutch teachers being physically assaulted by Muslim students, Dutch filmmakers being murdered in broad daylight.  It's all happening and it's all for real folks.  Europe can be as "multicultural" and "diverse" as it wants, but sticking its head into the sand to avoid what's happening right now is just idiotic.  It's appeasement all over again.  Harry Truman used to say that "history never repeats itself" and for the most part, he's been proven to be correct about that.  Until now.  Maybe. ON THE WEBSITE FRONT: I was looking for something in some old emails last night and came across an oldie but goodie I wrote a couple of years back - The Cure or Mr. Rogers. I also did a much-needed update to my eBay guide and also added some new information I just learned about Emiliana Torrini to my review of her new album. You stay classy, San Diego!

02/17/2005: Here's some hilarious news I've been meaning to post for a couple of days but just got around to it: it seems that one of the administrators of the Straight Dope Message Board decided to publicly publish information about a certain member - one convicted of a sex crime in the past and who was allegedly "trolling" for minors at the SDMB - on LiveJournal. The jist of the issue here is that the administrator was able to use her powers as an administrator to get information about him and publish it to a different site, claiming that the SDMB's privacy policy does not prohibit her from doing so. It's true that the information she linked to - an official State of California sex-offender registry website - is public information, but she had to use her admin powers to get enough info about the man to figure out what to search for in California SODB. And that's not right. In fact, according to Megan's Law, it is a CRIME to use any information from any sex offender database to harass or cause harm to a person. Needless to say, the SDMB's parent company - The Chicago Reader - freaked and apparently even considering shuttering the SDMB for good. But here's what's truly sad about the whole thing: the administrator had her admin duties suspended for 30 days. That's it.  She's still free to post anything she wants on the SDMB, she just can't admin.  A 30-day suspension might be serious if this was an actual, paying job, but the administrator in question was a volunteer. So she's suspended for 30 days from a job she got no pay for in the first place.  Meanwhile "ordinary users" get permanently banned from the board for far less. In fact, yours truly was threatened with a banning for humorously altering a previous poster's quote in a response. You see, there's a running joke at the Ars Technica forums where someone will post something like "The Browns will win the Super Bowl this year!" and someone will come along and post a reply using the "quote" feature, but will change the original quote to something silly like "The Browns will win the Toilet Bowl this year!".  I almost got permanently banned for that, yet an admin can possibly commit a crime and get only a 30-day suspension?  As George Orwell said in Animal Farm - "all people are equal, but some people are more equal than others". If you'd like to read a statement by Ed Zotti (chief SDMB admin) on this mess, click here.  You can also click here for my SDMB Boycott page. In other news, I stumbled across this page, which goes in to complete detail about Jimmy Carter's infamous run-in with the "Killer Rabbit" and even has a high-res picture of the (almost forgotten) incident.  It seems that Disney has angered the few remaining Carib Indians with the storyline for its follow-up to the monster smash Pirates of the Caribbean. The storyline apparently has as one of it's "central features" the "fact" that Caribs were cannibals - something that Carib Chief Charles Williams strongly denies. It looks like healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente is going to end up suing an 82 year-old woman who has been in the hospital for a year... not because she's sick - by her own admission, there's absolutely nothing wrong with her - but because she has nowhere else to go. If a piece of paper smells funny, check and see if it was made in Tasmania.  It seems that some nutjobs Down Under have taken to making paper out of kangaroo manure - or "'Roo Poo" as the BCC calls it.

02/18/2005: In my article about the future of TV, I wondered what people overseas - who usually have to wait months and months to watch American TV shows like Lost, Six Feet Under or 24 - would do now that it's easy for people with broadband Internet connections to download TV shows.  This article on Ars Technica proves my point: they apparently download them, especially in Britain. Several reasons are given for this: they don't want to wait several months for the show to start airing in the UK, they don't want to bother with commercials and\or they don't want to be bound by a network's schedule.  To be sure, I download a bunch of British TV - almost 40GB worth at this point - and occasionally download an American TV show that I might have accidentally missed.  But news from this report has advertisers all in a tizzy (as I predicted) due to people downloading commercial-free episodes off the Internet or using a DVR to fast-forward through commercials on their TV sets. I'm telling ya, we're gonna see BIG CHANGES in TV very soon... Also, here's a bit of advice for those of you that download video via BitTorrent: stick with British stuff. The British equivalent of the MPAA\RIAA hasn't gone after people for downloading TV shows yet, and it's unlikely that they will.  Here's why: as you might know, people in Britain have to buy a yearly license to watch TV; all the money from all those licenses is what funds the BBC (and is why there are no adverts during BBC shows). Because the British people paid for those shows with their license money, the issue of who owns the shows is quite murky. It's generally accepted that the "British people" own the shows, so there's no worry (well, perhaps a much lesser worry) that you'll get a cease-and-desist letter for downloading BBC shows. Of course, there are other British networks that may or may not take too kindly to you downloading their stuff, but I'd imagine that any legal threat from the UK would have as much weight as DMCA letters sent to a Swedish Bittorrent tracker (translation: American law firms are sending a Swedish website nasty letters about the site violating US law.  In Sweden). Oh, and speaking of "cease and desist letters", how is this for an egregious use of draconian laws?  There's a band out there called Beatallica.  They do parodies of old Beatles songs in the style of the heavy metal band Metallica.  On their website, you can download their various songs, like a rant against "hair bands" like Poison called "I Wanna Choke Your Band" (which contains the delicious lyric: "And when I punch you I feel happy inside").  And OF COURSE, the Nazis at Sony are now suing the band for "posting copyrighted materials" on their website.  OK folks - this is a band that does parodies.  They record their own songs and play their own instruments. They're covering old Beatles tunes in "heavy metal" style and adding their own lyrics.  NONE of this is a violation of US copyright law.  I can record my own version of anyone's music and post it online for the entire world to download for free and I'm not violating a single US law. So here's a big PISS OFF to Sony for once again proving that record labels and movie studios are jackbooted thugs that don't care about "protecting artists' rights" as much as they're interested in money and being able to control who can listen to their music.  Speaking of computers and video, check out this sexy as hell new portable video player from Archos. It offers a fat 100GB to store video and comes with "a 3.8" LCD screen, a Compact Flash memory card slot, support for playback of MPEG4, AVI, XviD and DivX video files, and a cradle for recording TV shows that comes with all the necessary video inputs and outputs to connect it up to either a regular TV or a cable or satellite box". Man, I WANT one of those... and my birthday is coming up! :) Lastly for today, a public service announcement: Do you own an Xbox?  If so, you should know about a recall on Xboxes sold in the United States and Europe.  It seems the power cord can overheat and injure you or scorch your carpet. American Xbox owners should click here (look for the large "Important Safety Notice" link on the right-hand side of the page) to order a free replacement.  In the meantime, Microsoft recommends that you make sure to turn your Xbox off when not in use.

02/19/2005: Here's a rare weekend update for you guys... Do you know what "RFIDs" are? They're tiny computer chips that are powered by radio waves.  They were originally developed for inventory control purposes, and for that they're fantastic. Each tag in each product has its own individual code, so as soon as a Wal Mart worker pulls a pallet off a truck, the store knows exactly what's on that pallet and how many of each item are on the pallet. Think of them like the ubiquitous UPC codes that scanners at the check-out lanes at most stores use, except they don't need to be scanned individually.  In other words, when you use a "self-checkout" lane today, you have to scan each item individually; sometime in the near future you'll be able to bag everything first and then run it under a RFID scanner that can instantly inventory everything in your bag at once. But stores aren't the only thing interested in "keeping inventory".  This week, an elementary school in California stopped a controversial program that required students to wear an ID tag with a RFID chip embedded inside. Sadly, it wasn't stopped because of civil liberties or health issues... it was stopped because the company that developed the technology pulled out for reasons that are not yet altogether clear. What's even scarier is that the RFID-tag program was developed and implemented without parent notification or approval.  Another step towards 1984, or just another helpful technology?  You decide. Although I hate his team with the heat of a billion suns and although I despise how well he plays for the New England Patriots, my good vibes and prayers go out to linebacker Tedy Bruschi, who suffered a mild stroke on Wednesday. The NFL is a family, man, and even though you're from the crappy Boston wing of the family, I hope you get better soon! Oh, and in some other NFL news, my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers are replacing the turf at Heinz Field - yet again. Heinz has only been open since 2001, but the initial surface - 100% natural grass - took quite a beating from hosting games for the Steelers, Pitt Panthers and high school championship games.  The sod was replaced in 2002 but was in such bad shape by the end of the season that the Steelers decided to switch to DD GrassMaster - a mix of natural and synthetic grass that holds up better from the abuse of two football games a weekend than pure natural grass - for the 2003 season. But the field was in such bad shape by the end of this season that the Steelers office decided to replant the DD GrassMaster, hoping it will "take" better this time.  The Broncos use DD GrassMaster and have had fabulous results with it... let's hope that the forth time's the charm! From the "It Couldn't Happen To A Nicer Company" Department: it looks like the State of New Jersey is suing Blockbuster over the brouhaha over their "End of Late Fees" campaign. Here's what Blockbuster didn't tell you about the so-called "end of late fees": the "unlimited" period you could rent a movie for was actually one week.  After that time, you were billed the full replacement price for the movie, although you could bring it back within 30 days for a full refund minus a $1.25 "re-stocking fee".  They also didn't bother to tell you that the program only applied to corporate-owned stores and around a half of all the company's franchise stores, however it seems that every Blockbuster - whether participating or not - hung the "End of Late Fees!" banner outside their stores.  Not only that, but many of the franchise stores ran the promotion in January only, but kept the banners up outside well in to February.  If that's not a bait-and-switch, I don't know what is!  New Jersey is seeking the return of late fees to all customers that were taken by this shoddy marketing scam. Lastly, it looks as if NASA has finally set a date for the next launch of a space shuttle: Space Shuttle Discovery is due to launch on May 15, 2005!

 “There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”

08/16/2005: HAPPY BIRTHDAY MADONNA! You're still the hawttest chick in the universe (next to Lisa, of course!).

And speaking of music, I just thought I'd take a few minutes out to pimp my new favorite music site, Allofmp3.com. Allofmp3 is not new, in fact, it's been around for a couple of years now. I've even been to the site several times in the past... but I'm one of those people that just can't seem to remember what he wants the second he enters a record store. However, this past Saturday, the missus wanted me to find a particular Belinda Carlisle song. I fired up all of the usual P2P applications, but came up empty. So - out of sheer desperation - I went to AllofMP3... and suddenly found tons of music to download! Now here's the deal with AllofMP3: it ain't free, but it's really, really cheap. First you create an account. Then you choose how much money to "pre-pay" into your account. Next you select which albums or individual tracks you wish to download. You're given the option of downloading the tunes in MP3, WMA, OGG, AAC or a few other formats. Once you've decided on a format, you then have the option of choosing the bitrate (for MP3 that's 128, 192 or 320 kbps). This is where money comes in - you're basically paying for bandwidth. Most albums cost around $1.25 at 128kbps, $1.95 in 192kbps and $3.50 in 320kbps - although this will vary based on both the length and the number of the songs. For example, I believe that I paid around $1.97 for a 192kbps version of Japan's Assemblage album, but $4.27 for a 192kbps version of New Order's Substance - which is (of course) a double album.

