Month: March 2003

Criminal asked to give the s**t back — literally

Link via Fark. Full story at this Chicago Tribune article (free registration required, so I’ll sum it up below). But here’s the story: A jewel thief walked into a jewelry store, and asked to see some expensive jewels. He picked one up and then started coughing and covered his mouth to cough. Then he returned the diamond. But it wasn’t the same diamond. It was a piece of junk. He had swallowed the expensive one. And the jeweler started screaming. They held him until the Chicago PD got there. But it was already internal.

Here’s the problem: They’ve got a suspect with a large 3-carat diamond worth $40,000 in him, but, according to the article, he can’t be charged until that diamond is recovered. It hasn’t moved through his digestive system completely, and doctors told police to not give him any laxatives as it could shoot the thing through there and cut up his intestines (where it’s currently lodged, according to X-rays).

But doctors said they could feed him.

So what do they do? They ordered some greasy White Castle sliders that should move the thing through. And they have appointed an officer to feed them to him.

That would be a crappy job.

March 7, 2003

What every human should know

From Dave’s Blog: Before the Internet, it was almost impossible for the average person to obtain this information.

March 7, 2003

Let’s go harass some puppies

Last week it was pigeons, this week it’s puppies that are getting chased around by a camera-welding RC car. The best part is that the puppy looks like he enjoys it a bit. From b3ta.

March 7, 2003

Want to know about Nigerian’s rights as citizens?

They don’t have any (from NTK)

March 7, 2003

BSA attempts to shut down Open Source software site

The Business Software Alliance (aka the BSA) has far too much time on their hands. The group is one of the leading fighters of software piracy, but they’re a bunch of morons. This quote from this Register story is great: “The Business Software Alliance has pulled off an astonishing anti-piracy coup, identifying a major European university as a distribution hub for… OpenOffice.org.”

For those who don’t know, OpenOffice is an Open-Source (read: free) office suite with many of the same features of Microsoft’s Office suite. Anybody can freely download and distribute it.

The automated anti-piracy bots discovered this “infringing content” after staring at it for a few months, wondering what the heck it was. The FTP’s site owner was e-mailed, and hilarity ensued.

March 7, 2003

In yet another waste of government resources

Federal investigators are looking into what happened to a peanut butter sandwich, taken from the break room. I don’t know what’s more disturbing: That somebody had to write up this report, or that somebody actually reported the theft to police.

March 6, 2003

Net speed record smashed

From the BBC via Fark:

Scientists have set a new internet speed record by transferring 6.7 gigabytes of data across 10,978 kilometres (6,800 miles), from Sunnyvale in the US to Amsterdam in Holland, in less than one minute.

One word: Damn.

March 6, 2003

Ruminations for the day

From Ruminate.com:

I like to look on the bright side: Every day I beat my own previous record for number of consecutive days I’ve stayed alive.

I’ve been married about 10 years now, but the wind chill makes it feel more like 50.

Of all the nicknames I had in high school, I think “Fat-ass, worthless, greasy, pizza-face waste of skin” was the worst. Either that, or “Spud.”

Whenever I get a nasty migraine headache, I start to think that I should be using a hammer to drive nails, rather than my head. Then I come to my senses and think, “Where’s the fun in THAT?!?”

How could they fire me?!? Putting “Ottoman Empire expert” on my resume as a euphemism for “couch potato” wasn’t being dishonest!

My dream job is to be a professional musician in the “Jeopardy!” house band — because then I’d only have to learn that one song.

March 6, 2003

All The Web debuts new features

Probably the feature I’ll use the most out of the ones they recently debuted will be the URL investigator. Plug a URL into the search box at All The Web and it returns a bunch of information, including how many external pages link to that site, how many pages are indexed by that domain, who owns the site, etc. There’s even a link to the Wayback Machine so you can see what a set of pages used to look like.

Google provides the most useful of these features, too (including their own cache), but not nearly as intuitively as AllTheWeb does.

Examples:

* AllTheWeb URL info for utterlyboring.com

* Google URL info for utterlyboring.com

March 6, 2003

Yet another reason why certain people shouldn’t have authority

I just got a phone call from the local owner’s association (which is like the governing body of sorts for this little resort community I work in). They called to report that the renters who just left from one our units left a small bag of cans on the curb (we don’t have curbside recycling here). So instead of just throwing the little bag of cans into his car and getting 5-cents a pop, he called us (from the scene, mind you), and wanted our maintenance folks to come out there and pick them up.

And these are the people in charge here?

March 6, 2003