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  • Home Alone, Part XXI

    So once again my parents are going away for a week and I’ll have the house to myself the weekend of the 22nd. I’m still trying to figure out what to do. I’m not sure that it will be warm enough to BBQ, but I’m thinking of having some kind of gathering. Maybe a movie/anime festival of some kind I can talk a few folks into coming down to visit. At least something to keep me from going stir crazy in his big house.

  • Truth is Stranger than Fiction?

    A few years ago I remember a story going around about someone trying to use a $2 bill at a Taco Hell. Snopes doesn’t have any indication as to if it is true or false, but it seems that there are some people out there who still aren’t familiar with $2 bills.

    Best Buy Has Customer Arrested For Using $2 Bills

    A Baltimore man tried to pay for a Best Buy car stereo installation with $2 bills—and was arrested. Apparently the man was already upset with the Best Buy’s service, so thought he’d stage a minor protest by using the uncommon currency:

    “I’m just here to pay the bill,” Bolesta says he told a cashier. “She looked at the $2 bills and told me, ‘I don’t have to take these if I don’t want to.’ I said, ‘If you don’t, I’m leaving. I’ve tried to pay my bill twice. You don’t want these bills, you can sue me.’ So she took the money. Like she’s doing me a favor.”

    He remembers the cashier marking each bill with a pen. Then other store personnel began to gather, a few of them asking, “Are these real?”

    (Thanks, C0bra!)

    More proof that Best Buy is actually “Worst Buy”: Man arrested for paying in $2 bills [Anandtech]

    [via Gizmodo]

  • Gloomy Bears, What Every Kid Wants

    I’ve seen Gloomy Bear comics, but never an actual one. I want one!

    Gloomy bears
    It’s a little mean, don’t you think, to give little kids cute stuffed bears to hug while they sleep, dreaming of the day when they will befriend a real bear, not yet knowing that it will never ever happen. I am still not over it. Gloomy bears, designed by Mori Chak are adorable and pink, but the blood stained claws will let your children know that bears are wild animals, not to be hugged if encountered in the woods.

    Images Gloomybears-1

    Gloomy bears are $20-$40 at unica. [via Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women]

  • Technology and Jumping Forward

    Last night everyone was supposed to have set their clocks ahead an hour. But here’s the strange thing. With the exception of my phone, everything else I have that keeps time changes its time automatically. No need for me to do a thing. I had a moment this morning where I was looking around trying to figure out how I could tell that the time change happened. If my phone wasn’t stupid and not able to do it on its own I’d still be clueless.

    Now I have to figure out if there is anything else that I need to change by hand.

  • Gotta Find One of Those Caps

    Googlegulp Images Logo
    Google has announced their latest project: Google gulp! (with auto-drink(tm)).

    Think fruity. Think refreshing.
    Think a DNA scanner embedded in the lip of your bottle reading all 3 gigabytes of your base pair genetic data in a fraction of a second, fine-tuning your individual hormonal cocktail in real time using our patented Auto-Drinkâ„¢ technology, and slamming a truckload of electrolytic neurotransmitter smart-drug stimulants past the blood-brain barrier to achieve maximum optimization of your soon-to-be-grateful cerebral cortex. Plus, it’s low in carbs! And with flavors ranging from Beta Carroty to Glutamate Grape, you’ll never run out of ways to quench your thirst for knowledge.

    I’m still unsure about the bottles reporting information about me to Google, but the Sero-Tonic Water sounds tasty. They are also rolling this out slowly, as they did with Gmail. You can only get some if a friend of yours gives you a bottle cap for it. Hopefully I’m cool enough that I can get one.

  • I’m an Existential Hedonist

    Decided to take one of those silly quiz things:

    You scored as Existentialism. Your life is guided by the concept of Existentialism: You choose the meaning and purpose of your life.

    “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”

    “It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.”

    –Jean-Paul Sartre

    “It is man’s natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.”

