Groundhog Day

According to Groundhog.org:

Here Ye! Here Ye! Here Ye!

On Gobbler's Knob on this fabolous Groundhog Day, February 2nd, 2008
Punxsutawney Phil, the Seer of Seers, Prognosticator of all Prognosticators,
Rose to the call of President Bill Cooper and greeted his handlers, Ben Hughes and John Griffiths.

After casting a weathered eye toward thousands of his faithful followers,
Phil consulted with President Cooper and directed him to the appropriate scroll, which proclaimed:

"As I look around me, a bright sky I see, and a shadow beside me.
Six more weeks of winter it will be!"

As someone on The Register commented, there is a reasonable explanation for Phil's prognostication:



Although I fully expect this will all be blamed on global warming.

Best video of the year so far...

I'd hate to pay the electricity bill for this, but I want one!



The Register reports that the muzzle energy of this weapon is 10.6 megajoules.

Now, roll on the hand-held rail gun a la Quake...

Dishonesty box

Apparently there is such a thing as a free lunch. For Edinburgh's crooked cuntcillors.

The Hootsman reports:

"The free lunches for councillors were originally scrapped in a bid to save £45,000 a year.

After the honesty box was launched, it is understood that staff regularly found it to be left short at the end of the day."

Sorry, "regularly found short"? You mean the thieving bastards couldn't even cope with £1.50 for a piece, or £1 for soup?

And this is when they can claim £45 a day in meals allowance when they are eating away from the council buildings!

If they can't be honest with their own money, what are the chances of them being honest with mine?

Hang 'em high!

Nerd

Since so many others are doing this, and I am easily led...



And here's the Nerd Handbook, courtesy of Rands in Repose. A friend sent the link to me, and I thought it was fairly appropriate.

Several points ring true - truer than I would probably like to admit. Those who know me in the real world can draw their own conclusions...

Network Solutions are crooks

Network Solutions Inc. (NSI) are, amongst other things, a domain registry for this new fangled interweb. When you want to buy a domain name, you do a "whois" lookup to see if it's available, then you buy it if it's available and you really want it.

The trouble is, NSI are registering domains that are looked up using their whois server... So, if you check to see if a domain is available using their server, but want to register the domain with another company, you can't because NSI have helpfully registered the domain, forcing you to buy it from them... This is apparently known as "front-running".

The helpful people at slashdot have a number of potential solutions to this problem (other than not using NSI in the first place)
including looking up (and hence making NSI register) a bunch of random domain names using a perl script. An alternative is to do a whois on a number of interesting domain names which include registered trademarks as part of the name - and then hope that a Cease and Desist letter is sent to NSI for trademark infringements...

What's really quite funny is their excuse for this practice...

"During this reservation period, the name is not active and we do not monetize the traffic on these domains."

Of course, they are monetizing the domain, since during this period you can only buy the domain from NSI...

In effect they're saying: "We're front-running to protect you (our customers) from front-running"

More tram nonsense

Apparently the west end of Princes St to Shandwick Place and the east end at St Andrew Square are to be closed for 16 weeks while workers move pipes and cables in preparation for the trams...

Hang on, so you mean we've got to go through more roadworks on the same stretch of road in the future? Oh yes, when they start laying the tracks, sometime in the future... In the meantime, they're just going to fuck about a bit, and piss off all the folk who are trying to commute in Edinburgh - Shandwick Place is a bottleneck for bus services at the best of times...

Some guy from Tie was quoted by the BBC as saying:

"The work will be completed before August so as not to impact on the Edinburgh Festival."

Of course what he really meant to say was:

"The festival is the be all and end all of life in Edinburgh, and we wouldn't want to give the tourists a bad impression, so in the meantime, we're going to fuck up the roads because we think Edinburgh's residents are cunts and don't care how this unwanted trams project effects the city. "

Webinar is not a word

A friend has just sent me an email with a link to this site, specifically, this cartoon:



Webinar is not a word. Stop using it you illiterate fucks! That non-word first came to my attention on the notice board at work several months ago. Yes, it's me that corrects the notices... Bullshit marketing terms made up to make things sound hip and interesting are not welcome on this blog, or anywhere near me!