@Randem

I didn’t even get honorable mention for my submission to the latest caption contest.

Okay, now open up and say “aaaarrrrggghhhhh”…

I’m not saying it was the best, but seriously? You didn’t even think it was worth honorable mention at the bottom of the page?

What were people thinking?

And when that picture happens to be a graph of the declining personal savings in the US, I’ll bet the majority of those 1000 words are spelled with four letters.

How realistic is it to discuss the possibility of an economic collapse in the US?

“Most of men’s problems arise from their inability to sit quietly and alone.” — Blaise Pascal

Quite often — more often than not, actually — when I use the restroom at work, I find myself rather put off by the amount of loose hair littering the top of the toilet seat. It leaves me wondering many unpleasant things about the previous person who sat there.

Here’s the thing: Hair doesn’t just fall out all day long. I don’t wake up to a hair covered pillow every morning. And even if you’re balding, the subject I’m discussing isn’t really the hair on your head, now, is it?

So for the quantity of loose (ahem) body hair I’m seeing to have been left behind from a single sitting, I have to wonder what the previous person (or people) are doing while they sit there to make their body hair fall out? Shouldn’t any loose hairs have already come off while they were presumably showering that morning?

And worse… this isn’t a train station, it’s a professional office. Do you have to leave that mess there? Couldn’t you, uh, clean up after yourself before you leave the stall?

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” — Arthur C. Clarke

This is a really interesting idea. Jay (aka, The Plug) tied a disposable camera to a bench with a sign reading:

Good afternoon,
I attached this camera to the bench so you could take pictures. Seriously. So have fun. I’ll be back later this evening to pick it up.
Love, Jay / The Plug

Here are the photos he got back when he had it developed.

After installing the Firefox 3.0 beta, the majority of my extensions stopped working. I had gotten rather spoiled with them, so I decided it was time to learn about writing Firefox extensions so that I could a)fix the ones I like which aren’t being updated, and b)write my own for the things that don’t exist yet.

For my first foray into writing Firefox extensions, I decided to go with something simple, but which I find useful. So I made PlusOne.

What PlusOne does is quite simple. It finds the numerical part of the current URL you are browsing, and simply adds 1 to it. (You can also subtract 1 from it.) So, if the page you’re viewing is called page1.html, you could right-click on the page and choose “Plus One”, and it will navigate to page2.html. Likewise, if you are viewing britney-spears-naked-17.jpg, you can right-click on the page and choose “Minus One” and it will navigate to britney-spears-naked-16.jpg.

Of course, if the file doesn’t exist, you’ll still get a 404. But often you can discover many interesting, and somewhat hidden, gems just by exploring the possibilities of incrementing the URL. It’s also easier than searching the entire page for the tiny “next” link hidden at the bottom when you’re reading a six-page scientific essay. (Yeah, right… you’re looking for naked pictures of Britney Spears.)

Please try it out and leave any comments on this page.

With elections coming, there’s a lot of discussion about The War Against Terror (TWAT). TWAT is going to be a big issue when you go to the poll, so I think it’s important to understand all the ins and outs.

First, it comes as no surprised that TWAT was first proposed during the Clinton administration. It was well known that Bin Laden wanted to blow our towers. (He had already tried to do it once in the garage.) The proposal, however, came at the end of Clinton’s term, so it was decided that the next administration should be given the reigns in deciding how to proceed, so TWAT was handed to Bush, whose was debriefed early in his term.

Bush dropped the ball. Bush and Dick didn’t take TWAT seriously, so they didn’t use protection. The end result: a 19-man mile-high club blew our towers. That got Bush hot and bothered, and he responded by shooting his load in Afghanistan.

The real problems started, though, when Bush and Dick got bent, and decide to go after Iraq in search of lubrication. The oval office thought the Iraqis would welcome us openly, so they just charged right in to the dry climate, without any foreplay.

As it turns out, the Iraqis didn’t really want it, they were just caught up in the moment. And then it got out that Bush and Dick were lying, saying whatever they had to just to get some action. At one point, they changed positions and Colin got irritated.

Nobody was prepared. Our guys were inserted without adequate protection and they’ve been pounding away at TWAT for quite some time. The friction has been intense, and lately they’re even experiencing surges. The whole thing seems ready to blow, and now the question is whether we should pull out, or stay in and make a long-term commitment.

If our guys pull out, they can come home and get some rest, and be ready to party next weekend. But Bush wants to stay in, because he wants to give birth to a new democracy. But the problem is, we were never committed to Iraq, we just wanted to get in their plants, and if you give birth without commitment you end up paying for it for the next 20 years.

As far as I can tell, the real issue is that Bush thinks he’s already sown the seeds of democracy, and he’s against aborting, so he thinks there’s only one thing left to do. But other people disagree; they think that we haven’t climaxed yet, and that we can avoid a big mistake before it’s too late.

It comes down to this: Bush tried to date-rape the middle east, knock them up, and then leave us paying child support… but our country can’t even afford our own children. Sometimes, it’s better to pull out.