weird - 25.2.2005 - 18.10.2006
Terror-Dentists - at least in the UK, former members of the British National Party are better equipped for terrorist attacks than the usually media-effective arrested Islamic terrorist suspects. Are dentists now being put on the general suspects list in the UK?
Lightning exits woman's bottom - autsch.
Your Ancestors Disgust Me - you inbred spawn of illiterate, unhygienic, penis-worshipping child molesters!
6502asm.com - 6502 compatible compiler and emulator in javascript - completely crazy. I love it.
Gizmondo's Spectacular Crack-up - Background of a game console manufacturer. Reads like a John LeCarre ...
Exploding Hello Kitty toys recalled - that was. definitely.
The Perry Bible Fellowship - evil comics. Very evil.
Nigeria widows lose their fortune - Life imitates Spam!
Fishermen missing for nine months rescued - wow. The three fishermen should sell the film rights as quickly as possible.
Star Trek Inspirational Posters - brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.
How To Criticizing Computer Scientists - Avoiding Ineffective Deprecation And Making Insults More Pointed
Garfield: Permanent Monday - Garfield comics analyzed.
Blue People of Kentucky - strange ...
OMG Girlz Don’t Exist on teh Intarweb!!!!1 - hilarious.
Conversation with Boston Volkswagen - Paul Graham wants to buy a car ...
Adactio: Journal - The ugly American - yep, Paul Graham == Wanker. After all, if he really spouted such nonsense.
When companies meet their doppelgänger - A particularly creative form of piracy
Things nobody tells you about the south pole
What you never wanted to know about the South Pole, but you get told anyway.
Abmahnwahn is everywhere
Just because it fits, Neil Gaiman is also being warned - for a link from one website to another website. Which in itself is nonsense - after all, the entire web consists of links (and no, the target website is nothing forbidden). The particularly absurd thing: he is not the one who placed the link. He only appears in a report on the website with a picture, that's all. With a tomato. And somewhere else there is a link to the website for the cult trash "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes". And the latter rights holders are probably the cause of the warning ...
The quality of research in the context of warnings seems to be suffering outside of Germany as well.
Frightening ...
... when Ajax, JavaScript, Web 2.0 even make it into the Tagesschau newsfeed. Well, the Schieb, of course - the revival of Wolf-Gang, only thinner and no duet. And with less destructive tendencies towards technical equipment.
And because the absurdities are not enough yet ...
... sues Google Kinderstart - because they are not ranked number 1 on Google, unlike other search engines, when searching for the term "Kinderstart". Is this somehow a permanent full moon?
Roam - a Google-like search engine including Ads. Not for the web, but for the Metaverse - the Second Life content. Did I mention that ads are also placed there? For virtual products in virtual stores in a virtual world? Payable with virtual money?
Principia Discordia the book of Chaos, Discord and Confusion Fnord! - Hail Eris, All Hail Discordia!
Blue Ball Machine - giant ball machine on a website. Beware, it has background music.
Instant Community Building
Here's what happens when the availability of "On Lisp" as a download is announced on Lemonodor. Apparently, not a single one of the commentators ever clicked the link or took a look at the site before commenting. This also happens with other postings on Lemonodor from time to time, but not as massively as with this posting.
Alleged Weather Manipulation?
Lightning strike reports alleged weather manipulation - Hoax? Joke? Or perhaps too much consumption of possibly not entirely legal means? The German Meteorological Society's information sheet also mentions this. So is there something to it after all? The report from Lightning strike sounds serious. Weather manipulation itself is indeed a real topic - and, for example, in the USA, it is indeed used in some areas, albeit on a relatively small scale (e.g., to activate weather fronts prematurely to avoid greater disadvantages for agriculture in certain regions). So should someone actually be experimenting with such things over Germany?
You just have to love Ask MetaFilter
Honestly - someone has a hole in their head and tries to see how deep it is with a paperclip. And what's the comment?
Not to derail, but, does anyone else think it's a really really bad idea to put random objects down holes in your head?
What if it was a reset button?!
I'm not a hater, I just flush a lot.
It's always fascinating to see what questions are asked on the internet - and get answers!
Bielefeld Rail Theft
Not only does Bielefeld not exist - the tracks in Lohra don't exist either:
According to police reports, the company had commissioned two firms with forged orders from the railway. The workers had work to do for at least two weeks. The tracks laid on steel sleepers were completely torn out of the ballast. Afterwards, the tracks went to scrap dealers. A ton of scrap currently costs 200 euros.
Well, if I had to come up with a joke, I wouldn't think of the idea that you could steal tracks. Reality can only be that absurd ...