The next question you might have is "Is AllofMP3.com legal?" The short answer is no, but the long answer is more complicated than that. AllofMP3  is based in Russia and the owners have apparently paid licensing fees to Russia's RIAA equivalent. So AllofMP3 is 100% legit... in Russia. However, due to some arcane legal mumbo-jumbo over what constitutes a "recording" and how said "recording" is "transmitted" to you here in the US, the general opinion is that AllofMP3.com is not legal in the United States (although no specific law or court decision has stated this). In other words, although it would be perfectly legal for one to buy a (non-bootleg) CD in Russia and bring it back to the United States, buying an MP3 from a Russian web site is not the same thing (legally speaking). So using AllofMP3 is not "legal" like using iTunes would be. However - as far as I know - the RIAA has not attempted to sue anyone for using AllofMP3. So consider AllofMP3 to be a "grey market" of sorts. Even if it's not 100% legit, AllofMP3 does have a huge catalog, offers its music in a variety of non-DRM formats and bitrates, and also has ACCURATE ID3 tags on the music - all of which is much better than you find on most P2P apps these days.

In website news, I'm proud to announce the release of SilentAIM 2.0 - snag it from my Downloads page. I also updated my article about Bittorrent with some news about legal issues and software updates.

09/30/2005: As promised, I updated the Hawt Chicks List today. Not appearing on that list... Tori Spelling:

October 2005

10/04/2005: Not much of a "web update" today - in fact, I only updated the "My Wireless Network" entry on the GeekStuff page.

The main reason that I'm posting anything at all today is to shower praise upon my webhost (the people that own the computer that runs this website) - JaguarPC. Several years ago, I signed up with a hosting company called Aletia Hosting, who were recommended by many folks at the Ars Technica forums. Aletia had low prices and a decent hosting package. It was affordable, but the service wasn't all that great. The site was subject to frequent downtime and support tickets seemed to take forever to get answered, much less resolved.

10/14/2005: You know who I never thought was all that attractive? Sex and the City's Kristin Davis. I used to think that she was kind of mousy and "plain Jane"... plus, her body ain't all that, especially compared to... I dunno... Jessica Alba or Charisma Carpenter. But you know what? I was surfin' the 'Net last night and came across this picture:

Click to enlarge
(WARNING: full-sized pic is 566kb)

You see those crow's feet? DAMN, that's hot! And that got me to thinking about my "new" obsession with older women. Of course, I've always been in awe of some pretty older women. For instance, Catherine Deneuve is #1 on my current Hawt Chicks List. But up until a few years ago, I used to think that women like Catherine Deneuve were pretty (but not "hot") and even that was in a fairly detached sort of way - sort of how you might think your best friend's sister is pretty, but you just don't "go there". But that all changed a few years ago, and I remember exactly when it happened - the first time I saw Madonna's "Power of Goodbye" video. For the first time, an older woman wasn't just "pretty", she was "hot" too! I don't know why exactly I felt the need to tell you all of this. Is it a sign of my inner maturity? Is it some biological thing in my brain that's making me realize I'm much closer to middle age than to all the young tarts on MTV? I dunno, but I don't care. Give me a woman with a few wrinkles - that's a few wrinkles, mind you, not your grandma! - over some skank like Christina Aguilera any day!

Oh, and speaking of "skanks", Paris Hilton's show "The Simple Life" was cancelled by Fox this week. I guess a show with a wedding theme (for a wedding that's not gonna happen anymore) based on two "best friends" that hate each other simply wasn't gonna work. Oh well. And hey, speaking of Madonna, she was a lot of promo stuff coming up for her new album Confessions on a Dance Floor. She will be on MTV's Total Request Live this Monday to debut her new single "Hung Up"; the same network will also debut the new video of the same later on this month on MTV Overdrive and VH1 Vspot. BUT WAIT - THERE'S MORE! On Oct. 21, MTV will premiere a new documentary I'm Going to Tell You a Secret, which follows Madonna's Re-Invention Tour. BUT WAIT - THERE'S STILL MORE! Beginning Nov. 8 - a week before the album's official release - fans will be able to exclusively preview the full 12-track album on MTV.com, VH1.com and LOGOonline.com. Pretty cool, huh?

Not so cool is news of terrorist bombings at Georgia Tech this week and also the sad story of one Debra Bolton, of Alexandria, Virginia. Ms. Bolton fell afoul of DC laws recently after having a single glass of wine with dinner. It seems that the parking valet at the restaurant Ms. Bolton dined at disabled the "automatic headlights" feature of her car; since the area she was in was quite bright, Bolton didn't notice that her headlights were off until she was pulled over "a few hundred yards down the road" by the police. She thought she'd just get a ticket, but instead was arrested for DUI under a DC law that allows police to arrest anyone with a BAC of over .01%. Apparently, .08 is the "legal limit" in every state in America - as well as The District - but most states have a clause that allows for "officer's discretion" arrests for low levels of alcohol intoxication combined with some blatant moving violation such as reckless driving or racing. DC is apparently the only jurisdiction in America that will absolutely arrest people with .02 blood alcohol levels for any reason whatsoever (such as, say, something simple like driving with your lights off). Although Ms. Bolton was eventually able to get the DUI charges dropped, that wasn't enough for the people at the DMV, who refused to reinstate her driver's license until she "got help" for her "drinking problem". Ms. Bolton's story is a true Kafkaesque nightmare - you should really check it out if you have the time!

And lastly, I just finished a GREAT BOOK that I'd like to tell you about. It's called Illegal Tender: Gold, Greed, and the Mystery of the Lost 1933 Double Eagle and it's the story of... a coin. But not just any coin, mind you. The "Double Eagle" was an American  $20 gold piece designed by Augustus Saint Gaudens and is considered by many to be the most beautiful coin the US has ever minted. The 1933 version of the Double Eagle in particular is the holy grail of coin collectors. It's Keyser Sose, Prester John, El Dorado and the Maltese Falcon all rolled into one. Men have spent years and all of their riches trying to obtain this coin, yet it existed in a world of quasi-legality and whispered reports of it's very existence. Trying to find a 1933 Double Eagle was literally like trying to find the end of the rainbow. Why? Well, in a nutshell, some 400,000+ 1933 Double Eagle coins were minted in late January, 1933 just prior to FDR's inauguration (inaugurations were still held in March back then). Before any of the 1933 coins could be released to the general public, FDR made the possession of gold bullion illegal and the vast majority of American gold coins - including all of the 1993 Double Eagles - were melted down into gold bars and shipped to a brand-new facility at Fort Knox, Kentucky. The story should have ended right there - after all, the government's own records account for every single 1933 coin. But no - the coin began appearing in limited quantities in Philadelphia's coin shops. Most were confiscated and subsequently melted down in the 1930s and 1940s, but yet... were there still any out there? What makes this coin such a siren song that someone would pay $7,590,020 for one?

Now, as far as the website goes... I added a list of Helpful Hints to the site today. If you have any of your own that you'd like to add, feel free to email them in!

10/20/2005: Added 10 movie reviews to my (much neglected) Rotten Tomatoes page today; check 'em out via the "My RT Journal" link in the left navigation bar. And speaking of, I switched around the left navigation bar a bit by getting rid of the Firefox button, moving the external links to their own "section" and also moved the My Résumé link towards the bottom of the bar, so that the links make more sense from top to bottom. And hey - I finally included a link to my MySpace profile (which I also updated recently to have a similar color scheme to this site!) I also added a couple of links to the Links page, updated the Useless Fact, moved some older front page news to the Archive page, added a couple of treats to the Member's Section.

10/21/2005: FEAR NOT, TRUE BELIEVERS, for Our Queen hath returned, and She hath returned with a mighty vengeance:

New York Post: "The Material Girl's returned, and the material's fabulous!"

Daily Telegraph (Australia): "Once again Madonna has proven she is one of the most astute artists or our time and there is little doubt Confessions of A Dancefloor, out next month, is set for a No.1 debut."

The Sun (UK): "Anyone who thought Madonna might have abdicated as the Queen of Pop can kneel at her throne once more. I’m the first [journalist] IN THE WORLD to have heard her new album – and it is an absolute belter. Confessions On A Dance Floor wipes the, er, floor with her critically acclaimed CDs such as Ray Of Light. It is an hour of pure electronic dance/pop heaven."

GMTV (UK): "Madonna... has been one of the major movers in the music industry for over 20 years with her ability to shake up pop music by working with the hottest producers, writers, stylists and image makers to produce her unique sound and look. Her latest stirring is no exception and shows that the queen of pop has by no means hung up her dance shoes and is no doubt set to be a huge success."

Popjournalism.com (Canada): "Madonna is back on the comeback trail... while 'Hung Up' doesn't rank as one of the best Madonna singles, it should more than do the trick in bringing her back near the top of the Billboard Hot 100."

Perezhilton.com (USA): "Finally, after all those false leaks, the real thing has arrived, and it is worth the wait!!! Welcome back bitch, we've missed you!"

Also, "Hung Up" is currently #2 at the US iTunes site and is #1 at iTunes sites in: Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, UK, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland and Norway! Also, Sweden's largest online music store (Poplife.se) made "Hung Up" available this week and it went directly to #1!

How dare you doubt me? Seriously, Madonna's on her way back... and in a big ol' bad way.

Also, I updated the Spooks page and moved MORE older front page news to the Archive page.

10/26/2005: Who knew that the engineers at Scientific Atlanta (and\or Aptiv) had a sense of humor? I sure didn't. But speaking of humor, I quietly rolled out a new picture section the other day called Silly Internet Pictures! It's four pages of random funny pics I've collected over the years. Wireless Magazine's Earl Dittman called them "JUST PLAIN LAUGH OUT LOUD FUNNY!", although you should be warned that many of them are not "work safe".

While I'm on the subject of "funny", I gotta pass on this phishing email I got the other day:

While performing it's regular scheduled monthly billing address check our system found incompatible information which seams to be no longer the same with your current credit card information that we have on file. If you changed your billing information or if you moved from you previous address please follow up the link bellow and update your billing information: If you didn't change any of this information you still need to follow up the previous link and update your existing billing information because it means that our database regular scheduled update wasn't made correctly. Choosing to ignore this message will result in to a temporary suspension of your account within 24 hours, until you will choose to solve this unpleasant situation.

We apologies for any inconvinience this may caused you and we strongly advise you to update your information you have on file with us. Clicking LINK CLIPPED you will avoid any possible futuring billing problems with your account.

Ya know, if you're gonna try and pass yourself off as a legitimate American company in order to fool people into giving you their credit card and\or banking account information, perhaps it would behoove you to spend a few minutes actually learning the language, no?

10/27/2005: Updated the "Up To The Minute" section and the Rant; will (hopefully) post a new review tomorrow.

10/28/2005: Added a gorgeous new Madonna wallpaper to the Downloads page and also updated the Useless Fact. I hope to post a new review over the weekend.

10/31/2005: HAPPY HALLOWEEN!! I added the pics from CarnEVIL to the Photo Gallery.

