so i can't decide if the fact that the school district put an announcement on it's web site about how the detention letter was a fake makes it funnier.

awesome review of life after upgrading from vista to windows xp

kid gets detention for using firefox when his teacher doesn't believe that it's a "better web browser". i would think this was fake if i didn't know so many ignorant teachers who while on their power trips don't think they could ever be wrong. this kid should take his laptop to detention and browse the internet using firefox the whole damn time.

rolling stone has bill maher's picks for biggest assholes of 2007

while, dumber than a monkey, might give you a relative sense, if you wanted to get a hard monetary figure you could go with $873,786.94 of stupid(thanks paul). i hope i come up clean when the satellites scan me, i'd had to the cia visiting me in my sleep.

a stupid popup, new program starting, etc. etc. stole my focus and made me less productive, i'd have enough money to fly to redmond and pay bill gates to let me punch him in the face

the windows vista + office 2007 combination represents the largest jump in overall cpu and memory footprint ever recorded on the windows platform. not only is the new combination "fatter" than previous versions, it's also a great deal slower on comparable hardware.

a nice history of the "improvements" ms has made over the years as intel ramped up processing power in their chips. the best is the nice interactive results of their xp vs. vista, office 2k3 vs office 2k7 comparison. vista on a machine with 1gb of ram running office 2k7 when performing common tasks will be twice as slow as the xp, office 2k3 machine with 256mb of ram you're replacing.

so after 30 minutes or so of beating my head against the wall i finally found that in nvelocity code like:

Hashtable hash = new Hashtable();
hash["foo"] = "bar";
// later
Console.Writeline(hash["foo"]);

becomes the easy part in the Controller:

Hashtable hash = new Hashtable();
hash["foo"] = "bar";
PropertyBag["hash"] = hash;

and the undocumented random black magic in the view:

$hash.get_Item("foo")

what doesn't work however is:

$hash["foo"]
$hash("foo")
$hash.item["foo"]
$hash.item("foo")
$hash.this["foo"]
$hash.this("foo")
${hash}["foo"]
${hash}("foo") 
etc....

no where is this listed in the velocity vtl documentation (brokenly linked from the nvelocity site). everything points the fact that $hash.item() would try to run hash.item(), hash.getitem(), hash.getItem() but no where does it proclaim this black magic to be needed. then i finally stumble upon getting the contents of the property bag from the monorail site showing the proper syntax after finally getting the google magic terms of "nvelocity idictionary notation" correct.

and of course searching for "nvelocity .get_Item(" yields tons of useful pages including "i'm trying to access an indexer on a nvelocity template with no success".... really?!?! an indexer?!?! is that what the kids are calling it these days? here's a tip for syntax faq entries.... use every possibly example of wrong syntax you can think of when documenting the right syntax. hashtable, idictionary, dictionary, dictionary entry, item, any of those words could have found me that damn page a lot sooner. hopefully this post finds it's way into someone's google results and makes them only waste 5 minutes.

thank you, dell, finally an honest evaluation of the abomination that is windows vista

headphones recommended: internet commenters in a meeting makes for quite a funny video, and a saddening commentary on the state of the wor.... actually it's just funny. i don't think i'd ever go see such a movie, but it'd probably be better than gigli.

though optimus has to be the coolest name ever, so i'd prob. want people to call me that... I AM
64%
OPTIMUS PRIMETake the Transformers Quiz

thanks, kyle, for destroying my faith in humanity:

actually i take that back, that's insulting to the people competing in the special olympics... i'm guessing she went backstage, pumped her fist in the air, screamed "nailed it!" and then slapped "the iraq" high-five.

mr. ali sent me a link to the coolest rust spot ever: obviously this is way cooler than mary in a tree or jesus toast.

sure barry you didn't use steroids, the record isn't tainted, it was a magical gnome that allowed you to hit as many homers when you were 36 to 40 as you did when you were 29. you don't need the legend to pick out barry's line, the only one that's even close to his is *shock* slamming sammy's. maybe it's the lack of steroids talking but i sure think the record is tainted. i give aaron props for refusing to show up for such a fraud.