Blowhard
'Nuff said:
The trend issue 3/2006, which the iBusiness editorial team is currently preparing, incidentally includes an outlook on the future after the currently much-discussed Web 2.0: Premium members will find out next week what awaits us with Web 3.0!
Loading a ZX Spectrum from an iPod - someone actually added .tzx support to iPod Linux, so you can now use the iPod as a mass storage device for the ZX Spectrum.
Suspicious Hat?
Again something from the land of the free and the stupid. James Moore is on the No-Fly-List. He is one of the authors of the book "Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential". And he is not allowed to fly.
From his phone call with the responsible hotline in Washington:
"I'm sorry, sir," she said. "There seems to be a problem. You've been placed on the No Fly Watch List."
"Excuse me?"
"I'm afraid there isn't much more that I can tell you," she explained. "It's just the list that's maintained by TSA to check for people who might have terrorist connections."
"You're serious?"
"I'm afraid so, sir. Here's an 800 number in Washington. You need to call them before I can clear you for the flight."
Exasperated, I dialed the number from my cell, determined to clear up what I was sure was a clerical error. The woman who answered offered me no more information than the ticket agent.
"Mam, I'd like to know how I got on the No Fly Watch List."
"I'm not really authorized to tell you that, sir," she explained after taking down my social security and Texas driver's license numbers.
"What can you tell me?"
"All I can tell you is that there is something in your background that in some way is similar to someone they are looking for."
"Well, let me get this straight then," I said. "Our government is looking for a guy who may have a mundane Anglo name, who pays tens of thousands of dollars every year in taxes, has never been arrested or even late on a credit card payment, is more uninteresting than a Tupperware party, and cries after the first two notes of the national anthem? We need to find this guy. He sounds dangerous to me."
"I'm sorry, sir, I've already told you everything I can."
"Oh, wait," I said. "One last thing: this guy they are looking for? Did he write books critical of the Bush administration, too?"
Well. Or it is like suggested in the comments - it is his hat.
Apart from his humor which he has kept, he also has a small nugget of information for us:
I have been on the No Fly Watch List for a year. I will never be told the official reason. No one ever is. You cannot sue to get the information. Nothing I have done has moved me any closer to getting off the list. There were 35,000 Americans in that database last year. According to a European government that screens hundreds of thousands of American travelers every year, the list they have been given to work from has since grown to 80,000.
80,000 people are on the American No-Fly-List - which is then given to other countries to prevent these people from flying there as well. Without control of this list, without a judge, without conviction, simply based on an arbitrary entry. And I have the suspicion that everyone is obediently cowering and participating in this madness ...
morons.org - Anti-Gay Preacher Arrested for Soliciting Sex from Male Undercover Cop - the biggest critics of the elephants, are themselves ...
Homebrew CPU Home Page - someone is building their own computer (including CPU!) from TTL chips. And then wants to write their own assembler, compiler, etc. - up to the OS. I wouldn't want to see the electricity bill, TTL logic is not exactly known for its frugal use of energy.
Hacking the jProject - The Daily WTF - ouch. An order system where each order is stored in its own table in the SQL Server. Great idea.
Westerwelle is hardly surpassable in absurdity
His latest move: FDP will not form a coalition with the Greens at the federal level
"The Greens are a political opponent and not a strategic partner," said Westerwelle after the board meeting. Furthermore, it is not the FDP's task to lead the Greens out of their insignificance, said the FDP leader. However, Westerwelle does not see the "collegial parliamentary work" with the Greens endangered by the renunciation of the coalition option.
So, two things are really impressive about this:
- with what vehemence someone who has nothing to say in federal politics still believes that anyone cares about his statements on federal coalitions
- and the idea that someone first kicks a potentially necessary partner in the political work (after all, you are sitting together in the opposition - and the Left Party certainly won't want to have anything to do with the little citizen's gang) in the ass, but then expects to continue playing with them.
What kind of stuff is he smoking, anyway?
Sue Wikipedia?
How mentally deranged do you have to be to publicly call for a mass lawsuit against Wikipedia (see the report at netbib), and then explicitly list making money as the goal? To stand up as if Wikipedia were an evil corporation that needs to be sued into the ground? And then not even have the guts to put their pathetic name next to it, so you can directly see what kind of sausages are behind it?
Stealing and modifying the Wikipedia logo to use it for their own site wasn't even too embarrassing for them.
Questions You Should Ask Yourself
Would actually hacking the security system for securing the one-way deposit be a terrorist act?
Shocking is ...
... to find a website about erectile dysfunction medications, penis enlargement, and all that junk that's offered in spam, which has a seemingly correct German imprint with address, VAT ID, and all that. Ouch. Did the operator read a bit too much spam?
