Thursday, October 20, 2005

nbc4.com - News - Girl, Father Suffer Burns At Md. Renaissance Festival

This is why you DO NOT have the audience help you with the fire part of the act. The most I ever did was let an audience member hold a torch, and ONLY for a short time. Then they clear off. What were these morons thinking??
nbc4.com - News - Girl, Father Suffer Burns At Md. Renaissance Festival

Clever coding ninjas

Back during the Dot Com bubble there was a website called desktop.com that attempted to recreate the functions of an OS using nothing but clever code and a browser. It looked great but suffered from a few things. 1) Lack of apps 2) Slow and 3) No business model.

In time desktop.com went the way of so many other Dot coms. But fear not! All that is old is new again! A company called Goovy has created an pretty damn spiffy application in Macromedia Flash. The system is not only good looking, but it actually does things.

The psaudo-desktop features an email client (which can access POP3 accounts) a contacts manager (which can import contacts from Outlook) a Beta Calendar app, a News reader, a ton of games and other bells and whistles.

I have to say that from a visual and usability point of view this system is very slick. A clean interface without excessive animated crap. The mail client features right-mouse menus. Thgis might mean little to you, but if you've ever worked with flash you know that right-mouse clicks are verbotten. These clever monkeys made it work. Go check it out. (Make sure you hhave the latest flash plugin first) The account is free and its fun to play with. Leave your impressions in the comments.

Monday, October 17, 2005

Do NOT f*ck with Vets who are bikers

Fred Phelps is a crazy 'preacher' who runs a website that is so vile I won't event link to it. His bigest pet peeve is gays but he's taken to protesting at the funerals of kids killed in Iraq. Apparently he's quite happy that IED's are killing these kids. These are not gay soldiers, but he's happy they are dying nonetheless. Apparently every second that isn't spent grovelling before GOD(tm) is a SIN and must be punnished! He has already protested at several funerals and I'm amazed a Marine Vet hasn't beaten the living shit out of this moron.

Phelps went to the funeral of a soldier recently but his hateful signs and bullhorn gibberish was drowned out by over 100 Veteran Bikers. Good for them. Of course, the evil part of me wishes that Phelps had run into the street brandishing a protest sign and was "accidently" run over by 100 plus bikes, but we can't have everything.

Words cannot express..


If you were at Pennsic this year, and you were in camp at just the right time. You witnessed an event so mindbendingly stupid and funny that words cannot describe it.

Somehow Trent (AKA Danger Trent) obtained a parachute. How he obtained the parachute is a story best left for another time. When he mentioned this fact I asked to see it, thinking it was just the canopy from an old parachute, which might be put to use as a shade of some kind. What he produced was a complete rig, including harness. Well.... that kind of toy is just begging to played with. So through trial and error we strapped Trent into the parachute and sent him to the highest part of the camp. What happened next is the stuff of legends. All I can say is "OolalaOolalaOolala!!!!


Thank you Trent. You are a pioneer and a man without fear.