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.