Blogger hates my genius

Blogger is using a trick to block the trick I was using to block Blogger's annoying banner.

So now I'm using a trickier trick to trick and block the trick blocker.

Rumor: Google's GPhone will turn lead into gold

I should first let you know that I don't work for Google, I don't personally know anyone who works for Google, nor has this rumor leaked from anyone even remotely connected to Google in any way. That said, I've been thinking about this, and it seems clear to me that if Google really wants to make a winning product that will beat the iPhone, they will make the GPhone turn lead into gold.

The demand for this feature isn't anything new. In fact, the concept of turning lead into gold has been around for at least a decade. But now that Google is in a position to sell their own cell phones, it just makes sense they would finally invest their resources into making this happen in a user-friendly interface.

An unverified source with no credibility recently claimed to discover that when he searched for "1 kg lead in gold" in some obscure unmentioned localized version of Google, he received a Google Calculator answer: "1 kilogram of lead = $80 billion in gold".

Sergey Brin stated in a recent interview, "Google is not in any way involved in turning lead into gold, nor will it ever be, nor is anyone else that I'm aware of." As our readers have pointed out, there are several ways this statement can be interpreted. It is possible that Google is planning to shift its entire core business into the lead-to-gold conversion market. Anonymous insiders at a company that may or may not be Google have told us that we're absolutely 100% correct and shouldn't even consider the possibility that half the rumors about the GPhone will end up as just that: rumors.

Competition in standards

<Microsoft> Competition in standards rules!

<Google> Competition in standards rules!

<developers> :(

Web developer

Graphic designer, web semantics engineer, layout architect, database engineer, web systems programmer, user interface programmer, accessibility consultant, quality assurance tester, marketer, and project manager.

Yet they pay you a single position's salary.

News

I don't like news. I like recent-but-old-enough-to-have-been-thoroughly-digesteds

Roswell

The whole Roswell thing is stupid. There was no UFO that crash-landed there. The flying object was identified. It was an alien spacecraft.

Ship travel

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But ships don't sail in straight lines when they cross the Pacific Ocean, they follow the curve of the earth. I suggest that we replace all cargo ships with submarines.

Fairies

"Hi, I'm a fairy."

"Um... aren't you a guy?"

"Yeah, I'm a male fairy. You got a problem with that?"

"I just never.."

"Where do you think fairies come from? Massive lesbian fairy orgies and magic pixie dust? You're in the wrong fantasy, bub."

Failed Linux desktop slogan

"It's Beryly functional!"

On belt size and food consumption

Thin people will ask for a minute meal, while fat people will ask for seconds. But a minute is 60 times the size of a second. Therefore, thin people can eat a lot more than fat people.

1120 fucking days

1120 fucking days.

Facts you didn't know or knew but didn't take seriously or knew and took seriously but had to listen to again in this post

Lemmings don't actually perform mass suicide off cliffs. Basically, the Walt Disney company decided that their documentary White Wilderness wasn't exciting enough, so they forced some lemmings off a cliff and videotaped it.

The world was not widely believed to be flat back in Columbus' time. It's a myth that originated from an 1828 fantasy by Washington Irving called The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus which was incorrectly repeated as fact and somehow became popular. The debate over Columbus' voyage was not over whether or not the Earth was round, but over the circumference of the Earth. Columbus made some calculations that were much smaller than the widely accepted circumference, and he based his voyage on that. It turned out that Columbus' calculations were very wrong. And by the way, Europeans already knew there was a large land mass to the West. They just hadn't really taken the time to accurately map it out before.

The typical supermarket banana, called the Cavendish banana, doesn't appear in nature. It was genetically engineered to be better suited for consumption than wild bananas. Wild bananas are blotchy green and brown when ripe, they're hard to open, they're filled with huge seeds, and they don't taste that good. Cavendish bananas were designed to be, among other things, seedless. Unfortunately, this means they don't have any genetic mutations that survive longer than a single "generation" and so there's no genetic diversity (they're all basically clones of each other). What this means is that a single virus can easily wipe out all members of the species and none will be immune. This actually happened in the 1950s when the main kind of banana was the Gros Michel which got wiped out by Panama disease. The Cavendish was developed as the replacement, although it wasn't quite the same in terms of size and flavor. A new variant of Panama disease has appeared in recent years, wiping out crops of Cavendish bananas, and scientists are working to develop a new replacement.

The cartoon series Captain Planet has some rather dark roots. In 1931, American playwright David Belasco, who had recently begun suffering mental illness, was found suffocated by his own pillow. In his latest journal entry, which was mostly nonsensical rambling, there was the sentence, "Through all of your being, I'm the captain of this planet." This was adapted into Captain Planet's catch phrase, "By your powers combined, I am Captain Planet!" Ted Turner also roughly translated the fact that Belasco was known for his naturalism (the ability to capture the essence of daily life) into "environmental awareness". Furthermore, he decided to give Captain Planet a blue face as sort of a sick jab at the way Belasco died.

Ostriches aren't able to chew their food, so instead they swallow small stones that roll around in their stomachs and help digest the food.

One of the above actually isn't true.

Global Warming

Contributing factors to global warming:

• Carbon emissions from vehicles.
• Cow farts.
• Disco (disco is dead, but the damage has been done).
• Greenhouses.
• Katie Price Jordan.
• Declining global pirate population (software pirates don't count unless they're dressed in full pirate garb and using wifi on genuine pirate ships).
• Walking to the grocery store.
• Steorn's free energy creation machine (See a demo).
• God's infinite and unfocused rage against people using their body parts for pleasure instead of their original core purpose (I'm talking about you, gum chewers; swallow or spit it out!)
• Firefox.
• The invisible Dyson sphere around our solar system, whose existence NASA has conspired to cover up.
• Terrorists.
• You. (See: Terrorists)
• The increasing amount of buildings and paved roads which retain more heat than dirt and plants. Hey, who knows?
• The melting polar caps. I always see ice melting when it gets hot, so the melting probably causes the heat.
• Al Gore's plane trips.
• Bears.

Google, as explained by emoticons

^_^ ^_^ ^_^ >_> ^_^ ^_^

King of web standards

If I were the king of web standaaaaaaards
Not queen, not duke, not prince

My magic hat of web standaaaaaaards
Would be fluffy, not hard, not tense

I'd write everything in XHTML
With a /> and a /> and text/html

As I'd post my spiel, all the readers would kneel
And the critics rave, and the Web is save!
And BusinessWeek would siiiiing
If I, if I were kiiiiiing!

Each author would show respect to me
The browsers all connect to me
With an extra slash, I would earn my cash
From every underling!
If I, if I were kiiiiiing!
Just kiiiiiing!

This song is dedicated to Jeffrey Zeldman, protector of the internets and omniscient XHTML knower-everything-abouter.

Good thing XHTML is properly parsed with an XML parser or this perfectly normal XML construct would totally screw up the sidebar.

Clutches of the sea

Once upon a moonlit voyage at the crest of a golden wave, a tale that began three score before descended to a salty grave.

Buck pushed him.

Essay on standards bodies

My professor asked me to write a 10,000-character essay on international standards bodies. Here was my submission:

T9998e

Resurrection

I've died and come back as a blog post. My life is meaningless.