Ramblings… nonsensical ramblings… wildly nonsensical ramblings…
This has been around… well, for a long time. But I was recently re-acquainted with it.
You can visit the versions of webpages past… such as the long since departed StockMaster, or our old friend Buildscape.
Some of it is quite amusing, such as Google circa 1998. It’s also helpful to find something like JavaRSS.com website before it got hacked and left for dead…
From BBC – Foster’s hops on green bandwagon
The technology – using bacteria which consume sugar to generate power from brewery waste water…
As bacteria consume water-soluble waste from the plant such as starch, alcohol and sugar, the battery will produce clean water and electricity.
I don’t agree with everything he’s saying, but it’s about time a Democrat stood up and said what he’s saying… ladies and gentlemen, here is former Senator Mike Gravel at the South Carolina Democratic Party debates…
(7 minutes)
The following video shows an impressive feat — an amateur takes on 9 master chess players and comes out with a winning record. How does he do it? Luckily, he explains (most of) his tricks at the end of the video…
(10 minutes long)
From the San Jose Mercury News:
IRS forgives last-minute filers delayed by TurboTax glitch
The Internal Revenue Service said Wednesday it would not impose late fees for users of the popular TurboTax and ProSeries software who missed the tax-filing deadline because Intuit Inc.’s servers became overwhelmed by a flood of last-minute returns.
Uhh… correct me if I’m wrong, but there was no surprise that tax filing was due on April 17th… don’t you think Intuit should have been prepared for this?
From Boing Boing: Vonnegut’s rules for short stories…
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
The news is that Kurt Vonnegut has shuffled off this mortal coil. We will miss him.
I remember going to a guest lecture by Mr. Vonnegut back in college, where he was impressive and irreverent at the same time. Duke would only grant guest lectures to speakers who agreed to have a question and answer period after their speech, and he agreed to those terms.
After his speech, he got to the question and answer period… he offered up, “does anyone have any questions?” Barely a second later he continued, “No? Thank you, and good night.”
Irreverent all the way.
This is what knowledge really is. It is finding out something for oneself with pain, with joy, with exultancy, with labor, and with all the ticking breathing moments of our lives, until it is ours as that only is ours which is rooted in the structure of our lives.
-Thomas Wolfe (1900 – 1938)
On a lighter note, this is very amusing…
Alanis Morissette gives us a different take on the “My Humps” song. Oh how different things are when the timing is so contrasting…
