Time to leave the country for a while...

...but I'll have to wait another six weeks.

Why this sudden urge? I'm damned tired of living in this administration. ( Behind here, find today's rant about U.S. government practices... )

Time to leave the country for a while...

...but I'll have to wait another six weeks.

Why this sudden urge? I'm damned tired of living in this administration. ( Behind here, find today's rant about U.S. government practices... )

Ten years later, it's still weird

I was scanning boingboing.net, which notes that next week is the 10th anniversary of the Heaven's Gate cult's group suicide, as they searched for enlightenment and a ride on a space ship flying behind comet Hale-Bopp.

You can still see the Heaven's Gate web site from 1997 (state of the art for its time, baby).

And there's a fairly dispassioned account of who the Heaven's Gate cult was on the Religious Movements web site.

I remember hearing about the suicide...and the self-mutilations the men went through (self castatration can't be pleasant)...and the fact that they were a web development company...and looking askance for a few weeks at all of the other web developers I knew.

And now, there's a green comet on the way. Could be dangerous. Lock up your web developers.

Ten years later, it's still weird

I was scanning boingboing.net, which notes that next week is the 10th anniversary of the Heaven's Gate cult's group suicide, as they searched for enlightenment and a ride on a space ship flying behind comet Hale-Bopp.

You can still see the Heaven's Gate web site from 1997 (state of the art for its time, baby).

And there's a fairly dispassioned account of who the Heaven's Gate cult was on the Religious Movements web site.

I remember hearing about the suicide...and the self-mutilations the men went through (self castatration can't be pleasant)...and the fact that they were a web development company...and looking askance for a few weeks at all of the other web developers I knew.

And now, there's a green comet on the way. Could be dangerous. Lock up your web developers.

Posted without additional comment

From the Boston Globe's, online edition:

SUPERIOR, Wis. --A 20-year-old man received probation after he was convicted of having sexual contact with a dead deer. The sentence also requires Bryan James Hathaway to be evaluated as a sex offender and treated at the Institute for Psychological and Sexual Health in Duluth, Minn.

[...]

Hathaway's probation will be served at the same time as a nine-month jail sentence he received in February for violating his extended supervision.

He was found guilty in April 2005 of felony mistreatment of an animal after he killed a horse with the intention of having sex with it.

I do draw the reader's attention to the dateline, however.

Posted without additional comment

From the Boston Globe's, online edition:

SUPERIOR, Wis. --A 20-year-old man received probation after he was convicted of having sexual contact with a dead deer. The sentence also requires Bryan James Hathaway to be evaluated as a sex offender and treated at the Institute for Psychological and Sexual Health in Duluth, Minn.

[...]

Hathaway's probation will be served at the same time as a nine-month jail sentence he received in February for violating his extended supervision.

He was found guilty in April 2005 of felony mistreatment of an animal after he killed a horse with the intention of having sex with it.

I do draw the reader's attention to the dateline, however.

Earliest known tech support calls

My mother sent me this link to a very early tech support call.

I suspect madfilkentist will find this amusing on several levels (as it is subtitled from the German Norwegian).

Subtitles in English, too. Very nice.

Thanks to jbriggs for the language corrections. *snicker* Original in Norwegian, with translations in English and Danish. Bit of overkill, but funny.

Earliest known tech support calls

My mother sent me this link to a very early tech support call.

I suspect madfilkentist will find this amusing on several levels (as it is subtitled from the German Norwegian).

Subtitles in English, too. Very nice.

Thanks to jbriggs for the language corrections. *snicker* Original in Norwegian, with translations in English and Danish. Bit of overkill, but funny.

Escaping from Ohio

Chatting with my sister Libby this afternoon, I heard reason #4,163 why I'm glad to have escaped Ohio 23 years ago: In one week in Elyria, Ohio, they've had 70 degree weather, 20 degree weather, an earthquake, and a tornado.

That's a lot of weather for anybody.

Why people from the plains moved back to northern Ohio: "Well, we liked the temperature fluctuations and the tornadoes...but Kansas just wasn't tectonically unstable enough for us."

Escaping from Ohio

Chatting with my sister Libby this afternoon, I heard reason #4,163 why I'm glad to have escaped Ohio 23 years ago: In one week in Elyria, Ohio, they've had 70 degree weather, 20 degree weather, an earthquake, and a tornado.

That's a lot of weather for anybody.

Why people from the plains moved back to northern Ohio: "Well, we liked the temperature fluctuations and the tornadoes...but Kansas just wasn't tectonically unstable enough for us."

Primary dirty tricks

A YouTube ad opposing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has been traced back...to an employee of a company doing digital strategy work for Sen. Barack Obama. The ad is a mashup of Clinton speech clips and the 1984 Apple Macintosh ad.

According to the AP story on L.A. Times site,

Philip de Vellis, a strategist with Blue State Digital, acknowledged in an interview with The Associated Press that he was the creator of the video, which portrayed Clinton as a Big Brother figure and urged support for Obama's presidential campaign.

De Vellis said he resigned from the firm today after he learned that he was about to be unmasked by the HuffingtonPost.com, a liberal news and opinion Internet site.

Blue State designed Obama's Web site and one of the firm's founding members, Joe Rospars, took a leave from the company to work as Obama's director of new media.

Neither the company nor Obama were to blame, said de Vellis:

He said he produced the ad outside of work and that neither Blue State nor the Obama campaign was aware of his role in the ad.

The ad is still on YouTube.

I'm just distrustful enough to wonder who was paying de Vellis.

Primary dirty tricks

A YouTube ad opposing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has been traced back...to an employee of a company doing digital strategy work for Sen. Barack Obama. The ad is a mashup of Clinton speech clips and the 1984 Apple Macintosh ad.

According to the AP story on L.A. Times site,

Philip de Vellis, a strategist with Blue State Digital, acknowledged in an interview with The Associated Press that he was the creator of the video, which portrayed Clinton as a Big Brother figure and urged support for Obama's presidential campaign.

De Vellis said he resigned from the firm today after he learned that he was about to be unmasked by the HuffingtonPost.com, a liberal news and opinion Internet site.

Blue State designed Obama's Web site and one of the firm's founding members, Joe Rospars, took a leave from the company to work as Obama's director of new media.

Neither the company nor Obama were to blame, said de Vellis:

He said he produced the ad outside of work and that neither Blue State nor the Obama campaign was aware of his role in the ad.

The ad is still on YouTube.

I'm just distrustful enough to wonder who was paying de Vellis.