I am a work of art!
You are Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.
You are extremely popular and widely known. Although unassuming and unpretentious, your enigmatic smile has charmed millions. You are a mystery, able to be appreciated from afar, but ultimately unknowable and thus intriguing.

Yeah, that's right. The millions (and millions) flock to me, or maybe just that Mike Carroll guy from a few posts down. But that's ok, for I am ultimately unknowable and thus intriguing.

How 'bout yourself?

*yawn* Me sleepy...
... but it looks like I still have to try and maintain a minimum one post per day quota. Damnit. Usually, such a task is easy to fulfill during the weekdays since there's always new news articles to take a gander at. But on the weekends? Forget about it. It's significantly harder to do, especially if I have one of those days that aren't any different than any other day I have had in the last two weeks. Pah. Then, I can usually throw some links at you and go on my merry way, but in the instance that I don't have any saved up links... well, I'm screwed.

I read this little piece of satire about hackers. Quite amusing. It would have made for a wonderful rant if it was something that was written in all seriousness. But it ain't. Hence the word "satire."

The X-Files episode tomorrow better not suck like all of the others this season (and most of last season). Otherwise, I may have to stop watching the show as I have been faithfully doing for the past several years. Did you see last week's episode? It was horrible! It pulled in the least amount of TV shares EVER for an X-Files episode. So, those writers better get their thumbs out of their asses and make Doggett get pissed off and break something, 'cause I will probably watch The Matrix air on TNT instead. And I already watched that movie yesterday and tonight, being the silly RPI geek that I am. Also, they need to get Scully out of the show ASAP and start fresh again. She's totally gone from badass to soccer mom in less than one episode. And it sucks.

Check it out. New soda machines. Did anyone else forget about this? It used to be in the news and everything. Then it kinda fell off the face of the earth.

Well, I think that's it. I think I'm gonna sit here in my chair and be cynical until I go to bed. Sounds like a good plan to me. I don't have much to look forward to right now. :/

And fuck Monkey Goggles, whatever the hell that's supposed to be. The beer squirrel is at least six hundred times cooler.

You know what has been lacking lately?
Castration stories. It's not everyday that you can just go to a news site (except maybe Ananova)and learn about some guy in Peru who decided to see what would happen if he put his piece too close to a band saw. In fact, I kinda forgot such self-maiming activities were still happening since my nifty Excite homepage hasn't reported on it in what seems like a couple months. But fear no more! The "oddly enough" section of my homepage was riddled full of things of or pertaining to male genitalia, and I need to share them with you:

* If at first you don't succeed, try again! It took a couple attempts for this religious Filipino to get the job done, but at least he did it out of religion. Also, I wish that when news stories quote from the Bible, they actually would print the verse word for word instead of just summing up the verse in modern English. It gives their religious fervor a little more credibility that way.

* Everyone knows that Jon does this, but did you know it can be passed off as art? Just say that each container represents a certain cycle in life. Funny, all of the vials looks the same to me... And don't forget to add a warning label to it, too. It makes it more controversial that way or something.

* Viagra: it isn't just for people anymore. It kinda gives "Go get 'em, Tiger!" a whole new meaning, huh?

So there you go. And there goes any class this site might have gained in recent weeks, heh.

The truth about nerdy geek schools
Here is a delicious article which describes many of the weird idiosyncracies of the nerdy geek engineering school Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) which has many of the same similar nerd attributes as Jerome, Mike and my Alma Mater, RPI. This article even describes the antics of CMU's group of kids who would drop stuff down stairwells for fun, which also happens to be part of the lore of RPI, the RPI Dropsquad. What is up with nerdy geek school? I mean I went there, and literally hated 99% of the people that went there. Kinda makes me wish I went to a real school.

Thanks to Niru

Weather in Concord, NH
Normal High: 37° F
Normal Low: 18° F

Record Low: -21° F set in 1901
Record High: 63° F set in 1982

------

It's 71° F and partly cloudy right now.

Who needs Florida?

Subject: fan
To: [my email address]
From: [some other email address]

Hi, would it be possible to send me an autographed picture. That would be
great. Please send to:
Mike carroll
75 Olive St.
[city, state, zip]

Thanks alot

Nice! So I have a fan! At least, it may be a fan of mine, although it is possible that this fellow is looking for an autographed pic of Shirley Manson and the gang. It's hard to tell, though, since it isn't stated who (or what) he wants a photo of. Regardless, I don't have a photo of either. And the most recent photo of Yours Truly was the one that was taken during my senior year of high school. Damn, that's almost five years ago. I've been out of high school for five years already? Shit! Didn't we just go whitewater rafting not too long ago? :p Woo! But anyway...

