Your Mom Likes German Cars.

I'm stealing this verbatim because its so wonderfully put.


BMW Tweaks Front-Drive VW Rabbit in New Ad - Jalopnik:

The tagline reads, “That’s why we don’t have front-wheel drives.” Not bad. Here’s a better idea: The rabbit has grotesquely outsized, Popeye-like front legs, and its hind quarters are strapped to a wheeled harness in lieu of its amputated rear feet — which we see hanging from a BMW key fob. The tagline would read, “Who’s Lucky Now, Mother******!?” Of course, no actual animals would be harmed.

Gold Jerry.

High-flying cocktail

The ultimate cocktail which can only be mixed by a barman freefalling from 10,000 feet has been launched in Croatia.

Humping hill brings in the crowds

Corneliu Olar, Mayor of Horea, has even planted more bushes and trees on the hill to make sure lovemaking couples are not disturbed.

Pregnant weather girl prompts complaints

Television viewers in Switzerland are campaigning for a heavily pregnant weather girl to step down.

Man donates kidney to his rescuer

A man plucked from a raging torrent 20 years ago by a stranger has repaid the favour by donating a kidney to his rescuer.

Mum worried about love life of daughter, 68

They had to tell the 92-year-old German mother that her 68-year-old daughter's love life was none of their business.

Gay storks make good parents

Four gay storks have proved they are as capable of raising a family as their heterosexual counterparts.

Minister ejected from nightclub

A minister has been ejected from a nightclub in a former church where he used to preach.

See through tops anger policewomen

Dozens of angry female officers have lodged complaints with the Dutch police trade union, reports the Algemeen Dagblad.

Man finds badger under his bed

The rudely awakened badger overturned the bed while running around the room and ended up trapped underneath with its rear end exposed.

School trip arrested

Slovakian police said the teacher had broken the law by not having a licence to give guided tours and that the pupils had broken the law by listening.

It's a fur cop

A crime-fighting kitten has been given a special award for undercover work that helped cops snare a bogus vet.

US Aircraft Carrier Sinks Off Florida!

Yup that bad bouy (hehe) went down in record time. 37 minutes, not the 5 hours the Navy expected. But that's what happens when you blow big ass holes in the hull. The ship will serve as all great ships dream, as a reef for recreational diving and sport fishing. Glad to see the Navy is making jungle gyms now.

By 1976, the Oriskany had become a relic and was decommissioned. An estimated 45,000 sailors served aboard the vessel during her 26 years in the fleet. The Navy tried repeatedly to discard the ship. Three attempts to scrap her failed. No one accepted an offer to turn the ship into a museum, unlike her famous sisters -- Intrepid, Yorktown, Hornet and Lexington. Finally, in what might have been the ultimate indignity, experts at the Naval Historical Center excluded the Oriskany from a list of Navy inactive ships eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. But the vessel dubbed by her crew as "Mighty O" may have had the last word. The Navy spent more than three years and $20 million preparing Oriskany to become an artificial reef. The project was repeatedly delayed to meet Environmental Protection Agency concerns about removal of hazardous substances including oil, fuel, asbestos and PCBs -- polychlorinated biphenyls, which are cancer-causing substances used throughout old ships in electrical equipment.

Sinking of the Oriskany 17-May-2006

Is Your Password 'Monkey'?

Oh good, my password is about to expire in 7 days and I hate thinking of a new ones.


Top 10 Most Common Passwords - Modern Life Is Rubbish

Who's Up For A Little Self Abuse?

Here you go; we finally get to hear what the 'mosquito' youngster repellent sounds like. Honestly I expected a little more. I mean, its kinda like the sound a CRT makes, granted one of the poorer fairing models. Maybe I have to listen to it a lot louder or something but there's no way this would drive me away. The only annoyance I could possibly see is the repetitive nature of it, like an alarm clock incessantly beeping. But I can sleep to an alarm clock if I choose to. Not like ignore it and suffer through; you have to get into the rhythm and its kinda nice. But even if it was annoying, do they not realize that I spend most of my day being desensitized to and learning how to cope with things that annoy me? Babies screaming on the metro, mouth breathers, those goddamn walky-talky phones...

