Aimless Wandering

Snagged by the junk mail filter today:

From: nolsue Ewaniuk [mailto:nolsue.Ewaniuk@immobilienpark-potsdam.de]
Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2007 10:44 PM
To:
Subject: tnaulfno

http://XXXXXXXX/  (website removed - I don’t  want to  even remotely come close to driving traffic to this)

Hi

I have a successful career, great friends, and own my own home. My sex life was the only area where I was lacking

nolsue Ewaniuk

So, I get this random e-mail from a complete stranger who claims that their sex life was lacking, and I’m supposed to be stupid (or desperate) enough to just click on the link and go check out whatever this person is sending me?  Better yet, just what are they sending me?  The reason nolsue Ewaniuk’s sex life was lacking, or how nolsue Ewaniuk’s sex life improved?

 Bottom line though: If you meet nolsue Ewaniuk just remember - they (hell I’m not sure if it’s a he or a she) had (or still has) a crappy sex life.    Just thought you would want to know…

So in my daily blog reading I came across not one, but two ludicrous stories today…

I discovered the first one on of all places Apple Insider, as it loosely has to do with them. It seems that a South Carolina inmate with a history of filing wacky lawsuits has filed a complaint with the US District Court Middle District of Florida that accuses Steve Jobs of employing OJ Simpson as a hitman for the last 20 years! Oh but it gets better – supposedly Simpson has been Jobs’s hitman since the 1985 MOVE house bombing in Philadelphia, which Jobs started with borrowed pyrotechnics from Great White (I think he means the rock band).

The inmate Jonathan Riches who is serving an 8 year sentence for his role in an identity theft ring. He also claims that “O.J. has been providing Jobs with food blenders since the midwest flood of 1993″ (so?) and that O.J. also “paid Jobs to clone Dolly the sheep on April 20, 1998.” 

According to Mr Riches some of the other criminal enterprises that Steve Jobs is involved in:

Aiming nuclear missiles at Riches’ brain and Lance Armstrong’s bicycle.

Price gouging iPhone customers. According to Mr Riches: “On May 10th, 2007, I bought an Apple iPhone for $922.01 at the FCI Williamsburg commissary, now Jobs sells that same iPod for $199.”

This complaint was dismissed, but it’s not his first. The guy has a HUGE assortment of insane complaints in the past, all documented on his Wikipedia page. Check this one out:

On March 9, 2006, Mr. Riches filed his most famous^] and largest lawsuit. The civil rights lawsuit naming George W. Bush et al as defendants. The “et al” list continues for 56 more pages and includes 783 defendants (both living, dead, and non-entities) such as the survivors of the Holocaust, Pizza Hut, Dane Cook, Three Mile Island, Paris Hilton, Dennis Hopper, Mount Rushmore, the Ming Dynasty, Mein Kampf, “Various Buddhist Monks”, Medieval Times, The Da Vinci Code, and the celestial object Pluto.

The New York Times says that Google is also getting slapped with an insane lawsuit (probably not the first). Dylan Jayne alleges that his Social Security number turned upside down and scrambled spells the word Google… So he wants $5 billion in damages!!!! The HANDWRITTEN complaint (which is hysterical in its own right) that not only is his right to privacy being violated, but that the Plaintiff and defendants have a responsibility to fight the War on Terrorism. The complaint also details the plaintiff’s numerous run ins with authorities in his area, what’s unclear is if Mr. Jayne believes that Google is responsible for those incidents as well.

So once a month a co-worker and I give a presentation to one of our incoming classes.  As part of the presentation members of the class are required to introduce the two of us and read short bios about us.

It’s always interesting to hear what happens to our bios when one of the students tries to ad lib and make our introduction their own…

Take my co-worker, shortly after graduating high school she toured Europe with the group Up With People.  However, one person who introduced us decided to rename the group Up With THE People.  Which sounded like some sort of people’s liberation revolutionary group.  Up With The People, empowering the downtrodden massses and toppling governments in every nation they visit!

Then there’s my latest intro, instead of being introduced as graduating Magne Cum Laude, I’ve now graduated Magne Cum Latte.  I believe that was a grande, whole milk, full cafe latte - but it was my college years so I’m a little hazy on the details now.

The other night I went out to Colonial Williamsburg to play around with some night photography.  I got out there at about 9:30 and it was DARK!  It was so dark that I had to use the manual focus because the autofocus couldn’t get enough light to work.

While the results weren’t as go as I had hoped, there are lots of BIG trees that obscure things, the sequence below should be pretty indicative of the keepers.

