Disorderly Content

One of the great things about the early days of the web was the delight we had in being able to customize things. Like the 404 page visitors would see if they mistyped a URL. (Or you broke one of your links, not that that ever happened.) People started to get creative with 404 pages; heck, there were entire sites of 404 links!

I thought my own site's 404 page was pretty clever. Even better, I'm not embarrassed by it all these years later. But that doesn't stop me from admiring other people's more creative efforts. Like this one; d'you think their real content is half as good?

The night before the Oscars is the time for the Razzies, an awards ceremony that honors the worst the movie business has to offer. But in a real shocker, Worst Actress winner Halle Berry actually showed up to receive her Razzie for Catwoman. According to Reuters, Berry thanked everyone involved with the Batman sorta-spinoff for taking her from the top of her profession to the bottom. Which, you have to admit, makes her both witty and honest. God, what would happen if that kind of thing caught on?

I do love the web. And I hope you'll forgive the immodesty with which I admit to enjoying my own little part of it. Which took the form tonight of some links from a couple of Japanese bloggers (or one blogger with two blogs) who mentioned my iTunes Music Store blog. You can find the writeup here; I hope your system can handle Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana. Or you can try Google's beta quality Japanese translator, which did surprisingly well:

This " iTunes blog " link share (the LinkShare) participating in the <Katakana sequence removed>, the iTunes Music Store of the apple (the icTms) has introduced the music inside. It is the Bu log which combines hobby and actual profit. When it clicks ahead linking, the iTunes starting automatically, the mechanism which it flies to the tune. Such we would like to try doing, don't you think? is, - Regrettable, in Japan the icTms is not open and, the Japanese link share (the LinkShare) there is no either this program. During this year it becomes possible kana? However, it meaning that music unit cost is low, you cannot expect large amount remuneration, don't you think? (laughing)

I can't argue with that.

Maybe it's our cynical age. Maybe I'm just getting cranky, or at least crankier. But I find myself less and less sure of things as I get older. More suspicious of those who are sure, who claim some special pipeline to God. And a lot less surprised when something I've known and taken for granted forever turns out not to be true.

The source of this minor revelation was this week's episode of the radio series This American Life on NPR. Early in the broadcast, they discussed Ben Franklin's famous experiment with lightning, which my older brother once described thusly:

"Benjamin Franklin, inventor was he.
Out in a storm with a kite and a key.
Proved how electric the lightning can be."

Which I'm sure wasn't original with him, but that's beside the point. Anyway, the gist of the story was that the whole business with the key probably didn't happen. There's a mention in Franklin's early writings where he suggests that such an experiment could be done, with no indication that he had done, or intended to do, the deed himself. It was only many years later, in perhaps a benign attempt to pad his resume for future generations, that he claimed to have been out in that storm. What's funny of course is that few people had resumes that needed padding less than old Ben.

Anyway, I'm surprised that I'm not really surprised. I've known that George Washington and the cherry tree was a crock since I was in junior high. And Columbus didn't have to convince anyone that the world was round, a fact we used in a school play in the third grade. (Actually, he did come up with one revelation regarding the size of the earth. Turns out in that case that he was wrong and conventional wisdom was right.) But Franklin and the kite? At the age of fifty I still bought that one.

And yet I'm neither shocked nor upset to lose another historic tableau. In part that's because it doesn't really matter. And in part, I guess, because I've learned to take most of what we're taught with a "Lot's wife"-sized grain of salt. Even in an age of video cameras we can be bamboozled by those concerned with a higher purpose. (The Jessica Lynch story comes to mind.) How much easier was it in an age where direct evidence was so much harder to come by?

While the music and motion picture business fight a vicious battle against people who copy their content, The Sci Fi Channel sees an opportunity in all that bandwidth. They've made the first episode of Battlestar Galactica available on their site. There's some bad news, like the fact that there's no download option; you have to watch it on their site. And it uses Real Player, which is unappealing both for technical and business policy reasons. But the quality of the video is surprisingly good, whatever I may think of Real. And for those of us who don't get Sci Fi or who have avoided the show for other reasons, it's a chance to see what we're missing.

