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Part of the fun of making Rice Krispie Treats is that everything sticks together into a huge mass of marshmallows and krispies… meaning as you stir it you get a gigantic sticky ball. Whee!

As reported by The Register:

“The Bush Administration plans to extend its mighty neural networks to international banking in hopes of discovering terrorist activity. The scheme would allow the US Treasury Department to maintain databases of international money transfers to and from the USA. The result of this additional data mining will be a flood of largely irrelevant data to federal agencies already awash in irrelevant data. But the Administration’s overall approach has been to get all the data it can now, and figure out how it might be used to catch terrorists later.

“Since the Administration’s grand schemes for monitoring the public’s every move, such as the MATRIX and Total Information Awareness (TIA), fell into disrepute, it appears to be taking a piecemeal approach, building its surveillance society one step at a time. The government hopes that the public will perceive them as discrete elements in the so-called war on terror, and not contemplate the eventual, cumulative effect of all this activity.”

Sigh.

So Donald Rumsfeld dropped in on the new Iraqi government today, in a surprise visit where he counseled them about how to run their country. His visit was punctuated with such sage advice as:

“Anything that would delay that or disrupt [the organization of the government] as a result of turbulence or incompetence or corruption in government would be unfortunate.”

Thank you, Rummy! I’m so glad my tax dollars are paying to fly you around the world and offer advice even a ten-year-old could grasp. I’m sure the Iraqi leaders are most grateful too.

Brawny (the paper towel company) has a new line of ads that are pretty funny. Unfortunately they’re all done in Flash (why?) and while you’re waiting for the file to load you’re treated to a nice little animation showing your progress.

Of course, the animation looks pretty much like someone tearing off sheet after sheet of toilet paper…

Saturday, April 9 : wore shorts and t-shirt, went on bike ride.

Sunday, April 10 : wore heavy coat and gloves, shoveled foot-deep heavy wet snow.

Mmm… new speakers…

It’s hard to believe the factory speakers in my Saturn lasted ten full years before one of them finally blew up and started rattling badly enough to wake the dead. Since I listen to music almost every time I’m driving somewhere, it was really hard to hear that rattle, so I decided to (gasp!) get some new speakers installed.

After a rather lengthy and annoying process involving a friend’s car audio shop, I had four new Alpines in place. Wow, the difference is amazing. All those years I was listening to the el cheapo speakers, and now I’ve got high-fidelity sound. My ten-year-old CD changer never sounded so good…

Today’s riotous spam:

“If you wana have the latest disc for computer operation system or functional discs with least expense, this store is your chance! The discs are provided to you at less expense while supplies you with stable performance! Access to the world of discs with office operation, computer diagnostics, graphic design and commerce!”

Umm, what?

Microsoft is such a riot. They paid for yet another study comparing Windows to Linux, and– surprise!— the study concluded that Windows can be recovered more quickly from a hack or other disaster.

My favorite quote regarding the study comes from some Microsoftian:

“I’m not saying Linux is not reliable, In fact, both operating systems tend to do so well in general uptime comparisons that faults have to be introduced in order to gauge reliability.”

Windows does “well” in uptime? That’s patently false in my experience. I have had Linux servers run for over a year without being rebooted a single time; my current hosting servers have been running non-stop for three months (and that’s only because I physically moved them to a new location in February). On the other hand, I personally know several companies whose Windows servers are scheduled to reboot themselves nightly so there aren’t problems in the morning when everyone comes into the office.

Ahh, Microsoft, we laugh heartily at your games and tactics…

Deep wisdom from Laralee:

“Life is too short to listen to music you don’t like.”

If there’s one thing worse than spam, it’s spam sent by an idiot who can’t even use the crappy spam-generating tools to create their message. Here’s a gem I just received:

From: “Evelyn” <betty0oYv@phreaker.net>
Cc: jeff@bitrelay.net

%GREET
%AD
%SITE
%EXIT

Sheesh. Loser.