A Florida guy took some educated guesses and registered the domains of potential Pope names. One of the ones he registered was right on the money. More details on the man’s blog with his demands (of sorts) from the Vatican.
Month: April 2005
Where Are You, God?
An atheist professor was teaching a college class and he told the class that he was going to prove that there is no God.
He said, “God, if you are real, then I want you to knock me off this platform. I’ll give you 15 minutes!”
Ten minutes went by. He kept taunting God, saying, “Here I am, God. I’m still waiting.”
He got down to the last couple of minutes and a Marine just released from active duty and newly registered in the class walked up to the professor, hit him full force in the face, and sent him flying from the platform.
The professor struggled up, obviously shaken and yelled, “What’s the matter with you? Why did you do that?”
The Marine replied, “God was busy; He sent me.”
Thanks JokeADay.
The Redhead
A man is dining in a fancy restaurant and there is a gorgeous redhead sitting at the next table. He has been checking her out since he sat down, but lacks the nerve to start a conversation.
Suddenly she sneezes, and her glass eye comes flying out of its socket towards the man. He reflexively reaches out, grabs it out of the air, and hands it back.
“Oh my, I am so sorry,” the woman says as she pops her eye back in place. “Let me buy your dinner to make it up to you,” she says.
They enjoy a wonderful dinner together, and afterwards they go to the theater, followed by drinks. They talk, they laugh, she shares her deepest dreams and he shares his. She listens.
After paying for everything, she asks him if he would like to come to her place for a nightcap ……. and stay for breakfast. They have a wonderful, wonderful time.
The next morning, she cooks a gourmet meal with all the trimmings.
The guy is amazed!! Everything has been SO incredible!!!!
“You know,” he said, “you are the perfect woman. Are you this nice to every guy you meet?”
“No,” she replies………”
“You just happened to catch my eye.”
Thanks Shasta Bob for that.
Slammed
Sorry about the lack of links today. Today I spent the day going through my “To Fix” list after the mess from last week. After a week of letting everybody play with it, there was a lot of stupid little things that needed to be fixed (funny little error messages, preferences not importing/saving right, profile issues, privledge issues, etc…) as well as things that I personally needed to fix like getting the virus protection all up to date and maintaining itself as well as our backup software up and going. I also got our old Citrix machine that went dead back up and running with a new hard drive and RAID system and have it running our online booking system now (instead of doing double-duty with the Citrix server). I have parts on order from NewEgg and Geeks.com to upgrade the Citrix server with some more RAM and get it a 2nd processor (anybody have any PC133 ECC/Registered RAM that’s larger than 256 megs to get rid of? I’m trying to max out the machine a bit). So I’ll have to come in late when those parts arrive to take care of that install (that’ll be easy, thankfully).
I’m also going to see if I can get MovableType 3.16 installed, now that I know many of my plugins will work appropriately. So hopefully that will happen later tonight.
Meanwhile, I’m going to see if I can clear up some of my RSS feeds and get some more content ready for you folks. Thanks for hanging with me through this!
Adobe To Buy Macromedia
Holy kitchen-appliances. I didn’t see this coming. But I can’t say that it will be that bad of a thing (we’ll just have to wait to see what Ken says).
I’m a user of products from both companies. From Adobe I use Pagemaker (because I can’t afford an upgrade to Indesign), Acrobat, Photoshop and, on rare occasion, Illustrator. From Macromedia I use Homesite more than anything (and have long before it was a Macromedia product), but occassionally use Dreamweaver and Fireworks (haven’t gotten really into Flash development). Both companies develop competing products that each have features that the other should have, and it will be nice to quit seeing them try to one-up each other all the time.
My concerns:
- GoLive had better not replace Dreamweaver, as Dreamweaver is far superior and extendable.
- Homesite better not disappear. While I know there are a hundred good text editors out there, Homesite is what I’m used to and what I’m good with. It’s got it’s quirks, but many of the solutions I’ve tried do, too. Homesite’s original developer asks the same question.
- Adobe is a big supporter of the SVG format which competes directly with Flash. While SVG is a W3C-approved format, Flash is far more mature as a platform for Web applications. Which one will live?