11/01/2005: Well, it looks like Sony has set off a firestorm of controversy on the Internet in the past couple of days. It seems that Mark Russinovich of the kick-ass Windows site systernals.com was testing out some software on his system when he found evidence of a rootkit on his PC. What's a rootkit? It's a technology that can "hide files, Registry keys, and other system objects from diagnostic and security software". Although any type of file could exist in a rootkit, they almost always hide bad things... so you could think of a rootkit as a type of "invisible virus"... and not only can you not see anything, neither can your antivirus or antispyware software! But how had Mark - easily one of the smartest Windows users on the planet - been infected by a rootkit? By putting a Sony Music CD into his CD-ROM drive! What actually happened when Mark put the Van Zant brothers' newest CD into his computer is a bit too technical for most folks, so I will summarize it this way: the CD installed software on his computer without his consent; the software completely hid itself from Mark, his security software and the standard Windows user interface; the software runs as a service and cannot be disabled, even in "safe mode"; the service runs under a misleading name; the (badly-written) software uses too many CPU cycles and is apparently cobbled together from many different sources; the software does not come with any "uninstall" feature; uninstalling the software manually requires a fairly advanced knowledge of the Windows architecture and several tools average users have never heard of; and lastly, the software disables any CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drives if tampered with. People, this is pure evil. This is something *I* would have a difficult time fixing on my computer, much less Mom and Dad. And it's allowing Sony to do anything they want with your computer. This MUST be stopped. Check out Mark's article on the subject for the complete skinny, or check out this easier-to-understand article on the same subject from F-Secure here. What's truly interesting about all this is that it makes you wonder what the hell Sony was thinking. They don't want us to pirate music... so they release copy-protected CDs that contain "viruses" that are harder to remove than anything you'd find on a P2P network? Does that make any sense to you? Now that this news is out in the open, I can promise you that there is a substantial number of people that will just download the damn album off Kazaa rather than buying it and risk getting their computers "rooted". Way to think that one through, Sony!

11/02/2005: The list of "Top 10 Reasons Rappers Don't Tour As Much As Rockers":

10) By the time you round the posse up, 3 of them have released solo albums and want their own tour.
9) It takes a long time to pimp the tour bus.
8) Acting roles keep interfering...
7) Bling-related injuries!
6) "Pimpin' Ain't Easy"
5) There's only 3 cities on the Rand-McNally Rap Atlas (New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta)
4) The Man
3) Death
2) Palimony suits
1) Probation

11/03/2005: BREAKING NEWS: It's finally HERE!!!! Get it from the Member's Section! Also, I added an article about how to cheat on Internet polls to the My Writings page last night. Enjoy!

11/08/2005: Wow - I saw Depeche Mode this past weekend in Atlanta and can I just say that it was REALLY GREAT! So many "technopop" bands just really suck live (New Order, I'm looking directly at you), so I wasn't expecting that much from the show... but it was really freakin' good! I had a great time and would like to thank Lisa, Kim, Ken and everyone else who made it possible... as well as my sister and brother-in-law who put us up for a couple of nights... THANKS EVERYBODY!

On the website front, I *finally* added a page with some Smartphone themes I created back in January - better late than never, no? I also *finally* updated my MP3 list and added a cool (free) program to the Downloads page. Oh, and I also tweaked my article about how to cheat at Internet polls to reflect some honest uses for macros. I'm still working on that review and hope to get it posted in the next couple of days.... and I also hope to have my RSS feed updated then too; updating it manually kind of sucks.

11/10/2005: So I was eating some Crows candy today - yummy, old-school licorice gumdrops - when I started wondering about their origin. A visit to the Tootsie Roll site revealed that they were "invented in the 1890's by confectioners Ernest Von Au and Joseph Maison". It was at the Tootsie site that I learned an interesting bit of trivia: "originally, Crows were to be called 'Black Rose', but the printer misheard the name as 'Black Crows' and printed wrappers with the wrong name on them" (Tootsie apparently dropped the "Black" from the name when they bought the brand back in 1972, so they're just "Crows" today).

And so - the name of the candy I was eating came about because someone misheard the name! That got me to thinking about some of history's most interesting misunderstandings:

California received her independence in a manner eerily similar to the way Texas did - white Americans rebelling militarily against their Mexican leaders. In California's case, one of the rebellion's leaders was a man named Jebediah Bartlett, an agricultural tycoon and developer of the Bartlett pear. To symbolize their victory over Mexico, the rebels quickly designed a flag (which is almost identical to the current California flag). The only problem was that the flag called for a pear; whether due to bad handwriting or smeared ink, the artist commissioned for the flag pained a bear on the fabric instead of the fruit. (Cite)

Electric Light Orchestra's debut album was called No Answer in the US but Electric Light Orchestra everywhere else in the world. This is because an American record company executive misunderstood (or rather, took a bit too literally) a note his secretary had scribbled on a piece of paper. She had been tasked with calling either ELO's management or record company to get details for the upcoming album. When no one answered her calls, she wrote "No answer" on a piece of paper. He somehow thought this was the name of the album, so it was released in the US with that title. (Cite)

A similar thing happened with The Byrds. Because the group had not yet decided on a name for their newest disc, their manager wrote '(Untitled)' on the official label copy sheet sent to the record company. Before anyone realized what was happening, the albums had already been pressed (and the sleeves printed up) as (Untitled). (Cite)

Fun stuff! Let see... I added some links to the Links page and also put a new tip about saving multiple email attachments to the Geek Stuff page. I also updated some older articles on the GeekStuff page and cleaned it up so that it looks better in Firefox.

11/10/2005: How's this for crappy: Cincinnati soldier Tim Hines was killed in action in Iraq. The evening after his funeral his wife - who is eight months pregnant with their second child - awoke to the sound of her car alarm going off. Racing outside, she found her car on fire. Police say that the fire was set using American flags that the family had in the front yard. So - let's review. A soldier dies. His wife is eight months pregnant with their child. Less than 24 hours after buying him, someone burns Ms. Hines' car using American flags as fuel. Fuckin' classy, really classy. And true too.

On the website front, I updated the Top 10 Hawt Chicks list and posted my review of the IMFree AIM device.

11/18/2005: Do you remember the USFL? It was an "alternate" football league started way back in 1983. It was an "alternate" league in that the league's main gimmick was a March through June schedule that did not directly compete with the NFL. Football fans could then (theoretically) enjoy football almost year-round. Unfortunately, the league folded after just two seasons. But that's not why I'm bringing up the USFL. No, I'm bringing it up of because of one of its teams:

My, my... that looks familiar, doesn't it? Especially to those of us in Charlotte. Hmmm.. How about the helmets?

 Michigan Panthers helmet above, Carolina Panthers helmet below.

I looked on the 'Net for some other similarity between the teams - same owner, same coach... maybe John Fox played for the Panthers? I could find nothing - although I'll freely admit that the web isn't exactly teeming with information about a chump team from twenty years ago. In any case... what a rip! I think that if I designed the Michigan Panther's logo, I'd be in a federal court right now with some serious-ass infringement charges.

Oh - and speaking of "chumps" - it looks like Costco is the first major retailer to jump on the "bottled water for dogs" craze. Yes, it's true - PupCups are sealed, disposable containers containing "the best-tasting, safest drinking water available. Every drop of our delicious water flows through a multi-step purification process". Of course, ya know... dogs think the cat's litter box is an all-you-can-eat buffet, so I don't know what the point is behind 1) Carbon Filtration 2) Pretreatment 3) Reverse Osmosis 4) Hot Filling and 5) Sterile Sealing water into containers for dogs. Granted, it sounds like a decent idea if you travel with your dog a lot... but the 4 ounce containers mean that anything bigger than lhasa apso is going to need three or four per stop. And at $34.99 for a 48-count case (at Costco), you'd better bring your wallet too! Idiots!

Speaking of idiots - I updated the Rant and Useless Fact for this week.

11/21/2005: Karma's a bitch, ain't it? It seems the bad news just won't stop for Sony Music these days - and given their almost maniacal hated and distrust of their own customers, it's not hard to see why karma's so busy dumping on them lately. Just about every website on the planet - including this one; see my news for 11/01 - covered the initial news about the "rootkit" that Sony included on 20-50 audio CDs for sale in the United States. Here's a brief recap in case you missed some of the finer points of the story:

•  On Halloween, Mark Russinovich - one of the most skilled Windows users in the entire world - posted a story about the rootkit on his blog. Rootkits are essentially a cloaking technology that allows someone to silently install a program on your system. The files installed by the rootkit will be completely to invisible to the user, his or her administrator... and even to Windows itself! Almost like a wiretap, a rootkit intercepts certain native Windows API calls (stuff deep within the Windows operating system; think of it as Window's "nervous system") and forwards the calls on as if nothing unusual is installed.  Unless (of course) that API call is something the rootkit creator wants to prevent Windows from doing. In this particular case, the rootkit is there to prevent people from playing the CD via any other player except the restricted one included on the audio CD. What makes the Sony case so despicable is that their rootkit (and related copy prevention software) offers no uninstall routine, can easily destroy your Windows installation if tampered with, and appears to be badly written piece of junk cobbled together from many different technologies. But perhaps the worst thing about the rootkit is that it leaves an infected Windows computer wide open to future exploits; this is because any file subsequently copied to your system's hard drive prefixed with "$sys$" in the file name will now be hidden on the user's system. All an enterprising virus writer has to do is name his virus $sys$virus.exe and the file will be invisible to the user, Windows and the user's antivirus software! 
   

•  Many news outlets picked up on the story in the following days. In response to the bad press, Sony at first admits nothing, then implements a hideously complex uninstall procedure. Well, sort of. At first, Sony's "uninstaller" simply removes the cloaking... but does nothing to remove the actual  dangerous files themselves. And rather than doing the right thing and put the information front and center on their website, Sony buries it in the FAQ. A user wanting to uninstall the program has to track down the FAQ in question, which leads to form one must fill out so that the uninstall information can be emailed to them (and of course, you have to give your email address to Sony in the process). The email contained yet another link to the patch - which is a a 3.5MB file that apparently does nothing other than run the following command: net stop “network control manager”. In other words, no files are deleted and nothing is "patched" - the cloaking service is simply stopped. Russinovich also discovers at this time that the Sony CD player "phones home" each and every time the user plays a CD - something Sony vehemently denies.
   

•  On November 4th, the president of Sony BMG's global digital business division Thomas Hesse pissed off millions of computer users, displayed the total moral bankruptcy of the Big Music cartel and revealed the utter disdain the music industry holds for its customers by saying the following in an interview for NPR News: "Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
   

•  On November 9th, Sony issued an actual patch for the rootkit. Again, the uninstall information is buried in Sony's site and again the affected user has to jump through hoops to uninstall the offending software. The new patch is pretty interesting: the user once again has to fill out a form and wait for a link to arrive via email. Once the user clicks on the email link, he or she is prompted to download an ActiveX control. Why an ActiveX control instead of the more common executable file? Because the uninstaller creates a hash - a numerical pattern based on the hardware in your system. Mark Russinovich determined that each email is individually tailored for each infected system, so that if the user sends the email from one system and tries to run the uninstaller on another... the patch won't work. This is additional "phone home" behavior, which Sony is still denying at this point.
   

•  Some time around November 12th, the first viruses taking advantage of the $sys$ exploit appear. An estimated 500,000 computers are "infected" with the rootkit, easily making this the largest computer infection of all time. And it could have been far worse: makers of antivirus and antispyware programs dilly-dallied for a couple of weeks before deciding this the rootkit was, indeed, bad and including it in their updated definitions. Also around this time, Sony announced that they will stop selling the infected discs.
   