BBC - Wiltshire - Info Exchange - The sound that repels troublemakers

Worst. Product. Ever.

That's right haters, the PCWorld list of 25 worst tech products ever is out. Guess who won??? My long standing love affair with AOL aside, I'm really glad they took highest honors here. They've earned it. "It has never overcome the stigma of being the online service for people who don't know any better." Yep that about sums it up. You know that commercial with the guy on the girl's bike and helmet in the middle of a real road race? I can infer that they mean to imply that everyone can be really fast if they get AOL. What really comes across is that AOL users are a huge detriment to the Internet and really don't belong there.

Hang on though, there's some other good ones on the list. RealPlayer (oh god I hate RealPlayer) is second. Windows ME is fourth and Internet Explorer 6 eighth. I can't pass up this quote: "In June 2004, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) took the unusual step of urging PC users to use a browser--any browser--other than IE." Ph that's just precious. -any browser- haha. And close but no cigar (you can't even win at losing) was the ROKR E1 who showed up on the honorable mention list.

PCWorld.com - The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time

Don't Lock Up The Fruit, Bury It.

Apparently Microsoft is a little worried and trying to win me back. I mean, I know that XP probably spies on your processes and un-install information (I've come to expect, if not demand, compromising surveillance from all authority) but this is ridiculous. I un-installed MS Office two weeks ago and now Microsoft is smearing OpenOffice.org on performance accusations.

Here's the deal, OpenDocument format was created by everyone but Microsoft as an alternative to .DOC, .XLS, or .PPT formats. (which, undocumented and proprietary, had to be reverse engineered for opensource support) Microsoft has now developed Office Open XML format for Office 2007. While Microsoft holds patents on this format, they promise to let everyone use it. To justify a need for this new standard they compared the new Open XML with OpenOffice.org using OpenDocument Format. The new one is faster. Surprise, surprise. Despite all the other apples to oranges problems with this test, OpenOffice.org isn't even optimized for that format yet. But that doesn't matter, lets take their word that Open XML is faster.

Lets just take a look at what Microsoft has done. They've just told the entire opensource (and consumer) community that their standard is obsolete. They've replaced the public standard with one that they own and maintain. They've opened implementation of it to everyone, eliminating excuses not to adopt. (They know from experience that locking it and keeping secrets won't protect them) They've started a scuffle that most consumers care little about (admit it, you don't care), introducing confusingly named products into an obscure field. And they're favored to win as the incumbent industry leader. They're way ahead on development (since they created the standard) and everyone else is playing catchup.

Here's the kicker though: Open XML has 4,000 pages of documentation. Compare that to the 700 page OpenDocument specification and you'll see what an obstacle supporting this is. Its almost as if Microsoft is saying "Go ahead, I dare you to use our format." So you see what a quandary the little guys are in now. Everyone thinks their product sucks and its a huge pain to upgrade to the new one. Looks like Microsoft read the opensource fairy tale and decided not to lock up their fruit. They just dumped a huge pile of paperwork on top in hopes that no one will be able to dig through it all.

Microsoft: OpenDocument is too slow | CNET News.com

Freaking Geniuses

Alright its done. Nike and Apple have launched a new line of work-out related iPod peripherals. That's super guys. (note sarcasm) Alright fine, it is super that you're beginning to understand that I want my iPod to do more than just play music. It's not super that this is how you think I want it done.

In case you haven't heard, there's a little module you can get to stick in your newly purchased (and compatible) Nike shoes that sends data to your Nano (with dongle attached) about how you're running. They'll supply 'inspirational' voice-overs to help you meet your workout goals. They're also selling all kinds of Nike apparel to help deal with the cords and bouncing that drives people mad while they run.

Alright, where should I start? Ummm... a pedometer? How about you just stick an accelerometer in the ipod? Most pedometers are worn on the waist anyway, not in the shoe. A dongle? How about you just add the freaking Bluetooth I've been begging for? Shirts to tuck wires into? We seriously don't have wireless headphones yet? Come on! Oh also, I'm sposed to go to iTunes to manage my workouts by hand? I want this shit done automatically. Like: play songs that match the beat profile of the pace I'm running. [ Update: Oh good, they're working on it.] Or track my usage and learn which songs I like to run to. You know, intelligent solutions. Oh and I can't imagine how pissed off I'd be if I had to listen to people telling me I can achieve my goals during a work-out. By the way, note the pictures have mannequins wearing the icon white earbuds. Have you ever run with earbuds? Pain in the ass. Hopefully Nike will start selling athletic headphones, much to Apple's dismay, and they'll start bickering.

