I know I’m desperately overworked when I spend too much time surfing sites like Magnificent Obsessions. This led me to Who Would Buy That? (auction oddities from all over the web), which in turn points at {drum roll}…
Smiling Green Eye Boob Salt & Pepper.
.
This is a work of genius, or of a very sick mind. Probably both. Yes. I want one. A pair, I mean.
Rich Tennant’s Fifth Wave shows photoshopping devils at work. 
Simon Brunning of Small Values of Cool points at the Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes of All Time. Read this before believing anything else today.
My personal favorites:
– The Internet Spring Cleaning (#40, at the bottom – I’ve spread that one myself a few times)
– Asterix Village Found (#89)
Update(s): The first items for 2003 are coming in… here are some nice ones. I’ll keep updating this throughout the day.
RFC3514: The Security Flag in the IPv4 Header. This one’s for techies only – if you don’t know what a RFC is, never mind:
Firewalls, packet filters, intrusion detection systems, and the like often have difficulty distinguishing between packets that have malicious intent and those that are merely unusual. We define a security flag in the IPv4 header as a means of distinguishing the two cases.
… Currently-assigned values are defined as follows:
0x0 If the bit is set to 0, the packet has no evil intent. Hosts, network elements, etc., SHOULD assume that the packet is harmless, and SHOULD NOT take any defensive measures. (We note that this part of the spec is already implemented by many common desktop operating systems.)
0x1 If the bit is set to 1, the packet has evil intent. Secure systems SHOULD try to defend themselves against such packets. Insecure systems MAY chose to crash, be penetrated, etc.
…In a move that will no doubt cause even more consternation, Apple today announced that it has again rescheduled the upcoming Worldwide Developer Conference, this time to coincide with the new Create conference that replaced Macworld Expo from 14-Jul-03 through 18-Jul-03.
…The $25 Asbesteze gloves use a combination of Lycra and heat-resistant fibers to keep palms and wrists from becoming too hot (which can exacerbate inflammation) when resting on the aluminum PowerBooks.
…the company announced the Segway Kids Interactive Transporter (KIT), more commonly referred to as the “Segwee.”…
…I’ve been busy helping some old friends at Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) with an upcoming release of Microsoft Word 5.1 for OS X, a carbonized version of Word 5.1a that preserves most of the features and all the look and feel of the highly popular Word 5.1…
Apple admits Mac OS X transition a failure; announces Mac OS 9.5, Jobs steps down:
“I blew it. It’s as simple as that,” said a visibly upset Steve Jobs as he announced he would step down as head of Apple, the company he co-founded on this day over 25 years ago.
CFO Fred Anderson quickly announced the company would end its two-year-long transition to the UNIX-based Mac OS X and would release Mac OS 9.5 within the month…
Bare Bones Software Announces New Pricing Option:
…Now available is the option to purchase a single user license of BBEdit with hand delivery by a Bare Bones Software employee and one full year of personal service (including unlimited feature additions, ripping the cellophane off the CD, reading the manual aloud, and more). This opportunity is only available for a limited time, at the special price of US$250,000…
Safari developer Dave Hyatt says that Safari will drop table support:
The next release of Safari will be fully embracing Web standards by dropping all support for tables. From now on, any pages that use tables will cause Safari to play a very loud raspberry sound and refuse to display the page.
…For all sites that attempt to nest tables more than four levels deep, Safari will play a loud flushing sound, and it will remove itself from the dock and erase itself from your system in order to protect itself from your bad taste.
HotAIR, the organization that publishes the Annals of Improbable Research and sponsors the famous Ig® Nobel Prizes, has a new project: Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. Any scientist possessing LFH may apply or be nominated for membership. Honorary members are Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Benjamin Franklin, and Isaac Newton.
Although I consider myself to be a (computer) scientist, unfortunately I don’t qualify full-time for the hair part, as I – on standing orders from my wife – usually have my LFH cut as soon as it grows into the required length. 🙄
Thanks to Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing for the link!
Unbelievably, David Weinberger, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, World of Ends, noted weblogger and so on and so forth, is actually (in his own words!):
…addicted to plastic surgery, faces accusations of fathering three children, and became America’s Most Ignored Sideshow…
Read all about it! I have, with great willpower, avoided linking to, or even mentioning, other similar celebrities (one word: “plastics!”). Thanks to the Devine Betsy Devine for the link.
