WMD Backtracking Good link via Lying Media Bastards tracing the tangled web of rhetoric that goes from "We know for a fact that there are weapons there." to " They may have had time to destroy them, and I don't know the answer." Most amusing, even more so because all the quotes are dated and sources. Whether you were pro or anti war, it is funny to see what spin the US government puts on the whole WMD thing.

XEmacs dot file Very nicely set up .xemacs-options file. Via DECAFBAD.

Nigerian Email Conference Oh if only the 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference was real we'd know where to target the ICBMs..... The funniest part of it all I think is the $995 registration fee..... to a conference about ripping people off. Thanks for the great laugh Jeremy! Some more of this humor can be found here.

Reloaded Explained [fozbaca] Interesting read called Matrix Reloaded Explained.

Slashdot Randomness Wow, two +5 posts on /. in two days. Does this mean I win? I doubt it, only that if you say the right sort of thing, at the right time, attached to the right post, you can "manipulate" the /. moderation system enough to rack up loads of karma that you really don't care about :)

Now back to your reguarily scheduled randomness.

Climbing Quotes More Climbing Quotes gathered on the Net. Thanks Brad!

Climbing Humor In seeing the QTVR that I just posted I went to search for a nice Mt. Everest wallpaper and found some good climbing humor.

• Signs you've chosen the wrong guide to take you up Mt. Everest
• Climbing humor main page

I know Brad will enjoy these :)

Everest Panoramic Movie Wow, talk about a view from the top of the world! This was created by Roderick Mackenzie when he summited Everest on May 25, 1989. The 360 degree panorama from the top of Mt Everest is just awsome to look at, and runs dandy in linux under crossover.

Cat Video A must have for any cat lovers, kitten lovers, and anyone with a funny bone. This video is a collection of kittens and cats doing cute and amusing things. Via $otherprogrammer at $newjob. Enjoy!

TextMaker - a New Word Processor for Linux It looks like there might be a new kid on the block to compete with Abiword and Open Office. A German company called SoftMaker has produced TextMaker, a powerful word processor. According to the review over at linux and main it is "It is one of the best word processors -- maybe the best word processor -- I've ever used."

It's closed source, but there is a release candidate for download. I haven't tried it out yet, but it certainly looks and sounds interesting.

Sexy Case Mod Wow, a very cool and sexy case mod. Bascially a full scale model of a woman, looking a bit like Lara Croft, but not quite, made of styrofoam.... Via Kasia's blog.

Joke of the Day

They call it an Irish joke, but it's not really IMHO. Don't read if you're easily offended, but if you're not, it's quite amusing. Read more for the joke....

LOVE THE IRISH
" Bless me Father, for I have sinned. I have been with a loose woman."
The priest asks, "Is that you, little Tommy Shaughnessy?"
"Yes, Father, it is." "And, who was the woman you were with?"
"Sure and I can't be tellin' you, Father. I don't want to ruin her
reputation."
"Tell me, Tommy, I'm sure to find out sooner or later, so you may as well
tell me now.
Was it Brenda O'Malley?" "I cannot say."
"Was it Patricia Kelly?"
"I'll never tell." "Was it Liz Shannon?"
"I'm sorry, but I can't name her."
"Was it Cathy Morgan?"
"My lips are sealed."
"Was it Fiona McDonald, then?" "Please, Father, I cannot tell you."
The priest sighs in frustration.
"You're a steadfast lad, Tommy Shaughnessy, and I admire that.
But you've sinned, and you must atone..
You cannot attend church for three months.
Be off with you now.."
Tommy walks back to his pew.
His friend Sean slides over and whispers, "What'd you get?"
"Three months vacation and five good leads," says Tommy.

99 Bottles of Perl on the Wall Found a link to a 1998 perl "shortest way to produce '99 bottles of beer on the wall'" challenge, and discovered why Damian is my hero. Check out the full thread here.

Spyware Report News.com has a report on gator spyware, in what it does and how it doe sit. Nifty info via scripting.com.

Fark Funnies Not every fark story is worth reading for the comments, but this one is. The link is about a guy who lost his job for spending something like 60% of the time "collecting and organizing porn".... lets just say the farkers have some great things to say about this. Caution, not safe to be read by anyone who doesn't mind jokes about porn :)

Uphill Water MC Escher eat your heart out. James Dyson had an apparently logic defying display at this years Chelsea Flower Show.

