I haven't posted on this thing in forever and a day, but I had to add a note for this: Mozilla Firefox 0.8 is out. It's the best web browser on the planet. It will make you like using the Web much more, and it will make the time spent more efficient. Download it now.

War + Iraq Poster Exhibition: Statements about the war that can be Simple, Beautiful, Clever, Haunting, Amateurish, Confused, Obvious, Strange, Inscrutably Weird, Cute, Vaguely Frightening, Brilliantly Sardonic, and Hilarious

The greatest April Fools' Day hoaxes of all time. It's a link ripped right from MetaFilter, which is having has a number of great threads on April Fools' Day today, but this link was too great to pass up.

Until we can escape to Canada, I'll take my escaping in the form of simple, meaningless bullshit.

Also available for .Net and Perl!

Marines asked to pray for George W. Bush. Yes, you read that right. The Marines are the ones on the front lines, but George W. Bush is the one that needs the prayers. I mean, assuming that making soldiers pray is OK in the first place.

Why haven't I moved yet? I mean, I know Canada is bland, but they're not evil, right? God I'm sick of this bullshit.

If h4><0rZ Ruled the World, an especially well done Photoshop contest.

I gotta admit, I have ambivalent feelings toward "haxors;" on the one hand, I feel a certain cameraderie with anyone who's that into their geeky technical skills, but at the same time I think anyone who couldn't pass 8th grade English should be killed.

BREAKING NEWS®

So the bombs are falling and webpublishers all over the net are discovering larger fonts and reinventing grammar on the fly.

A fun game that you can play at home: Reload the New York Times once every fifteen minutes or so and See How Long the Headline Gets! Half an hour ago, it read:"Bombing Begins."

Fifteen minutes ago:
"U.S. Tries to Hit Saddam Hussein."

Now:
"Iraqi Missiles Fired at G.I.'s in Kuwait After U.S. Tries to Hit Saddam Hussein."

Next, I expect something like:
"US Fires Patriot Missiles to Intercept Iraqi Missiles Fired at GI's in Kuwait After US Tries to Hit Hussein."

Then:
"Iraqi Missiles Say They Really Would Rather The US Didn't Fire Patriot Missiles to Intercept Iraqi Missiles Fired at GI's in Kuwait After US Tries to Hit Hussein."

Hence:
"US Missiles Give Iraqi Missiles a Wedgie and Tell Them To Go Cry About It When Iraqi Missiles Say They Really Would Rather The US Didn't Fire Patriot Missiles to Intercept Iraqi Missiles Fired at GI's in Kuwait After US Tries to Hit Hussein."

Now, I understand that tastes have changed since 1974; however, it would seem to me that certain things could never appear palatable to normal humans (»more).

Of course, that is making the big assumption that people in the 70s were normal.

Well, we kind of knew this already, but here's confirmation from the ever-interesting Camille Paglia. According to Paglia, Scientology was based on Satanism! Well, to be precise, it was founded on the ideas of Aleister Crowley, who melds a variety of occultish ideas into a melange of bizarre spirituality. But whatever it is, it's a SCAM.

I know everyone and their brother knows about The Onion, and could read this if they wanted to, but I found it noteworthy. Why? Because I know several people myself who've started Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, and gotten nowhere near the end. I got about 100 pages in, and realized the futility of the effort. One friend decided that yes, last year he was committing himself to finishing this 1,000+ page behemoth. I haven't heard from him since.

Has anyone out there actually finished this tome of tomes? How about Cyptonomicon, Neal Stephenson's novel of cross-generational cryptography, weighing in at 1,168 pages? Did ya get the feeling that they could have chopped it to 400 pages and said the exact same thing?

Say you like minor league hockey, i mean you really like minor league hockey, but you are totally conscious of how silly it can be, what do you do? What do you do?

Oh good God. Here's a site from the depths of right-wing-Christian hell : The Presidential Prayer Team! With such stunning calls to childrens' spirituality as asking them to follow Stonewall Jackson's example of piety (seceding from the Union?), and praying that GWB's "State of the Union" proposals are supported and passed. Fascists!!

The ATT.Com Style Guide: protecting corporate identity on the internet since sometime before yesterday. Or if you prefer, you can take your cues from some place a little more erudite. And then, for a good time, check out my new work site.

When Mozilla 1.0 came out, C|Net gave it a rather bizarre review, in which they harp on Mozilla's inability to render Internet Explorer-specific web pages. They claim that, since IE is the market leader, pages tailored for IE should be acceptable as Web standard; "That's reality," according to C|Net. That is absolutely insane.

On a sidenote, they also criticized the IRC client "ChatZilla" for not being compatible with AOL Instant Messenger or any other IM services. Of course, they missed the point; IRC is a unique system incomparable with anything resembling a "Buddy List" or AOL's "Chat Rooms". Don't believe me? Check out the Quote Database - distilling disinformation for your comedic pleasure.

Goth Pet of the Week!Just the concept has me peeing my pants.

I just found out that if I were a Debian package, my name would be mkcreonfs. I can dig that ... a Creon Filesystem? The whole world in my image! (rimshot)

Too Stupid To Be President Your One-Stop Shop for Anti-Bush/Cheney/Enron humor.

Microsoft Gives Up on Hailstorm
[Microsoft] Posted by michael on Wednesday April 10, @11:33PM
from the partly-sunny dept.
Dephex Twin writes "According to a NYTimes article: due to lack of 3rd-party support for Microsoft's "Persona" (originally codenamed "Hailstorm"), the company has been forced to dump the project. It seems the companies didn't like having a middleman between them and the consumers. As a person worried about the future with .NET, this is a bit of a relief."

I hate to just directly rip off a post from Slashdot, but this one is way too important to miss. Remember a lot of the fear of sticking all your shopping and personal information on one central Microsoft server, and how much that would blow for users? Well, the companies realized it would also blow for them, and most of them told MS to shove Hailstorm up their ass.

Just another reason to use Open Source Software. You can reproduce all the functionality Microsoft proposes with Linux, Apache, SQL, Perl and Java. All open source, all more flexible and powerful that MS's individual components, and you don't have to sign your life and business away to Microsoft.

Slashdot pointed to a story which posed the question as to whether software should expire. Now, I'm not advocating any kind of Internet scrubbing here, but could we be paying a higher psychological price than we can possibly understand simply because bad design sticks around forever? It's my high school paper. Somewhere in there is a story about a few of my friends getting expelled. Don't go looking for it though, you would probably go blind first.