An amusing-until-you-realize-how-sick-it-is little article over on CNN. Apparently Hedgehogs in Britain have been dying by the droves because of poorly designed McFlurry containers. The little fellers are attracted to the sweet contents of the container, but get stuck and die of starvation and/or dehydration. Well the articles speaks of how McDonalds has spent the last five years redesigning their containers to solve this problem. WTF. Why has it taken five years to make the entry hole of a McFlurry smaller? This makes absolutely no sense at all. Did they need to design some anti-Hedgehog coating or something. It is utterly despicable that they spent five years fixing this problem when they could have fixed it in months. Mind, Hedgehogs are something of a pest in Britain, akin to gophers here.

News Article that speaks for itself.

The reviews are in. Snakes on a Plane might just be one of the best movies to come out this summer, or so says Moriarty over on Ain’t It Cool. As amusing as the title is, the movie delivers everything is promises and more, from lines like “I’VE HAD IT WITH THESE MUTHA FUCKIN SNAKES ON THIS MUTHA FUCKIN PLANE!” what’s not to love? Read the review. It sounds like a great time.

So, LOSURS had a BBQ last night and it was brought up that a lot of German radio stations carry english music. This inevitably led to the mention that David Hasselhoff is huge in Germany. Now I’ve heard this before, but I always thought it was a joke. I mean, David Hasselhoff … a singer? However, Europe make big stars out of jokes like Günter (Re: “Ding Ding Dong” song). So I travelled to the great You Tube and searched to see if I could find the horror that would be Hasselhoff singing … and this is what I found (forgive me!).

Abosolutely hilarious clip of what the STNG would have been like if the NCC-1701-D ran windows. The infectious music, according to Digg comments, is “Livin’ in the Sunlight, Lovin’ in the Moonlight” by Tiny Tim. It’s absolutely infectious … The actual clip is from STNG Season 5, Episode 15: “Power Play”. It’s the episode where Data, Troy and O’Brian are taken over by alien “ghosts” who want to take over the ship. This clip is part of the scene where they first try to take the ship, but Riker transfers bridge control to engineering, preventing Data from accessing the computer.

The video clip sparked an interesting geek debate on Digg:

#1:

Actually, as it seemed like about 50% of TNG plots were centered around the Enterprise’s computer screwing up (the other 50% were based on “an unknown anomoly in a previously unexplored region of space”), I think it’s perfectly plausible that they were running the 24th century version of Windows.
- NachoBusiness

#2:

Are you kidding me? The Enterprise ran on Isolinear chips, Microsoft’s so bad about accepting new technologies that the Enterprise would still be built with PCI cards and BIOS if it were the OS onboard. And don’t even get me started on the nusiance known as “Clippy”… *shudder*.
- nTesify

#3:

Actually, Data is the 24th-century version of Clippy. He just kinda came with the ship, and just won’t stop stating the obvious. “I see you are trying to make diplomatic contact. Would you like me to open a channel and assist you?”
- korteenea

Almost as amusing as the link, eh?

Funny

I have a lot of bandwidth … at least during the summer, but I still get pissed when people hotlink to my images. I’ve fixed that with this bit of .htaccess code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?zy\.ca/ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|png|jpe?g|flv|mpe?g|avi|mov)$ images/hotlinking.jpg [L]

I would have added a line for no referrer … but some ass weasels have taken to giving links to my images … I’m very annoyed … and a bit of prick. At least I haven’t taken to targeted vengeance like this person or this person … who are now my personal heroes. I simply don’t have the time to be that vindictive.

Damn, I really need an Editor …

Ran across this on the web… well, on a myspace page … very scary people on myspace … very fucking tweaked.   Anyway, to spare you the horror of music and the backgrounds and the asinine messaging, just look at the image:

I know this is old news, but I finally found the audio recording of the infamous Senator Stevens “Internet Tubes” theory [June 28th, 2006]. I would like to highlight some segments of the audio link.

“What happens to your own personal internet?” [3:58 - 4:53]

There’s one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service is now going to go through the internet* and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

I’m not sure about you, but I’d consider a four day turn around for a complete copy of the Internet to be amazingly good. And think of the storage and bandwidth required! Seriously, though, an alternative theory is that your mail server was down/malfunctioning, people lied to you, said it was sent of Friday, and then forged the sent date, or the sender/receivers mail client was misconfigured and only sent/received when the end user synced it. There is no amount of traffic on the internet today that would delay an e-mail message for four days. It just doesn’t happen.

“It’s a series of tubes” [9:08 - 9:31]

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

People have had a lot of fun with this. I particularly liked John Stewart’s one about using fibre optic cable to unclog Stevens tubes …

“It’s not using what consumers user every day.” [9:47 - 10:14]

Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.

Maybe there is a place for commercial net, but it’s not using what consumers use every day.

It’s not using the messaging service that is essential, I think, to small businesses, it is essential to our operation of families.

I first ran into the internet in 1995. My friend Tony and I would get into his car and sneak into the local University’s computer labs to access the internet. I can’t recall everything that we did with the internet, but one of the earliest memories I have of that time was looking up a new RTS game that was coming out. I can’t recall its name anymore, but I was able to download a demo for the game. At that moment, I fell in love with the Internet. As much as I dislike the over commercialization of the Internet, 80% of what I use the Internet for is commerce. Not buying, really, but researching. Messaging is such a small segment of my usage that it is almost not on the map. The internet is commercial. It always will be, and the Net Neutrality arguement comes down to money. I had originally not understood why it has come up, but now I do. Stevens was talking about a german company which was building a new, highspeed fibre backbone and they wanted to keep their competition off of it. What they want to do is turn their segment of highspeed fibre into an internet toll-road of sorts. They want all traffic traveling on it, not originating from their networks, to pay more for its usage. So let’s say I am on the german company’s network, and I watch a video on NBC.com. What they want is NBC to pay them money to ensure that they all full access to their bandwidth, even though they already have an agreement with either NBC’s upstream provider to grant that bandwidth or their upstream’s provider … and so on. They basically want money from both sides of the transaction. In essence, turning the internet into the annoying mess that telephone system is. I hate this idea. But I dislike the idea that the FCC, which is to quote Family Guy “The Stuffiest of special interest groups,” to regulate my internet. I’m outside of their country. And I dislike how they operate. Still, I don’t CRTC regulating things here either. I like it deregulated. I like it how it functions now. Stay the fuck away from my internet … and nobody gets hurt …

Grammar is apparently important.   A misplaced comma is likely to cost Rogers Communications 2.13 million dollars.   Read more.