I know there is at least one brooder whose favorite breakfast food is a heapin’ helpin’ of fruit covered pancakes.
Today would be a good day to go to IHOP, according to Snopes.com. Between seven AM and two PM on February 28 (today), IHOP will be offering its patrons a free short stack of pancakes in celebration. Better move your butt over there before two o’clock rolls around.
I just ran across this while researching Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Looks fun and playful. Enjoy–TC
Apple’s ode to hackers
Developers embed poetic warning deep in OS X software
SAN JOSE, California (AP) — Apple Computer Inc. has resorted to a poetic broadside in the inevitable cat-and-mouse game between hackers and high-tech companies.
The maker of Macintosh computers had anticipated that hackers would try to crack its new OS X operating system built to work on Intel Corp.’s chips and run pirated versions on non-Apple computers. So, Apple developers embedded a warning deep in the software — in the form of a poem.
Indeed, a hacker encountered the poem recently, and a copy of it has been circulating on Mac-user Web sites this week.
Apple confirmed Thursday it has included such a warning in its Intel-based computers since it started selling them in January.
The embedded poem reads: “Your karma check for today: There once was a user that whined/his existing OS was so blind/he’d do better to pirate/an OS that ran great/but found his hardware declined./Please don’t steal Mac OS!/Really, that’s way uncool./(C) Apple Computer, Inc.”
Apple also put in a separate hidden message, “Don’t Steal Mac OS X.kext,” in another spot for would-be hackers.
“We can confirm that this text is built into our products,” Apple issued in a statement. “Hopefully it, and many other legal warnings, will remind people that they should not steal Mac OS X.”
While reading a Wikipedia article on Bob Dylan’s brilliant music video, Subterranean Homesick Blues, I discovered this Weird Al parody of both the song and the video. Note the Allen Ginsberg lookalike, with a deliberately fake-looking beard.
I am almost ashamed to admit it, but I’ve been a Weird Al fan since I was in Elementary School. I remember in fourth grade, everyone was singing his parody of the Brady Bunch theme song, which was merely the lyrics to the original song set to the tune of some now-forgotten eighties pop song.
This parody of Dylan took some real creativity, however. Al’s lyrics are in fact palindromes, sentences that spell new sentences when written backwards. Thus we have the lyric, “Go hang a salami, I’m a lasagna hog,” sung with an impeccable Dylan twang. Brilliant stuff. Enjoy!
One day, I will make this list….Todd
David Horowitz’s List of 100 Most Dangerous Professors in the U.S.
The Professor’s Colleges and Universities
Arcadia University: Warren Haffar
Ball State University: George Wolfe
Baylor University: Marc Ellis
Boston University: Howard Zinn
Brandeis University: Gordon Fellman, Dessima Williams
Brooklyn College: Priya Parmar, Timothy Shortell
Cal State University, Fresno: Sasan Fayazmanesh
California State University, Long Beach: Ron (Maulana) Karenga
City University of New York: Stanley Aronowitz, Bell Hooks, Leonard Jeffries, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Columbia University: Lisa Anderson, Gil Anidjar, Hamid Dabashi, Nicholas De Genova, Eric Foner, Todd Gitlin, Manning Marable, Joseph Massad, Victor Navasky
When there aren’t any posts in a while…
Mel B. goes crazy. It’s late. She’s got a password to the blog. There isn’t a category that really fits insane tripe.
What happens when she sees a picture of Donald Trump, these thoughts come tumbling out.
My fantasy is that someone will sneak into the Donald’s sumputous bedroom
one night and give him a haircut.
Every time a see a picture of him, I look, in vain, to see where the bald
spots would be. Sometimes I imagine I can see something through a trick of
light.
I’m just tired of guessing.
Have some respect. We don’t believe that haircut. Many men look sexier bald (though I don’t believe it would help you.)
And if it’s really your hair, then get a decent haircut. It’s like a small
furry animal died on your head.
Now that I’ve written this, someone will carry out my evil plan and the
Donald will buy and sell and buy and sell me a dozen times.
Ah well. At least my curiosity will be satisfied.
Just a little something that came across on The Wittenburg Door Insider recently. Too funny not to share.
I just have to share this with you all. Oh, the possibilities. It’s Monk E-mail from CareerBuilders.com. Choose a chimp, dress them, place them and you have three different ways of making them speak. One of those ways is ultra-fun because you can use your phone and CALL IN a recorded message in your own voice! Send it on to friends and/or co-workers from there. The way I figure it, any time you have a talking monkey, life is good.
(I’d insert the image here but I’m having trouble uploading photos too.)
I am just testing the photo upload feature of WordPress. Following is an image I took from the catalog of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. It’s an anti-war poster from Vietnam.
The above picture is a linked thumbnail. When I tried to use the original, it defaulted to an unlinked thumbnail. I think the reason is that the frame containing the text of a blog post is a fixed width. If the picture is too large for that fixed width, the editor uses an unlinked thumbnail by default. If you encounter this problem, you might try down-sizing your image in a photo editor such as Photoshop. In fact, let me try that now.
OK, that didn’t work. This requires some more research.
…to be continued…
With strategies ranging from automated keyword filtering and Web site blocking to Internet traffic surveillance, the Chinese government is unmatched in its ability to censor and monitor its citizens online.
Of course, no system is perfect.
The OpenNet Initiative (www.opennet.net), an international human rights project linking researchers from the University of Toronto, Harvard Law School and Cambridge University, tracks Internet censorship and the techniques used to evade it. To surf the Web in China and elsewhere without censorship and in marginal safety, said John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor and a member of the initiative, the primary tool is an old standby: the proxy server.
A proxy server is simply a generic computer through which people who want to be anonymous drive Web traffic before it reaches their own machines. This helps dissociate a computer address from the Web sites its user has visited.
It’s not perfect. You never know, for instance, how trustworthy any proxy really is, and servers go up and down unpredictably. But people regularly use proxy servers for all kind of reasons — from the political to the pornographic.
Every day in China, Mr. Palfrey said, an underground economy of proxy server addresses comes alive — usually connecting to servers made available by volunteers around the globe. These addresses are passed along and traded, using elaborately coded language, on electronic bulletin board systems or chat channels.
Elsewhere on the Web, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) helps maintain Tor, a communications network that helps make Internet communications anonymous, and it appears to be accessible from within China. Peacefire.org offers a program called The Circumventor that lets anyone turn a Windows-based machine into a proxy, allowing others to use it to circumvent local Internet restrictions.
Even two small commercial companies, Dynamic Internet Technology and UltraReach Internet, offer software or Web services that try to poke holes in China’s “great firewall.”
Of course, these precious few leaks are most likely little consolation for the dozens of Chinese citizens languishing in prison for saying or doing the wrong thing online. And they are all the more reason that human rights workers keep discussions of circumvention tactics short — and vague.
“I don’t ever want to make it any harder for people,” Mr. Palfrey said.