Sci Fi has received a lot of grief over their programming decisions, particularly among Farscape fans who blame them for the show's early demise. (Well, we have to blame someone.) But isn't it nice that the folks who program for a future-oriented audience are making their own tentative steps to embrace the future?

"...and all the men and women merely players." I take that line from As You Like It out of context because something made me think about stages and companies of players. Frank Oz explains in his commentary on Little Shop of Horrors that he had to change the downbeat ending from the stage musical (and, I believe, the original Roger Corman film) because test audiences hated to watch Audrey and Seymour die. He said that movies have a realism the stage lacks, that an audience is more comfortable watching a character die if they can see the actor take a bow at the end.

I remembered that comment while watching the first season of A&E's Nero Wolfe on DVD. The episodes or teleplays or whatever you would call them have a very stagy quality. Despite dealing with murder, they're stylish and lighthearted. And one factor that helps them from being taken too seriously, beside the fact that the violence is never seen, is that many of the same actors reappear in story after story. Not just the recurring characters; you would be surprised if it were otherwise. But in all the secondary roles. The FBI agent in one episode is a ne'er do well nephew in another. The murder victim returns to life as someone else, perhaps to die again (I haven't seen them all yet), perhaps not. But it takes the sting out of whatever evil happens. And it makes it easy to mistrust anyone in the story we don't know. After all, even if they're the good guys, that could always change in the next installment.

Which makes me think about the theatrical tradition, troupes going from place to place, the same people taking different parts every time. Or community theater today, for that matter. It's somehow easier to suspend disbelief, to pretend that the performer is the character of the moment even though you've seen them be someone else.

You hear stories about actors in television and films getting typecast. Is this a modern phenomenon? Does the realism of the screen that works so well for the current performance work against the performer over the long haul?

I needed a good laugh right about now. Working at a startup can be positively grim if you don't have a well developed sense of the absurd.

But then stuff like this comes along: hacked versions of Harlequin (or at least Harlequinesque) romances. Brilliant stuff like "I Married a Sissy-Boy" and "The Legend of the Totally Lost Mountie". Hey, Longmire, d'you think you could do some pulp thrillers or some SF next?

(Another shoutout to Boing Boing.)

The Movie Blog has an article about fan-made films at TheForce.net, which I haven't visited since discovering Troops, a brilliant Star Wars meets Cops homage I have on DVD somewhere. Anyway, one of the fan movies mentioned in this new article is called Grayson. It's the trailer for a film about Dick Grayson's attempt to avenge Batman's murder, with an entire Justice League of superheroes trying to stop him. The trailer is absolutely brilliant. I can only hope the producer can find the money to make the movie that goes with it. Trust me; it's worth the download.

Last night's episode of Gilmore Girls was entitled "Jews And Chinese Food". It's a cliche of my childhood in New York that you can tell the Jewish population of any neighborhood by counting the number of Chinese restaurants. Yep, even the Orthodox like Chinese food, although their sweet & sour pork is made with chicken. (Kosher chicken, of course.) But that's not what the episode was about.

No, in fact the story was two unrelated stories. The first involved Luke and Lorelai reconsidering their breakup during an elementary school production of Fiddler On The Roof, with Kirk as a surprisingly effective Tevye. (Is there anything that man can't do?) And the second had Rory and her two suitors at the most expensive Chinese meal in North America.

Which leads me to wonder which came first? The stories or the title? Me, I'm betting on the title.

From Boing Boing comes a link to a shocking story of vendor lock-in. It seems HP laptops include a list of Mini-PCI cards they'll permit to be installed. Insert a card not on the list, like one that supports Linux, and the computer refuses to boot. It's the next logical step from printers that won't accept third party ink/toner cartridges. What's next? Stereo receivers that reject unapproved speakers?

I'm willing to bet that HP would justify such an action by claiming to reduce its support costs. But an important lesson I learned in life is this: Never let somebody else make their problem your problem.

