Bend’s infamous pregnant man is pregnant again — for the third time.
If you didn’t even know Bend was (in)famous for the pregnant man, you have some reading to do.
Category: Sad
Late Night TV Chaos
The blog world is all in a dither about NBC’s late-night shake-up. First, NBC outlined a plan to move “The Jay Leno Show” from it’s 10PM time slot to an 11:35 time slot, moving Conan O’Brien’s “Tonights Show” to 12:05. The reasoning, apparently, was because NBC affiliates were complaining that their 11PM newscasts were seeing lower ratings. The topic was brought up on pretty much every late night show. Conan came out and said he won’t do the show if it’s moved to a different time slot. The Web has come to the support of Conan, or “Coco” as he’s known, calling Leno all sorts of names. The Consumerist is encouraging people to email NBC before he decides to bail and go to Fox.
Personally, I’ve always like Conan and his show far better than Leno, but this whole fiasco is just hilarious and shows how much pull Leno still has at NBC (and how little respect they have for Conan).
Dick Clark Sounded Awful
Poor Dick Clark. While I know he’s a New Year’s icon, he really needs to retire. He’s 80 years old, not in the greatest of health, and you couldn’t understand a word he said. I have all the respect for Dick Clark and all he’s accomplished in his life, but he needs to take a break. While Ryan Seacrest — his future replacement — is a no-talent hack, it just made me sad to see (and hear) Dick countdown. He even miscounted the countdown.
According to his Wikipedia article, apparently he sounded better this year than he did last couple years (I don’t think I made it to midnight in years past). If he sounds this bad this year, I can only imagine what he sounded like in years past.
Just the same, Happy New Year everybody. I’ll be going to bed once the morons in my neighborhood quit shooting off fireworks.
This Made Me Cry A Little
Yes, I know you could find uninformed morons on both sides of the political spectrum, but this is still just sad:
Thanks Mark for the link.
Stay Indoors Today
In case you haven’t heard, the area got hit with a bunch of snow overnight and throughout the day. I had nearly a foot at my office at one point, but it’s down a few inches now (still a nasty mess outside). Took me nearly an hour to get to the office this morning. I blame the weather system pictured to the right, from the KTVZ radar, that appears to have an evil face in it over the ocean. Evil-Face Storm (which is what I’m sure Bob Shaw would probably call it) is probably responsible for the snow.
If you can avoid going anywhere today, please do. Meanwhile, here are some links to keep you busy:
- Oil tankers are lined up just off the British shore, waiting for oil prices to go up.
- Lose the calculator: How to do speedy math in your head.
- Subtle messages to your annoying neighbors.
- We’ve all had users/clients like this: Clients From Hell.
- Answering life’s ultimate question.
- Jon Stewart Enlists Pro-Wrestler to Protect a 10-year-old Gay Marriage Activist.
- Chrome OS is what I want, but not what I need.
- Speaking of Chrome OS, if you’re looking to play with it, you can download a Virtual Machine-friendly version here.
- This might come in handy someday: 8 Ways to Tell if your Loved Ones Plan To Eat You.
I’d better go shovel out my car here and start heading home. Be safe out there!
Balloon Boy Saga Continues
So we all know at this point that the balloon boy was a hoax and charges will probably be filed, but now we know the guy that helped the dad plan this whole thing.
There’s a name for these kind of people.
Late Night TV Hosts Are Corporate Shills
Whether on the Tonight Show or on his new show, Jay Leno is a big-time shill.
And same could be said about Conan O’Brien and David Letterman.
New York Times Serves Up Malware
Some folks who visited the NYT’s web site over the weekend were greeted with a warning that their system was infected with all sorts of crap. Their ad system had been hijacked by folks posing as a legitimate client (in this case, Vonage) so that the false ads were served up, trying to get people to buy their worthless software.
This isn’t the first time this has happened, sadly. According to the story, FoxNews was hit in the past as well. While I know media companies are desperate for ad revenue, they need to be more diligant about screening this type of thing.
Personally, I wouldn’t lose a night’s sleep if the creators of these scam anti-malware products were to disappear off the face of the earth. In some sort of gruesome way would be fine, too.
Reading some comments on other sites about this, folks are debating various anti-virus products. Avast vs. NOD vs. Avira vs. whatever is a moot point if you don’t keep it regularly updated. I’ve had good luck with Avira, but I know people who swear by NOD and Avast. AVG is fine, but its spyware catching capabilities are pretty minimal in my experience. But for cripe’s sake, update it. So many new computers come with a 90-day trial of some sort of anti-virus product that will stop updating after 90 days (I’m looking at you, Norton). People have been just starting becoming accustomed to clicking “Ignore” on the sales pitch warnings that pop up, so they will have a two-year old computer with an anti-virus program that hasn’t been updated in a long time. Even if it isn’t that great of a program, it’s worthless if it’s out of date.
I’ve also heard folks saying “If Windows were up-to-date and patched, this kind of thing wouldn’t happen.” Sorry, that’s not always the case, either. Hidden PDF files exploiting weaknesses in Acrobat Reader have caused more trouble in the computers I remove malware from than Windows being out of date. (Generally the site’s that have these kinds of embedded PDFs are sites people really shouldn’t be on, but that’s another rant for another time.)
And lastly, you need additional protection on-top of your anti-virus program, as they won’t catch everything. I’ve had really good luck with Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware and SuperAntispyware. Both have free versions, but each offers a for-pay version that offers real-time protection that is probably superior to whatever protection your anti-virus program offers. I keep copies of both on a USB key. And while some of these really nasty nasties (like one I ran into last week) will detect if you’re trying to run one of those programs and block it, a simple renaming of the executable will usually do the trick.
Way To Screw Up Big Time, CNN
While I generally think CNN is a better cable news station than some (**cough**Fox News**cough**), it is ridiculous how bad they screwed up this morning.
CNN unnerved the nation Friday morning with live reports of Coast Guard teams firing on a suspect vessel on the Potomac River that would not stop when ordered. We know now it was just radio chatter, part of a “routine and low-level” Coast Guard exercise. And to top it all off, it came on the morning of the anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
At one point, CNN reported on the air that a reporter had seen a boat challenge Coast Guard vessels and refuse to stop. We now know that did not happen.
Speaking of 9/11, have things changed for the better or worse eight years later? Discuss.
This Is A Monty Python Joke Waiting To Happen.
In a race to get 4GB of data across the country, a pigeon easily outpaced South Africa’s DSL service.