Samizdata makes my day.

"Culinary".

For some unfathomable reason I found this gem in the pikiwedia entry on ducks highly hilarious.

A classic example of this problem....

keine ahnung ob diese Rosa Riedl auch ein schutzgespenst ist; den nervigen hausmeister-posten und gschau und gwand teilen sie ja eh schon - nur die strassenbahn zum drunterfallen fehlt uns hier...

The object of contention is Halva, which I recently found at Coles (one of the big supermarkets here) and simply had to buy. Looks like Conny likes it :-)

"Lucky" must be his middle name -- and "Clumsy" his first: a fellow in Frankfurt fell down an elevator shaft, and landed on a woman who had "been there, done that" 24hrs earlier. He stayed awake, she stayed unconscious; he was not hurt while she is in bad shape.

How exactly one manages to fall into an elevator shaft despite knowing the thing is being repaired, is a tad beyond me.

A snippet from the classic Owed to a Spell Chequer:

I halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plane lee marques four my revue
Miss steaks aye ken knot sea
...

Reminds me a bit of what openoffice's spall choker did to one of conny's homework texts recently...

(This title constitutes an obscure in-joke for Austrians. No alkbottles were harmed making this joke.)

In the news today: Australian Senator arrives at Parliament dressed as a beer bottle. My first thought: "When in Rome^WACT..."

ABC has the story complete with pics.

Das Inserat hier ist grad eben vorbeigekommen, sehr schräg... Dazu passend die folgende Headline von gestern: Ein Abgeordneter in Mississippi (selber blad) hat einen Gesetzesvorschlag eingebracht, nachdem es Restaurants verboten werden soll, Blade weiter zu füttern. Welch Brilliante Idee.

In Obelix' Worten: ils sont fous, ces americains. Completement fous!

Townsville might be a good place to learn golf quickly - or else. Gives a whole new meaning to the term "water hazard".

This stuff is pretty cool I think. I found that one the funniest construct.

The QLD Transport Authority was (or still is?) running one of those safety awareness campaigns, with the slogan "Rest or R.I.P.", complete with huge billboard ads showing a white pillow and said slogan.

(see pg. 5 of this flyer for an idea of how that looks).

Driving up to Ikea and rob's place yesterday, I went past the driver training centre at Mt. Cotton, which sports such a huge billboard ad.

It also has a neighbour/vis-a-vis, which is announced on the road signs around the place in the same size as the training centre: the neighbour is a crematorium. Driver training turn left, Crematorium turn right. Easy, but don't you forget it!

I wonder which institution was there first, and who decided to show that particular ad facing the road and the crematorium.

Apropos billboards and coppers:

Not for me. For him, apparently.

And of course, here's the ObXKCD:

You should have a look at the title attribute (mouseover usually shows it) that Randall has come up with.

Tim Kreider has a nasty kind of humour, and he's observant, politically-INcorrect and draws wicked weekly cartoons.

And of course there's the title of his mad angry tome: The Pain -- When Will It End?

The Archive and the Enemies section are especially recommended.

...can indeed be odd. Very odd.

The phone rings. Hmm, an external call, maybe I should get ungrumpy. Alright. "hello, this is alex speaking."
"hello, is this mr. garagedoors?" (some east-european accent)
huh? "no. no garage doors here."
"i'm calling because of right motor on my garage door doesn't work."
...
*sigh* "this is a university."
"oh, i must have wrong number. sorry." *click*

Hamming-coding for phone numbers NOW!

A pretty fun writeup of the 11 worst toys. Not in my book, though: worst, I'd say, only in the opinion of the bloody landsharks, ahem, liability lawyers; what a PITY that these things got recalled! I'd have *loved* to see more unthinking proto-idiots kill themselves...

On this happy note of unmitigated antisocial ranting we conclude this Christmas bulletin.

das material vom Österreich Institut zum deutschlernen beinhaltet auch auszüge aus Indien, dortamts im schönsprech "Filmdidaktisierung" getauft. Schon schön deppat wenn einer grad den film zum lernen kriegt; den verstehns ja schon links von Kufstein nimmer mehr. "europasiegel für innovative sprachprojekte", my ass...