A set of four glass ramps positioned in a square clearly show water travelling up each of them before it pours off the top, only to start again at the bottom of the next ramp.

It is a sight which defies logic, and has become probably the most memorable image of this year's show.

The full story is here. Muchos gracias Cthulhu.

A Trillion Pennies Ever wondered what a trillion pennies would be like? Well now you know.

Virus Myths Good article on Windows, IIS and Exchange myths from security focus. Thanks to < a href="http://members.shaw.ca/barrygray/">Bear.

More Half Life 2 Spooge I'm sure by now everyone has seen the brief Half Life 2 video (and if you haven't, go get it). I don't have the bandwidth to provide it, but I heard a little birdie say that the 500 meg .mov was uploaded to the usenet newsgroup alt.binaries.multimedia. I've watched the first half of the 15 minute video and all I have to say is wow. This game is going to completely and totally kick ass. The physics engine alone will be worth the price of a computer upgrade (and the game itself of course!).

So run, don't walk to your newsreader and search for "half" in you-know-where and start downloading (it's in rar format and pars are there as well.

Top 10 Things I Hate About Star Trek Forwarded to me by my buddy JasonM, Top 10 Things I Hate About Star Trek. My favorite:

2. The Holodeck.
I mean, it's cool and all. But do you really believe that people would use it to re-create Sherlock Holmes mysteries and old-west saloons? Come on, we all know what the holodeck would be used for. And we also know what the worst job on the Enterprise would be: Having to squeegie the holodeck clean.

Doom 3, Half Life 2 Trailers Online

"Wow" is the censored version of what I said when I watched these two trailers. I highly recommend using bittorrent to grab the Doom3 trailer, and then grab the half life 2 trailer (.mov). Both are just... "wow".

E3: 3 New Doom 3 Screens and Halo 2 Shots For the Doom 3 folks, there are some new shots here. They show floating attacking heads (not as scary as the big ass floating eye things from the original IMHO), the title screen, and some spider things (oooh, check out the lighting). As E3 has started it sounds like there will be more screenshots or a movie or something doom wise coming soon (fingers crossed).

There are some absolutely awsome shots of Halo2 here... wow, talk about nice lighthing and texturing. Course, it'll be another 5 years before those who refuse to buy an X-Box (or who can't afford it) will see anything Halo wise for the PC....

As always, Steve over at shacknews has the scoop.

New Keyboard Cuv found a shot of this keyboard, which at first looks completely bizzare, but if you read the labels, it sort of makes sense..... as he says, I'd love to try it out.

Courgar Attack Great link from fark about a guy who caught a salmon, strapped it to the back of his backpack, and wandered towards home through the bush. A cougar jumped him, and ran away. Some insighful and funny comments about this from MachuPichu:

The hunter returned to the area Wednesday morning, but the cougar wasn't located. Under state policy, cougars that attack humans are tracked and killed.

But it didn't attack him. You can tell by the way he's not dead. It only attacked the fish strapped to his back.

Typical asshats. Guy straps fish to back, and they want to destroy the cat. *sigh*. I think DirtyDeadGhostofEbenezerCooke says it best through:

Like wearing a porkchop suit in the tiger cage.

Personally I figured that people would realize that not wearing bait on your back was a key point in avoiding animal attacks by now, but hey, maybe it's just me.

Halo On PC Originally Halo was supposed to be a badass third person shooter that was just going to kick complete and total ass. It was (from what I've heard) developed by programmers on P200s to ensure that it didn't fall into the "requires an 18Ghz Dual P5" syndrome. It was going to be released simultaniously for PC, Mac and Linux. Then Microsoft bought the company, or the game, depending on who you talk to, to make it the premier title for the X-Box. This of course meant that the team had to re-do a lot, changing and adding a lot for the X-Box architecture, and of course the nice zippy graphics card and processor the X-Box offered.

At that time I knew we'd never see a Linux or Mac version, and I was very very doubtful we'd see a PC version. Howver, there is a story or GameSpy from the company (Gearbox Software) that got the job of doing the PC port. Good to see there is still a chance.

On a personal note, I'm sad to say I don't think that Halo matters anymore. If it had come out in 1999 or whever it was it was first talked about it would have been the best game ever (or something like that), but this many years later, there are other games that do what it does, and it has been leapfrogged technologically, so I don't think the impact it could have made will still be there. My hopes are still out that it'll be good though.