or maybe he was wrong and it fell out of the back of the dump truck that is the internet, too bad ARPANet's inventors didn't invest in a tarp. in either case ted, you had to know that backing a 300 million dollar bridge to an island with 30 people on it would lead to this eventually....

dear god i hope this never really happens... thanks for scaring me mr. ali

"a letter to optimus prime from his geico auto insurance agent" is one of the funniest things i've read in a long time.

in the economist they detail the gas usage of the US vs. the rest of the world. in 2003 we used more gas than the next 20 countries combined. what can i say, we love gas. personally i like to go buy a gallon each day, and just pour it on the ground. sometimes i throw it up in the air and run through like a sprinkler, but mostly i just water trees and flowers with it.

indexed is a great blog, either despite or due to it's distinct lack of words.

msnbc's highly un-scientific poll is showing 88% of those polled think bush should be impeached. but with votes approaching 500,000 even if you account for the fact that people sampled in an internet poll, are largely middle to upper class, intelligent, and educated, that's still a very telling number. sure someone could have deleted their cookie and voted again 100,000 times, but even impeachment has 84% support.

my angry email to nbc sports about pulling a "heidi" by cutting away from the series deciding overtime hockey game this weekend to show the 1 hour and 20 minute pre-show for the preakness: (they even called them out on sportscenter: espn 1, nbc sports 0)

I was shocked to see that you would cut away from sudden death, overtime, series ending overtime to start your absurdly over-hyped, drawn out, incredible overkill of one hour and 5 minute pre-show for a 2 minute race. Certainly people watch the race, which even as I write this is still 20 minutes away, but how incredibly overinflated are your egos that you think that what America wants to watch is your 1 hour of boring, stuffy commentators talking about the condition of dirt, and how horses are "feeling" rather than the deciding game in one of the most exciting sports in North America. Not only the deciding game, but the sudden death overtime period of that game, where Buffalo had to win or their season was over. Since you were hopefully watching your own programming this afternoon, Ottawa won, and therefore is in their first Stanley Cup Final ever. How many of your commentators are reaching the pinnacle of their careers this Saturday afternoon? How many of the horses running today can claim that they've invigorated their city, captivated their fans? How many people will be talking about the Preakness over the next 2 weeks, compared to talking about the Stanley Cup Finals? How many people will still be talking about freaking Barbaro (by the way, a touching tribute, good thing you found the time to reschedule it) in 4 years, compared to how many will be talking about Crosby, Ovechkin, Malkin, and the Staal brothers? Pushing your coverage to VS doesn't absolve what you did, a lot of people that receive NBC don't get VS and in fact, I'd bet that horse racing "fans" are decidedly wealthier than hockey fans, and therefore maybe next year you should push your pre-show to VS, and let the live coverage of the actual "SPORT" stay on NBC. I hope the NHL moves to another network, you've proven you have no business being the national face of the NHL. Good luck riding your horses into the sunset.

Here's a little hint, what are 20-30 year old males interested in? Not pasty white guys talking about dirt. Not horses running in circles. Their interested in hitting, goal scoring, great saves, and the energy that playoff hockey brings. Not that I was watching your coverage of todays game, I was busy watching lacrosse on FSNY, all those ad dollars down the drain for you I suppose. Next time you have an hour to blow, instead of a tribute to Barbaro "a nations horse" or some guy talking about how wet some dirt is, maybe you should spend it on another sport that rich 18-24 males like to watch, lacrosse. After disrespecting one of my favorite sports, I'll personally be making a point of never buying something advertised during your programming. Hopefully NBC sports won't ever carry lacrosse games though, I'd hate to have the coverage cut away to the pre-show for a synchronized fishing event at a season changing moment in the game.