Basically, good job thinking of more crap for us to buy that brings us closer to what we want. But not what we want.

Cool Hunting: Nike x Apple = Nike Plus

Who paid for this?

"In the early days of the Second World War, Allied forces began Operation Bolero, a daring and risky effort to bring American planes to the European theater by way of secret airbases in the far north."

This ended fairly poorly for one squadron who were forced to abandon the 8 planes in Greenland. This Lost Squadron remained there until 1988 when they were located by two explorers.

"The two men found that in the forty-six years since the planes had crash-landed, an astonishing 268 feet of ice had accumulated over them, and they had been carried three miles by the drifting glacier."

They made two attempts to exhume planes and in 2002 were finally successful in refurbishing a P-38 to flying condition.

Damn Interesting » Exhuming the Glacier Girl

Its a good read, and damn interesting, but all I can think is: didn't this cost an ass-load and a half?

You Should Have Stolen Her Peanuts.

I don't mean to come off cold, heartless and completely callous. It happens naturally. But I'm pretty sure this is the best way to discover that the person next to you on a plane died in mid-flight. Once you're off the plane. Honestly, I have no experience in the matter, but I can only imagine that I enjoy sitting next to sleeping people more than corpses. Honestly, they're saying people should have noticed, but what would they have done? I'm pretty sure airplanes don't have morgues. (ships do, which is a little worrysome to think about on a cruise) I mean its not like they made a few stops to stay on schedule and then finally dropped her off 3 cities later. They only do that in Vienna.

cbs4.com - Woman's Death Goes Unnoticed On Local Flight

Oh Man, I Love Being A Man.

There are just so many ways men have it easier than women.  Make-up, salary, craziness, making out with guys.  Don't get me wrong, you ladies have done very well with all you have working against you.  But it looks like the boys have caught yet another break.  Men who consume alcohol every day (*cough* moderately) are found to be 41% less likely to develop heart disease.  They didn't find the same benefit for women in the five year study, but of course there needs to be more work done on the subject.  (funny how every scholarly study concludes that more studies need to be done)  But in the meantime, women, you'll just have to be satisfied with your ability to make me do whatever you want.

Daily tipple can bring health benefits -- for men - Yahoo! News

Vacation's Over Boys, Back To Work!

Its really nice to see the wildlife returning to an area after a disaster; really gives a feeling of hope. So those 19 penguins walking off the FedEx flight and onto the purple carpet accompanied by a brass band is a real positive sign for New Orleans. You know, as environmental indicators go, this one was pretty fancy. Plus I bet those little guys are glad to be out of California and back in their natural climate.

Penguins, otters leave California, return to New Orleans

In related archival news, make sure you check out these hard-hitting photo galleries:

Oct. 14: Sea Turtle Evacuee Returns
Oct. 6: Penguins Get Temporary Home
Sept. 28: Puppy, Owner Reunited

And in barely related but amusing old news:

Do penguins fall over backwards when watching aircraft fly overhead?

CNN.com - Nature - Penguin plane spotters intrigue scientists - November 2, 2000

Death From Above Watch: Day 302.

Alright, I'm thinking I just need to stop paying attention when these eggheads tell me that things are going to collide with the Earth. I mean just look at all the trauma they've put me through:

Throwing Rocks
We're all gonna die
Death From Above

And now their latest news is that 'Apophis' (etymology) is less likely to hit the earth than they thought because a new speed measurement shows its moving 6 mm/s differently. So now our chances are 1 in 24,000 of impact instead of 1 in 5,500. Any gamblers out there? Still, even though this object is a "1" on the Torino Scale, it makes me a tiny bit uneasy that this scale exists at all.

New Scientist SPACE - Breaking News - Risk of asteroid smashing into Earth reduced

I Gotta Get A Piece Of That.