I like the xkcd comic strips very much, but reading comics on lotsa pages sucks. dailystrips doesn't come with support with xkcd, and I couldn't find anybody else's setup to steal. This definition snippet takes care of xkcd.

strip xkcd
        name xkcd
        homepage http://xkcd.com
        type search
        searchpattern <img\s+src="(http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/[^"]+.png)"
        matchpart 1
        provides latest
end

I wonder: did Adam+Eve succumb to this problem when they took that bloody apple?

Just found this guy via Boingboing: This one I like a lot. He also has a nastier side. Enjoy.

Japanese crows fight dirty: in Tokyo they're taking down (pole-strung) fiber cables because the stuff apparently makes good nesting material. Result: loads of people without Internet access.

Propaganda idiots at work: Dear Captain Copyright, it is with great pleasure that I hereby violate your absolutely moronic IP disclaimer, which shows that you have no clue whatsoever about technology or anything else for that matter.

In short: you are total wankers. Now, please stop linking to yourself and do vanish in a puff of logic as your own site is very much "damaging or cause(ing) harm to the reputation of, Access Copyright".

The disadventure hits it spot on. *sigh*

From worth1000.com comes this contest entry titled "an early art project by young MC Escher".

Goddam, it feels like the Endless September all over again: hordes of clueless, reckless, dumb twits invade a world. Again, the fools themselves are not the guiltiest party but rather the provider of the sucky service (who didn't bash them with the netiquette first) should rot in hell.

I'm a "mischievous webmaster"! (Thomas Scott says so, so it must be true.) As a matter of fact, I'm a non-compromising utter bastard. Therefore I do my best to make the experience of looking at (a number of) myspace user pages a...memorable one.
(naturally I don't discriminate against normal people: having no referrer header is fine by me. Copying images onto your own machine and serving it from there is fine by me as it's unavoidable.)

A short reminder from your friendly webmaster: DO NOT HOTLINK TO ANY OF MY IMAGES, OR ELSE. The "else" part can be seen at these places, brought to you by the magic of

perl -ne 's/&/&/g; m!"(http://[^.]+\.myspace.com/[^\"]*)"! || next;
{$1}||=1 && print qq|<a href="$1">|.++.qq|</a>\n|;' </var/log/apache/access.log 

(Note that not all links work as I'm too lazy to strip the ephemeral gunk from the urls.)

(more...)

There are people who just don't deserve to be alive. Responding to spammers is stupid, but dragging thousands of other recipients into it makes it a capital offense. A recent email to the debian-security list supports my assertion:

Subject: Re: Sell Your Organs Online!
From: "kwd" <kwdowse@mts.net>
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2006 17:57:20 -0700 (Fri 10:57 EST)
To: <jkeon@rcn.com>
Cc: <debian-security@lists.debian.org>

so what's this all about? get back to me with a list of what's worth what.

"Brain: $0.1 (as yours is too small)
Fat and skin: $0.5/kg (let's make some soap, shall we?)
Eyes: $10/pair (please gouge them out with a clean teaspoon only and pack them in dry ice straight away before couriering them over.)"

(from the NonSequitur archive which offers only the last month)

I'm in a bad mood, therefore I think I'll make the non-accessible logo image you like so much into a redirect to a big tubgirl image, it'll make your site look much better. (Now my friends know what kind of mood I'm in.)

You may find it TMI that bloody Google spits out tubgirls galore without even disabling the evil "SafeSearch" crap.

...10 minutes later...

Done. Enjoy! <sfx: evil laugh>

Looks like she didn't like the 1278x956 tubgirl image, but I really can't understand why...

Now she has even put an email address on her website, so the Big Hammer treatment must have helped a bit. 10 brownie points for me! (I really do enjoy being evil, sometimes.)

The occasional spam titled thus always cracks me up so badly. (Sometimes I'm easily amused.) A replica of what? (And what woman, anyway?)