While I'd be amazed if any of you bothered to respond, I'd love to hear your reasoning for the decision. I may not be a powerful network executive, but I can tell you for sure if I was, I wouldn't make the same mistake you did.

so microsoft has made the claim to anyone who will listen that open source software violates 235 microsoft patents. they say that something must be done by the open source developers or users to pay royalties for using these pieces of microsoft ip. sun responded by directly attacking microsoft for it's openly hostile attitude toward open source. sun's ceo and president jonathan schwartz pulls out all the stops with great statements including in essence, we decided to innovate, not litigate. touché.

i'd love to see pbs run a real sesame street episode about tcp and maybe throw in net neutrality. i'd love to hear snuffy's thoughts on telcos trying to ruin the internet.

so yes, as kyle points out, the magical number, has gotten covered by the prestigious new york times. i love when they stray outside their comfort zone, and cover news they know nothing about. way to go, nambla, what genius gave the thumbs up to those lawsuits? oh and the irony and recursion of a story about digg, in the new york times, being dugg, and the times' website has a link to digg stories, wow, my head hurts. and just in case you need some extra beaters

the folks at mule design have some very funny t-shirts in their feed store each shirt has a bit of back story on it's specific page: (the first is less funny, more true)

from this game (now edited). original post at signal vs. noise
btw, when was the last time a football or hockey or lacrosse player missed a game for a strained muscle, blister, or hang nail, etc? maybe baseball and basketball players need to suck it up a little.

if you get the joke within 2 seconds of first seeing the picture fafa sent me:

you'll notice i've added the blog advisory system to the bottom of the navigation. apparently the current state of the web site is in asshat territory, maybe i should tone down my aggressive language.

google seems to have a lot of confidence in your swimming abilities: i stumbled on this via this post which i got via ali's shared items... for a series of tubes it gets rather complicated.

by setting browser.search.openintab = true, you can cut down on the open a new tab, search for something on google routine. i never typically want to replace the current page with what i'm googling, so this should come in handy.

ali sent me this, i don't know what dancing and singing sushi chefs have to do with searching the internet, maybe the japanese on the page explains it better. prepare to be confused and entertained:

so i have wanted to redesign the layout for a while, and i finally got some time to do it. in doing so i found 4 reasons to be reminded why i hate ie:
1. if you're reading in ie the whole page is left aligned instead of centered. i've fixed this in the past, but really i don't care any more. ie users: if you want the things to look right when browsing the web get firefox
2. it doesn't display things correctly without extra un-necessary code because ms refused to implement w3c standards. ie displays this: instead of this:
3. more standards support, or lack there of, but i don't think any amount of extra code will save this: instead of this:
4. sometimes ie is just on crack, plain and simple: in case you couldn't guess, there shouldn't be a second "udios" randomly injected at the bottom of the page, on it's own line. go ahead, check the source, there's nothing there to make ie do this. so if you're reading this in ie, do yourself and every person who's ever put up a web site a favor and go download firefox. your computer will thank you, web designers will thank you, microsoft won't thank you, spyware, malware, and virus writers definitely won't thank you, but most importantly after about 10 seconds, you'll thank yourself.

1. changing john mccain's stance on gay marriage because his staff is dumb enough to steal your images
2. aqua teen hunger force's carl has a myspace page this itself is great for several reasons: 1. the user name for the "official" carl myspace page linked to from the official aqua teen website is "therealcarl2" 2. it takes horrendous myspace background text color combos to a whole new level 3. i must assume that it is targeted at mocking myspace and everyone who uses it, especially those with unreadable pages, and i love the fact that the aqua teen guys are willing to rip on a possibly sizable portion of their fan base so openly 4. maybe the bush administration will declare that carl's myspace page emboldens the the mooninite terrorists.

when i went to check when the train was running to get back into nyc from nj i noticed this odd paradox: i think my personal favorite is the weekday april 1st, but that's just me.

it's scary how well that caption works for so many new yorker comics

I'm not sure which is better the light-saber battle or the Commodore-64 talking about porn.

these color changing tiles from moving color are very cool

thanks to mr. ali for the link

here's the plan, i'm going to hire unemployed retirees to sit in parking lots all throughout maryland and sell these: first off there's an infinite demand for these bumper stickers in maryland, second no one will think the retiree put it there, so they won't get beat up like i would if i sold it myself. give them a cut and just sit back and watch the funds role in.

