I doubted the existence of god for a long time...until I found over 300 proofs of god's existence. Example:

ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT (I)
(1) I define God to be X.
(2) Since I can conceive of X, X must exist.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

Here's Dubya's re-election website! Dubya in '04 was Dreamhost's site of the month. Enjoy.

They even have a headline feed you can include in your website! Behold:

Weird, weird stuff.

*57 Customer Orignated Trace (COT) Activation
*60 Selective Call Rejection (SCR) Activation
*61 Selective Distinctive Alerting (SDA) Activation
*62 Selective Call Acceptance (SCA) Activation
*63 Selective Call Forwarding (SCF) Activation
*65 ICLID Activation (caller ID)
*66 Automatic Recall (AR) Activation
*67 Call Privacy Toggle
*68 Computer Access Restriction Toggle
*69 AC Activation
*70 Call waiting disable
*71 Ring, no-answer forward activation
*72 Call forwarding immediate Activation
*73 Call forwarding Deactivation
*74 Speed call 8 program
*80 SCR Deactivation
*81 SDA Deactivation
*82 SCA Deactivation
*83 SCF Deactivation
*85 ICLID Deactivation
*86 AR Deactivation
*89 AC Deactivation

I decided to track these codes down this morning after I got the 957th hang-up call from (most likely) telemarketers who, when I *69ed the number came up unavailable. Now when they try to call they'll feel the awesome power of their natural enemy, *62!

It's hot in Oregon. The weather pixie might say "81F" but don't believe it. It's 81 celsius. I saw Satan twice yesterday.

I was reading The Smoking Gun's 2003 Article of the Year and I came across this page which explains the origins of lots of other naughty words:

Cock:
The word "cock" dates to early 17th century England and not to surprisingly relates to the rooster. Roosters have an annoying habit of getting up early in the morning and crowing loudly to welcome the morning sun. As the rooster crows, he stretches out his neck and points it upwards. Think, morning. Think something raising it's head....enough said?

I completely wasted two perfectly good opportunities to replace my car at someone else's expense today.

First, while returning from dropping Christine off at the airport, I was nearly sideswiped by a brand new Cadillac. I would have been the other driver's fault, thusly getting my totaled car replaced with a new one.

Next, while driving across town I nearly T-boned a brand new Volkswagen Passat when the driver (who was having an important conversation on her cell phone at the time) failed to yield at an intersection.

Blown chances, both of them. I though bitterly about this while driving my busted, 14-year-old, dirty, crappy car home in traffic while slowly cooking due to the lack of A/C and functioning driver's side window. Every sqeak and grinding sound from the brakes was my blown opportunity mocking me.

According to this article from Fox News, Paul Wolfowitz said:

"This is a war that’s going to be won not by smothering the country with individual guard posts (but) by better and better intelligence," Wolfowitz said.

I thought that the war was over?

Another funny thing:

"The reports of deaths are terrible. Any American death is a terrible thing," Wolfowitz said. "But I think the American public understands that when you're fighting a war against terrorists, when you're fighting for the security of this country, that sacrifice is something that you'd have to expect."

Oh well. It's not like Wolfowitz has any credibility to lose anyway.

Click here to see a pie chart of my search statistics for this month. It's a telling picture of what people are interested in: Eminem. Young Eminem.

However, Oliver the humanzee is still representing. Good for him. Keep holding true, Oliver.

Friendster is arguable the biggest meme to hit the internet this year. Slate asks the question, 'Why is everyone you know on friendster?' and the answer of course is, 'yes'. It's pretty funny, because I got myself entangled with it only yesterday, and now

You are connected to 294 people in your Personal Network, through 1 friend.

"It's growing exponentially," said CEO and founder Jonathan Abrams.

I was turning blue as I sat in the library choking back laughter today. I received a link from a source who shall remain anonymous (let's just call him..."boris") which directed my attention to the plight of a certain Star Wars fan in Quebec who recorded a video of himself re-enacting Darth Maul's battle in Star Wars: Episode I.