But the content...my, these spammers apparently believe in Truth In Advertising more than normal marketing assholes! (how that works out when selling fake Rolexes I don't know, but extrapolating from election results I infer that there are gazillions of sufficiently stupid fools)

The spam goes on like this:

Get the Finest Rolex Watch Replica

...in a combo with the "Yes, I'm that stupid!" T-shirt.

"We only sell premium watches. There's no battery in these replicas just like the real ones since they charge themselves as you move. The second hand moves JUST like the real ones, too. These original watches sell in stores for thousands of dollars. We sell them for much less."

Amazing! A watch with a second hand that ACTUALLY MOVES!

"- Replicated to the Smallest Detail
- 98% Perfectly Accurate Markings
- Signature Green Sticker w/ Serial Number on Watch Back
- Magnified Quickset Date
- Includes all Proper Markings"

I love the part about the 98% and the Signature Green Sticker...suppose without that it wouldn't be a Genuine Fake Rolex Replica Premium Watch my nonexistent woman should drool over.

If you read this in a Debian package announcement, would you think of work-safe occupations or guba-style activity?

sextractor -- Source extractor for astronomical images.

Thought so. The author is proudly getting his rocks off with those super asstronomical pictures.

Hehe. Two of this year's IgNobel prizes have been awarded to Australian academics: one team got the biology prize for figuring out that stressed frogs stink differently from normal frogs. (But hey, they also found an pigeon-be-gone smell that seems to work.)

What I found way more fun, was what the ABC news nicely headed "Watching paint dry": two guys from UQ in Brisbane devoted their entire life to an experiment as exciting as, *drum roll*, watching pitch drops drop. Which. doesn't. happen. very. often. The experiment started in 1927, and one of the fellows already died - of boredom, I assume. The IgNobel fellows thought this commitment worth the physics prize.

Some MS weenie tries to recruit Eric Raymond. Much hilarity ensues, including his response (where this entrie's title comes from).

The "Australian International University" is a brilliant spoof by some pissed-off Oz academic. (Not me!) He made it into a variety of papers already (owing to newspeople without brains, humour and/or the necessary academic cynicism).

Some pearls to follow:

"The Australian International University website is produced by an organisation called Academic Jihad. Academic Jihad has sleeper cells spread throughout the Australian university system and is poised to unleash a merciless firestorm of pedagogy on unsuspecting students, both local and international."

"Here at the Australian International University we have rationalised the normal system of different university faculties into a single faculty. We realised that most of the other faculties were not generating sufficient income and were having a negative effect on the overall marketing plan of the university. As a result, the Australian International University only has one faculty - the Faculty of Business."

Cynical, me? No way!

Source: the ever-brilliant samizdata blog

Kiwis are cool, and this kiwi and his kids are no exception. The embedded content sucks, however, so here's a link to the actual movie.

Evolve On!

(Not a surprise for anybody with a shred of common sense; but this instance at least is funny.)

On Friday, Ms Robertson sent a letter to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, near Los Angeles, asking directors to take fish off the cafeteria lunch menu, adding: "Serving fish at an aquarium is like serving poodle burgers at a dog show."

Now what's wrong with that? I guess if poodles tasted any good...

I hope the members of this "Fish Empathy Project for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals" (Judean People's Front, anyone?) show their empathy with the fish by not breathing any more air. Soon, please.

Link to the news article

(more...)

This is "Bad Table", a piece of real-world furniture made and sold by a Vancouver Company (fittingly called "Straight Line Designs"). (To the designers of their flash eye cancer webshite: here's a nickle, kids, get yourself a real editor and a copy of the relevant RFCs.)

If only I had the money for such practical jokes...*dream*

Subject: Re: a sad host
From: Brian Kantor
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 05:28:34 +0000 (UTC)
Newsgroups: alt.sysadmin.recovery

Garrett Wollman ... wrote:
>Yeah, it is kind of sad when machines have to be rebooted weekly.
> 4:15PM  up 409 days, 22:02, 1 user, load averages: 12.34, 9.87, 8.01
>-GAWollman

Or yearly, even:

>Last login: Wed Apr 20 15:56:09 2005 from karoshi.ucsd.edu
>10:26PM  up 1453 days, 18:20, 3 users, load averages: 0.35, 0.17, 0.15
>-----------------------------------------------------------------------
>[brian] 1 : 

*hehe*

MS UK, transatlantic offspring of the Evil Empire is sponsoring a short film competition, titled "Thought Thieves".