Another reason to be glad I'm a Mac person. And that the only piece of HP gear I own is an ancient Laserjet 4ML. When it finally dies, you can be sure its replacement will play nice with third party hardware, software and consumables. It's called voting with your dollars.

No, not crazy. Shortsighted; definitely that. Because as much as it hurts that Fox killed Family Guy too soon, that's nothing compared to the way they screwed Wonderfalls. Heck, even Firefly got more of a chance.

If you missed Wonderfalls in its brief run, you're not alone. Fox ran three whole episodes before they changed time slots. Then they ran one more before canceling it. At the time of the cancellation I still wasn't quite sure whether I liked the show or not. But now that I've seen all thirteen produced eps on DVD, I can see where the producers were going. And boy, was it a journey worth taking!

A lot of television programs are shaky in their early episodes, both in terms of their storytelling and their audience appeal. One of the challenges of turning friends and colleagues onto Farscape, to which I am a devoted fanboy, is that things don't really settle down until you're half a dozen episodes in. Heck, I wasn't sure I loved Firefly until I got to the last episode on the DVDs. To be sure, there are shows that just don't work, where you know in the first few episodes things aren't going to gel. But for anything with a story arc, where the characters and their adventures need time to develop, the networks need to provide enough time to be sure.

The good news is that Wonderfalls works as a miniseries. The producers gave us a reasonably self-contained first season, with a satisfying conclusion to the arc developed over the thirteen episodes. And the commentaries by producers and selected cast members are a hoot. Especially that last ep, where they all sing along to the show's quirky theme song. Good stuff.

Well, he will if nap time doesn't interfere. From Fox comes word that Family Guy: Stewie's Guide to World Domination will be taking over bookstores everywhere on April 26th. Of all the Griffins, Stewie is certainly the most articulate, not to mention unprincipled.

And to think that Fox had so little faith in the series that they cancelled it. Power of the fans, I guess.

Dan Gillmor, formerly a columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and now a citizen journalist and advocate for open media (or something like that - it's easier to describe than it is to name) has a link to a wonderful exchange between Jeff Jarvis, formerly of TV Guide, People and some real newspapers, and Bill Keller, executive editor at The New York Times. What's wonderful about it is that it considers real issues of journalism and the people it purports to serve. With all this instant communication technology, in both directions, how should the news media model of largely one-way communication change? (I for one have no doubt that it should change, a view I share with Mr. Jarvis.)

I've been helping out Virginia Hey, former blue-skinned alien in Farscape, Bond girl (The Living Daylights) and warrior woman (Mad Max 2), with a couple of her websites. Nothing major; some database configuration, editing of pages, domain setup, stuff like that. I like technical challenges, and moving, reconfiguring and adding capabilities to her sites have provided a few of those! So I was surprised and pleased to see a shoutout on her blog this morning. Granted, she gives me way more credit than I deserve. And she gushes. But that's Ginny, a wonderful combination of gracious and "say exactly what you think, the moment you think it".

Anyway, if you're a fan and haven't discovered her blog, you'll find it right where you'd expect: VirginiaHey.com. And then stop by her shop at WhiteFlowerLei.com. Ginny does an amazing line of candles, soaps, meditation CDs and the like.

Oh, and any technical problems you find, send those to me. My email's over on the left somewhere.

One of my nightly rituals involves checking my web access logs to see how visitors find me. It's not about ego. Okay, it's not entirely about ego. (Just mostly.) But every now and then I discover something to my benefit.

Tonight was one of those moments. I noticed a couple of hits on my iTunes Music Store blog from a blog on Salon.com called In Which Our Hero takes on entertainment. (Thanks for the link, Keith.) But once I found my link, I started to read the blog itself. And promptly got caught up in his entry from last Monday, about a podcasting site called Coverville that features song covers. (Duh!) And which he used as a springboard to talk about the group Big Daddy, a sadly out of print favorite of mine. That sent me over to Coverville to find that podcast from last October, consisting of 30 minutes of humorous covers. Including a track from an entire CD of Stairway to Heaven covers an Australian lady friend sent me a while back, a Springsteen-soundalike cover of The Flintstones theme and a whole lot more. Great stuff. And justification, if I really need it, to keep checking my logs every night for more treasures.