Yeah, this does make me a little nervous.  There is virtually no way to keep a company as pristine and evil free as I'd like Google to be when there's this much money associated with it.  Think of money as a big stinking carcass, how are you gonna keep the vultures off?

Sec Form 4 Insider Trading :: SEC Insider Transaction history

What Do You Mean "Unbreakable" ?

You know that's just asking for trouble.  Put the label 'unbreakable' on anything and all of a sudden you've got people throwing stuff off roofs and  renting bulldozers. 

Although I must say it'd be nice to not worry about breaking wine glasses.  But I can't help thinking this might lead to something worse.  You know, you're having some wine and its gettin a little drunk in there.  You'll usually realize how inebriated you are when the first wine glass breaks.  That just might help you calm down and keep you from breaking that TV or getting out the cell phone for a drunk dial.  Then again, maybe we should think of a better drunk-ometer than shattering glass, I dunno.

But I digress.  The glasses are made from 'Kwarx' hand blown crystal.  Who's gonna get these so we can do some "testing" ?

'Unbreakable' glass launched - decanter.com - the route to all good wine

Dump And Run.

Wow, I didn't even think about this advantage when I dumped MS Office a couple weeks ago. I was just trying to remove bloat. I mean come on, when's the last time you used infopath, access, or frontpage on your home computer? I know this is the same argument as the one for macs that I think should be further explained if its going to be used in a marketing attempt. Sure there are less known security vulnerabilities, but that's just because less people use it and less people are trying to break it. For now I will admit that OpenOffice looks a little strange, but overall I'm happy with it. Not that I actually use it very much, mostly its just complaints from friends trying to mooch my printer.

Microsoft: Use MS Word in Safe Mode

Super.

This really makes me feel good about putting my credit card number into a web form. I like to think I'm a little more savvy than to fall prey to any of the scams of a 14 year-old Nigerian, but you never know. I hate that they make this sound like such a legitimate job. I like the movie version of the noble con-artist whose victims don't feel like they've been stolen from after the deed is done. Somehow e-connery cheapens the whole industry. So what are we going to do about this? Send in the storm troopers? Bust some heads? How about we just cut off Nigeria's Internet till they're willing to enforce a law about not stealing? Its a pickle... mmmm... pickles.

FORTUNE: Online scams create "Yahoo! millionaires" - May 29, 2006
BBC News | AFRICA | Nigeria grapples with e-mail scams

Update
Or we could all just screw with scammers in our spare time.

Donuts Will Save Us All

So Fusion. Seriously, lets get all up on that. They're working on it, but it doesn't really seem like I hear enough about it. You remember ITER, but there are other efforts going down, take for example the boys in San Diego. They've just figured our how to ease some of the pressure created in the fusion process. To get hydrogen to fuse you suspend 100 million degree C plasma in a donut shaped magnetic field. Sometimes the hot plasma busts out and can damage the reactor's components. Needless to say this is a little concerning, but they've devised a solution that bleeds off excess particles and keep everything under control. Sweet. Sounds great! What's the catch? Well, here's the thing: they're not sure why it works. The current theory doesn't match the results. So it'll be hard to convince ITER to install this thing till they work out the details. I guess I'll have to wait a little longer for my free electricity. But this is the kinda thing that makes me want an electric car over diesel.

New Scientist Breaking News - Nuclear fusion plasma problem tackled

Sad Times At Ridgemont Filling Station

Holy crap, I just realized that my odometer has turned into a price gauge. Well, almost. If anyone feels like pointing out any errors, I'll fall back to CompSci math, which basically forgives any small magnitude errors. So I bought gas for $3.09 today. It totaled out to $31.29 which blows my mind as I can recall filling up this same car for 10. Ok, so that's 10.1 gallons, pretty normal for me. And I managed 324 miles this time. Which averages out to 32.08 mpg, a little under the 35 I'll round out to in an extended analysis. I don't know what the average cost of gas is but the station I stopped at was selling it for $3.11 when I drove by this morning, so we'll say its like $3.10. Which means that the .0311 gallons per mile cost $.0966. Yeah? Ten cents a mile? One cent a tenth? Every time the white ring clicks on my trip odometer its a penny. It cost me 37 cents to get home from the gas station. Of course it's a little off, but still that's kinda nuts. Now when I roll up to the pump and my dash says 332.7 I'll think I'm getting a bargain only paying 30 bucks to fill up. I wonder if they could raise the gas prices just a little to help me out.

