Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

I like Calvin:

He should try taking the train... sigh

Tom McLaughlin on IRC just told me that the "Shelley the Republican" site is a spoof. I had hoped so, but unfortunately, the original is not much better than the spoof.

Still. I'm sure there are people somewhere in the deep bowels of America who believe the kind of stuff on "Shelley the Republican". All those affirming comments can't be from people following the spoof.

Anyway. Good laugh. :-)

And the worst thing about this is that these people, and many like them, actually believe this patent nonsense. I wonder if they also believe the Earth is flat and the Moon made from cheese?

http://shelleytherepublican.com/2006/04/linux-european-threat-to-our-computers.html

http://www.shelleytherepublican.com/2006/05/linux-and-windows-compared-facts.html

Scary.

This afternoon, I found this interesting article linked on Bruce Schneier's weblog: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/04/27/business/nec.php

Of course, the whole thing is ridiculously funny (beside the fact that I don't like the word "piracy" -- that's a completely different kind of crime), but the funniest part of the article, I found, was:

NEC said it would continue collecting evidence to support further criminal complaints. It was also planning to start civil lawsuits against some factories while negotiating with others.

In other words: the factories that did a particularly good job at faking NEC's products will be assimilated and will continue to produce. Only from now on, NEC will skim off some of the profits.

Funny planet we live on. *grin*

David's blog sums up my reaction to this article perfectly. *grin*

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12467604/?GT1=7938

Brightened my day!

In other news -- spring is officially here, it's time to break out the t-shirts and the sandals and make people wonder about my sanity (my what's-that?). Fun fun.

You know it's Monday when you're hacking on a gadget and find you've written 'ECONFUSED' six times where you should have written 'ECONNREFUSED'.

Next time I need to implement an error handler, my catch-all for puzzling things that shouldn't happen will be called that. :-)

easily amused

Trying to avoid buying the new Harry Potter book for philosophical reasons, my dangerous idle mind went looking for other things to read. After a couple of hours of reading boring drivel, I stumbled upon a little masterpiece which I feel deserves a posthumous nomination for a Nobel prize in literature.

Cantatrix sopranica L., or Experimental demonstration of the tomatotopic organization in the Soprano is a mock scientific paper describing the yelling reaction in sopranos when tomatoes are thrown at them.

This jewel was written by Georges Perec, a famous (or at least infamous) master of constrained writing. I had previously read his books La disparition and La vie mode d'emploi, but I was not aware of this paper.

Needless to say, I was very amused. :-) Every geek should read this. It's much more interesting than Harry Potter. No monsters though.

http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/stuff/tomato/tomato.html

Be sure to read the references.