Even more shocking when such a website is then apparently promoted by the owner in blogs by entering it as a homepage in comment functions. Double ouch.
Immortal Letter Exchange - and pigs can fly. Somehow.
Richard Stallman Gets in Trouble with UN Security for Wearing a Tin-Foil Hat - well, not a tin-foil hat, rather an ID card wrapped in aluminum foil. Due to RFID.
vi meets Word
Shocking: vi Steuerung für Word - built as Word macros. Somehow sick. I think I need to install this ...
When Web Designer is a Bad Word
For example, with companies that rant against ALT attributes on IMG tags and then incorrectly refer to them as ALT tags. Well, incompetence is their concept:
Just exactly what text can a person read or see in a 1 x 1 pixel gif? Zippo. Thus, the text or line reader, JAWS, cynthia, etc, should be smart enough to see that the image size of Height="1" and Width="1" and automatically know it's a spacer and then make a if-then condition to NOT PRONOUNCE alt tag in the spacer.gif.
I have edited quite a few table layouts myself - among other things because they were simply there - and I can't remember when the spacers were actually output in 1x1 pixels. Of course, the image itself was only 1x1 pixels in size, but the width and height attributes on the IMG tags were naturally according to the size that was to be spanned. In addition, there were a lot of other layout elements in the source that were candidates for ALT="" - for good reason, layout graphics should be correctly bypassed by screen readers. But according to their idea, the screen reader should first load the graphic element, which is completely useless for it, and look at how big it is. Just because the trolls are too lazy to write ALT="" on IMG tags.
Oh, and they also demand more intelligence from screen readers:
HERE IS SIMPLE SOLUTION so EVERYONE WILL NOT HAVE TO RE-WRITE THEIR PAGES just for you.
READ THE BIG TEXT FIRST, either font tags with say 3 to 7, or CSS styles with the biggest fonts sizes. Next, read the 2nd largest fonts second, and so on. This is JUST LIKE WHAT HUMAN WOULD DO ANYWAY.....So, look for Font tags with a setting 7 or 6 or 5 or 4 and down and in that order and then start reading it. Same with CSS, PIXELS sizes of say 24px should be read FIRST, NOT LAST!! How hard can this be? This what the browsers do anyway, so why can't you do it?
Exactly. The screen readers should just figure out what they need from the tag soup (including analyzing font tags and such junk), instead of the designer thinking about what he produces and providing a somewhat logical structure for text-only browsers. Hey, what are the h-tags and their friends for since HTML 1? Oh well, it's probably all just imagination ...
But you can find even more gems there, such as the discussion about CSS vs. Table Layouts, where CSS is of course made to look really bad. Because they just don't understand what CSS is all about and why you separate HTML and CSS and what's the good idea about it. Because they probably haven't had a single good idea in their entire sad designer life and therefore wouldn't even recognize a good idea if it hit them on the head with a big stick.
Oh yes, a word of warning to more current designers at the end: don't look at their source code, because it will give you hair loss, curled toenails, and rotten teeth.
Golden Hamster Stories
Goldhamster turns 75 years old:
On April 12, 1930, a golden hamster burrow was excavated near the city of Aleppo (Syria), containing one female and 11 young animals. Of the young, three males and one female could be raised and bred at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. All golden hamsters in human care worldwide descend from this brother-sister mating that took place 75 years ago. In the wild, the golden hamster was considered lost or extinct.
So this is a joke, right? All pet golden hamsters are the result of inbreeding? Everything stems from these two animals at the beginning? And they haven't mutated into furry broccoli yet? Wow.
Suitable from 6 years
Stumbled upon this at Spreeblick: what a game company considers suitable for ages 6 and up:
Your task: rule over your island, where pirates and prisoners reside. These two population groups must be treated completely differently. The pirates want to enjoy an undisturbed life of luxury to recover from their strenuous raids. You can best increase the productivity of the prisoners by spreading fear and terror.
Building brothels (and filling them with female prisoners), random executions, keelhauling - all to amuse the pirates and frighten the prisoners. Great training for the little ones for our wonderful world.
Hey, with politicians, bankers, and business bosses instead of pirates and the unemployed and foreigners instead of the prisoners, it could almost be realistic ...
R-Archive - Discussion Forums Cease and Desist
R-Archiv - Discussion Forums Cease and Desist Notice - is this now a hoax, or what? Heise is sending a cease and desist notice to the Baron for violating forum rules? Or is there another Munich lawyer they are in a dispute with? This must simply be a hoax ...
The background to this is actually probably true - Heise has indeed blocked the Baron's forum access. So there might be something to the story. It would be quite crazy.