Author: cosmo

An awesome entry from today’s Fark Photoshop contest.

Woo hoo! I learned to wakeboard last weekend… what a blast.

It’s a load of fun, at least until you catch a wave and smack the water face-first at 40mph…

I’ve always liked the opening title music for The Hunt for Red October. Tonight I’m listening to various soundtracks while I work, and this one came up in the queue. Curious, I hit the “Lyrics” tab in AmaroK to see if I could finally learn what those crazy Russian guys are singing about.

AmaroK didn’t let me down:

I spent a couple of hours today putting the finishing touches on my shiny new and improved photo album, in the hopes that I’ll finally be a little better about keeping it updated. The old one was database-driven, written about five years ago, and terribly difficult to manage– which explains why the most recent photos were almost two years out of date. The new one is much simpler, and allows me to quickly upload big batches of images.

Now, of course, I open myself to friends and family perusing the album to find compromising pictures of me or the fam…

People are funny about spam. Since I run about a dozen domains for various personal things, there are spammers out there who invent addresses on those domains and send their crap. The downside is every now and then someone gets all mad at me because they think I’m the one sending the spam, when in fact I have nothing to do with it and moreover can’t do anything to stop it.

But today I got this message from a guy named Scott, who apparently thought that Wilfred Bolton had written to him pitching some miracle drug or stock tip. Notice that Wilfred’s e-mail address is the easy-to-remember oabdiiunjnja@davinci-projects.org, which any reasonable person would immediately recognize as something fake. But oh well, Scott sent the message in the hopes that I would remove him from “my email campaign”.

Sorry to disappoint you, Scott, but Wilfred (or one of his other made-up buddies) is probably going to continue harassing you…

Sometimes the first line of a news article is all you need:

Wow… uhh… there’s really nothing else to say. I’m sure the neighborhood kids were impressed, though.

Senator Stevens, after his hilariously awful description of “the internets” the other day, has apparently come out with some clarification for those who simply couldn’t follow the discussion about trucks and tubes:

Okay, maybe Senator Stevens didn’t actually say that. But he probably would have if given a chance for a filibuster.

Argh– I could just strangle Internet Explorer. I’ve got some great page layouts for a web site I’m building, and to get things lined up I’m using some CSS for “min-height”, which makes the content area a certain number of pixels high, UNLESS the content extends below that, in which case it expands as needed.

Of course it works beautifully in Firefox and Konqueror, but when I look in IE it’s all horked. Apparently the browser completely ignores the min-height specification entirely. That means I’m going to have to build some kind of crappy transparent-GIF shim to force the content area to be that large.

Stupid stupid stupid IE. We hatesss it, yesss!

I just read an interesting article that details some of the most-feared ways to die, and demonstrates that most of them are actually extremely unlikely to occur. Without ado, here’s the list:

1) Airplane crashes. Your odds of actually being killed in an airline accident are 1 in 6.9 million.

2) Shark attack. The odds here? 1 in 11.5 million. It’s interesting to note that according to maritime records dating back to 1580, only 38 people have actually been recorded killed by sharks.

3) Murder. Globally, about half a million people a year are murdered, which seems like a lot until you consider that over six million people a year die from cancer.

4) Terrorist attack. Despite what the Department of Homeland Insecurity would have you believe, your chances of being killed in a terrorist attack are 1 in 9.3 million. The odds of dying in an avalanche are about the same– and who the heck walks around with a fear of avalanches?

Perhaps just as telling are the actual most likely causes of death. These are compiled from U.S. statistics, so they may differ in other countries; moreover, the first three are easily preventable.

1) Tobacco. 18% of all American deaths each year are attributable to tobacco.

2) Poor diet and physical inactivity. This claims around 17% of Americans.

3) Alcohol. Just shy of 4% for the booze.

4) Car accident. Around 2%.

Interesting stuff. It’s funny how we often have irrational fears– and sad how certain people *cough* Bush administration *cough* take advantage of those fears.

“‘Down the tubes.’ That’s one you hear a lot. People say, ‘This country is goin’ down the tubes.’ What tubes? Have you seen any tubes? Where are these tubes? And where do they go? And how come there’s more than one tube? It would seem to me for one country all you need is one tube. Does every state have its own tube? One tube is all you need. But a tube that big? Somebody would have seen it by now. Somebody would’ve said, ‘Hey Joey! Lookit this huge farkin’ tube over here!’ You never hear that. You know why? No tubes! We don’t have tube one. We are, sorry to say, tubeless.”

— George Carlin

It seems to me this is particularly funny given Sen. Stevens’ recent comments about how the internet is made up of a bunch of tubes. Not trucks, mind you. Tubes.