•  On or around November 16th, Sony announced that it would cease production of the rootkit CDs permanently, recall any infected CDs remaining in stores, and send any affected customers "rootkit-free" replacement CDs. Even though Sony is offering free DRM-free MP3 downloads of the albums to affected customers waiting for their replacement CDs, the general consensus amongst the geek set is "too little too late".
   

•  On this past Friday, some delicious news appeared: it's almost certain that First4Internet - the UK company that created the copy protection system on the rootkit CDs - used large portions of the open-source LAME encoder in their software. LAME is released under the Limited General Public License (LGPL) - and the terms of the LAME license mean that any software author that uses any of the GPL code in his or her project must publish their code publicly. Which means that - check your Irony Meters, folks - First4Internet (and, by extension, Sony) might be guilty of copyright infringement in their crusade to stamp out... copyright infringement! Delicious!

So... what does this all mean? It's hard to say exactly, but one thing is clear: digital rights management (DRM) simply doesn't work. People have been ripping CDs to their hard drives for almost a decade now - an eternity in IT years - but Big Music still hasn't come up with an effective way to protect their precious, precious content. They want to be able to dictate whether or not you can copy music to your iPod or other device. They want to be able to dictate whether or not you can make your own mix CDs. And they want you to pay more money every time you use an iPod or make your own CD. But yet in a decade - the amount of time it took us to go from Windows 95 to Windows XP and from standard definition TV to high definition TV - Big Music still hasn't figured out an effective way to control their content.

Given Sony's latest debacle, Big Music's greatest fear is that they'll never be able to implement a DRM scheme. And rightly so. But one has to wonder what Sony's balance sheet will look like after the dust from this scandal has settled. First, Sony will have to eat the cost of recalling 4.7 million CDs from stores and 2.1 million CDs from consumers. That's almost 7 million CDs that will take up space in a landfill, all because Sony decided to take its marketing cues from its legal department instead of people that know music. Secondly, there are several class action suits forming in the US and elsewhere (like Italy) because of this boneheaded move, and that's not even mentioning the legal actions that several state attorneys general are considering now. Thirdly, one has to consider the cost of the negative publicity Sony now faces. I don't think that consumers will stop buying CDs from their favorite artists just because they're on one of Sony's many labels, but you can certainly bet that many tech-savvy folks will seriously consider buying the disc from iTunes or just downloading it from a BitTorrent or P2P site rather than get a virus by doing the "right thing" and buying the actual CD from a store. And honestly, who can blame them? When one can get a virus by putting an official music CD into their computer, who can honestly blame them for taking their chances elsewhere? I've never gotten a virus from any music I downloaded, which is more than I can say about Sony CDs.

In the end, one has to wonder if it was all worth it for Sony. How much money could they possibly "lose" from piracy to justify the recall, the lawsuits, the lost sales and the bad press? Surely they couldn't have lost that much money. But even if they end up claiming that they did, in fact, lose more money to piracy off those 20-50 CD titles than they lost from this fiasco, I'm not sure that I'll believe them. Simple macroeconomic theory says that, if given an ultimatum of paying for something they used to get for free, a huge chunk of people will simply do without. And that should trouble Big Music even more than piracy itself. What if Sony came up with the perfect DRM system? What if they came up with CDs that couldn't be copied? Personally, I'd just stop listening to Shakira. My life won't be any less richer for it, I suppose. And Big Music would lose its favorite scapegoat. Like a Third-World dictator always blaming America for his own country's economic woes, Big Music would no longer would they be able to hide behind the spectre of "piracy" any time one of their albums tanks.

Another thing I learned in macroeconomics is that black markets exist for a reason. At the end of the day, most people want to do the right thing. But if people are buying your product from the back stalls at flea markets or doing the digital equivalent by using a P2p network, one of two things must be happening. Either your product is in short supply, or it's priced too high. I don't think anyone will say that music is in short supply, so that means that music is simply too expensive. But rather than adapt to and embrace the Internet, Big Music sees it as its sworn enemy. Part of this is because selling music online means selling individual tracks instead of albums. And trust me, Big Music is far happier selling 2 million Britney Spears CDs at $12.99 (almost $26 million) than selling 5 million digital copies of the one good track on the album for $4.9 million. But guess what? People are sick of doing this. Customers want to be able to spend 99¢ for that one good song precisely because they're sick of paying $12.99 for the same thing.

But Big Music's fear of the Internet goes even deeper than just dollars and cents. It's afraid of the Internet and has stuck its head in the sand for years when it comes to digital distribution. That's something which it can continue to do if it wants to, but that will be at it's own peril.

UPDATE: Yep, I knew it would happen. Texas is officially the first state to sue Sony over the XCP discs, according to court papers filed today.

UPDATE: It looks like the EFF is now suing Sony! They are not only suing Sony for the XCP debacle, but are also targeting SunnComm MediaMax, another type of DRM that Sony has used on 20 million compact discs. According to the EFF, MediaMax "installs files on the users' computers even if they click 'no' on the EULA, and it does not include a way to fully uninstall the program". MediaMax also "transmits data about users to SunnComm through an Internet connection whenever purchasers listen to CDs, allowing the company to track listening habits - even though the EULA states that the software will not be used to collect personal information and SunnComm's website says 'no information is ever collected about you or your computer'. The EFF also says that users had to provide multiple requests for an uninstaller "but they first had to provide more personally identifying information". The EFF also determined that "SunnComm's uninstaller creates significant security risks for users, as the XCP uninstaller did." Sony is so busted!

UPDATE: Kudos to Amazon.com for doing the right thing and offering refunds or replacements to anyone that purchased a Sony XCP CD from the online giant. This refund is as "no questions asked" as they come - purchasers get a refunds or replacement whether the disc has been opened or not and Amazon has also waived the 30-day limit on refunds for these discs. Amazon is doing this solely on its own and has no agreement with Sony to return the crippled discs to the manufacturer.

UPDATE: Plain ol' Scotch tape placed on the outer edge of these discs can apparently defeat the XCP protection entirely. More proff - as if we needed any - that DRM CDs simply do not work.

On the website front, I added a new recipe to the Recipe page and also added a new link to the Links page. Oh, and I also expanded the list of my favorite concerts from 5 to 10 on my Favorite Things page.

11/22/2005: FIRST THINGS FIRST - HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAD!!! :) OK, just so you know, I added several updates to yesterday's entry about Sony getting sued into oblivion. Scroll to the end of the entry to read them if you wish. I promise I'll shut up about it in a minute, but I *must* clarify one delicious point about the whole Sony fiasco: as you might know, Sony didn't write (or, more accurately, steal) the software published on their CDs. That was done by a British company called First4Internet. However, because Sony distributed the software they are also open to liability... due to the standard the US Supreme Court set earlier this year in... (are you sitting down?) MGM Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. My God, people - it's as if Sony has started a chain of events that have caused the very fabric of spacetime to rip! Irony is piling on top of irony piling on top of irony on top of yet another irony... until the spacetime itself warps and takes us back to 1980 where there aren't any CDs. And not only has this story hit the mainstream media, it's even hit the comics too! Lastly, I felt that yesterday's commentary was so important that I gave it its own page (which compelled me to finally get around to cleaning up this ancient document).

I also added a bit about Obscure Windows Shortcuts to the GeekStuff page and also cleaned up the table on the Critic's Corner page.

11/28/2005: OK - I'm back from Atlanta and the whole Thanksgiving gig - see some pictures here. I also added a link to a page of Mimi pics and also added a few new links to the Links page. I had a great time this past weekend, but when I returned home I discovered some highly disturbing news... Imagine owning a beverage company with worldwide brand recognition. Imagine that despite being the "default brand" people think of when they think of your beverage, your sales have been flagging as of late. Imagine that you have a team of research folks working on changing a formula that's been popular and unchanged for ages. You're convinced that the "new formula" will be a smashing success and it'll help you regain flagging market share. Well, stop imagining... and stop thinking of "New Coke" - I'm talking about Guinness. And if Coke's management team thought they had a disaster on their hands, the people that run Diageo PLC (Guinness's parent company) have no idea what the shitstorm they're about to unleash will be like. Seriously. Don't screw with Guinness... or else!

12/01/2005: No real updates today, just some housekeeping. I deleted some of the files from the Member's Section because they are now easily available all over the Internet. If you need help finding what used to be there, just ask. I also archived some older news to the news archive, which should make for faster homepage downloading.

12/06/2005: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HUNNY! My sweet girlfriend turns 22 today! :)  Aside from mentioning her birthday and telling ya that I added a few new links to the Links page (and edited some older ones), I just wanted to post this:

hehehehehehe!

12/07/2005: Lots of lil' updates today! I edited the Justice for Kirsty entry on the Links page, added a cool new Guinness commercial to the Downloads page, updated my MP3 lists (also on the Downloads page) and also updated the Useless Fact.

12/09/2005: Today's odd lil' bit of trivia: Andrew McCarthy wore a wig for the final scene of Pretty in Pink. Many of you might know that the original ending of the movie called for Andie (Molly Ringwald) to finally hook up with her friend Duckie (Jon Cryer). However, test audiences simply hated the ending, so John Hughes reshot the ending to have Andie and Blane McDonnagh (McCarthy) get back together. The only problem with doing the reshoot was that Andrew McCarthy had already shaved his head for a play he was appearing in at the time, so he had to wear a wig for continuity purposes. (He had also lost around 20 pounds for the role in the play too, although the weight loss is not as obvious (to me) as the wig).

Even more of the pointless and random trivia you know and love: Belmont Abbey is a private Catholic liberal arts college in my city of Belmont, North Carolina. They recently opened a student-named coffee house called ... (wait for it...) Holy Grounds.

In website news, I added a new recipe to the Recipe page. Enjoy! Oh, and by the way, Scarlett Johansson fans should absolutely check out these pics of her posted over at The Superficial. Push-up bras are TEH WIN!

12/12/2005: Mariah Carey is so classy. When she came onstage to accept the award for Best Female R&B/Hip Hop Artist at the Billboard Music Awards a week or tow ago, she not only had the nerve to read her acceptance speech off her Palm Pilot, she even complained about "whoever wrote this list for me" because they apparently left some names off of it. Not writing your own "thank you speech" for an awards show is bad enough - admitting it onstage during your acceptance speech is something altogether worse. What a tired old whore! In fact, she's so tired that she even has an assistant bring her drink to her mouth for her. Ah well...

I posted the pics from Lisa's birthday gathering at the Bucket Shop to the Photo Gallery and also swapped out the QuickTime version of the Guinness commercial for a high-res XviD one on the Downloads page. Enjoy!

12/16/2005: New uploads in the Member's Section. That is all.

12/17/2005: Added a new tip to the Geek Stuff page, updated the Playlists page, Useless Fact and the Up To The Minute sections.

