Jericho: Wheat Be Gone

Because being poor just isn't bad enough, now the excesses of the richer countries on the planet are going to make it just that much tougher to live in a poorer country. Global Warming is striking again.

What am I talking about? Read this.

How much longer do we have to wait for viable biofuels?

Okay, I know the answer to that question. No answers are going to come over night. It's just infuriating. I can't believe how much we are fucking up this planet - all due to our own carelessness and lack of fore thought.

Max: Jerichomazon

Sweet.

Thank you!

Max:And There Was Much Rejoicing

They AC has finally been brought back to life. It is still a far cry from being comfortable, but at least they have the temperature down to survivable levels.

Max: Barbequed Head-Meat

ergelflarg

Max: Oven

The AC in my office has been out since Friday and won't be back up until Wednesday.

It is at least 100 degrees in here.

I have 150 pounds of extra insulation.

I may not live to see 36.

Oy.

Max: An Idiot Returns to His Village

Attorney General Gonzales resigns - CNN.com

"Embattled U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced his resignation Monday in a brief statement at the Justice Department. art.gonzales.ap.jpg Alberto Gonzales was dogged by controversial issues including wiretapping programs and fired U.S. attorneys. 'Yesterday I met with President Bush and informed him of my decision to conclude my government services as Attorney General of the United States effective September 17.'"

Jericho: Has Spock beamed you?

It's cliche by now: the web has changed everything.

But, indeed it has. No matter how hard we try, our information is no longer our own. We are all public figures now. I have often laughed at public figures who go out of their way to promote themselves, then have very public struggles attempting to keep a "private life". Andy Warhol said we would all be famous for 15 minutes - how little he knew!

So, if you were an Internet entrepreneur, how would you get a lot of hits to your site? These days the simple answer is "force everyone to come to my site in order to protect themselves"! It's a neat trick if you can pull it off and Spock.com just did. At your expense!

Spock.com's premise is simple and even useful: become a "people search engine" by crawling the web and setting up profiles on all the people one can identify. I have to admit there have been times I have sent an email to a friend listing all of my various social networking pages (MySpace, Friendster, etc.), this blog and other info and wished I could simply point them to a page where all of that info lives - now I can. My Spock profile is right here.

However, not all is perfect in this scenario. Spock uses tags as a way to describe the individual in question. When the Spock bot crawls a person, it finds words associated with that person and makes them into tags. The profile it made for me listed several normal things "married", "likes reading", "likes politics" - all of this it seems to have culled from looking at my Friendster profile. However, it added one that mystifies me: "likes sex". It's true, I do like sex, I think most humans do to one degree or another. I would just like to know why it picked that tag from my Friendster profile - a rather family friendly profile if ever there was one.

I got off pretty easy, others have gotten worse treatment from Spock. Check out this article. Yipes!

My advice to you: if you have a profile on the web, check Spock and see what they have done to you. If Spock hasn't found you, make a profile and connect up all the loose ends of your profiles on the web and police the site regularly. I imagine if this kind of thing takes off, your friends will not be the only people checking out your tags.

If you do set up a profile on Spock - add it to the comments below, I'd love to connect to you!

Jericho: All Hail the End of "Reality" TV

Have you read this?

FOX and other networks have got to be getting the picture by now. Taking a stupid person(s) and putting them in front of a camera without a script does not good television make.

I mean, really, FOX, when are you going to get this? The era is over. You have beaten this dead horse enough. You cancel shows like "Firefly" that are excellent before they get a chance to get a following (did you see how much the movie and DVD sales made?) and then you kept putting idiots and midgets on the air hoping to drag in ratings.

I never thought I'd say this, but it's obvious from the ratings that the American people are smarter than that!

FOX, look at your biggest successes - what do they have in common? Look at The Simpsons and The X-Files and even - like a FOX News wet-dream - 24. All of them have great acting and great writing. Solid shows built on solid premises and real possibilities for entertainment.

FOX isn't the only culprit - I'm looking at you MTV.

I don't watch a lot of TV anymore (cuts into my WoW time) - but I do wish that there was more better TV. Heck, I might watch more if there was something to watch!

Max: Panic! Panic Now!

There's darkies on our ferries.

FBI agents in Seattle have asked the public to help identify two men spotted behaving in an "unusual" manner during several trips on the nation's largest ferry system.

Federal officials released a pair of photos of the men to the public Monday after they were shown to employees of the ferry system. The two men appear to be of Middle Eastern descent and are seen standing against the rail of a Washington State Ferries system vessel.

FBI field agents told ABC News' Seattle affiliate KOMO-TV that the two men were observed on ferries and seemed unusually interested in how the boats worked and docking procedures. They were seen on multiple ferry runs over a period of four to six weeks and ultimately photographed by a ferry employee.