See for yourself why there is an online petition asking George Lucas to include him in the next installment of Star Wars.

Here's a cool site on UI design for programmers. I should read it some time.

From Fortune.com:

Microsoft suffered utter defeat at a crucial pretrial hearing in what appears to be the highest-stakes patent litigation ever—one in which a tiny company called InterTrust Technologies claims that 85% of Microsoft's entire product line infringes its digital security patents.

The article goes on to say that the company probably wouldn't settle the suit for anything less than a number starting with "B". Given the fact that a victory would mean InterTrust could demand a halt to the sales of such MS products as Windows XP, Office XP Suite, Windows Media Player, Xbox, and oh yeah, .NET, why would they?

InterTrust CEO Talal Shamoon asks rhetorically, "How much would that be worth to Microsoft?"

Mwahahahaha!

Marshall Brain, the author of How Stuff Works, paints a scary picture of the future in his article, The Robotic Future. In 2025:

Humanoid robots soon cost less than the average car, and prices kept falling. A typical model had two arms, two legs and the normal human-type sensors like vision, hearing and touch. Power came from small, easily recharged fuel cells. The humanoid form was preferred, as opposed to something odd like R2-D2, because a humanoid shape fit easily into an environment designed around the human body. A humanoid robot could ride an escalator, climb stairs, drive a car, and so on without any trouble.

Once the humanoid robot became a commodity item, robots began to move in and replace humans in the workplace in a significant way. The first wave of replacement began around 2030, starting with jobs in the fast food industry. Robots also filled janitorial and housekeeping positions in hotels, motels, malls, airports, amusement parks and so on.

He goes on to paint disturbing (because it's completely feasible, given Moore's Law) picture of the future where unemployment is around 50%. In the height of the Great Depression, unemployment was 25%. Humanoid robots, each with roughly the processing power of the human brain, fill jobs which today are held by constuction workers, pilots, service sector employees, and even professional athletes.

Ignore the lies your eyes are telling you. Nothing in this picture is moving.

It was really nice seeing the bummed-out faces of FCC Chairman Michael Powell and his homey, Rupert Murdoch when their shaisty scheme to allow unprecedented media consolidation was overthrown by the house. Now on to the senate: Bush has pledged to veto a move like this, which might mean his first veto in office will be against his the will of his own party.

Portland's serial dog poisoner called up the Lucky Labrador brewpub to taunt the dog-loving employees and tell them he's moving his campaign to Mount Tabor. The call came on the night of the pub's fundraiser to raise a reward to find the person poisoning Portland's dogs.

There were $500 checks, $100 bills, even $5 bucks from 6-year-old Berry.

"To find the person that did that bad thing," said Berry.

Poor Barry. I've had people misspell my name all my life, and he's only getting a taste.

Rampaging monkeys invade tea garden.

I'm saving $100 out of every paycheck. Someday I'll be able to move here.

Use RIAA Radar to check whether your potential music purchase is a RIAA product. It's cool, along the same lines as knowing whether your potential food purchase is non-GMO, or whether your T-shirt or shoes were made in a sweatshop.

As Baghdad celebrated the passing of Saddam Hussein's insane and villanous sons by shooting their guns in the air, leave it to people from Florida to screw things up.

According to SFGate:

In the confusion, a unit of the Florida Army National Guard, believing that it was coming under fire, shot a man in the chest and a young girl in the head.

I suppose this shouldn't be surprising, coming from people unable to operate a ballot.

Major Fun's weblog led me to the Trikke, a 3-wheeled version of the venerable Razor scooter.

It really makes me laugh when George W. Bush says he has "darned good intelligence".

"And to lead this nation to a responsibility era, a president himself must be responsible." - George Bush jr.

" I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services[emphasis added]." -George Bush jr.

Responsibility era, indeed.

The healthcare industry is lobbying congress to prevent patients from suing them for more than $250,000. Then they go and do stuff like this.