12/22/2005: Since I won't be able to update this until next year, I just wanted to quickly say MERRY CHRISTMAS and throw out a few fun facts for you:

1) Magazines make the lion's share of their profits from ad sales, not subscriptions. The amount of money a magazine charges for its ad pages is directly related to how many readers they have. In other words, you're worth far more to a magazine as a statistic to be used for ad sales than you are as a paying customer. Many magazines - especially newer ones - are usually so desperate to build a readership base that they'll do just about anything to get one - including giving subscriptions away for free! There are thousands of "free magazine subscription" websites out there, but I don't advise you to use them. Some sites basically give you the magazine in return for your address and marketing information; expect a ton of junk snail mail and spam if you use them. Other sites are multi-level "scams" that require you to get three or four friends to subscribe before you can get your "free" subscription. But even if 90% of the "free magazine" sites aren't to be trusted, that doesn't mean that you should be a sucker and pay the price listed on those annoying postcards that are stuffed into magazines. Sites like this one are perfectly legit. They offer dozens of magazine subscriptions for $5.95/year - even for some weekly mags like OK!

2) For years, I was a fan of "wacky law" websites and newspaper filler stories. You've probably gotten an email with a list of such "wacky laws" like "It's illegal for a man to marry a camel in Broken Arrow, Arizona" or "In North Carolina, it's illegal to use elephants to plow cotton fields"... crap like that. Now, I've always been interested in how such crazy laws came to pass. It was in search of the origin of these laws that I found out the horrible truth: these "wacky laws" are usually huge embellishments on the real thing. It's true that some of the "wacky laws" floating around in emails or on the web are laws copied verbatim from city or state ordinances. These archaic laws have been ignored for so long that people have forgotten that they even exist. Most of the "it's illegal for a woman to to X in the state of Y on a Sunday" laws are, in fact, real laws from 150 years ago that are still "on the books" but haven't been enforced in 100 years. However, the vast majority of the "wacky laws" you read about take real laws and try to put a funny spin on it. For example, imagine a pedestrian-friendly city like New York. Imagine that dog owners typically take their dogs with them when they run errands. Imagine that they tie the dogs up to something outside of the store, then go inside to pick up their dry cleaning, get some groceries, etc. Now, imagine that one particular summer several people are bitten by a few of these dogs, so the city of New York passes an ordinance making it illegal "to leave any animal unattended within the city limits of New York". Well, the people that collect those "wacky laws" will take that ordinance and change it to something like "it's illegal to leave a hyena unattended in the city of New York"... and hilarity ensues! Sort of. Here are some real world examples from a well-known "wacky laws" website:

"Ordinance #223 in Bexley, Ohio prohibits the installation and usage of slot machines in outhouses" - I can almost guarantee you that the law bans slot machines in any building in Bexley, Ohio - it's just funnier to say "outhouse" than "any building".

"It is illegal to offer whiskey or cigarettes to animals at the zoo in Manville, New Jersey" - It's almost certainly illegal of offer animals at the zoo anything - it's just funnier to say "whiskey and cigarettes" than "any item".

"It is illegal to visit a cemetery in Virginia for any other reason than visiting the deceased" - not especially "wacky", this is probably part of an anti-loitering or anti-vandalism law.

"It is illegal to tie giraffes to street lamps in Atlanta, Georgia" - See my example above. It's probably illegal to tie any animal to a street lamp in Atlanta.

"It is illegal to pawn your dentures in Las Vegas, Nevada" - This is hardly unique. There's an entire class of personal items that cannot be sold at retail - used mattresses, used underwear, used toothbrushes, etc. Of course, you can sell any of these items on a person-to-person basis, but a retail store (which includes pawn shops) cannot.

"It is illegal to juggle without a license in Hood River, Oregon" - Many cities require street performers to have licenses. This includes jugglers.

"According to Indiana state law, once your breath leaves your body, it is no longer your property" - That sounds like a law that was written up after one particular DUI case, doesn't it?

"In Grand Haven, Michigan, it is illegal to abandon a hoopskirt on any public street or sidewalk" - Yes, littering laws... most places have them.

"It is illegal to drink beer from a bucket on any street curb in St. Louis, Missouri" - Yes, it's called an "open container law". Walking down the street and drinking a beer is illegal in just about every state in the Union. The part about the bucket was just added for laughs.

"In Memphis Tennessee, it is illegal for a woman to drive a car unless there is a man running or walking in front of it, waving a red flag to warn approaching motorists and pedestrians" - I actually like this law! Seriously, if this is a real law, then it's an archaic one. When I was a kid, I knew several older women that had never driven a car before.

3) Actress and confirmed hottie Jessica Alba once had the phone number 867-5309. She says that she got an average of eleven "Jenny" calls a month while she lived there. Unfortunately, I can't find the interview online at the moment, but if I find it in the next day I'll post a link.

01/05/2006: We're back from London! The pics are coming soon, I promise!

01/13/2006: OK, the pics from the London trip are finally ready for public display. Why the holdup? Well, instead of just dumping 300 pictures in a photo gallery and leaving you to figure it out on your own, I decided to write up a travelogue about the whole experience. I had a lot of fun writing the whole thing up, but man... writing down everything you do for a week can take a lot of time! But no matter, it's done and you can start reading it here. And that's not the only thing I've been working on, either! I wrote up a quick list of things that the UK does better than the US as well as things that the US does better than the UK. I think it's pretty funny - especially in the "it's funny 'cos it's true" department - so check that out by clicking here. Oh, and remember my Archos portable video player? This London trip was the main reason that I bought it in the first place, so I updated my review of the player with some in-depth looks at the Archos' storage and battery capacity. You can read that by clicking here (scroll to the bottom of the article for the update). One night this past week I had trouble sleeping, and to help me sleep I made up a list of what makes records valuable (or worthless). That little sleep exercise resulted in a brand-new article about record and CD collecting that you can read by clicking here. So yeah, man - I haven't been sitting at this computer doing nothing for the past week... I've been writing up a storm! Yet I must tell ya that that I haven't been working constantly. There have been periods of goofing off, I'll admit. Last week some joker unleashed this goofy picture to the Internet. It's a silly parody of a Mariah Carey DVD cover that pokes fun at her weight issues. You've GOTTA admit though... that picture is about the best Photoshop job I've seen in a LONG time!

01/17/2006: Does the name Sweeney Todd ring any bells with you? It's always sounded like a vaguely familiar (and long and boring) novel by Charles Dickens or W. Somerset Maugham that I was supposed to read in high school but didn't. Boy, was I wrong! Sweeney Todd's origin is similar that of King Arthur or Robin Hood in that it's a bit of a mystery. There's no definite historical figure behind the legend, nor is there one single fictional work that marks the true "beginning" of the story. All scholars know is that stories about Sweeney Todd started appearing in England sometime in the early part of the 18th century. And what a story it is:

You see, Sweeney Todd is the son of a petty thief. As a small boy, he was arrested for a crime his father committed, and as a result spent twenty years in London's infamous (and very real) Newgate Prison. He had a very rough time of it in prison and often has nightmares about the cruelty of the jailers and other inmates. As a result of this, Sweeney became a bit of a "justice freak", albeit a very unconventional one. He's sort of a "People's Justice Freak", the targets of his wrath being wealthy men that exploit the lower classes, evil jailers, crooked cops and the like.

But Sweeney isn't an animal. In fact, he's quite gentle. Whilst in prison he trained to be a barber, and upon his release he opened up his own shop. He's known for giving the best shaves in London. He's a veritable virtuoso with a straight-blade, never once nicking a customer. That is, until one day when an evil prison guard asks for a shave. He gets in Sweeney's chair and goes on about the "poor bastards in Newgate" that "deserve everything they get in there". He laughingly tells Sweeney stories of the things he's done in prison, like raping little boys and knocking over poor people's food (which they had to pay for, mind you). This man just makes Sweeney snap. He slashes the man's neck and dumps his body into the Thames. Several other "bad people" meet similar fates in the coming weeks.

The story of Sweeney Todd is set in the early 1700s, back when barbers were also surgeons. If you had some sort of bodily injury you went to the barber for help, not a physician (they only dealt in diseases). So it wasn't especially unusual when a woman came to Sweeney's shop one day asking for help with a physical problem. What was unusual was what she needed help with: an abortion. Sweeney somewhat reluctantly performs the operation on her, and then checks up on her a few days later at her place of employment - a pie shop. She's not doing so well - her belly's fine, but her drunk of a husband has beaten her up pretty badly, which causes Sweeney's "justice meter" to start going off.

As luck would have it, the same woman rushes into Sweeney's shop a few days later, claiming that her husband was having terrible pains in his abdomen. Sweeney rushes over and discovers that the man has stones, and the only way to extract them to to insert a long pair of pliers up... well, you don't wanna know. Sweeney successfully extracts the stones to everyone's relief. While everyone is looking away from Sweeney - hugging each other, running out the door to tell friends and family the good news, etc. - Sweeney jams the pliers back up the man's Johnson and into his guts, causing massive internal bleeding which results in the man's death a few days later.

Now, here's where the story gets really weird: A few weeks after the husband's death, Sweeney buys the shop next to his so that the woman can go into the pie-making business for herself. One night another bastard offends Sweeney, so he slashes the man's throat. Rather than dump him in the Thames or put him in the crypt of the church next door, Sweeney decides to carve the man up, wrap him in butcher's paper and present him to the woman as "fresh meat, compliments of my butcher brother from up north, recently moved to London". So she starts selling "meat pies" made from the corpses of the unjust people that Sweeney decides don't deserve to live anymore. Fun story, eh?

The woman eventually finds out about Sweeney's little... habit and after some deep thought about it, she decides to "stay" with Sweeney - even though he apparently cannot have a physical relationship. Sweeney and the woman even work out a set of signals with each other - if anyone offends the woman, she sends him next door for a shave with a certain code word. Sweeney will them kill him and butcher him for meat, which the woman will bake into her now much-in-demand pies. 

But just like the story of Adam and Eve, the woman eventually ruins everything. A rich man comes into the pie shop one day having just bought a fancy strand of pearls for his wife. The woman sees them and wants them badly, so she sends him next door for a shave. Sweeney then kills and butchers the man on cue. But then he just loses it when he finds out that the man had done nothing wrong and that the woman just wanted him dead for the pearls. Remember now, Sweeney's a "justice freak". No one that Sweeney's killed so far deserved to die perhaps, but they were hardly innocent, either. But this killing is just for greed, and that's bad. The Sweeney mentally unravels from there, tearing apart the crypt where he had stashed several of his victims. The stink of the freshly dead bodies fills the church, which attracts the authorities and ultimately leads to Sweeney's downfall.

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OK, so.. the reason I brought all this up is because when I was in London I saw a commercial for a BBC production of a Sweeney Todd film that was due to air shortly after we left the UK. Because I am a member of a Bittorrent site that specializes in British shows, I was able to download the movie and watch it at home. Just in case you were wondering why I brought all that stuff up about the story. It's a damn good movie, and I'll send it to anyone that's interested.

And speaking of British TV, one of the best new shows I've seen in a long time is a new 8-part series called Life On Mars. Here's the premise: a Manchester cop named Sam Tyler (as played by John Simm) gets into a horrific car accident, which puts him into a deep coma. He wakes up in 1973 Manchester where he is still a cop, only things are quite different. There are no mobile phones or personal computers. Forensics tests which took only hours in 2006 now take two weeks. Cops sit at their desks smoking cigarettes and harassing the "skirts" when they're not assaulting suspects or planting evidence. Sam tries to work his way through this bizarro world, wondering if he's died, or if this is all just a dream. He can sometimes hear doctors and nurses around him in 2006 Manchester when he's not focused on a case or trying to figure out where his is - and especially when he's sleeping in 1973 Manchester.

