The most valuable supply of worthlessness on the web
Information you have no need for. Ever. Usually about me, but possibly about other trivial crap in the world.
I have no idea why I’m so fascinated with these crazy interchanges, but as much as I wouldn’t want to drive them, I do like to check out the pictures.
That’s just one. There are another half-dozen or so on the hosting site.
[tags]Insane interchanges, Driver beware, Who would want to drive there?[/tags]
I’d read about this recently but not checked it out yet – here is a practice session of a performance of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, as put on by 1500 Filipino prisoners.
And there’s more. Hit my source for the movie to get the scoop.
[tags]Thriller, Jackson, Filipinos, Prisoners[/tags]
My older son is still having problems related to writing. Not that he can’twant to write, and has trouble sitting still long enough to write much. After getting the OK from his teacher to try letting him type his journals instead of writing them, my wife has been looking at typing tutor software. Looking around on my own, I found this cool looking Flash-based typing game called Word Shoot. You stand in the middle of a battlefield of sorts and type words on approaching enemies to shoot them down.
Just the kind of thing my son might enjoy, and on the easy level it starts out slowly enough that he might be able to get a few enemies before getting overwhelmed. Sort of a typing-tutor by fire thing.
[tags]Typing, Word Shoot, Typing tutor, Flash[/tags]
After getting my older son to school this morning, taking the younger one to the doctor, taking the younger one to school, coming home and cleaning the kitchen, fixing part of my lunch, cleaning out some of the refrigerator, stripping and re-making the beds, starting laundry, climbing into the attic to make sure the AC unit isn’t leaking any more, looking for my older sons Tae Kwon Do uniform, fixing my breakfast, taking dirty clothes from downstairs to the upstairs, caulking the bathtub, getting clothes out of the dryer, going back into the attic to see if my son’s uniform was in the luggage stored up there, picking up my sons’ clothes from the bathroom, taking things down to the basement to put in the freezer, finally remembering to get my breakfast out of the microwave, fixing myself a drink, and clearing away the junk my wife stacked around my computer so I could sit to work or play, I wonder just when it is I’ll get to live the life she thinks I live.
I want to come home from taking the kids to school, sit at my computer, eat breakfast, play games, surf porn and masturbate, and take a nap until I have to leave for work. Especially the gaming and porn stuff. Because that’s what she thinks I do all day.
So I’m asking someone who does get to sit around all day doing this stuff – at what point do I actually get to live this life I’ve being punished for?
I’m not sure why, exactly, after years of amazing growth, the Firefox community still faces crap like this:
I’m trying something simple – I want to see if I can get a DSL connection for my mother’s house. She doesn’t need a cable-connection and it’s associated $40/month, so I was looking for a simple $20 connection I could get hooked up for her. Shoot – I was even going to tie the account to my credit card, if the company would let me. Instead, I find that BellSouth hates Firefox.
[tags]BellSouth hates Firefox, Internet Explorer still sucks, BellSouth, DSL[/tags]
If you’ve ever sat and thought “Where can I get a sex change operation if I don’t have a lot of money?” – it looks like the Brazilians have you in mind.
Brazilian judges have ruled that a sex change is a constitutional right, so the government says it will provide the operation and treatment  gratis.
Unfortunately, some of you won’t qualify. To find out if you can catch a ride on the “I want to play for the other team” ride, hit the full USA Today story and see what the rules and requirements are.
[tags]Brazil, Free sex change, Just a sweet transvestite[/tags]
As a hardcore gamer, there are some things you just don’t want to hear in reference to games. Anything referring to Barbie is bad. Barbie and Horse appearing in the title is much worse, because you know only one way that could be a good game, yet you also know there is no way Barbie would be in a bestiality pr0n game. Though Mary Kate and Ashley are hotties, seeing their name on any game is a sure sign you’d want to pass it by. But we’ve got a couple of new entries into the games-you-never-want-to-see-developed category.
Did you know there’s actually a Barbie MMO? BarbieGirls.com is the kinda thing that makes hardcore gamers groan, but there is — a pink-festooned, dolls-getting-manicured, ‘tween girl-focused MMO, and moreover, it’s ridiculously popular. In its first 60 days, it signed up three million users. Now it’s up to four million — that’s half of what Second Life has drummed up in its entire lifespan — and growing at a rate of 4500 a day.
. . .