    –Blaise Pascal

    More info at Arocoun’s Wikipedia User Page…

    Existentialism
    		85%

    Hedonism
    		85%

    Utilitarianism
    		80%

    Justice (Fairness)
    		75%

    Apathy
    		50%

    Kantianism
    		35%

    Strong Egoism
    		30%

    Nihilism
    		30%

    Divine Command
    		20%

    What philosophy do you follow? (v1.03)
    created with QuizFarm.com

  • iPod/iTunes Survey

    Taken from LJ:

    How many total songs?
    7580

    Sort by Song Title
    First: ‘Till the End of Time, Delerium
    Last: track 8 (it’s in japanese: 黒い翼) off of Los Angeles by the brilliant green

    Sort by time:
    First: Let’s Hear It For Nine Inch Nails, Nine Inch nails
    Last: Essential Mix – 04.01.2001, Carl Cox Live @ Space

    Sort by Album:
    First track: (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thing, Heaven 17, (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thing (cd single)
    Last track: LITTLE BUSTERS, The Pillows・他, フリクリ オリジナルサウンドトラック

    Top Ten Most Played:
    I Love Love You, Hideki Naganuma/Guitar Vader
    READY STEADY GO, L’Arc~en~Ciel
    HEY! JIMMY, HAV
    Super Shooter, RIP SLYME
    Cutie Honey, Koda Kumi
    The Concept of Love, Hideki Nagnuma
    A Place in the Country, Adam Ant
    Puss n’ Boots, Adam Ant
    Future Is What We Are, Ken Ishii
    Run Rabbit Junk, Yoko Kanno

    10 most recently played: (Same comment as last one):
    Place in the Country, Adam Ant
    Take Me To The River, Talking Heads
    You Won’t See Me Coming, Jean-Jacques Burnel
    Screw, The Cure
    It Only Makes Me Laugh, Oingo Boingo
    No One Lives Forever, Oingo Boingo
    Greetings to the New Brunette, Billy Bragg
    Like a Prayer, Bigod 20
    Run Rabbit Junk, Yoko Kanno
    HIT IN THE USA, BEAT CRUSADERS

    Find “sex”, how many songs show up?
    18

    Find “death”, how many songs show up?
    13

    Find “love”, how many songs show up?
    442

  • More on Feedster (and why I love the web)

    The other day I posted about issues with spam in the search results I was getting at Feedster. Within hours there was not only a post on Scott Johnson’s blog, but I got a nice message from him about how to remove blogspot results from my NetNewsWire searches there. I love to see companies being this on the ball. Especially a place like Feedster. I wasn’t really looking for a solution right that second. I more was commenting how spammers seem to be doing their best to devalue a lot of the usefulness of the web.

    So here’s a quick thanks for the help!

  • Blogger + Feedster + Spammers = Useless

    I use NetNewsWire for reading RSS feeds. One of the great features up till recently has been the ability to have it search places like Feedster and have the results show up as a feed. In the recent past my regular search for anything to do with Pulmonary Fibrosis has achieved nothing more than hugely long posts of spam (click and see). Since the 15th there have been around 27 hits on that search, only ONE of them being an actual post by someone. And all the offending posts have been at blogger.

    I think Blogger needs to do something about this. Have a better way of detecting automated blog signups or something. Currently it has drastically reduced the usefulness of things like Feedster for me. At least Feedster does have the ability to filter out responses from some urls. I just need to see if I can get NNW to support doing that.

  • So Who Gets It?

    This article at the New York Times made me laugh quite a bit this morning:

    Right Name, Wrong E-Mail In-Box

    LAST fall, David A. Green was looking forward to his new job at a Manhattan real estate brokerage. Finally, he would be able to shed the e-mail confusion that plagued him because of the two other David Greens at his company.

    No such luck. At his new company, Cushman & Wakefield, there was yet another David Green. And that Mr. Green already held the coveted e-mail name David_Green, following the company’s convention for e-mail addresses.

    At his old company, CB Richard Ellis, he had been, reluctantly, David.A.Green. Now he became David_A_Green. Hundreds of his e-mail messages went to the wrong David Green.

    “I would have been better off being at his desk than at mine,” said David A. Green, noting that the original, initial-free David Green is “most gracious about sending me the volumes of e-mails that go to him.” [via New York Times: Technology]

    So why did I find this amusing? This isn’t a new topic. The sendmail FAQ has had a question on this forever (or at least since 1997). It still amazes me that people don’t think that this might be a problem. When I was in college pretty much everyone had four character email addresses in the format (first initial)(second initial)(random alphanumeric)(random alphanumeric). Mine was gb1d. I can still remember pretty much all my friend’s addresses from then too. It also helps to keep out people just spamming by sending emails to any old firstname_lastname address.