So on one hand, Life On Mars is a slightly atypical cop show, with Sam playing the "good cop" while his boss DCI Gene Hunt plays the same type of "rough and tumble" cop anyone will remember from 70s cop shows. But on the other hand, the show is also about Sam and his dealing with his "fish out of water" existence. He's used to playing by the rules and having databases with tons of information just a mobile phone call away. Now he's in a world where WPCs (Women Police Constables, or "lady cops") do nothing more than fetch coffee and clean out cells. He's gone from a world where various people of different races and sexual preferences are more or less equal to a world where "darkies" and "poofters" are the regular targets of police harassment. Plus, Sam has to deal with his own existence - is this all real? Is it a dream? Has he really gone back in time? Why did he come back to 1973 instead of 1963 or 1983?

Interested? Click the pic under "What I'm Watching" in the Up To The Minute section below to hit the BBC's site for the show. Wanna see it for yourself? It's out there on the Internet, but I'd be happy to upload the two shows already broadcast to anyone that's interested!

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Lastly, some sad, sad news from Bimini, Bahamas: the Compleat Angler hotel and bar burnt to the ground this past Friday. Not only was the hotel the center of Bimini's nightlife, it was also a shrine to one of it's most famous guests, Ernest Hemingway, who frequently stayed there on fishing trips. Many, many priceless Hemingway artifacts are now gone forever in the soft sand of God's own little island. Never again will The Calipsonians rock the night away with their happy island music. Never again will I enjoy a cold Kalik from the bar. And never again will Gary Hart have his picture taken with Donna Rice at this hotel again. 

And this would be bad enough, but it comes on the heels of the crash of a Chalk's Ocean Airlines flight that killed 18 of this tiny island's citizens. God bless the people of Bimini - better times will come, I promise! In honor of poor little Bimini, this month's Useless Fact is dedicated to the islands and her people. Also, a close family friend sent us some pictures of the Compleat Angler the morning after the fire:

01/18/2006: Lots of website updates today. I updated the Rant and also created an archive for older rants, so you can read what made me mad six months ago. I also added a new tip to the Geek Stuff page and updated the Top 10 Celebrity Hot Chicks list for February 2006. Oh, and in case you were wondering, the reason I haven't updated the Hot Chicks list since November is that - contrary to what you might think for reading the lists - I don't sit around lusting after celebs all day. It's actually taken me this long to come up with 10 more girls to add to the list! Lastly, I just wanted to mention that I received my first issues of OK! Magazine a couple of weeks ago. You might remember that I mentioned this site as a source for cheap magazines in the news section a few weeks ago. I was hesitant to mention it, as I hadn't gotten any magazines at that point, but it appears that the site is 100% legitimate. Why pay $72 for a yearly subscription to OK! when you can pay this site $5.95 for the same thing? That's only 11¢ an issue, folks!

01/23/2006: What's going on in the world? Well, the referee that overturned Troy Polamalu's interception in the Steelers\Colts game had a rock thrown through his front window last week. Because Mr. Morelli is also a high school principal, it's not entirely clear if the incident was motivated by his call in the game or simple teenage shenanigans. Oh, and an 74 year-old British lady regained her eyesight after having a heart attack. Doctors are at a loss as to why the woman - who had been blind for almost 25 years due to glaucoma - was suddenly able to see after all those years.

As far as the website goes, I added an article entitled 10 British Shows Worth Watching to the Critic's Corner page.

Oh and by the way... THE PITTSBURGH STEELERS ARE GOING TO SUPER BOWL XL!!! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! Here we go Steelers, here we go! :)

02/02/2006: OK, here's a backlog of news for you from around the world:

Guess what is no more? The telegram. For 150 years, Western Union sent telegrams all over the world - I even received one once from "Santa Claus" when I was a wee child - but as of January 31st, the telegram is dead, a victim of email and faxes. You have to give them their props, though - imagine what it must have been like to get a telegram way back in 1851. It must have seemed even more magical than the first time you sent an email - especially given the state of technology in the mid-nineteenth century. Oh telegram, I'll pour some of my 40 on the ground just for you, buddy!

Hey - guess who got busted making illegal copies of movies last week? None other than the MPAA themselves! It seems that MPAA decided to take a break from suing people that make and distribute copies of motion pictures to... make a few illegal copies of their own, in this case the upcoming movie This Film Is Not Yet Rated. The movie is a documentary about the way movies get rated, and specifically looks at why extreme violence is given a pass but anything sexual is given the third degree. You should really click the link and read the story, if only to enjoy the twisted logic MPAA uses to justify breaking the law! Apparently the MPAA was worried about "the safety of [their] employees", since the movie does, in fact, feature many MPAA employees, and not always in a kind light. It seems that piracy is justified in the MPAAs eyes when "safety" is concerned, even though director Kirby Dick "specifically requested in an e-mail that the MPAA not make copies of the movie" (emphasis mine). Ooooops!

Guess who's a complete bitch? Yes, I know - Mariah Carey - but I'm actually thinking about Annie Lennox, who snubbed Orlando Bloom back in December at a London screening of Annie Hall. According to this article from The Superficial, "when Orlando asked for her autograph, she allegedly told him: 'I just want a quiet night. Please leave me alone and get a life'." Classy! Annie Lennox should be so lucky to have someone ask for her autograph these days. For some time now, she's had a reputation of being a pain in the ass not unlike the similar rep of Val Kilmer - and notice how he's not in many movies these days? That's not a accident. The Superficial article continues: "Nobody could understand why she was being so rude to Orlando of all people. It was difficult to believe she didn't know who he was. But it turns out she genuinely thought he was an unusually good-looking fan. Annie was said to be horrified when she realized her mistake, and rushed over to apologize. She quickly gave Orlando an autograph and he gave her a quick kiss on the cheek". Bullocks to that! If I asked Annie Lennox for an autograph and she told me to "get a life" the last thing I'd wanna do to her cheek is kiss it.

Speaking of bitches, guess who isn't going to jail any time soon? Dead or Alive's frontman Pete Burns. Let me explain: Ol' Pete decided to have a go on the British TV show Celebrity Big Brother. If you remember the US version, you'll know that it was a reality show where a group of people are selected to live in a house where just about every square inch is in the range of a video camera. Anyway, the show's ratings are starting to tank in the UK, so they're now doing "Celebrity editions", much like how Who Wants To Be A Millionaire did a celebrity show every week as its ratings went into a death spiral. ANYWAY, it seems that Pete was caught on tape bragging about how the jacket he was wearing was made from gorilla fur. Animal rights people in the UK went nuts and demanded that action be taken. The cops seized Pete's jacket and sent it off for testing - and the results came in yesterday. According to the good people at Britain's Natural History Museum, the jacket was indeed made from "black and white colobus monkeys", which are native to Africa. However, it seems that the coat "was in a poor condition" which led the investigators to believe that "the pelts used to make it were likely to have been imported into the UK in the 1930s or 1940s" - before any import restrictions were put into place - thus making the jacket legal to own in the UK.  Hertfordshire Police say that they'll be returning the coat to Burns shortly.

You know how I'm always ranting about the horrible state of grammar and spelling in America today? Well, if only the criminals would listen... It seems that one Julie Kay Russo (age 32) was arrested on twenty counts of forgery after trying to pass fake payroll checks. Russo had - in all her wisdom - picked a fake company with the word "independent" in the name... only she spelled it "indapendent". The convenience store's eagle-eyed clerk noticed this and called the bank... only to find that the account did not exist. So remember kids - crime doesn't pay - especially if you don't bother using a spell-checker on your forged checks!

And lastly... do you wanna feel old? Jessica McClure - a.k.a. "Baby Jessica", the girl that got trapped in a Texas well in 1987 - in now 19 years old... and just got married! If you're too young to remember 1987, the saga of Baby Jessica was carried "play by play" in near real-time by all the major television networks. It was a nationwide phenomenon that was spoofed on The Simpsons. And so now - the girl that was a wee baby when I was a junior in high school - is married... to a 32 year-old guy, too! What a wonderful world!

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In website news, I'm working on an update, but have posted an updated Rant and Useless Fact in the meantime.

02/09/2006: Hey everybody! Aside from the new Steelers SUPER BOWL CHAMPIONS landing page, I haven't said anything about the game itself. It was AWESOME! I'm ecstatic, over-the-moon and chuffed! It's SO AWESOME following a team for so many years and finally winning the big game! I'll admit that I had more than my fair share of beer whilst watching the game, but after the final gun went off, my body was so completely exhausted from the 3-hour adrenaline rush that I couldn't stay up for very long. I'm just overjoyed - not only for myself, but for the players, coaches, staff and owners of the Steelers... especially for The Bus, Coach Cowher and the Rooneys. GO STEELERS! THE CHIN WILL WIN AGAIN NEXT YEAR!!!

Also, thanks to our many guests for making the Super Bowl party a ton of fun! I hope you all had a GREAT time and we're already looking forward to the party for Super Bowl XLI!

I'm still working on that one piece I've been working on for a couple of weeks now. I hope to have it posted by Monday at the latest. In the meantime, enjoy some funny celebrity pics I've found in the past couple of weeks:

Britney Spears being a safe driver (and mom):

Wonder why Tonya Harding isn't on Fox's Skating With Celebrities? It's 'cos her fat ass would crack the ice:

Janet Jackson is also in fine shape:

Ever wonder what Pamela Anderson looks like underneath that makeup? Like your average East Gaston trailer-trash whore, if you ask me:

In the last football-related item for the next six months, check out Lawrence Taylor (the original LT) breaking Joe Theismann's leg in a now-legendary Monday Night Football game:

For what it's worth, the readers of ESPN.com named the above play the most shocking moment in football history. And if you saw it on TV, you'll remember why.

OK, this last one's not a celebrity pic, but what the hey? Stare at this picture for 30 seconds or so, then move slowly away from your monitor... Creepy, inn' it?

02/16/2006: OK, I finally gave up and simply polished-up and posted the article I've been working on - a British English Glossary. At the missus' request, I also posted pictures of this year's Super Bowl Party to the Photo Gallery. Plus, please enjoy a rare two-fer in the Useless Fact section! I've gotta run - more later!

02/20/2006: Added a few more words to my British English Glossary and also added a slew of new movie reviews to My Rotten Tomatoes journal. Check it out!

03/08/2006: Sorry for the lack of updates lately. I began working on several articles, but it seems that they're just going nowhere. To make matters worse, I've been busy with what will end up being remembered as "The Great ID3 Clean-Up of 2006". Like a lot of folks, I have a TON of digital music files (around 11,000 of them, to be exact), and for years I've ignored the ID3 tags on them. A couple of months ago, I started cleaning up my music collection, mostly by archiving redundant files. In the past week I've switched from the files themselves to the ID3 tags therein. As you might imagine, adding cover art, genre information and track numbers to 11,000 music files takes some time. I hope to add some updates to the London Travelogue and British Glossary tomorrow though. Oh, and I did manage to update the "Up To The Minute" and Useless Fact sections.