Nigerian Scam with a Twist I'm sure anyone with a "God Bless George W Bush" bumper sticker will be offended but this, but heck, I live to offend. Check this fantastic parody of your standard Nigerian scam email. Great to get a mid-day laugh!

Doom III Interview A very interesting article on doom 3 found via shacknews. Lots of tidbits about the story and the technology, and bascially how we're all going to have to upgrade when it comes out (no, no release date, but they will be showing video at E3 this year).

Top 75 Security Tools The top list of 75 Favorite Security Tools. Good stuff.

10 Things I Want in a Browser 10 Things I want in a Browser is a great post on the fuzzyblog, home of the dude who created feedster, the RSS search engine. I agree with many of his points, especially the one about bookmarks. Some of his bitches are addressed in some browsers already, but not all in one. Something to think on anyway.

Internet Timeline Kasia found a good Internet timeline with a more realistic perspective. For example:

• 1981 Bill Gates embarks on heroic and lifelong quest to piss off every person in America.
• 1994First piece of spam appears in USENET newsgroups and is quickly removed. "Well, that should be the last of that", say users.

And much more...

Fred the Slime Mold Plush Toy Almost as cool as the Dust Puppy plush toys is the Fred the Slime Mold plush toy, for those of you who GPF-Comics.

Teen Lingo For future refrence, and to help anyone trying to understand kids these days (beyatch), I give you Teen Lingo. Via LittleYellowDifferent, and I'm pretty sure it's not a joke.

The Matrix and Religion Interesing link via fark is The Gospal According to Neo, which points out some interesing parallels between the Matrix movie and religion.

iYear - the story of a man and his first year with a mac iYear is a great read for anyone thinking of jumping from a windows or linux world into the world of apple. Via a post on fozbaca.org.

Random Funny Stuff Reveal your secret nickname (mine's "strangler") and much other funkiness over at Cowgrass.com

Memories: Half Life 1 Preview In consideration of Half Life 2 being released in just a few months, Steve of shacknews has posted his first Half-Life 1 preview. Ah, the memories. Currently I'm making my way through the Half Life 1 expansion pack Opposing Force and all I have to say is "Damn you Tig! Curse you a thousand deaths for getting me sucked in to this game!" I'd forgotten how engrossing the game is.... it's graphics have even stood the test of time well. I have actually turned up the brightness of my monitor at times, and man, when I enter a seemingly normal area and suddenly the CD spins up and some music starts pumping out.... oh... man.... (yea yea, I'm a wimp, shut up!)

Reasons to Avoid the Matrix Reloaded As always, some pointlesswasteoftime.com has a great feature entitled 50 Reasons to Reject the Matrix: Reloaded.

Hacker Stickers Hacker Stickers is a thinkgeek type site selling shirts, stickers, etc. Neat looking place to get some new hackerwear....

Street Signs Via Raskal comes street signs explained at somethingawful.com

TopStyle HTML Editor I haven't used it yet myself, but apparently TopStyle is from the same guy who originally wrote Homesite, an HTML editor that didn't suck until it was bought by Allaire. From the screenshots it appears that a lot of Homesite is in TopStyle, which is a good thing. Of course, my HTML is done in Vim, so this isn't a lot of good to me :)

iTunes Man Great parody of "Piano Man" in the /. comments entitled iTunes Man.

Loyalty Day I'm not sure what to think of this, but all ya'll from the US now have another holiday, called Loyalty Day. Not sure if it's just another excuse to eat hot dogs and drink beer, or what is required (praying to a giant statue of W, not thinking anti-american thoughts...). I wonder if it is really just a way to celebrate W beating Saddam while his daddy couldn't (note that of course no one actually knows where Saddam is....). Either way it sounds a bit too 1984 for me.

Memorize 1000 Digits of Pi Nifty page found in the /. comments: Memorize 1000 digits of pi has some reasons for doing this, how to not memorize it, and tips on the best ways.

Man Amputates Own Arm This man has got to have the biggest balls I've ever heard of. Holy crap. After being pinned under a rock for two days, he amputates his own arm below the elbow, put a tourniquet on, then rigged up anchors for a rap down to the canyon floor, and met a pair of hikers on his way out.

Wow.