The man who said that that the British government 'sexed up' the WMD reports about Iraq turned up dead recently.

The ministry said Dr Kelly had at no point been threatened with suspension or dismissal for speaking to Mr Gilligan. [from bbc news]

It was made clear to him that he had broken civil service rules by having unauthorised contact with a journalist, but "that was the end of it", said a spokesman.

The end of it indeed.

I learned that John Ashcroft was visiting the Hatfield Federal Courthouse today by the driving in front of it and seeing the masses of protesters with signs like "Please take your jackboot off my neck". Ashcroft is not a popular character in the northwest, especially Portland which George Bush Sr. dubbed "little Beirut" when visiting our fair city.
I was followed by a dozen or so motorcycle police while driving in front of the courthouse. They were part of a larger force (I believe some were wearing actual jackboots) which was heavily armed and wearing body armor. It was very intimidating, and I threw the horns to the protesters for being tough enough to stand of for what the believed in. Ashcroft really represents a lot of things that Portlanders are against: government encroachment on abortion, doctor-assisted suicide, medical marijuana, and freedom from blanket wiretaps. I was really happy to see people out there protesting against him.

Wow, I thought Metallica were just a bunch of sellout, washed-up corporate rockers. However, I was completely wrong. They're also idiots.

We have elected to pursue legal action against Unfaith, a Canadian band using chords (E & F) traditionally associated with Metallica. We intend to agressively defend our rights in this matter to the fullest extent of the law. It's nothing personal against the band in question, as we intend to do the same to anyone else using the same chords in that order.

Read more here.

I had a conversation last night where I talked to someone about how dismal the job outlook was. However, according to this article there's nothing to fear, for the jobs are going to bounce back and all of us programmers will be making six figures in a couple months. lol j/k.

Here is a page about the fun things you can do with MovableType

I really should've typed "cheap hosting" into Google before I dropped a chunk of change on hosting for my website. I found this site and it's got links to far better hosting deals than I got. Curses! I'm paying about $10 per month for 200 megs of hard drive, 20 gigs of transfer, and the usual round of hosting goodies. Globat has 1000 megs of hard drive, 50 gigs of transfer, and the goodies are far gooder! And it's only $7.50 per month. There are tons more deals like it on allcheaphosting. Grrrrr...

Howard Dean has completely locked down the blogger vote. He's guest blogging on Lawrence Lessig's website. Genius.

It's amazing to me that people are obsessed enough with their fish tanks to devote an entire blog to them. Of course, I'm probably +just saying this because I haven't gotten a fish tank and devoted a blog to it yet.

This link belongs in Ryan's Brewblog. It details how a guy built a 10 tap walk-in cooler in his basement for around $600. Very impressive. Almost as impressive as the jet-powered beer cooler.

In beer-related news:

Awww...

According to this Time.com article, "Coalition" (read: American) troops plundered Baghdad International Airport after the conflict in Iraq was over, looting and vandalizing.

U.S. estimates of the cost of the damage and theft begin at a few million dollars and go as high as $100 million. Airport workers say even now air conditioners and other equipment are regularly stolen. "Soldiers do this stuff all the time, everywhere. It's warfare," says a U.S. military official. "But the conflict was over when this was done. These are just bored soldiers."

Wonderful. It's good to hear about my tax dollars hard at work. What's $100 million when Donald Rumsfeld just doubled the cost estimate in Iraq to $3.9 billion per month of occupation? I wonder if he's taking incidents like the Baghdad airport into account...

As Gogobot puts it, Who knew the ayatollahs were 31337 h4x0r5?

Here is an article from ACM Queue magazine wherein Jim Gray (head of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center) talks about the past, present, and future of computing. The end is very interesting, when he talks about hard drives that have their own 1ghz processors and operating systems. The article is a must read if you're a geek.

Earlier I posted about Pat Robertson's business relationship with Charles Taylor. Here's more.

Poor, poor Michael Savage. He got fired on his first day at work for MSNBC.

hehe.

Justice is alive and well.