Recent news about the threats to Comdex have reminded me of similar tales from the last years of Comdex’s precursor – the NCC (National Computer Conference), in the late 1980’s. I have fond memories of the May ’84 NCC, when I bought the first 128K Macintosh – complete with second 400K floppy and ImageWriter printer. It cost $2495 for the system, plus $495 each for the printer and floppy.
Anyway, I also remembered a humor piece I wrote 5 years ago for MacKiDo. There are some dated references, so I think it’s time to update it. Any references to real persons, institutions or phenomena are strictly satirical and do not necessarily represent my real-life opinion; also, my disclaimer of course applies. And if I inadvertently spared anybody, please tell me 
…
There was a fire at <some huge computer conference>…
When it reached the main exhibition hall:
– The Windows 95 users asked the door guard to close all windows and restart the exhibition.
– The Windows 98 users loaded their installation CDROMs to look for a Windows Extinguisher Wizard™.
– The Windows NT users said the fire would probably be fixed in the next service pack.
– The Windows XP users were asked to reactivate their installation “due to hardware changes”.
– The Mac OS 9 users clicked on everything in sight to see if that would affect the fire somehow.
– The Mac OS X users were awed at the cool transparency effects displayed by the fire.
– The OS/2 users reminisced about the much more full-featured fire that burned down the OS/2 User’s Conference in 1994.
– The mainframe users pulled the “emergency stop” handle and waited for the field engineer to arrive.
– The former BeOS users commented on how their own fires had been much faster and more efficient.
– The Unix users tried connecting all the stands together with pipes to build a fire engine.
– The SCO users sniffed that the exhibition hall obviously wasn’t POSIX compliant.
– The Linux users searched the Internet looking for the hall’s source code so they could find out why it caught fire.
– The Amiga users decided there was no fire and went on doing whatever they were doing.
When the fire reached the developer’s hall:
– The C programmers started looking for a NULL pointer.
– The Delphi programmers sneered that this would never happen at a Delphi developer’s conference.
– The C++ programmers argued about which design pattern a Fire Engine template should follow, and whether the hall’s construction was fully ANSI-compliant or not.
– The Objective-C programmers tried to change the fire’s behavior, but fought on whether categories or poseAsClass: would be the best way.
– The Assembly Language programmers started to write a very detailed and optimised treatise about firefighting techniques.
– The ADA programmers alleged that the fire was not in their original specifications.
– The FORTRAN programmers began muttering about “COMMON something”.
– The COBOL programmers started prowling the hall and looking for Y2K bugs.
– The Visual Basic programmers asked the C programmers to write a “fire” module for them.
– The .NET programmers commented favorably on the fire’s fully-distributed architecture-independent implementation.
– The Java programmers attributed the fire to a faulty VM implementation.
– The Python programmers promptly set fire to another hall in a much more elegant way, with fewer lines of code.
– The Perl programmers blamed everything on a subtle fault in the implementation of regular expressions.
– The PHP programmers hacked the fire’s code to do syntax highlighting.
When the fire reached the press room:
– The ComputerWorld reporter wrote “Microsoft Fire(tm) takes the conference by storm”.
– The PC Magazine reporter wrote “Blazing 3-D effects herald a new era in computing”.
– John Dvorak wrote “Duh. Deadly dull conference, second-rate fire. Who do they think they’re kidding?”
– The Business Week reporter wrote “Apple’s market share is further reduced by conference fire”.
– The Wall Street Journal reporter wrote “High-tech stocks may burn in the near term”.
– The Washington Post reporter wrote “Fire may be a cyber-terrorist act”.
– The MacAddict reporter wrote “Bill Gates should have been here when the Main Hall collapsed”.
– The MacWorld reporter wrote “Steve Jobs takes the stage with unheard-of pyrotechnics”.
Continua a história do Zé Megabyte e seu fiel Jaca Plus, agora ocupado por um software de inteligência artificial. Será que Itaipú está mesmo na Internet? E porque “em tese”?
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