- While I’m not a big fan of ColdFusion, I know a lot of people who are. Adobe better not kill development for that, otherwise they’re going to anger a lot of people (or convince them to move to PHP).
Anyway, this is interesting, and will be fun to watch (and again, I’m sure Ken, who knows more about all of this, will contribute more later on his site). Mezzoblue has some good thoughts on this and he also links to other blog posts with lots of great questions. Here’s a comment from a guy that works at a newspaper
An Amazon Web Services Programming Wish
This is a note to all folks out there who are intimately familiar with Amazon’s API but if somebody could create something simple to do this, I’d be extremely happy (as would the RIAA, for that matter).
Here’s my situation. My wife is trying to create a custom CD for a friend of hers, consisting of some older (Golden Oldies-era, 50s and 60s) type of music. Since we’re really not in the mood to piss of the RIAA by downloading MP3s illegally, and these are fairly popular classics (“Stand By Me” was one of the songs she was looking for), we were curious how much it would cost to buy a CD or two with those particular songs on it (they’re all from the same era, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find them on just a few CDs).
So here’s what I’d like the application/service to do: We would put in a title and artist for a song we’re looking for (“Stand by Me” by Ben E. King, for example). It would then return the cheapest way to acquire that song. It would a have an option to take several songs and find the cheapest way to get all of them. Maybe one of the used sellers has several of the CDs, so we could save on shipping. Or one CD, while more expensive, has several of the songs we’re looking for on it, saving us the cost of buying several CDs.
I would think the RIAA would love this. I’d be legally buying all the CDs I’m trying to make a mix CD from, which is all perfectly legal (as long as I give the CDs to the person I’m making the mix CD for, transferring of ownership, blah, blah…). And I’d probably sleep a bit better at night. Maybe.
Of course, if the RIAA has a fit about something like this (“We’re not making enough money, etc…”) then the program should have a function that will only search record labels that aren’t members of the RIAA.
Anybody out there willing to try programming something like this? I’m not totally familiar with Amazon Web Services, so I don’t even know if something like this is possible, but I figured I’d throw it out there.
Bible Stories With Legos
The Brick Testament: The stories of the Bible, as told in Lego.
More Google Map Goodies
I mentioned before about the fun people are having with Google Maps. Lately, the web is all abuzz about all the cool things that people are doing and finding. So far, my favorite (just because of the pure usefulness of it) goes to this great hack that places all the For-Sale/Rent listings on Craigslist onto Google Maps with nice color coding by price. People also have discovered interesting results when you’re searching for “cocksuckers near NYC.” Conspiracy theorists around the world have been entertained by the Area 51 shots (as has Greg).
Google’s blog is getting in on the fun including links to an airline graveyard and somebody with too much time on their hands. They’ve also come up with a map that shows where the most people are searching. Wired has a good article on fun spottings and perljam has a large listing as well.
And for those of us that never leave the house, here’s a good way to do some sightseeing.
On a totally unrelated note, did you know you could get Google Facts and other Google info sent to your mobile phone via SMS? That was news to me. Search on the go — I love it and just wish I didn’t have such a crappy cell phone when it comes to reading this stuff (I have a Nokia 2260, just because it was free, but I’m not a huge fan of the thing).
Automated Paper Writing
Computer geeks will eventually create software that will do everything for them. The latest example is this open-source project that automatically creates Computer Science Papers. Using the software, the creators even managed to get a paper accepted into a conference. Just check out this abstract I had it create:
The investigation of Lamport clocks has studied model checking, and current trends suggest that the understanding of RAID will soon emerge. After years of key research into DNS, we disconfirm the refinement of gigabit switches, which embodies the typical principles of cryptoanalysis. In order to address this quandary, we introduce new classical information (SnodGay), which we use to verify that interrupts can be made virtual, scalable, and heterogeneous.
For anybody who understands computer terminology, you’ll realize how hilarious that statement is.
Since they’ve been accepted to a conference, they plan on going to the conference and give a completely randomly-generated talk, delivered entirely with a straight face. What I wouldn’t do to see that in person.