follow up idea: also sell these to the people who's car has the other sticker on it and need to cover it up with something: once again, key aspect, most people won't punch an old lady in the face.. old men... maybe, that's why we bulk them up with wii first.

no not that kind of wee. no longer relegated to slow, non-contact nursing home sports, grandpa has a whole new way to hustle pudding from other residents. considering how much pain i'm in after playing wii, i can't imagine this is easy on the fake hip.

joe pointed out that the ny times is running a hard hitting and in-depth positively cracked out article about this year's crop of super bowl ads. the article, entitled, "Pardon me sir could you watch my child while I go score some more crack?" "Super Bowl Ads of Cartoonish Violence, Perhaps Reflecting Toll of War" pulls out all the stops when explaining how obvious it was that all the commericals were thinly veiled commentaries about bush's playing cowboys and indians in the sandbox the war in iraq.
there are some really choice quotes in this article:
oh the horrible violence:

In another Bud Light spot, face-slapping replaced fist-bumping as the cool way for people to show affection for one another.

about k-fed's commercial:

The same gag, turned inside out, accounted for one of the funniest spots, a Nationwide Financial commercial by TM Advertising, also owned by Interpublic. The spot began with the singer Kevin Federline...

wait, wait, stop right there, yes you read it right, the new york fucking times just printed the words kevin federline. that's it, i'm moving to canada. i'm amazed they didn't call him k-fed.

about a commercial in which a robot gets fired and commits suicide, only to wake up from a dream as it sinks into the water:

The best of the batch was a commercial for General Motors by Deutsch, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, in which a factory robot “obsessed about quality” imagined the dire outcome of making a mistake.

yeah too bad all those damn war commercials couldn't have been as happy and upbeat as the robot killing itself.

prudential's rather simple commercial:

The problem with the spot, created internally at Prudential, was that whenever the announcer said, “a rock” — invoking the Prudential logo, the rock of Gibraltar — it sounded as if he were saying, yes, “Iraq.”

actually i kept hearing "a rock," maybe it's because i don't have that constant din of the 20 other crazy person voices talking in my head.

oh, and since when has the times been l33t enough to have a digg this story button?

roto-rooter's pimped out john contest all i can say is freaking sweet, the only way this could be better is if it was built into a recliner like homer's was.

so by now most everyone has heard about the whole, aqua teen hunger force bomb scare in boston. but what's really funny about this, aside from the fact that no one in the national media, nor apparently the boston police department has ever heard of, or seen a commercial for the show, is two things:
1. the interview about hair styles from the 70s that the two "suspects" gave upon being released from jail in boston "that's not a hair question, i'm sorry....that's also not a hair question." one of the reporters finally resorts to "if you go to jail are you afraid you're going to get your hair cut?"
2. the fact that the bastion of reporting integrity the long island newsday, took the opportunity to kick boston while she was down, reporting less on the story, and more on how boston sucks compared to new york.
make that 3 things: in a comment responding to the newsday story "how does the editor allow this kind of crap journalism in?" obviously this person was a victim of a common typo spelling "nytimes.com" as "newsday.com"

trying to add a site feed to google reader this morning yielded this... simple yet effective.

get yours now i think his best answer is a toss up between "i died for this?" and "let me ask my dad"

so googling for "miserable failure" no longer returns our douchebag, miserable failure, war mongering, illiterate, idiot of a president. which is probably good for whoever follows him, as they wouldn't want to be associated with such things. i would have respected google a lot more if they had left this one in when removing the rest of the googlebombs, at least until right before january 2009.

i really need to get some of these cards, i've met a lot of people i could have given them to.

upon trying to search my computer for something today:
microsoft data execution protection: "viruses don't kill windows, windows kills windows"

the first from the daily wtf?:


and the second from exploding dog

i missed this when it originally aired, but this was right after jon stewart was on crossfire, and it's great. it shows how smart and funny he is even when working without a script: part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6

jason jones details two plans to curtail violence in schools and make our kids safer. i seriously almost died i was laughing so hard.