Mike DeWolfe : The Daily Edition

The $100 PC may be on its way, according to the Red Herring It will run on Linux, use AMD chips and have a 14" screen. Too bad I can't get one :(

This is almost as low brow as it gets: http://www.turdwords.com/ Thank Family Guy . Peter (dressed as a prostitute) offered a " Cleveland Steamer ." ew.

This article shows what life is like in the US right now. The quick summary: reporter goes to film Walmart opening in Lovejoy, Georgia. Police detain her in keeping with the US PATRIOT Act because a friend does plastic armor to Star Wars costumes. I don't know what fact this emphasizes more: police are stupid; Walmart is evil; or America is possessed by the devil.

Do you have weird questions about comics, cartoons and Hollywood? Look no further . Answers from long time insider, Mark Evanier. Neat read.

Vaacummed up the house. Wow: was it was a mass of filth that sucked in and held that recurrent cat-litter and crotch cheese ambiance. I could work for months to get this place liveable. The good news: people I know have far worse places. At one place, this couple had old chocolate cake and cups piled in amongst books and gaming debris-- I think they had a birthday in the Fall. Another guy (who moved into the place with a series of grocery carts) looked like a bombed out cellar. His place now looks like a game store/clothing store/computer store where somebody beamed out all of the shelves, fixtures and racks, leaving the stuff to fall in disheveled clumps. Strangely enough, these people all have smokin' and pristine computers. Come to think of this, this secondhand P400 laptop feels real good.

On the heels of "Common People" comes " You'll Have Time ". Go William Shatner. You're my hero.

Operation Oldtimer: Because so many elderly and disabled were being beat up in downtown Vancouver, Vancouver Police set up a sting operation to catch the pieces of crap who were beating up the weak. This is the reason why people shouldn't go soft on drug users. They are society's disease. Nobody cuddles a tumor and nobody should give drug addicts a walk. While downtown Vancouver was the subject of this police operation, Victoria too has its share of scumbags.

Snowballs. On a summer day, their icy cool would be welcome. In a pitcher of tepid iced tea, it would be an island of cool. If you don't like the snowball, leave it sit. It will melt. If you get a high speed snowball in the face, it can piss you off. But, in truth, it's really nothing. But, it's a big thing to someone who can't stand snowballs in the face. That's what a hot button is. Like saying, "You're fat. Lose some weight." Or, "Did your Dad move to Canada to dodge the draft?" For a lot of people, these questions would be non-issues. For others, they're a hot button. If someone asks you to just get over an issue, ask them to get over one of their pet peeves. Not subvert it. Not avoid it. Embrace it and completely get over it. If they can do that, you can that. If they can't take a snowball in the face-- take it as though it were nothing at all, take a second or third with the ambivilance of the first-- they have to respe...

Google Rank formula : http://ecommerce.insightin.com/search_engine_marketing/ranking_pagerank.html

When I was looking for this page , that showed Frodo after his corruption by the Ring. Before I found that, I first stumbled over this page . Why? Why is slash fiction needed?

In the spirit of the Apprentice and Episode III, Revenge of the Sith, I present: Sith Apprentice

from http://theforce.net/latestnews/story/Star_Wars_Trilogy_on_CBC_88906.asp: Canada's CBC is running the original trilogy on January 15th, 22nd and 29th. This isn't the original release or the Special Edition, but the DVD release. Saturday night's broadcast of 'A New Hope' had the cleaned up Jabba; the Death Star tractor beam controls in Aurabesh and all that. If the other episodes follow suit, the 29th broadcast should unmask the redone ending with Hayden Christensen.

Cool: an airless tire. Because it's airless, it won't suffer blow outs or deflations. http://www.gizmo.com.au/go/3603/

I have taken copies of the RecipeML archives , extracted them, posted them on my site and then made a C# .NET page builder to turn the XML into usable HTML. The Recipes up for grabs: http://mike.dewolfe.bc.ca/recipes/index.aspx Enjoy. I have another 3000 from the archive and I will post them later.

Did you want to see what Google sees? http://www.google.ca/search?q=inurl%3A%22axis-cgi%2Fmjpg%22&btnG=Google So many things in the world are web enabled. Google creeps through these networks and the result is stuff like security cameras laid bare by Google. My favorite is something I'm dubbing ChapelCam : http://24.234.139.139/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?camera=&showlength=1&resolution=320x240 A close runner up: The Imperial Palace floor webcam (it's a like a low-res version of CSI) http://24.234.255.102/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?camera=4&resolution=352x240

http://hiddenfrontier.com/ Francis Ford Coppola predicted that the advent of camcorders will cause a blossoming of new talent in film making. Wrong. Instead, it's lowered the bar so that anyone with a camera, a premise, some software and a video-in port can produce a series. Welcome to Star Trek The Hidden Frontier . An Internet only video series that doesn't pick up where the other series leave off: it kind of snugs in between the others like fanboy mortar. The acting and writing is of what could only be called, "Internet Quality." Nevertheless, the idea of delivering a series via the Internet is cool. What's interesting is that it does things that regular trek would only graze (gay relationships, obscure alien races, guest stas from other incarnations, ships not named Enterprises, etc.) . It does lend REALLY heavily (e.g. use of the GalaxyQuest theme song) to get the job done.

Walking north for 50 min. into a snowstorm SUCKS I stopped at one point to discover that my hair was frozen to my head. Facing north meant I got these specks of ice/snow in the eyes for most of the trip. Also, buses were nicely clustered so I missed every chance for a bus. E.g. Four buses went west on the University route. Two went east (I saw them from a block away).

I didn't know the size of my tires, so I used the Internet. First, I looked for tire information (for a suitable model): http://www.1010tires.com /tiresearch.asp?make=Dodge &year=1997&model=Caravan+SE +FWD next, I looked for a conversion chart to tell me what them codes and numbers mean: http://clubs.hemmings.com /clubsites/chevylist/tech/tire _size_conversion.htm Fun with the Internet.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/05/wal-mart_scam/ See: computers are good for something.

I've been tinkering with a new search engine. The first trick, was to build a parser to turn a recipe into an orderly format. The good side: all I needed to parse out is the ingredients. The bad side: funky recipes are not prone to parsing. My site doesn't really store recipes: it just organizes the data so that searches are relevant and the result link to the offsite resource. When I looked to see if anyone else was doing it, I found a recipe XML format (which is very easy to parse). It had some issues with that format, so I modified it a little . Then, I looked for a natural language parser. One site, Recipezaar, toiled under this task for two years ( http://www.decafbad.com/blog /2003/11/14/the_recipe_web ). I got version 0.1 in two weeks: a parser for foodtv.ca recipes. All of the sites are a little bit different, so I'm going to build a modified parser for each site I hope to crawl. If you want to add a recipe resource, please feel free: http:// dewolfe001 ....