Although I normally keep things pretty PG around here, I can't resist sharing this link from a site called College Sex Advice. It consists of cartoon drawings of Tux the Linux penguin and a female friend in various Kama Sutra-esque positions. At least I assume Tux's friend is a female. And a friend. They certainly seem friendly...

From the Vancouver Film School comes Help!, a CG retelling of the fable about Androcles and the lion, this time transported to the time of cavemen and dinosaurs. Yes, I know cavemen didn't really overlap in time with dinosaurs. Stop being so literal!

Anyway, it makes me wish we'd had anything like this level of technology when I was studying computer science. When I think of the stuff we were doing with Tektronix storage tube displays and APL, all I can do is cringe...

What a world of difference between the world of "legitimate news" and the blogosphere! If you get your news from blogs, you're likely familiar with the story of Jeff Gannon, the phony reporter who somehow managed to get into White House briefings where he could ask softball questions and insult Democrats. But if you rely on mainstream media, you might not have heard more than a few rumblings. That's a shame, since it's a story of politics in our time that has all the elements of a proper Watergate-style scandal.

Joe Conason has a good writeup of the story, including Gannon's connections to conservative Republican activists and his rather more (or less, depending on your point of view) shady past as a homosexual prostitute and website builder for others in the same profession. But he raises an important question: where the hell is the supposedly liberal media when such a vital story, with connections right to the top of the government, all the juicy details you could want and a chance to show the conservatives in question as the anti-democracy (and not just anti-Democrat) slime they are, is waiting to be told? Can we just can the "liberal media" crap for the lie it is? Like "elite Republican Guard" of Gulf War I or "stately Wayne Manor" of Batman, it's a linguistic shorthand that keeps us from even considering its truth. Or in this case, its utter absurdity.

Update 02/17: Frank Rich has written a comprehensive piece for The New York Times, covering both the phony news and the minimal reporting of it by real news organizations, such as they are. But c'mon, people! Where's the outrage?

Sorry, I couldn't resist. Wil Wheaton has redeemed himself many times since he played the most annoying continuing character in Trek's long history. But his response to news that ASCAP will demand license fees from podcasters is as insightful and honest as it is impolitic. The more the record industry tightens their grasp, the more star systems music fans will slip through their fingers. When will they learn?

Amazon has a real trailer for the movie of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. And suddenly I'm looking forward to this thing in a big way. Not enough Marvin, but everything else looks megahoopy!

Bitter? Not Robin Williams!

Williams is doing press for Robots, the new CG movie from the folks who did Ice Age. And in his manic improv way, he has a few things to say about Disney and their soon-to-be-severed relationship with Pixar.

IGN has an audio clip on their website. I'm gonna guess he's still steamed over his treatment on Aladdin.

Thanks to Boing Boing for the pointer to this site full of rock band fonts. Although I'll never find a use for them, just like all the hundreds of other fonts I've collected over the years.

Today my friend Carol and I attended the third play in the Best of Broadway (in San Francisco) series we bought last fall. You certainly can't accuse these guys of being predictable; the first entry involved Dame Edna and the second was a stage version of White Christmas. Today's musical was called Caroline, or Change; it's the work of Tony Kushner, who wrote Angels in America. And I'll admit that I wasn't expecting to be entertained. The plot sounded dreary, especially for a musical. And the review in the Murky News was less then enthusiastic.

Boy, it is a pleasure to be wrong. Caroline, which I gather is semiautobiographical, is the tale of a black maid working for a Jewish family in Louisiana in 1963. It takes in race relations, worker/management relations, the adaptation of Northerners to the South, the stress on a new wife and stepmother trying to adapt to dysfunctional family, the Kennedy assassination and a bit more. And yet it is neither somber nor preachy. Kushner has genuine affection for his characters. The way they deal with their lives lacks the pat, perfect answers of a sitcom. And the music and the spare sets make the story even more real and compelling.