"The theme of your film should be about how intellectual property theft affects both individuals and society."

The entry form clearly shows its origins:

"...Should I be selected as a finalist in this competition, I confirm the following: 7. I will formally license on terms acceptable to Microsoft, all intellectual property rights in my film and agree to waive all moral rights in relation to my film if requested to do so..."

Pot. Kettle. Black. Assholes.

Link to the boingboing article

VI "Improved"

"It's made out of poo, but also it's so Aussie."

say Joanna Gair of Creative Paper Tasmania who is the manufacturer of a paper made from roo dung. Which seems to be a solid seller despite looking like, well, shite. King Midas would be impressed.
Link to the ABC's story

Google Maps helps us to identify the greatest liar.
(more...)

sagt die Bayreuther Polizei. Gut so, das wär ja noch schöner! Meine Hochachtung für den Scheiße-verzierer; viel stinkige Arbeit aber eine schöne Idee.
Link zu einem von vielen Artikeln

This is about as silly as the arguments the Content Cartel wants us to swallow.
Source: Cigarro & Cerveja

"A Sampling of Mathematical Folk Humor", published by the AMS. Contains pretty cool silly things like this:

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: Fermat: It did not fit on the margin on this side.

Link to the article (PDF) (via Monochrom)

How about this OZ gem? An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces. That one won one of the Ignobel Prices last year.

The engineering winner, and IMHO highlight this year, is US patent 4,022,227: the comb-over baldy man hairstyle. greed and stupidity, a mind-boggling combination.

"Being a maintenance programmer is such a privileged joy and honor. I get to spend anywhere from eight to twelve, sometimes as many as sixteen straight hours a day locked in an eight by eight cube grinding my ass out writing code that you freaks don't appreciate."

What a beautiful rant, make sure to read this while it's still there.
Link to the rant

I like the Go Faster Wheels in particular.

This thing is a photoshopped fake, by the way.

This spam just came in via Tiscali UK. Apparently the spammers have discovered the magics of Babelfish. But true to form they botched it: the babblefish mangles (apparently) reasonable English into hilarious stuff quite totally unlike German...
(more...)

The shrub:

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

Kerry:

"We will double our special forces to conduct terrorist operations!"

I'd say they're both crooks.

Link to the press release (fourth paragraph from the bottom).

Jake Kaufman is evil. And a Bastard. A Tricky Bastard...

"IRC is a network full of chat rooms (or "channels") where a lot of scary internet people (or "perverts") hang out.
...
so i replaced eliza's tiny, boring script with a massive dumb blonde script that has like 3,800 responses on all sorts of topics, but mostly sex. jenny18 is very horny and she loves talking to horny guys. and everyone knows the best place to talk to horny guys is on dalnet irc sex channels."

And he took jenny18 there. jenny18 passed the sex Turing test with flying colors, but a lot of the dalnet denizens didn't pass anything...except pass for fools, that is.

"this goes to show that lots of challenge in AI is in speaking naturally, and on the internet most people speak like idiots, so you can sort of cheat around a lot of things."

Jake's article on speaking like an idiot is a lot of fun to read, too.

...meint zumindest die deutsche Rechtsprechung. Ich bin sicher die Österreichische variante ist genauso hirnrissig und verkneif mir das 'saupreussen, gsöchte!'...

"Der Wertsack ist ein Beutel, der auf Grund seiner besonderen Verwendung im Postbeförderungsdienst nicht Wertbeutel, sondern Wertsack genannt wird, weil sein Inhalt aus mehreren Wertbeuteln besteht, die in dem Wertsack nicht verbeutelt, sondern versackt werden."

