Herbert Geddes’s photos of Japan taken circa 1910. The most fascinating thing for me is how many of the places in the ‘Architecture’ section I recognize from my trip last year, and that they’re still completely recognizeable. A lot of the ‘Agriculture’ pictures also show how Spartan Japanese life used to be; they seem to come from the Hakone/Mount Fuji region.
Ultimately it all makes sense, and those left alive live happily ever after.
The Armageddon Flowchart. Needs slight updating as Jerry Falwell is already having his bottom roasted in the Gehenna, but otherwise it’s pretty much spot-on…
The ride of his life, indeed!
Man’s wheelchair becomes stuck to semi’s grille, becomes front-row seat for a four-mile wild ride. I’m imagining a sort of “Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove” kind of scenario here…
It’s one part Big Brother and one part voyeur.
Interesting sightings on Google Maps’ Street View. Always be on your best behaviour, you never know if you’ll find yourself on this modern ‘candid camera’ one day…
Like Memento, only in real life.
Anteretrograde amnesia. “I have no short-term memory. I know who I am and all about myself, but since my injury I can’t make any new memories. Everything fades. If we talk for too long, I’ll forget how we started. I don’t know if we’ve ever met before, and the next time I see you I won’t remember this conversation.”
The Googlebot.
Here’s a little story I came up with while reading this XKCD entry and noticing the “sinister Google projects” item… it’s based on an old joke everyone in IT already knows, but I just figured I’d flesh it out a bit. Technically I published it on reddit first, but it is my story! Continue reading The Googlebot.
Halo 2 for PC: part 1, the ugly.
I’ve been looking forward to playing Halo 2 for a while now. Not being as much of a gamer as I once was I’ve decided to skip this current generation of consoles — when they’re available at all they’re quite expensive, and the console game prices are just insane. I have no desire to spend $500 just so that I can spend a further $60-$70 PER GAME in order to have fun and relax. I mean, there are limits. So, to play Halo 2, I had to wait for the PC version to come out, and I just bought it earlier tonight. Well, I haven’t even played yet, and it’s proving exceedingly annoying already. Why? Because it’s made by a company whose motto is “you’ll bloody well do what we tell you and sign up for what we tell you to sign up for and you’ll like it.”
So, how did the other 94 reach their decision?!?
Only 6 Senators out of 100 read the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq released two days before the Iraq war authorization vote. Just 6. And one of them urged all the other Senators to vote against the war, quite strongly. If you’re wondering why US foreign policy seems so bollocksed-up, well, that’s because Congressmen are evidently too used to signing blank checks to even read a document that’s less than 100 pages long.
That’s how valuable ‘developers, developers, developers, developers’ really are to Microsoft.
Microsoft threatens its ‘Most Valuable Professional’ for writing a tool that supports Visual Studio Express. Rarely has a company done so much to threaten someone who seems to believe in it… or at least did, before Redmond released the hounds. I guess that monkey dance really was just a monkey dance…
‘We should enjoy our Coca-Cola while we still can…’
Dana Milbank covers the press conference by Khartoum Karl. How Milbank manages not to laugh in this report is beyond me…