For whatever reason, Caroline didn't do terribly well on Broadway. Perhaps this personal story wasn't epic enough for people who loved Angels, which I will confess to not having seen. But I liked it just fine. Can't wait to give the cast CD a few listens.

Boing Boing has the tale of a freelance photographer who was threatened with arrest in San Francisco for taking pictures inside a MUNI station. The problem is that there's no statute forbidding it. But the transit employees and the local cops so want there to be one, out of some post-9/11 sense that being paranoid makes you safe, that they're acting as if they can invent one.

If I have limited respect for those in authority, stories like this certainly don't help. Fighting bad laws is hard enough; dealing with those who would abridge personal freedom just because they think they can; that just makes life that much harder.

I try to arrange my Saturday erranding to start around ten in the morning. That way I can catch bits and pieces of Car Talk, followed by Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! at 11. Wait Wait... is National Public Radio's weekly news quiz, a show that's both informative and hysterically funny. Where else will you learn that Hasbro once issued an SS Officer version of G.I. Joe? Or this week's tidbit: that a local fire station in Australia couldn't answer a call because one of the firemen had borrowed the fire engine to make a pizza run? During which he met some friends and took them cruising? We're assured than another station responded to the actual emergency, and that the fireman in question was suspended. But where else do you get news like this?

This is so cool! If you've ever taken pictures underwater, you know how weird the colors get. The problem gets worse as you go deeper, not just because of increasing darkness, but also because different parts of the spectrum get blocked to differing degrees. Not being a swimmer, my entire experience with underwater photography involves semisubmersibles, along with one real (civilian) submarine ride off Waikiki.

Anyway, I was impressed with a tutorial at Gadling that explains the source of the problem and then provides step by step instructions in Photoshop for bringing back the (mostly) missing colors. The results are startling, as you can see from the before and after images at right. Not perfect, perhaps. But awfully good on a cost/benefit basis: great payoff for low effort. Can't wait to try it out on some of my own photos.

A while back a local television program did an episode about Scharffen Berger, a boutique chocolate maker across the Bay in Berkeley. Heading over to their website for a little bit of research, I found their Frequently Asked Questions list. And got a real kick out of this one:

Is Scharffen Berger chocolate vegan?

A simple enough question, right? (For those of you who aren't up on lifestyle choices, at least as they apply to diet, a vegan is a kind of vegetarian.) But it isn't simple at all, as the answer quickly makes clear:

At Scharffen Berger, we work to produce the most flavorful chocolate possible. To do this, we use only cacao beans, whole vanilla beans, soy lecithin, and refined white sugar in our chocolate. For some, the use of refined sugar is inconsistent with their expression of veganism. Further, it is the not the sugar itself, but the process of making the sugar that raises debate.

The explanation goes on from there, and pertains to the question of whether the use of charcoal made from animal bone in the processing of sugar makes it non-vegan. You can read about it on their website.

As somebody who can't imagine a meatless lifestyle, such issues don't apply to me. But I find this sort of complexity fascinating, as even straightforward issues become convoluted when matters of principle are involved.

And by the way, their chocolate is pretty amazing stuff, wherever you stand on this vegan business.

Blogger Karl Wagenfuehr read the appropriate statutes to discover that the punishment for infringing copyright are far harsher than those for stealing physical goods, even if they're a physical representation of exactly the same content. Steal a CD and you face a maximum of a year in jain and a $100,000 fine. Steal the bits and it's a year and $3.4 million, plus lawyer fees for your accuser. Read the details at his website.

Do I have to even ask what's wrong with this picture?