I decided to shoot down the green at the Governor’s Palace.  The green has a few small lamps and the palace isn’t lit (this is Colonial Williamsburg after all), I was hoping that there would be some torches along the green but not this night.  It was dark, and I had to manually focus on a light in the tower of the palace.  This give you and idea of what I was dealing with, although it’s light compared to what I was looking at:

In all honesty, that’s much lighter than what I had because I could barely make out the outline of the building.  However with the shutter open for 10 seconds I got this:

I like this shot a lot.  Considering how dark it was, I thought that the Palace really came out well.  Although I just had to go a little farther - enter Photoshop.  A quick tweaking of the levels resulted in this:

This just blew me away.  Despite the low light, not only did the Palace show up extremely well - but so did the green in front of it!  This actually makes it look like the Governor’s Palace at Colonial Williamsburg is well lit at night - one might say in a very un-colonial fashion…

This evening I wandered into the Apple store in my current undisclosed location in order to kill some time.  I figured I would get a little hands on time with the iPhone.  As I start groping an iPhone a perky Apple Store Employee (iEmployee?) approached me.  So not expecting any real information, I ask her if she has heard anything about when the iPod Touch was shipping..

And she tells me “oh we got them today, they’re on display on the other side of that wall…”   … and I left a vapor trail over to the indicated wall where I WAITED IN LINE to check out the new Touch.

When I got up there, initial indications - it’s SMALL.  Typing is a little difficult, mainly because I was trying to use my fingernail to do things on the screen, however with the Touch (and probably the iPhone) you need to use your actual fingertip.  The only other negative I had in my first look was that the high gloss screen did pick up quite a bit of glare from the bright lights in the Apple store.

Soon… I’ll get one soon…

So I’m off on another trip, one I haven’t been looking forward to. Well, that’s not completely true the first half of the trip was to Washington DC and that part of the trip I was very excited about. I got to see some very good friends that I haven’t seen since we moved.  It felt good to be back with them, I only wish that The Boy and The Wife could have come along for that.

But I’m jumping ahead- because the trip didn’t exactly get off on a great start.  Let’s see… there was the mad 30 minute scramble to find the sync and charge cable for my phone… then the discovery that the battery in my noise canceling headphones had leaked - badly, so they no longer noise canceled.  Heck, they barely functioned as headphones…

Up at o’dark thirty to get to the airport because we’re a solid hour away from the airport, and as I’m loading the car I manage to break my cell phone case.  (When I informed The Wife of this story while I was in Chicago on my layover she freaked out… She thought I had managed to break yet another expensive cell phone, however it was just the belt clip on the case.  Phone is fine).

Thankfully for me that was the worst of my pre-flight incidents, so I commenced to people  watching….

First off, what’s up with the Clear Traveler program?  From what I’ve seen, all you’re doing is paying to go to the head of the line at security.  You still have to go through the metal detector, still have to take off your shoes, and still have to unpack your laptop…  BFD…

Note to other passengers - even if you speak Mandarin, the folks in the terminal around you STILL don’t want to listen to your cell phone conversation THAT YOU’RE HAVING ON SPEAKER PHONE!!!!  I thought that was the pinnical of cell phone rudeness right there.

Other than playing “spot the people coming back from Hawai’i” there wasn’t a lot of interesting stuff in the airports the other day.  It was kind of a let down…

BTW if you want to figure who is coming off the Hawai’i flights just look for the ABC Store and Hilo Hattie’s bags, they as easy to pick out as the Hawai’ian shirts…

Sacrifice a goat! http://www.reuters.com/article/email/idUSEIC47086020070905

It would seem that Nepal Airlines has been having some problems with one of it’s two 757’s.  The electrical problems have caused the airline to cancel some flights.

So, the airline sacrificed two goats in front of the balky aircraft in an effort to appease the Hindu sky god Akash  Bhairab.  Apparently the sacrifice has helped since the plane is reported to be fixed and flying again.

BTW the picture Reuters choose to go with the story - not a plane….  but a goat!

… I’d be pretty pissed today…

In case you didn’t hear it, Steve Jobs hosted a new round of Apple product announcements - and one of the things he did was announced that they were cutting the cost of the 8GB iPhone by $200! The folks I really want to see smacking their heads are the ones who WAITED ON LINE for 12 or more hours to get the phone for $599 a little more than 60 days ago… Now not only did they not have to wait in line in the first place - put apparently their device also manage to depreciate at the staggering rate of $2.99 a day! Heck for $399 it almost makes sense to me to buy one… I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an Apple device get such a drastic price cut period - let alone less than three months after release….

The device I have been waiting for - the one I decided would replace my iPod (which has been giving me grief for months anyway) has also been announced… The iPod Touch aka the phoneless iPhone will be shipping on September 28 in 8 and 16GB varieties. Take the phone out of the iPhone and you have an iPod Touch - and I hope to get one before our trip next month.

While the display and WiFi have me excited, I’m not too thrilled about the storage space… Granted I only have about 9GB of stuff on my 80GB iPod, but considering that I a)currently have an 80GB iPod and b) the new “iPod Classic” comes in 80GB and 160GB stepping down to 16GB seems a little daunting…. Especially since I would now own an iPod that could play video…

What I won’t be getting though is a new iPod Nano- or as engadget has been calling it the iPod Phatty…

Finally, on this iPod day - I bring you an old video that you may have seen - how Microsoft would have designed the iPod packaging…