Aiming at Nothing

When I was a little kid I remember seeing stories about the future in Popular Mechanics and on TV that promised we would all be flying around in personal transportation pods or flying cars. Now that the future is here (it is here, isn’t it?) we’re still stuck with these ground-based, wheeled vehicles that only [...]

As you probably know I have a registered domain name. (It’s printed on this page several times — you figure it out.) Anyway, occasionally I get an email from parties interested in linking to my site and, after blacklisting their address, I go on with my life as if nothing happened. Usually this mail comes [...]

Many years ago (when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in my early twenties) I remember telling people that there were three things I would never do: I would never own a cell phone. Cell phones in the eighties were expensive and, frankly, status symbols. If you could afford one of those things and [...]

Thanks mostly to a tip from one of my peeps (shoutz out 2 Gordon out on da West side), it has come to my attention that Taiwan will finally receive its first Mr. Donut franchise. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been in Taiwan and haven’t been able to find a decent donut [...]

(or Rhesus Pieces) Yet another WIRED.com article to share. (Notice how I seem to get all of my news from WIRED? I subscribe to the print version, look at the pretty pictures and then read the thing online.) It seems that scientists have discovered that if they block dopamine receptors in the brains of rhesus [...]

Don’t you just dislike those web sites that require you to “register” in order to read their new items? (I was going to say “hate” instead of “dislike,” but the feeling I have just isn’t that strong.) I mean, I understand why companies want to at least have a good guess at how many individual [...]

According to this story in the Scotsman News, Prozac and other pharmaceuticals have been found as trace elements in drinking water. Apparently these chemicals are not entirely broken down when digested and end up in the waste water; some of the material survives treatment and ends up in ground water. A spokeswoman for the Department [...]

After years of running with hand-me-down computers my parents’ latest boat anchor finally bit the dust. You can only replace bits a pieces of an old machine so many times. So, anyway, they asked me to take them computer shopping. I just love spending other people’s money! I set them up with a fancy new [...]

There’s a big stink being raised by some critics about the alleged selling of “advertorial” material on Fark.com and possibly other blog sites. Product placement seems to have migrated from the visual media to electronic print outlets. From a WIRED article: Paid placement is a long-running issue with search engines. Google does not accept payment [...]

There’s an article on WIRED.com about a guy who built an antenna on the end of a rifle stock. He can snoop your fancy-pants bluetooth phone from a distance. Security professionals Adam Laurie and Martin Herfurt demonstrated the attacks last week at the Black Hat and DefCon security and hacker conferences in Las Vegas. Phone [...]