I'm tied up in product training at work this week, which is playing havoc with my blogging time. But I've been reading several other blog entries about a Google employee who was sacked, presumably (at least these bloggers say) because of his blog about his job. That's now been confirmed by Google Blogoscoped. But what I didn't know and find particularly interesting is that this wasn't a Google employee who suddenly decided to blog. No, this guy started writing on day one of the job. And it didn't take long at all for his employer to object, first by insisting that details they considered proprietary be removed from his blog, and finally by letting him go. His entire history with the firm was a matter of a few weeks.

It's a sad reality that bears acknowledgment: that an individual's right to free speech doesn't trump a company's right to determine what's said about it. At least where people on its payroll are concerned.

Update 02/11: You can read the story from the man himself. I'd describe his surprise at Google's reaction as rather naive. Then again, if I'd had access to the Web at the start of my career, my displays of dumbth would have been a lot more public than they were.

I'm used to getting phishing emails. I'm sure you've seen them, the messages from eBay or your bank or brokerage house claiming that your information is incomplete and must be corrected within 48 hours. Or else! Whenever I get one of these things, I switch to the raw source view of the message to find the scam. Usually it's a numeric IP address in a URL; sometimes it's a tricked out text URL that looks right, but only if you don't look too closely.

But as I said in the title, they're getting sneakier. Today I got one from eBay requiring an update of contact information, including a phone number. And my cursory examination of the message made it look genuine. Including the first Received header, which claimed to be from a real eBay server:

Received: from csa002.corp.ebay.com (172.180.94.12 [172.180.94.12])
    by pmta02.mta.everyone.net (EON-AUTHRELAY) with ESMTP id BF439CF9
    for <**********>; Sun, 6 Feb 2005 16:15:47 -0800

And I didn't spot any phony URLs in the plain ASCII version of the message or the HTML version. Still, being the paranoid sort, I went directly to eBay to check my contact information. And discovered something interesting: nowhere do they ask for a telephone number.

That made me doubly suspicious. So I went back to the email, where I found what I'd missed the first time in the HTML version of the message:

<FONT face=3DArial><A 
href=3D"http://signin.ebay.com-ws2.org/DLLupdate/eBayISAPI/login.html" 
target=3D_blank><FONT face=3DArial color=3D#0000ff
size=3D2>http://signin.ebay.com//ws2/eBayISAPI.dll?SignIn&ssPageName=3Dh:h:sin:US</FONT></A>

Do you see it? The URL in the <A> tag that goes to signin.ebay.com-ws2.org instead of signin.ebay.com? I have of course forwarded the message to eBay. With any luck at all, this particular site will be shut down before too many people get caught. But it's a sad day when I start thinking of spammers as benign creatures. Even if it's only relative.

At the end of a collection of miscellany on Groklaw we find mention of a funny commercial Novell produced in response to the announcement by Microsoft that users of Windows NT are now officially SOL: all tech support for the OS has been discontinued. I think the ad's hysterical even if you're not tech obsessed. But what do I know? My own nerddom is in its fourth decade. Or possibly its fifth; it's so hard to remember.

A little admin note for the handful of folks reading this blog with an RSS aggregator like NetNewsWire for the Mac. After noticing that another blogger had a [Comments] tag at the end of his postings, I decided to examine his XML and see if I couldn't do the same to mine. The nice thing about using Blosxom for my blog is that it's so transparent; I can change anything I want with a little bit of editing. So now I have that [Comments] tag too. Now all I need are a few more people to actually write something. (More readers would be nice too.)

I started working on the website that surrounds this blog almost ten years ago. (I think the actual anniversary is some time in August. Cards and gifts are most welcome.) Since then, I've spent countless hours working on its content and even more hours thinking about things I might do that could lead to new material. Like looking forward to business trips for their photographic possibilities. If you've done a lot of business travel yourself, you'll probably agree that it's something you prepare for, not something you necessarily enjoy.

Anyway, the site has taken on a life of its own. And it's long since gone beyond any need to justify its existence. Still, justifications do come along every now and then. Like this morning, when my spam filter caught a message from the .cz domain. Turns out that this particular missive wasn't spam at all. It was a request from a gentleman at the Nicholas Copernicus observatory and planetarium in Brno, Czech Republic. He wanted permission to use the photo at right (the larger version in my desktop backgrounds collection, not this thumbnail) in a book on craters. No money, of course; why do they never offer money? Still, it's nice to think of my name appearing in a book, even if it's in a language I can't read.

