INFINITY Welcomes Careful Drivers

I've got several things going for me with this gem from the BBC. First, I suffer from a fairly healthy dose of paranoia when it comes to checking baggage for a flight. I don't like the idea that my bags are ever out of my sight, though I understand there is now way the airlines or their lawyers would ever consent to allowing me to load my own luggage (other than carry-ons, of course) onto an aircraft. But I also don't like the idea that people can just rifle through my personal effects. Things get stolen that way.  read more »

Just to be fair, Muslim extremisim does not corner the market on insanity. Christians have their own as well:

This is part of a BBC documentary posetd on YouTube about the members of the Westboro Baptist Church and the Phelps family.  read more »

I really have issues with religion. Without getting too far into it at this point, I have problems in that every organized religion has, at some point, been responsible for atrocities that we can hardly imagine. Many involved canabalism or human sacrifice, many were used as an excuse to subjegate entire nations and states, still more were used as an excuse for hate and murder.  read more »

It looks like good news for Ham Radio in the coming years. NASA is now predicting a massive solar storm, possibly as big as the last massive storm in 1958. This should generate all sorts of wacky effects on things like cell phones, satellite TV and radio. But for Ham, it may mean some wicked propogation. Oh, and potentially we of the lower 48 will get to see the Aurora Borealis as the storms energy hits our upper atmosphere. Here's a bit from the article, which can be found on NASA's Web Site:  read more »

Holy crap this is just awesome!!! Those guys from Top Gear just rock. This video speaks for itself:

MSN is running a story right now hinting that Emma Watson may not be onboard for the final movies in the Harry Potter series.

According to the article, Order of the Phoenix is filming now, but she is unsure if she will continue on for the rest of the movies. Rupert Gint (Ron) and Daniel Radcliffe (Harry) seem to be set to do the rest of the films but Emma is still not sure.

Personally, I think it would kill the franchise to replace someone as central as Hermione at this point. It was diffcult replacing Dumbledore, but as his parts in the movies are small, the effect was not as dramatic as replacing any of the three central characters would be.  read more »

I had a great weekend. It seems that not everyone had such a great weekend however.

Google News has a list of articles covering the death of The Crocodile Hunter, Mr. Steve Irwin.

This weekend, Steve was diving and took a stingray barb in the chest. He apparently went into cardiac arrest and died before paramedics could arrive, they having had to fly in from a neighboring island.  read more »

It is with sadness that I must relay the passing of Syd Barrett, who died a few days ago at the age of 60. Syd was a troubled man, who founded what has to be the most popular rock group ever, Pink Floyd.

Their album "Dark Side of the Moon" stayed on the Billboard charts for a combined total of over 1500 weeks. DSOTM has sold well over 40 million albums, and sales continue to this day.

Of course, the band recorded DSOTM after Syd left the band, but without his work in the early days, they would not have been the band that they became. They were a big influence in my own life as well. I fell in love with The Wall the first time I saw it on the original MTV.  read more »

Normally, to guage whether or not a given technology is "ready for prime time" or even close, companies do surveys of random people. Sometimes these random people are IT professionals, sometimes they are end users, sometimes they are just randomly selected people. In some cases, they are just people who happened to walk up to a booth at a trade show somewhere and answered some questions.

To listen to these kinds of surveys, we would have to say that Linux is not desktop ready, despite the cries of the Linux advocates and distributions to the contrary. But I think there is a better test to see if a given thing is becomming more popular. That test is the test of "How much will a company support for their products".  read more »

My friends didn't believe me when I described a cute 19 year old petite girl riding this thing I found in a Brookstone store. They didnt belive me when I told them how she rode it like a horse, and how mesmerized I was by her gyroscopic hip movements. You probably dont believe me either. So feast your eyes on this:

The iGallop Core and Abs Excerciser

Or, if you would like, watch the Chinese television commercial:

 read more »