Month: January 2004

Just shut up, woman!

Joke from Shasta Bob…

A police officer pulls over a speeding car. The officer says, “I clocked you at 80 mile per hour, sir.”

The driver says, “Gee, officer, I had it on cruise control at 60, perhaps your radar needs calibrating.”

Not looking up from her knitting the wife says sweetly from the passenger seat, “Now don’t be silly, dear, you know that this car doesn’t have cruise control.”

As the officer writes out the ticket, the driver looks over at his wife and growls, “Can’t you keep your mouth shut for once?”

The wife smiles demurely and says, ” You should be thankful your radar detector went off when it did.”

As the officer makes out the second ticket for the illegal radar detector unit, the man glowers at his wife and says through clenched teeth, “Doggonit, woman, can’t you keep your mouth shut?”

The officer frowns and says, “And I notice that you’re not wearing your seat belt, sir. That’s an automatic $75 fine.”

The driver says, “Yeah, well, you see officer, I had it on, but took it off when you pulled me over so that I could get my license out of my back pocket.”

The wife says,” Now, dear, you know very well that you didn’t have your seat belt on. You never wear your seat belt when you’re driving.”

And as the police officer is writing out the third ticket the driver turns to his wife and barks, “WHY DON’T YOU SHUT UP??”

The officer looks over at the woman and asks, “Does your husband always talk to you this way, Ma’am?”

“Oh, heavens no, officer. Only when he’s been drinking.”

Microsoft wants to kill your productivity

According to Microsoft, there’s only one really affective way to avoid security problems in its browser:

The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER

Link to the KB article.

I’ve got a better idea: If you want to avoid the problems, just download and use Moz.

Dead whale explodes in busy city street

A decomposing sperm whale has exploded while being transported through a Taiwan city, splattering cars and shops with blood and blubber.

While that whale spontaneously combusted, we prefer to help them along here in Oregon, and blow them up ourselves.

Update: Here’s a link to a picture of the mess in Taiwan.

Those whiny French

Joke from my cousin who’s stationed in Germany.

An officer in the U.S. Naval reserve was attending a conference that included admirals from both the U.S. Navy and the French Navy.

At a cocktail reception, he found himself in a small group that included personnel from both navies.

The French admiral started complaining that whereas Europeans learned many languages, Americans learned only English.

He then asked: “Why is it that we have to speak English in these conferences rather than you speak French?”

Without hesitating, the American Admiral replied: “Maybe it’s because the Brits, Canadians, Aussies and Americans arranged it so you would not have to speak German.”

The group became silent.

UtterlyBoring.com To-Do List

I’m posting this here, mostly for my own benefit, but for yours as well, so I can make sure I’m getting things changed/fixed on this site and you can suggest things as well (and these are in no particular order):

Of course, this is after I do the other pile of projects on my plate, as well as my day job, so I wouldn’t hold your breath on seeing the changes above anytime soon. I’ll be adding more to this list when I think of them.

But comment here if there’s something else you’d like to see!

Ping Yahoo! with MovableType

Go into your Weblog config, and add “http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2” to your URLs to ping. So in addition to blo.gs, weblogs.com, and the Moveable Type recent update key, here are all the sites that get pinged in my config:

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

Update: http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php (got that from here)

Update: http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/ (got that from the comments on Neil’s Pinging Service Run Down)

So a total of seven nine sites that get pinged whenever I post. Posts sometimes slow a tad to ping, but it’s really not too bad. Besides: I get traffic from all of them, so it’s worth it.

Why would you want to ping Yahoo? They are launching an RSS Aggregator.

101 Dumbest Moments in Business

From Boing Boing, Business 2.0 presents its yearly “101 Dumbest Moments in Business.” Some pretty funny ones in there.

In September, retail chain Urban Outfitters begins peddling Ghettopoly, a Monopoly knockoff. The top hat, shoe, and car are replaced with a machine gun, marijuana leaf, basketball, and rock of crack cocaine. Reacting to protests, Urban Outfitters pulls the game from its stores.

Link

Someone’s going to die for this

This stupid MyDoom worm is slowing things down for me like you wouldn’t believe, and it’s causing e-mail server admins to block anything remotely looking like the virus. I’ve been trying to communicate with a tech support contact of mine who’s working from home and using her Yahoo! account. They just blocked my e-mail for “550 Administrative prohibition” — whatever the hell that means.

Now there’s a variant of it going around, and SCO is offering a reward for the capture of the SOB who created this. Meanwhile, there are jackasses who are cheering the creation of this little bastard.

This thing is pummeling my servers. They’re all sending the packets to the bit bucket, but it’s still unwanted traffic that has to be looked out. UtterlyBoring.com was down for a while this morning because the server its on was getting pummeled with e-mail requests with the virus. And for all of SCO’s faults, is this worth it? I’m not fond at all of what SCO is doing to the open-source community, but is taken down the Internet’s e-mail system as a whole a proper revenge? Hell no. My servers are running Linux or Windows 2003 — two great OSes, but they’re getting beat up, despite having nothing to do with SCO. Is that fair? No way.

SCO deserves what they get, but the rest of us don’t.

Bill Gates says no more spam by 2006

You may be a knight, Mr. Bill, but you’re still a moron.

Thoughts of a Jewish Buddhist

Thanks to Barney for this list of Jewish Deep Thoughts of sorts.

Let your mind be as a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as the wooded glen. And sit up straight. You’ll never meet the Buddha with posture like that.

There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?

Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story.

To practice Zen and the art of Jewish motorcycle maintenance, do the following: get rid of the motorcycle. What were you thinking?

Be aware of your body. Be aware of your perceptions. Keep in mind that not every physical sensation is a symptom of a terminal illness.

If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?

Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Forget this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.

The Tao has no expectations. The Tao demands nothing of others. The Tao does not speak. The Tao does not blame. The Tao does not take sides. The Tao is not Jewish.

Drink tea and nourish life. With the first sip, joy. With the second, satisfaction. With the third, Danish.

The Buddha taught that one should practice loving kindness to all sentient beings. Still, would it kill you to find a nice sentient being who happens to be Jewish?

Be patient and achieve all things. Be impatient and achieve all things faster.

To Find the Buddha, look within. Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers. Each flower blossoms ten thousand times. Each blossom has ten thousand petals. You might want to see a specialist.

Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?

Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkes.

Update on 4/20/08: It’s been brought to our attention that these lines that were forwarded to me originally appeared in Zen Judaism: For You, A Little Enlightenment. So if you’re looking for more like this, buy the book.