So that's part of the reason I continue to Web. As to why I blog, well, I'm still working out the answer to that one.

Who knew that religious people could have a sense of humor? And how can you not love this page at the United Church of Christ's website that welcomes SpongeBob Squarepants into the church's warm and witty embrace. A nice message of inclusion, as well as a finger in the eye of Dr. Dobson and his Focus On The Family bunch. The middle one, I hope.

I've been using this wonderful RSS aggregator called NetNewsWire to keep up with a long list of favorite blogs. One of the nice features of NetNewsWire is its handling of changes to blog entries. If you enable it, NNW will show both the old text in red, the new text in green and the unmodified text, well, unmodified. Usually the changes are no big deal: typos, grammatical corrections, that sort of thing. Sometimes they include updates to the original story, tagged with the word Update so browser people and users of less clever RSS tools will know. But sometimes the story undergoes a real transformation.

Case in point: this posting on Engadget. Read the story now and you'll learn about a product from Japan that lets you whistle for your lost remote. But that's not what it said when it showed up in NetNewsWire this morning. Here we have the original text:

"To be honest, we’re not sure where half of this stuff comes from.  Maybe there’s a Japanese Willy Wonka churning out gadgets instead of candy. This somewhat puzzling looking device is actually a system that lets you change the channels on your TV by simply whistling.  Apparently, you attach the yellow piece to your remote then either whistle yourself or, if you can’t, blow into the included whistle and the device lights up and changes the channel.  Okay, we understand the lighting up part, but how exactly does this control your remote?"

And here's approximately how NNW rendered it when it noticed the changes:

"To be honest, we’re not sure where half of this stuff comes from.  Maybe there’s a Japanese Willy Wonka churning out gadgets instead of candy. This somewhat puzzling looking device is actually a system that lets helps you change find the channels on your TV lost remote simply by simply whistling.  Apparently, you attach the yellow piece to your remote then either either whistle whistle yourself or, if you can’t, blow into the included whistle and the device lights up and changes the makes a sound so you can find channel.  Okay, we understand the lighting up part, but how exactly does this control your remote?it. "

Kind of changes the meaning, doesn't it?

Thanks to Engadget for reporting on this eBay auction item. Whether the idea was to turn technology into art or simply to make the best of a post-BSOD-rage moment, who can say? Whichever it is, the result is both compelling and emotionally satisfying.

I've been fighting a holding action against the flu or something remarkably similar for the past few days. Stayed home Monday and Tuesday, one benefit of the internets being the ability to do most work-related activities from the comfort of my couch. I did have to go in today to do a remote presentation, WebEx web conferencing not working so well on Macintoshes. But as soon as the presenting was done, I returned home to watch television and continue my interrupted recuperation.

As per my routine, I popped the screen on my PowerBook within a couple of minutes of arriving home. And shortly afterward, my Instant Message program popped up with a file being sent to me by a former coworker. The title was slightly provocative: thong-sandals or something like that. And if I were healthy, my natural paranoia would have kicked in. But it didn't; I accepted the file. And after a couple of minutes my IM program died.

Still not getting it, I restarted the program. It tried sending again, at which point I noticed the .pif extension on the file. That's no image format, I thought. That's a Windows executable file. I bet said coworker's computer is infected with a virus!

And so it turned out to be. Fortunately, my Mac is immune to Windows viruses. (Or is that virii?) I wish my own immune system were nearly so virus-resistent.

No, not Alice's Restaurant. Not this time, anyway.

You can find most anything on eBay. Including a gentleman's club with a drive thru. Yes, it's twoo; there is an actual strip club on auction. Minimum bid is $300,000, with a reserve price that's even higher. And all that for a crappy building on Route 22 in Pittsburgh. One assumes that the performers are extra.