Jericho, you and your fattest, hairiest, whitest friend need to start riding the ferries. Take pictures. Ask questions. Show an excessive interest in everything about the ferry. Keep hope panic alive!

Max: NSFW Japanese Thrash NSFW

Interesting, and relatively free of the extremely overused "dreath grunt"

Max: Moyers on Rove

Max: Sky (Space?) Diver

Skydiver plans freefall from the edge of space to break Mach 1

He will leap head-first from a weather balloon 25 miles above Earth and plummet at more than 1,000mph with only a parachute for company.

He will face external temperatures of minus 100c while inside his carbon-fibre suit it will be a stifling 65c - almost 150 fahrenheit.

And most amazing of all, Michel Fournier is actually looking forward to it.

The daredevil Frenchman, a greyhaired 63-year-old former paratrooper, aims to become the first person to break the sound barrier in free-fall.

Max: The Gospel According to Shrub

Shrub talk about the Big G.

1. I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq'. And I did. Sharm el-Sheikh August 2003

2. I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job.
Statement made during campaign visit to Amish community, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Jul. 9, 2004

Max: Turd Blossom Pruned

Don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.

Karl Rove, George W Bush's most trusted and senior adviser, has paid tribute to the US president as he confirmed his intention to leave the White House.
Mr Rove, who will step down at the end of August, said he was "deeply proud" to have served Mr Bush and the US.

But he insisted the time was right to leave, saying he was quitting the White House for the sake of his family.

Max: Blog Jazz

My dogs' unconditional love for me - along with the fact that they would eat their own shit if allowed - is proof of their lack of discernment.

Caffeine is the only thing that slows the inevitable onslaught of entropy.

If the day ends and I have not offended someone, then I have done nothing. If the day ends and no one has offended me, then I have learned nothing.

If no one tells you your plans are impossible, you are not being ambitious enough.

Look before you click.

Don't bite the hand that can format your hard drive.

If a new technology is not condemned by someone as an infernal device that will destroy the human spirit, it probably was not worth developing.

Anyone who successfully commits suicide should be forced to live with the consequences of his actions.

If you need cameras, keyloggers and screencaps to spy on your employees, you either hired the wrong people or are a jerk.

"All work and no play" is the battlecry of modern corporations.

Religion, boiled down, is using war to spread a message of peace and love to people you hate.

I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend with my life your right to say it. If it is annoying enough, I may just shoot myself to avoid having to listen to it.

Never say in ten words what you can say in two. Better yet, just shut the fuck up right now.

Max: Data Mining Done Right

CBC News: Data mining

Using some sophisticated software and hardware they started overlaying crime reports with other data, such as weather, traffic, sports events and paydays for large employers. The data was analyzed three times a day and something interesting emerged: Robberies spiked on paydays near cheque cashing storefronts in specific neighbourhoods. Other clusters also became apparent, and pretty soon police were deploying resources in advance and predicting where crime was most likely to occur.

These cops used their brains and used their tech to figure out how to protect some of the most vulnerable people from violent crime and they got results. Meanwhile, the Shrubsters use their tech to randomly listen in on phone calls and email instead of, say, figuring out where IED's are likely to show up in Iraq.

Max: Awesome or Sign or the Apocalypse?

Max: Basic Instructions

This amuses me.

Max: DailyLit

DailyLit is an groovy site that will daily send - via email or RSS - 1000 word chunks of classic, public domain books. It even tells you in advance how many chunks you will receive and lets you choose to get your chunks every day, every weekday or Monday, Wednesday and Friday. If you are feeling spunky, you can even tell them to send the next chunk right now rather than waiting for the next scheduled post. It isn't perfect. The translation of Aristotle's Poetics they were sending me was so incomprehensible - especially compared with the translation available at the Gutenberg Project site - that I cancelled it in favour of Around the World in Eighty Days, which oddly enough comes in 89 chunks.

Give it a try.

Max: A gentlemen's duel

Video A gentlemen's duel - short

Max: Phoenix Rises

Phoenix Project webpage.

Jericho: Build Bridges not Bombs!

People are going to think I'm picking on STL, well, I'm not. I saw the article first on CNN and then went to KMOV for their coverage.

If it was only two bridges in the entire country, that would be one thing. But it's not. There are many, many bridges and other bits of infrastructure falling apart around us.

Yet, where does the Bush administration waste my tax dollars? On a continuing unpopular war in a far away country. We will not achieve victory in Iraq. We have already done what we can do there.

But, spend that money domestically, and we might be able to win a few battles against the ravages of time and neglect.

And people wonder why I hate driving? If you aren't run over by an SUV in the wrong hands, the bridge you are on falls out from under you!

Max: Damn Time Dilations