Sure, there are a couple more recent pics of me floating around that were taken with a digital camera, but it's kinda hard to autograph those.

I guess I should be flattered (frightened?) that someone wants a pic of me (assuming that's what he wants an autographed photo of) so he can begin dedicating a room in his house in my name, but I think it would be fifty times cooler if this email came from Cameron Diaz or perhaps even Carmen Electra. Yeah... that'd be sweet.

I do not think it means what you think it means
How to keep the pounds off. Thanks to Serpa.
Presidential monkey comparison. Thanks to Niru. Whats up with the man with the big yellow hat anyway? What does he hide under that hat? Is that how he smuggles monkeys out of Africa?
The best new .Net guide for developers? Thanks to my boss, Cris.
<Yokel Voice>And this here's them purty little scientists at the Center for Adaptive Optics whats gonna fix my eyes up like one of them thar eagles, so's I can see all purty and everythin. Thanks to Popular Science.</Yokel Voice>
How to find the ANY KEY. Thanks to Justin.

Microsoft busted for software piracy
Hehe! I find that funny. One of the biggest advocates against pirated software is guilty of doing it as well. One of Microsoft's bought-out French outliers was using a CGI animation-making program called "Character," and it cost them three million francs (about $405,000) plus interest for its unauthorized use. Ouch, that's one expensive program.

I learned of this over at Blues.

2 New Active Buddies
Check it out. At Active Buddy, you can now talk to 2 new bots, RingMessenger, a bot buddy that can tell you all about the Lord of the Rings movies, (including where to get tickets!), and TheSportingNews, which can give you content from the Sporting News, to go along with their previous agents, AgentBaseball, GooglyMinotaur, LindsayBuddy, and SmarterChild. Check it out and have fun, but you need to have AIM installed to talk to the bots.

This is better than your real friends (be they internet only, or real life), because the Active Buddies don't point out your flaws or make fun of you (such as: 'You are on AIM too much', or 'Boy, don't you have any friends?', or 'You're fat', or 'I had your mother last night, she was great.'). Unless of course you make fun of them first or swear at them.

NASA Report: Space Travel 'Inherently Hazardous' to Human Health
Well, no shit. I bet NASA spent millions of dollars coming up with this brilliant deduction. I could have told them that for $5. Man people are stupid some times. The second filthy rich son of a bitch civilian to get to go into space better read the 300 page (yes, 300 pages!) report to find out it may be hazardous to his heath to go into space.

My queer horoscope
Pisces: Feb. 19 - Mar. 20
Today is your day, dear Pisces, so celebrate it any way you want to. Open a bottle of champagne for yourself tonight in thanks of being alive. There are no shortages of reasons to throw a party on your behalf. More than likely you are the one who is constantly consoling others. Today is a day for others to revolve around you. Be the queen of your world and feel free to call all the shots.

An update
OK, since my original post about the Segway, a lot more information has come out about the invention, from official, exclusive (read:biased) sources, about the machine's potential. Read about it at Time, and CNN.

I guess what is the 'most' revolutionary thing about this invention is that it has perfect balance on two wheels (while it is on), and it moves and stops without a areal engine or brakes. From the Time article: 'Developed at a cost of more than $100 million, Kamen's vehicle is a complex bundle of hardware and software that mimics the human body's ability to maintain its balance. Not only does it have no brakes, it also has no engine, no throttle, no gearshift and no steering wheel. And it can carry the average rider for a full day, nonstop, on only five cents' worth of electricity.'

There is still no mention of how long the battery actually lasts without needing to be recharged, only that there is a recharge rate of 2 to 1 (2 hours of use for every one hour of charge). I also haven't heard anything mentioned about integrated security features, so it looks like it may be pretty easy to steal these things, because it looks like it would be hard to even lock them with a bicycle lock.

Just some things to think about. I kind of feel bad for this guy Dean Kamen, because all these other people hyped up his invention to insurmountable expectations.