According to the Sun, Professor Steven Hawking (author of "A Brief History of Time") stopped by the Stringfellows strip club. Link.

This hurts. I have a limited number of earned time off hours from work. Then stuff like this happens:

I finally found the page detailing the plan for a PVR that I've been telling everybody about!

for the grand total of $1200 i can probably assemble you a via epia m10000, 512 MB DDR RAM, 250 GB HD, CDRW/DVD, and two WinTV-PVR cards. armed with this, you can record two shows simultaneously, stream MPEGs off the PVR, play back DiVX on your television, play DVDs, record radio, burn VCDs, stream and play MP3s, use xmltv for program information -- all through the really spiffy mythtv interface. really - i'm not kidding. if you're interested in me building one (note, that the doesn't cover some cash for me), drop me a note. i think.

Link.

I find it very interesting that the media isn't mentioning Pat Robertson's dealings with Liberia's president, Charles Taylor. Charlie is the Saddam of west Africa. He sucks. Google him and see. He's an escaped convict. He has ties to Al Quaeda. He's wanted by the UN for war crimes (he supported forces in neighboring Sierra Leone, who amputated the hands of innocent villagers).
According to BBC:

When, as president in 1999, he faced accusations from the United Nations that he was a gun runner and a diamond smuggler, he addressed a mass prayer meeting clothed from head to foot in angelic white.
The showman, who is also a lay preacher in the Baptist tradition, prostrated himself on the ground and prayed forgiveness before his Lord - although he also denied the charges.

Levitated.net is an amazing website with lots of intriguing flash applets. It makes sodaplay and modifyme look boring by comparison.

"It's been a fabulous year for Laura and me." -- George W. Bush., three months after the World Trade Center towers went down.

Baptists Are Saving Homosexuals (BASH) asks the question: Is Bush Gay?

The TVBrick allows you to transmit broadcast television over the internet. You simply plug it into an antenna and your home network, and it serves television to you on the internet. Think about how this could be hacked and, if widely distributed around the world, be a great thing for the internet.

Instead of paying $20.95 I'm going to pay $3.30 for my printer cartridge. Ha! They deserve to lose some business when they charge more for their ink than Dom Perignon charges for champagne.

Some people looked to the skies for a sign. This is what they found.

I want to be blog guru for google. Hire me, please.

Go to http://www.google.com/

Type "weapons of mass destruction" in the search field but DON'T hit the search button...hit the i'm feeling lucky button.

Now, read the error messege!

I went on a crazy trip yesterday. I rode to the top of Mount Tabor, and during my journey I stumbled upon a bike race where at least fifty guys on road bikes and in tight pants raced up and down the mountain. The view from the top was awesome. I think for my next adventure I'm going to go riding on one of these trails.

Mil Millington wrote a website and two books dedicated to the things he and his girlfriend have argued about. I'm getting material to write my own.

thingsmygirlfriendandihavearguedabout.com.

I was getting interested in the iBook, until I read this:

It figures. Just after the expiration of the one-year warranty, my iBook starts having problems (Apple hardware has a history of this apparently). The right speaker now cuts in and out, but more annoying is the ticking sound the computer started making last night. Well, it's not a tick exactly, more like a pop. A popping tick maybe. Hard to describe. Sounds like a tiny spark leaping across a tiny gap, waiting for its chance to become a big spark and hose my whole system. Or the platter on my hard drive skipping against something.

Weird...it just stopped. It's not ticking anymore. It ticked/popped for about two hours and then stopped. Did it know I was writing about this? Maybe my iBook is haunted. Do they do exorcisms at the Genius Bar?

Update: After sleeping for 30 minutes, the tick/pop is back. Is anyone else's iBook doing this?

Now I'm starting to think that the people at Apple are clever enough to make their hardware break down after the warranty expires. Hmmmmm...

Go here to have your favorite musicians mercilessly berated.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found it it its heart to differentiate blogs from news media, protecting them from libel lawsuits! See for yourself.