Link zu mehr Details

"Five days after arguing that the Eolas browser plug-in patent should be invalidated as obvious, Microsoft pocketed a patent of its own for 'Computer programming language pronouns', which covers the use of ellipses, blanks, and ditto marks as substitutes for names in a computer programming language. Perhaps the USPTO was won over by the patent's eloquent conclusion: 'Eliminating names is a substantial benefit as programmers dislike creating names.'"

Link to this glorious patent

The answer is SEVEN:

1. One to deny that a lightbulb needs to be replaced.
2. One to attack and question the patriotism of anyone who asks questions about the lightbulb.
3. One to blame the previous administration for the need of a new lightbulb.
4. One to arrange the invasion of a country rumored to have a secret stockpile of lightbulbs.
5. One to get together with Vice President Cheney and award a one million dollar no-bid contract to Halliburton Industries for supplying a lightbulb.
6. One to arrange a photo-op session showing Dubya changing the lightbulb while dressed in a flight suit and wrapped in an American flag.
7. And finally one to explain to Dubya the difference between screwing a lightbulb and screwing the country.

Source: monochrom bagasch

The rest is german, cause that's the langugage this message pretends to use.
(more...)

Austria's minister of the interior is a dimwit (and should stay in the interior where he's less embarrassing): while visiting Iceland he said in a press conference that Reykjavik has 400 surveillance cams which could be monitored live on TV. His source: a TV documentary. However, all he had seen was a Icelandic fiction film named "Citizen Cam".

(The story made it on page 2 of Iceland's largest newspaper - but they mixed up their pictures of the minister...by chance?)

The Austrian Arbeiter Zeitung has been made available online. As this piece of contemporary history rests in peace since 1989 you won't find much current news in there.

Hold it. On reading a couple of sample pages I retract the last statement: nothing notable has changed in the last 30 years. Politicians are still all crooks. Bickering, idiocy and greed still rule.

Anyway, it was interesting to look at my birthday's news.
Link to the archive

MS's newest conquest: the hyperlink. This is so silly that I couldn't even muster the annoyance to move this post into the anti-everything topical area.

"The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER."

No wonder their software behaves as if written by braindamaged lemurs on crack: it is.
Link to this gem of sage advice

This tool mixes layout from one site with content from another. Hilarious effects ensue.

hmm, slashdotted or what? It's gone. Bummer.

IKEA is a fully immersive, 3D environmental adventure that allows you to role-play the character of someone who gives a shit about home furnishings. In traversing IKEA, you will experience a meticulously detailed alternate reality filled with garish colors, clear-lacquered birch veneer, and a host of NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS (NPCs) with the glazed looks of the recently anesthetized.

Truly Lovely.
Link

Am Anfang war das UML-Diagramm wüst und leer. Da sprach der Consultant: "Es werde ein UseCase!" - und es ward ein UseCase und er sah das es gut war. Und er trennte die Akteure von den UseCases und es war das Anforderungsdiagramm. Dieses waren die ersten 2 Millionen Lewonzen. -- Boernout Schultz, 29.08.03

paßt sehr gut zum Fachbegriffe der Informatik lexikon.

...as flem sees things: not-king george and his exploits.

sorry guys, this silly poem is in german, as is the Programmer's Erlkönig.

...but Zen Tech Support is. The I Ching also can help to cope with your subjects.

For further reading I recommend the BOFH stories and TCP Towers. Of course bofh.* and asr are important media, too.

One definitely should care for one's admin properly, or you'll discover the truth the hard way:

Meddle not in the affairs of sysadmins,
for they are subtle and quick to LART.

Therefore: RTFM!
HTH && (HAND || FOAD)

Fortunately (for us BOFHs) many of the dumbest people on earth auto-darwinate themselves, and the methods and results are hilarious.

I won't talk about Dilbert and userfriendly, they are must-sees anyway..

This is a very good compilation of computer jokes. There's the list of toaster makers^W^Wcomputer companies and the famous methods of how to shoot yourself in the foot, but see also other Unix methods. Internet...On A Stick is cool! Attrition has a nice picture gallery.

As a discerning BOFH, you should never be without your O'Re*lly...ahem, though.
Don't miss the other series of O'Really designs.