Revolutionary machine revealed
Sounds to me like it sucks.
Against the Grain, (with the help of Yahoo! News) has the advanced scoop on 'Ginger' or 'IT' (which has been in the hype pipeline for about a year) about 6 hours before you can see it unveiled on Good Morning America. About a year ago, such noted 'visionaries' as Steve Jobs of Apple and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com said such ridiculous things as 'Bigger than the Internet', and 'As revolutionary as the PC' about this machine. We shall see.

Read the article and then come back here. Here are the Jon highlights:
-The Human SegWay Transporter is in no way revolutionary. (Or even novel).
-The Human SegWay Transporter has a top speed of 17 miles per hour over flat land. I can get that on my bike. (And get exercise at the same time!)
-The Human SegWay Transporter weighs 80 lbs, where my bike weighs about 12 lbs.
-The Human SegWay Transporter costs $8000 where my bike cost about $300.
-The Human SegWay Transporter gives off little pollution, where my bike gives off no pollution, unless you count my sweat odor.
-The Human SegWay Transporter needs to be recharged for an hour after 2 hours of use. My bike doesn't need to be recharged, and can theoretically go a couple hundred miles a day, if I was a Tour De Francer.
-Steve Jobs said the Human SegWay Transporter was more revolutionary than the internet, yet I don't think the Human SegWay Transporter will give me the ability to ridicule it while simultaneously ridiculing Steve Jobs.

Closing thoughts: The inventor, Dean Kamen says 'cars are great for going long distances'. He gets the obvious award for the day. I don't want to ridicule him, because he is responsible for some really useful inventions, but seriously, I don't see this newest invention achieving diddly or squat. But then again, all I have is that Yahoo! article to go on.

Update:
I have come up with a new, novel name for the SegWay, and you get it by rearranging the letters like this: the SEW-GAY.

RuPaul's weblog
Blogger is reaching out to the millions...

Check it out.

-----------

Jon: dude, I don't know if this means anything, but RuPaul writes the way Keith writes
me: hehhehehhe
Jon: so, in 8th grade, (maybe 9th) me and my friends were watching the mtv video awards, and my friend Dan, who usually has a keen eye for such things utters the phrase 'wow, RuPaul's a babe'
me: way to be
me: just like the middle hanson kid, huh?
Jon: yeah
Jon: ok, this is my new favorite site

Links
I'm not too sure where I have found these, but I found them as I persued about six billion different personal websites to get a general idea of what people tend to have on their front page and what type of information they tend to share about themselves. If you're really anal about it, I can probably retrace my steps and find out where I got these links from, but I don't think anyone really cares, let alone read this site (Actually, this site gets quite a good number of hits!). You may understand why I was looking for such things at a later date in time. For now, just smile and nod like when you do when you can't understand what your foreign grandmother is saying to you.

* Healthy people are in New England. The healthiest Americans are in Minnesota and New Hampshire. Louisiana and Mississippi, though, are fairly not healthy compared to the rest of the union.

* The official rules of "Shotgun." These rules are pretty accurate, and they came into play several times back in my days of good ol' RPI. Learn them and use them to your advantage. Learn that "Not Bitch" essentially uses the same rules, but "Not Bitch" calling usually doesn't occur until after "Shotgun" has been called. And sometimes the skinniest passenger will get "Bitch" by default because the other non-shotgun passengers are like way huge and manly or something. And in case you're out of the loop, "Bitch" refers to where the third back-seat passenger has to sit: the middle.

Eh... that's all I got. Two links. How pathetic. I had a third link that was a calculator that determined whether you'd get fired by the end of next year depending on where you work and what job you had, but you need to be a member of some online cow-abducting conspiracy group or something to access the page now. What a scam. Oh well. Make due with what you got.

Spam. Yum.

Strictly For Pleasure
(Presented by FoxC Sensations)

Grand Opening!!

New Online Lingerie Store

Top quality lingerie for both men and women. The store is shopping cart enabled with secure credit card processing, so you can shop with privacy, confidence, and ease. Wide selection of styles and sizes to fit everyone.

Click Here To Start Shopping Now!
Shop from the comfort and privacy of your own home!

With every order you will be sent a free link to "blast bin Laden".

Yes! I've been meaning to pick up some hosiery for the people in my immediate family for Christmas! And I can even pick up something black and sexy for myself. Woo!

And as to the "blast bin Laden" thing, whatever that is (probably a dumb Flash game or Java applet), I think I can find several mock-ups using Google. Thanks, but no thanks. I've got more important things to do.