Author: Mithrandir

Trade in/up your handheld for a Visor Edge.

Handspring, Inc. today introduced an innovative product trade-up program through which handheld computer owners can exchange almost any handheld computer for $100 toward the purchase of Handspring’s slim Visor Edge from Handspring.com. In addition, customers who already own a Handspring Visor handheld can pass it on to a friend or family member and receive the same $100 to put toward a new Visor Edge.

Cool. Now I can give my Visor Deluxe to my wife and get a deal on a better model for myself. Good news for us “early adopters.”

Unfortunately, I missed Towel Day. However, I just found a place to play the classic HHGG Infocom text game online.
I agree fozzy that the web in getting boring, but this just breathed a little fresh life into it for me.

Hey, all I said in the car coming home from work was, “You know, it surprises me that no one has made their cam picutres into their background for their website.”

This did not mean one SHOULD make your live cam as your background, I was just surprised no one HAD done this, considering the horrible sites I have seen on This Old Internet. I was in no way endorsing the activity.

Foz took it upon himself to prove that he is, indeed, totally aesthetically challenged.

Brian, that is undoubtedly the most FSCKING UGLY thing I’ve seen on the net since the original Fozbaca’s Realm.
You should be ashamed of yourself, and engel should be ashamed for encouraging you! I call shenanigans!

Re: Where did the fun go?
I’m with fozzy on this one…sort of. I think that it has something to do with the nature of “information overload.” Each of us can realistically only have so many major areas of interest, and those of us who have been serious netizens for a long time have by now exhaustively combed the web for tiny bits of trivia and information concerning our major interests. So we’re left with our secondary (or tertiary, or….) interests/hobbies to explore, which by definition aren’t as interesting (sic. fun) as the stuff we were hungry for. I know that this is the case for me. Every now and then, some new thing will catch my fancy, and I go on a surfing spree until I’m saturated with it. Fun for a short time, but we can’t expect to be entertained constantly on a relatively short list of topics.
BUT…I do think that we might be seeing the beginning of the mono-tainment of the net (a la AOL-Time Warner, etc). Face it, the more the net is controlled in terms of access and content by a select few corporations whose primary income is from entertainment dollars, the less they will be willing to allow on THEIR inter-network that will entertain us for free.

Then new trailer for The Fellowship of the Ring is OUT!!!
Real Player only – streaming or download.

Douglas Adams dies at 49.
This happened over the weekend, but I only just heard about it. Though some fozbaca readers might be interested to know this in case they hadn’t heard.
So long and thanks for all the laughs!
See the /. post here, or the CNN article about his death.

Somebody stop these bastards before they breed. Just stumbled on an article (an old one, but it still holds). It tells how far ASCAP is trying to bilk even more people for enjoying songs that they own the licensing rights to. Basically, groups going camping can’t sing songs like “This Land is Your Land,” or “God Bless America” around the campfire without paying a license fee to them, or risk a $5000 fine and six months in jail. The whole article is here.

I’ve seen this first hand. I used to work for the State Parks department, and not only did we have to pay license fees when local musicians sang covers of popular songs (why we had to pay them when we didn’t pick the musicians’ song list is beyond me), but they actually tried to make us take count of the number of times we sang Happy Birthday to camp kids so we could be billed for the public performances of that song.

As far as I can see, the only positive note about this debacle is that now when I’m at Applebee’s for my birthday, I can tell those singing, clapping assholes that I’m gonna turn them in if they interrupt my meal.

I agree with Mithrandir: the teaching system sucks. Ironically, what I want to do in my “old age” when I am no longer a console cowboy is teach. However, the problem is that I need to find a forum that doesn’t disgrace humnaity.

It is my hope, maybe my naivete, that compels me to say this:

ALL HUMAN BEINGS ARE GENIUSES

Now, let’s make a school system that teaches KIDS that they are geniuses; let’s teach them that they can change things; let’s teach them that the wisdom of a single person can be more powerful than the blabbering of a thousand fools.