Want your weight in cheese?

All you have to do is pass this challenge:

Can you get from London city-centre to Paris or Amsterdam’s city-centre for under £27 return? And in under 12 hours travel time each way?

We don’t think that anyone can beat the great Eurolines ‘Heart-to-Heart’ fares, so we’ve laid down this challenge for anyone who can.

If you think you can and can prove it, email us your travel plans — if your route checks out we’ll send you your weight in cheese.

Paris travel solutions win their weight in Brie, and if you can get to Amsterdam for under £27, we’ll send you your weight in Edam.

I don’t know anything about the area, so I have no idea how hard it would be.

April 15, 2004

Looking for a way to pay for college?

Just start a porn site. That’s what these ladies did.

April 15, 2004

I Hate Central Oregon Sometimes

It’s April 15th (Have you done your taxes?), and what do I wake up to? About two inches of snow. I took pictures last night when it first started, but my image upload script on this blog has gone nuts, so I’ll send ’em over to Barney for the story he’ll probably be posting on Bend.com about it (which I’ll be linking to when it happens). Meanwhile, I might have to go throw the studs on my car so I can make it to work this morning.

Update: Here’s a story on the storm.

April 15, 2004

Anybody have a laptop to get rid of?

I’ve got a friend who’s looking to get a laptop/notebook/whatever. She’s not a big geek or anything, so just getting something functional, but easy for me to repair, is the goal. Needs at least 256 MEGs of RAM, PIII 700 or better, CD-RW, Floppy, modem, and that’s about it. Anybody have anything?

April 14, 2004

Can you pass the third grade?

A fun flash for the day. I managed to get it on the first try, but I was pushing my time limit. Link from Ken.

April 14, 2004

Some Lawyers Have Too Much Time (and Money) on Their Hands

Quoting this BoingBoing story:

Brad Templeton — the long-time moderator of rec.humor.funny and host of the rhf archives — has received a cease-and-desist notice from AmEx’s lawyers over a 13 year old joke called “American Expressway.” Brad, being fully aware of the Constitutionally protected right to parody and how that trumps trademark, has posted a link to the joke, the C&D, and his response, which pokes vicious fun at AmEx’s lawyers at the firm of Dewey, Cheatham and Howe.

Read Brad’s hilarious replies here. There’s also a good bit of fun comments on SlashDot.

April 14, 2004

Message from Weird Al Yankovic

Comedian/musician Weird Al Yankovic lost his mother and father this weekend in an accident involving carbon monoxide poisoning. He’s posted a message on his website about this, and corrects some errors in media coverage on the tragedy. Via BB.

April 14, 2004

Amazon’s A9 Search Engine Launches

Amazon.com‘s Entry into the Search Engine World launches today. It looks like it’s currently using Google’s Adwords for its sponsored results, and the main results content comes from its own database, Alexa.com, and Amazon.com. It also has a list of what’s new and cool. It does have some interesting features (like built-in “search in the book” from Amazon.com’s database), but nothing too wild, other than interface stuff. I do like the fact that I can type “a9.com/search term” into my URL field and it will search.

What I can see happening is better integration of Amazon.com’s product listings into the results, as another set of sponsored listings. So if somebody searches for an author, for example, it’ll show search results, but also easy ways to buy books from that author. That is one thing that Google will never have is that locked-in product inventory.

April 14, 2004

Bloggers are a Funny Breed

When most bloggers disagree with someone, they post an entry on their site (I’m probably guilty as well), and the format of those rants fits this template perfectly. Link from b-links.

April 14, 2004

Welcome to My Hell

OK, I’m supposed to be leaving work in an hour, and so far, I’ve been up to my ears in broken crap. Started my day with a full reinstall/restore of our company’s accounting software, because something had gone corrupt. Then one of our modems for our off-site workers stopped working. Then the modem for our credit card interface went bonkers, and all day long, people have been bitching about how slow online bookings have been on our site. So I go upstairs and come to find that a script that was setup on our server to process the credit card transactions got stuck in a loop, and started up over 100 copies of itself. Needless to say, the server’s been less than response.

On top of all that, after I reboot, I find that I can’t get the online booking interface back up, and the server’s running dirt slow. No processes in task manager are taking over 5%, so what was going on? Ran SpyBot, no problems, ran TrendMicro, and it finds a backdoor virus installed on the online booking Web server — my most locked down server in the building (in theory). How the hell it got on there, I have no idea, but I’m trying to find into on how to eradicate it, meanwhile am scanning the entire building to make sure there’s no other holes in things.

April 13, 2004