03/10/2006: Hey everybody! It's the day before my birthday... WOO-HOO!!! So OK, let's get on it:

In what must go down as one of the best practical jokes ever, students at the University of California at Berkeley spent a week chatting up rival University of Southern California men's basketball guard Gabe Pruitt via AIM, claiming to be a UCLA hottie named "Victoria". Things got so heated between Gabe and "Victoria" that he eventually gave "her" his phone number, presumably in hopes of a booty call in his near future. A week later USC played Cal at Berkeley. The first time hapless Gabe went to the free throw line, the students started chanting "VIC-TOR-IA, VIC-TOR-IA!" and then yelled out Gabe's telephone number! According to witnesses, Pruitt "glanced back at the crowd in horror and bewilderment before clanking his free throws". Pruitt has apparently knocked down 79% of his free throws this season, but he "missed both shots after the 'VIC-TOR-IA' chants began, and hit only 3 out of 13 shots the whole game". The Bears went on to beat USC by 11 for a season sweep, which my source says is "in part due to the Cal fans' devious psy-ops". To make matters even worse for poor Gabe, transcripts of his IM sessions with "Victoria" are now floating around the UCB campus, with lame lines attributed to Gabe like "You look like you have a very fit body" and "Now I want to c u so bad". AWESOME! Read more about it here.

Here's something shocking for those of us in our thirties: this week Brit superstar James Blunt became the first British act to have a number one single in the USA since 1997! This is really hard for me to believe, since I grew up on British New Wave bands like Duran Duran, the Thompson Twins, Madness and The Jam. Hell, I still remember the "Summer of 'The Police'", when their Synchronicity album was number one for an insane 17 consecutive weeks! (For an interesting tidbit about a song from that album, see my Useless Fact). What's even sadder about this story is that the song that hit number one back in 1997 was Elton John's rehash of Candle in the Wind for Princess Diana's funeral. I have a hard time believing the BBC's assertion that John's tribute to Diana was "number one in the USA for 14 weeks", but you can read it for yourself here. Still, one has to wonder what happened to the Brits in the American charts since the last British number one before Elton John's single (which was popular both for nostalgia and charity purposes) was the freakin' Spice Girls "Wannabe". That's right - if you take Elton out of the mix, the last British number one in the USA was "If you wanna be my lover..." AMAZING! Between the Spice Girls and today, Oasis and Robbie Williams - two acts more popular than Jesus in the UK - have flopped on a spectacular scale here in the US... and that's not even counting lesser deities like Craig David, Keane, Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party and The Libertines. Amazing!

In more serious news, the German company Loremo AG is about to release an awesome little car in Germany in the next couple of months. Sure, it only has a 20hp diesel engine. Sure, it takes 20 seconds to go from 0-60 MPH. But the diminutive (992 lb) little car only costs around $13,000 and gets roughly 157 miles per gallon, with a cruising range of 807 miles. That's almost enough to drive from Atlanta to New York City on a single tank of gas... or more than enough to drive from Charlotte to Miami! A meatier GT version will also be available with a 50hp engine that "gets around 87 miles per gallon, has a cruising range of 497 miles, goes 0-60 in 9 seconds and tops out at 137 MPH". I dunno when (or if) these cars will be available in the US, but I'm interested. They actually look pretty cool too - well, much better than many of those "eco-friendly" European cars. Check out the main site here or the original story I leeched from here.

Wanna see something a little disturbing? A team of American divers has discovered a new animal in 7,500 feet of water near Easter Island. The animal - which looks like a lobster, but is covered in soft blonde fur - is so unique that scientists have given the animal a new family and genus. Check out the article here just for the picture... It looks like something out of the Alien movies!

As promised, I updated the London Travelogue and British Glossary  pages on the site. Since the London Travelogue is quite a long and drawn out piece, here are the updates for those of you who have already read it:

Concerning an exhibition at the V&A Museum:

Lest you think that the V&A only has piles of "old stuff", we also greatly enjoyed seeing some of the newer collections. One of the first rooms we went into that day was a room full of German radios and original Scandinavian furniture from the 1950s as well as some "space age" plastic furniture from the US and UK circa 1965. The room even had a special section dedicated to "punk design", with a copy of Never Mind The Bullocks, an original Vivian Westwood dress and some fanzines.

It would be the next room, though, that would really get me to thinking. It was a temporary exhibition called Hearwear, which was dedicated to the design of future products that will both enhance our environment and protect our hearing. It might sound silly, but there really were a lot of really cool ideas being shown in this exhibition. Some of the products were avant-guarde enhancements on products already in use today, such as earbud headphones that don't have to actually go inside the ear canal, or a set of headphones with a mobile phone and noise cancelling technology built-in. Other devices were a bit more forward-thinking, such as "ShareWear", a radio-powered microphone that would transmit the speaker's voice directly to any "ShareWear-enabled" hearing aid. It's kind of amazing that someone hadn't thought of that one already, isn't it? I mean, imagine going to a lecture. If you're forced to sit in the back of the lecture hall (and wear a hearing aid), the professor's voice might never reach your hearing aid to be amplified. With something like ShareWear, the professor's voice only has to travel a few inches to the microphone on his lapel, where it will be sent directly to your hearing aid - thus it sounds as good on the back row as it does on the front row.

While a lot of the devices were simply experiments in design - as in "how cool can someone make a set of earbuds look?" - some of these devices were designed by people with an actual scientific background. And these devices - all of them way out into the future - were simply mind-blowing... like a product called "Mute", which looks like standard-issue earplugs, but can block any particular noise the user doesn't want to hear. The neighbor's dog barking? A car alarm going off? Just point your head in the direction of the sound and press a button on the Mute plugs and PRESTO! that sound is gone! And then there's "Corona", a product designed to let you hear only what you want to hear. If you're sitting at a bar with a loud band playing in the background, all you need to do is press a button and you'll hear only the band or only the people sitting next to you - not both! Cool, huh? And lastly there's something like "The Beauty of Inner Space", a device which cancels out sounds we don't want to hear - dogs barking, traffic noise, jackhammers - while simultaneously amplifying sounds we might want to hear, like birds chirping, the sound of wind or the bubbling of a stream. One could theoretically do this today with noise-cancelling headphones and one of those "Nature Sounds" CDs... but what "Inner Space" offers isn't pre-recorded. The birds you hear are next to you, and the wind is just above your head. Walking down a busy London street could one day sound just like walking through a peaceful meadow!

I walked away from the exhibition pondering all of the possibilities of what hearing might be like given a helping hand from technology. I'm no scientist or engineer, but the exhibit got me thinking about the nature of sound and how humans relate to it, and how noisy our world would seem to someone from a couple of hundred years ago. In any event, the whole think just got me to think, and that's what museums are for in my opinion. It's all well and good to just look at pretty stuff, but it's pointless without thinking about the how or the why.

Concerning girls standing outside strip clubs in Soho:

Which reminds me of something Lisa and I noticed a couple of days earlier whilst walking around Soho. You see, they have tons of strip clubs in that part of town. And I guess because of so many tourists wandering around (or so much competition) the owners of these bars like to put girls in the doorways to entice the customers in. But there are just a few teeny, tiny problems with their implementation. First of all, almost every single one of the girls Lisa and I saw were simply unattractive. They weren't hideous or anything, but they were a long, long way from being mistaken for Rachel Weisz, Helen Baxendale, Elizabeth Hurley, Kate Moss or any of the hundreds of attractive English actresses and models you might be familiar with. But that's not so bad, right? After all, with the exception of the upscale "gentlemen's clubs", most of the girls at American strip clubs aren't anything to write home about, either, right? So who cares if they're not so attractive, so long as they're dressed all sexy-like, right? Well, no. For the most part, these girls were dressed in plain ol' street clothes. I even remember one girl dressed in jeans and a powder blue "midriff exposing" shirt... with her belly hanging over the top of her jeans. But that shouldn't matter, right? After all, the sexiest part of the body is the brain, right? Even if she's not the prettiest girl in the world, and even if she's dressed more like Victoria Station than Victoria's Secret, she can still be sexy, no? Wrong again, Jose. Most of these girls just stood silently in the doorways of the clubs all glassy-eyed, as if they were waiting in line at the DMV or the post office instead of trying to get punters in the place. And it wasn't that sad, "stripper that just got into it to pay for college and now she's addicted to coke" kind of glassy-eyed, either. It was just boredom on their faces. And just to put a fine point on the Ironymeter, most of these girls were standing in front of beautiful pictures of gorgeous models, too... as in "professional-quality black and white photos taken by a real professional photographer with a real model taken in a real studio". The girls in the photographs were far too pretty to ever have to lower themselves to stripping for a living. Maybe the girls at the clubs have stared at those beautiful pictures for so long they just can't take it any more. I dunno, but it was both funny and tragic at the same time.

And lastly for today, some updates to the British Glossary page: a longtime reader of jimcofer.com pointed out a couple of things, which I have since clarified. I originally said that "half-six" means 5:30 in the UK, as in "I'll meet you at the pub at half-six". This is completely incorrect. It means 6:30 - in other words, it's shortening "half past six" and not "halfway to six". However, the phrase "half-six" does mean 5:30 in German. Lots of confusion there. I also clarified another entry about stones as a unit of weight in the UK. The same faithful reader said that his grandmother used to get "5 stone bags of potatoes" from his uncles' farms in Northern Ireland. This one much simpler to figure out: it's illegal to sell produce in any units other than metric in the UK.

Oh and the very last thing: Woo-Hoo!!!! 200,000 hits!

03/15/2006: Okay, I added two new reviews today: one on VoiceEclipse VoIP service and another for a Uniden Multi-Handset Phone System. I also changed the folder name where my downloadable wallpapers reside, so as to keep the MySpace asshats from hotlinking my images. I'll be changing the name of the folder at least once a week, so hopefully the rampant bandwidth thievery will stop! Lastly, check out the Geek Stuff page to see how you too can get the grooviest WinAMP plug-in ever:

03/16/2006: The staff of jimcofer.com are pleased to announce the GRAND OPENING of the jimcofer.com message board! By clicking the "Message Board" link in the left-hand navigation column, you too can join the fun thanks to the good people at JaguarPC and Invision. Chat away, me mateys! But before you do that, check out a couple of quick stories about bad celebrity behavior:

Isaac Hayes has quit "South Park"... because the show decided to make fun of his "religion", Scientology. Apparently he had no problem being associated with the show when it was making fun of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism. Hayes was quoted as saying "Religious beliefs are sacred to people and at all times should be respected and honored. As a civil rights activist of the past 40 years, I cannot support a show that disrespects those beliefs and practices". Fucking hypocrite.

Also, Britney Spears grossed out several customers at a Los Angeles restaurant... by changing her baby's diaper on a table. You know, like a regular table... that people eat on? One might say that Britney's faux pas is a refreshing view of a celebrity as a normal person. Or you could just be honest and call her a damn hillbilly, 'cos that's what she is. How else do you explain driving around with her kid in her lap, stinking up the first class section of a plane with her feet, going into a public restroom barefoot... or marrying Kevin Federline? I'm surprised that she doesn't shop at Dress Barn, personally.