Not to be left out of the competition, the freaky skank dolls of Bratz are getting in on the action with Be-Bratz.com, another ‘tween girls’ virtual world with a real-world component — you buy a $29.99 Bratz doll-slash-USB key, and it comes with some pink computer peripherals (a mouse and pad) that look like Japanese sex toys.
Please – if you ever hear that I’m playing these games in any serious manner, just shoot me. Neither Barbie nor Bratz should ever exist in a game title that references MMOs. (via Kotaku)
[tags]Barbie, Bratz, beastiality, horses, MMOs, gaming[/tags]
It’s astounding what one can find on the science blogs, isn’t it? How about information the insight that a Rubik’s cube can always be solved in 26 moves or less? This work beats out last years 27-or-less moves proof.
Daniel Kunkle can solve a Rubik’s Cube in 26 moves. Or at least his computer can.
Kunkle, a computer scientist at Northeastern University in Boston, has proved that 26 moves are enough to solve any Rubik’s Cube, no matter how scrambled. That’s one move below the previous record. In the process of cracking the cube, he developed algorithms that can be useful for problems as disparate as scheduling air flights and determining how proteins will fold.
Rubik’s Cube has approximately 43 quintillion possible configurations. Even a supercomputer can’t search through every possible configuration to find the quickest way to unscramble a given starting arrangement in a reasonable amount of time. So Kunkle and his advisor Gene Cooperman developed some clever mathematical and computational strategies to make the puzzle more manageable.
The article discusses in brief some of the work done to generate this proof. And as noted in the above snip, these algorithms could well have applicability to other work dealing in problems with massively large numbers of permutations. (via boingboing)
[tags]Rubik’s Cube, World record, Algorithms, Science news, Science[/tags]
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I’m all about the helpful tips here at the blahg. Consider this a freebie Blahg-tip to help you keep your current obsession without resorting to stalking.
Of course, I’m not sure that represents a better decision process than stalking. But hey, it’s an idea.
[tags]Nicorette, How not to become a stalker, Keeping the woman you want[/tags]
For reasons I cannot even begin to comprehend, scientists have put together what they call an exhaustively compiled list of the 237 reasons why people have sex.
It is more about lust in the body than a love connection in the heart.
U.S college-aged men and women agree on their top reasons for having sex – they were attracted to the person, they wanted to experience physical pleasure and “it feels good,” according to a peer-reviewed study in the August edition of Archives of Sexual Behavior. Twenty of the top 25 reasons given for having sex were the same for men and women.
Now of course, I find that compiling an exhaustive list isn’t that difficult for men’s reasons for having sex:
That pretty much covers men. We really are pretty much that shallow and evil. And numbers one and two could probably be combined. Anyone care to offer the 234 other reasons that must have come from women?
More seriously, Fox actually takes the time to show us the top 10 reasons for men and for women.
[tags]Why men and women have sex, Exhaustive list[/tags]
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After years of not playing around with it, I have gotten back into POV-Ray. I am working through the tutorial that comes with the program (also available in HTML format) and another cool tutorial I found online that looks helpful. So far, here is the best image I have achieved on my own.
Unimpressive to most, I am sure, but I am trying to figure out how to make marbles. A scene of mostly clear, slightly internally reflective, colored glass balls (with a couple of reflective metal ones for effect) is helping me to understand a little how some of the lighting settings work. I know there are lots of folks who could crank out this kind of thing in minutes, but I still know so little about the scene description language that I am taking it slowly and learning just a tiny bit at a time.
And most importantly – I am having fun learning something with no obvious career motivation.
And I still don’t know why posts are showing up 2-3 times each. They are only in the database a single time. I’ve had to go to a couple of Dr. appointments today with my youngest son to find out he had a fleck of metal in his eye and to get part of the metal removed, so I haven’t had more than about the 3 minutes I’ve spent on this post to worry about the site. Perhaps tomorrow the wife will actually do something useful and allow me time to do things for me.
[tags]POV-Ray, Ray Tracing, Marbles[/tags]
I’ve been working on site upgrades. I’ve had some issues with the site back-end software which I thought would be cleared up with an update to the site software. Sadly, not only did that not fix the problems I was having, it introduced some other problems. I have a backup that I can go back to, but I’m trying to hold off until I have a little more time to try resolving the other problems I’m having. In the meantime, I’m not sure when I’ll get regular updates going again. I’ve been trying to maintain 3-6 articles and asides a day, but the recent site software issues have impacted this negatively.
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