Oh baby!

So a while ago I did a little test to see how much my blog was worth. (Even though it cut to the bone to call DP a blog) It used various rubrics I'm sure to judge the content of my pages and assign it a value. That's for suckers. Check out this valuation at leapfish. Its based solely on your domain name and search hits, not what you have there. So for anyone wondering, I'm not willing to let go for any less than $11,094.00

LeapFish.com Domain Name Resource Center

How do you sleep at night?

Wow this is terrible.

YouTube - Global Warming - "Glaciers"

You Have To Love Darpa

I mean, what other government agency is taking cues from the circus?  That's right, they want to build a pneumatic person launcher to put special forces and emergency personnel onto the roofs of buildings.  Uh... alright, I spose that'd be cool and everything.  Assuming you've got a whole bunch of guys crazy enough to get thrown up a five story building.  We're still working on the personal jet pack from the 30's, right?  That seems way more reasonable than this.

New Scientist Tech - Breaking News - Invention: Human cannonballs

Peeka... whiff

Remember Peekaboom?  The goal was to show computers what makes up objects - like wheels make a bike.  The hope was that AI systems would use the game data as training and be able to tag pictures on their own.  Well from the sounds of this article it didn't quite pan out.  They detail a new "game" wherein people actually tag pictures as they play.  The difference is slight, but you can see the implications.  5,000 people could tag all of the images indexed by Google, which is good.  But if they'd succeeded in making an AI system no one would have to tag anything.

New Scientist Tech - Breaking News - Gamers help the blind get the picture

The Art Of The Road Trip

Now this is just a little too funny not to mention. A tourist dies on the bus and the tour operators decide not to stop till they get back at the end of the day. I mean who wants to ruin a nice trip by stopping to remove the corpses piling up in the back of the bus? I need to get my souvenir shopping done.

The Local - Coach trip continues with dead pensioner on board

Ok, and on to the meat. Here's a little roadtrip that compares a few cars in the day trip MPG field. The corvette did way better than I'd have expected, and apparently gets the same fuel economy at 80 as it does at 65. Oh they also saved gas by taking as many corners as possible at-speed, a technique that I highly enjoy. Anyway the end result was that the TDI beat the hybrids and is a better ride anyway, so that pretty much puts the nail in the coffin of this hybrid generation for me. Why, oh why, did they make the jetta so ugly?

Are We There Yet? - AutoWeek

But I'm So Tired Of Reading...

Oh WOW!  Pictures next to people's names!  Of course everyone actually running Google Talk already knows there have been pictures associated with people's login information for a while now.  The interesting thing about that is that once you pick one, even if you're only signed on with gchat it still uses the last picture you set.  Anyway this'll bring it to the more mainstream audience that uses gmail and as such I'd like to outline the trend I'm trying to start.  Actually use a picture of yourself, not some cutesy pain in the ass GIF that no one wants to see.  It'll just be nice to scroll through your contacts and see what everyone looks like.  I'm not staying you have to Photoshop your head floating in a while alpha channel field (that's bonus points though) but we can be civil enough to not litter gmail with goofy trolls and cats.

» New feature: Gmail Pictures | Googling Google | ZDNet.com

Nothing Gets Me Going Like A Line Graph.

Google trends is a cool kind of Zeitgeist comparison tool. Think of search terms or trends you're interested in and find the reports. They'll also show you benchmarks where events of note happened and the corresponding Internet news volume. They also provide some data on where the search requests are coming from. Mostly its just cool to be able to analyze this data like this, but hey I work with statistics.

Google Trends: Volvo, BMW, Volkswagen
Google Trends: volvo ocean race

Got Free Time On Your Hands Much?

There's just something about big red buttons... they're magical. Especially when they activate "Party Mode". I imagine this being something like when some one said the secret word on Pee Wee's Playhouse.

MIDAS: Homemade Dorm Room Home Automation System

Oh really?

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