03/17/2006: HAPPY ST. PATRICK'S DAY!!! Two items of interest before I head off to quaff some green beer:

First of all, you might have heard about the guy that ripped up one of those credit card applications you get in the mail and carefully taped it back together again. He filled it out (and checked the "change of address" box and entered his parent's address!)... and received a Chase credit card a few weeks later! You can read the write-up he did on it here. I know that credit card companies always like to say that the onus is on us for our security, but this is just ridiculous! How cavalier can these people be with their customer's credit histories? Let me repeat the story: he submitted a ripped-up application with an altered address... and they sent him a card anyway. It boggles the mind!

Talk about serendipity: the very same day that I wrote about Britney Spears being a hillbilly (that'd be yesterday, BTW) , Britain's Daily Star newspaper reported that Brit was recently rushed to the hospital... after stepping on a hypodermic needle whilst walking across a parking lot... barefoot. Sigh. You can take the girl out of the trailer park, but you can't take the trailer park out of the girl. For every day that passes, Joy from My Name Is Earl looks more and more cultured than Britney Spears. It too boggles the mind.

That's all for today, but be sure to check out the new jimcofer.com Message Board if you have a few spare minutes. And be careful tonight, OK - drunks (and the PoPo) will be everywhere!

03/20/2006: Remember my article about the future of TV? It looks like Ars Technica has finally caught up with me (hehehe!) by doing this piece about the future of TV advertising in a "DVR World". I urge you to read the story in full, but if you don't have time for that, the future can be summed up in two words: product placement. Remember Eddie Izzard chiding California about its smoking policy in Dress to Kill? Well, it seems that the Golden State is living up to its reputation as the "Nanny State" as the city of Calabasas last week banned smoking in almost every public place. It's now illegal to smoke on the sidewalk, in city parks and even apartment common areas. "Land of the Free", huh? It's almost like living in a dictatorship... oh, and speaking of dictatorships, our "friends" the Saudis apparently had a hand in helping the Taliban destroy the 3000 year-old Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan back in 2001. With "friends" like these, who needs enemies? You know who does need a friend, though? Preferably one with an engineering background? Some of the residents of Clashfarquhar House in Stonehaven, Scotland. It's a house for "old age pensioners" (in US English, an "old folk's home"). It seems that 12 elderly residents have been stuck on one of the top floors since Christmas, because the elevator has broken and cannot be easily repaired. Although the staff considered moving the residents downstairs via stairs, doing so was ruled out for safety reasons. In the meantime, staff have worked overtime making the top-floor residents as comfortable as possible, even going so far as to bring in entertainers. And lastly - now that I've mentioned "old age" and "entertainers" in the same sentence, let's see how the various musical entertainers of my generation have fared:

Eddie Van Halen
(Sure he had mouth cancer, but he looks like a bag lady now!)

Axl Rose
(Makes Joan Rivers look attractive!)

Boy George
(Looks like an average soccer-mad Brit without his makeup!)

Robert Plant
(Actually, the picture is quite good. But RP looks quite scary!)

03/29/2006: Hey everybody! Did you think I fell off the face of the earth? Not hardly! I've been working my ass off migrating the photo galleries to the new software, and now I'm more or less done (with the exception of the gallery for Ty Gerold's birthday party, which I'll get around to doing one of these days). AND SO, I'm pleased to present to you the BRAND NEW JIMCOFER.COM PHOTO GALLERY! I hope you enjoy it! (If you have any questions about any of the new features in the photo gallery, please see the new About This Site page or the Photo Gallery FAQ in the Message Boards). I also updated the London Tips page and the British English Glossary a few days ago, so you might wanna check those pages out, too.

So what's going on in the world? Well, a man from New South Wales, Australia was arrested for DUI in the most stunningly stupid way ever. The man was trying to locate Ayers Rock, and so he stopped his car to ask some people in another car for directions. Unfortunately for him, the rock was less than 100 yards away and the other car was full of cops. People, I can't begin to tell you how stupid this is. Ayers Rock is 1100 feet tall and 5.8 miles in circumference. Unlike the Rocky Mountains here in the US, Ayers Rock is not surrounded by other mountains or blocked by trees or brush. In fact, Ayers Rock is a frickkin' gigantic boulder in the middle of an almost tree-less and hill-less plane. There's no way on God's green earth that any able-bodied person could not see Ayers Rock. To make it all the more funny, when one of the cops came over to give the man "directions", he pointed out that the man's headlights were actually shining on the rock itself.

Have you heard about the "pro-life" Britney Spears sculpture? The one with her giving birth on a bearskin rug? Here's a story about it, although remember: there are some things you simply can't "un-see". Britney's still a little chubby from the whole birthing thing, so she might want to skip staying at a hotel in Norden, Germany that has started charging guests by the kilo for an overnight stay. Apparently hotel owner Juergen Heckrodt became distressed at the number of fat people staying in his hotel, so he now orders people onto a scale so that he can charge them a half euro per kilogram of weight per night. Fat people can breathe a sigh of relief, though: he's capped the total price at his normal rate of €39 a night.

Geologists are all excited now that we might be getting a new ocean. Well, not really. But a part of Africa does indeed appear to be collapsing, and in a few years the "horn" of Africa will be separated from the rest of Africa by a new body of water. What makes this particular story so interesting is the unbelievable speed at which the change is taking place. This might (or might not) happen in my lifetime, but it will certainly happen within the lifetime of my grandchildren. Get the complete scoop at Der Spiegel here. And while you're there, you might wanna check out their piece about the "Secret History of Garden Gnomes". While not steeped in gravitas as the Africa piece, it's still fun.

Lastly, allow me to end on a sad note: it looks like the Bluth family is gone for good. The 'net was buzzing with reports yesterday that Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz was leaving the show, even if (as rumors had hoped) the sitcom was picked up by Showtime. Sadly, these reports are 100% true. And without Hurwitz, you have no Arrested Development. Arrested was the funniest show TV had seen in years - some will say the funniest show ever to grace the tube - and the world is the worse off for losing it. I'm really bummed, but at least Hurwitz and company sent the Bluths off right, ya know? [cue Europe's "The Final Countdown"] Still, I can't help but feeling that they've "made a huge mistake". I just wanna scream "Come On!" and stuff a "banger in my mouth" about the whole thing. Maybe I'll need to find an "analrapist" to talk to... because after all, "I'm a monster"! Well, if it means "taking a chubby, I will suck it up" just to "get one in the can".  Maybe I'll get lucky and Hurwitz will reconsider, which will just "stick an arrow in my buttocks" to see it come back. But probably not. Oh, Arrested Development, how I'll miss you so!

03/30/2006: Wow - a lot of stuff's going on, so I'll get right to it: It seems that Mike Holmgren is still upset about losing to the Steelers (and, according to Mike, the referees) in the Super Bowl. Just Wednesday, Holmgren was quoted as saying that "to have the story of the Super Bowl be the officials, that is crazy". Well, that's just great, Mike... but everyone on the planet outside of the Seattle metropolitan area thinks the story is over and done with. There was only one blatantly bad call - the personal foul on Hasslebeck after the Ike Taylor interception - even if the rest of them were "gimmies". And hey Mike, let's not forget at least two fumbles by Seahawk receivers that were ruled incomplete passes and the blatant block in the back of Ben Rothlisberger after Kelly Herndon intercepted him. Had that been called, you would have been first and ten at your own... what? 16 yard line? Quit yer whining already!

Got tons of cash lying around and nothing to do with it? Why not buy a genuine WWII-era Enigma Machine, now for sale on eBay. I'll be honest with you... when I heard about this auction, the history nerd and computer geek in my collided and SUPER HISTORY-COMPUTER NERD was born, a man that simply must have this machine. Unfortunately, the Enigma will probably sell for at least $50,000, probably more. Much more. There aren't that many Enigma Machines left in the "wild" these days, and given the mystique of this machine, I can imagine that lots of people will give their eyeteeth for one. Don't know what an Enigma machine is? Click here.

Speaking of having a lot of money, do you shop at Whole Foods? If so, you might be interested in this Slate article by Field Maloney. It's hardly a whistle-blowing epic like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, but the article does raise interesting questions nevertheless. Why, for instance, does Whole Foods' produce section display a huge banner listing "Saving Energy" as one of the "Reasons To Buy Organic", when the chain refuses to buy conventionally-grown tomatoes from 20 miles away in favor of ones grown in Chile? Surely the amount of energy it takes to grow a tomato using "modern methods" 20 miles away is less than it takes to ship a tomato in from Chile! Another reason Whole Foods gives to buy organic is that doing so "help[s] the small farmer". This is flat-out playing with numbers. Of course there are thousands of small organic farms in the United States. But the vast (and I mean vast, as in 95% or more) majority of the "organic food" sold in the United States comes from one of five or six massive organic farms in California. Look, I'm not knocking Whole Foods here. They do indeed sell nice stuff. They also pay their employees an awesome minimum wage ($13.15/hour). But things just aren't as rosy and wholesome as they might want you to think.

At the other end of the scale, if you don't have a lot of money, you might shop at Wal Mart. And one thing you might not be able to buy at Wal Mart much longer is UMD discs. UMD discs are movies made for the Play Station Portable (PSP) game console (you might have seen a commercial for an upcoming DVD release: "available April 10th on DVD and Play Station Portable". UMD is the format PSP discs use). Sales of UMD discs have been dismal so far and apparently Universal and Paramount have stopped shipping UMD discs altogether, while studios like Buena Vista (Disney) and Twentieth Century Fox and even Sony itself are scaling back future UMD releases. So what gives? Why is UMD well on its way to receiving Extreme Unction? Well, it might be the price - UMD discs sell for around the same price as DVD discs, even though UMD discs can only be played on a PSP with its small screen. One could argue that teenagers - given limited cash and the choice between buying a DVD or UMD disc - will opt for the DVD. Of course, older people could probably easily afford both the DVD and the UMD disc... but who wants to pay twice for the same movie? Of course, one could also say that it's just the latest in a line of Sony consumer flops: Betamax, DAT, Mini-disc, and Memory Stick... not to mention other failures like the Walkman Bean and and a Sony online music store that only sold music in a format the Sony players could play. The “Not Invented Here” Syndrome apparently has claimed another victim.

Oh, speaking of Wal Mart, some pretentious college kid "lived" in a Wal Mart for 41 hours. The linked CNN article describes as Skyler Bartels "an aspiring writer and Drake University sophomore" who "thought he'd spend a week in a Wal-Mart as a test of endurance, using it as the premise for a magazine article". I'd describe him as a moron with a stripper name, but that's just me.

Lastly for today, Rolling Stone has released their "10 Artists To Watch" list. There's some good stuff on the list, although a band called "TV On The Radio" is named as "David Bowie's favorite band", which, in my book, is reason enough to stay away.

03/31/2006: Some random thoughts:

Morrissey recently said that he'd "rather eat my own testicles than reform The Smiths. And that's saying something for a vegetarian." What the hell does vegetarianism have to do with it? Were it me giving the press conference, I'd say something like: "I'd rather eat my own testicles than reform The Smiths. 'Cos, you know, I'm not a cannibal or anything."

The Joker, The Riddler, The Penguin... they were all constantly foiled by Batman and his crusade to save Gotham City. So why the hell didn't those guys just pack up and move to Chicago? If Batman is HERE, wouldn't it be easier to get away with heinous crimes THERE?

Speaking of Chicago, if Marshall Field became a general in the French Army and the stadium where the Bears play were named after him, it'd be "Field Marshall Marshall Field Field".

Terri Hatcher ain't all that.