Rorschach.net

Someone is part of an amazing marketing campaign or is being witty. The presiding judge on the recent DaVinci Code plagarism case has embedded a code into the ruling. Personally I find the judge a smartass on all counts. NYTimes has the details on the message.

Canada was a surprise. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it was not only beautiful; I also found some of the people I met to be the most wonderful combination of witty and earthy. I can’t figure out if it is a national characteristic – or just the company we visited has a brilliant HR director who’s hired the best the country has to offer. Continue Reading »

I’m not quite sure who Paul Robertson is but he’s put together a great animation. PBCBSF2k6 is the Kill Bill of 2d side scrolling beat-em-ups like Double Dragon or more recently Alien Hominid. It’s a video, not a game, but I’d sure play it if it were. You can stream it in low res in from YouTube in two parts or download the 113Mb mpg from mirrors on his Livejournal. It’s gory and violent but if you dig animation it’s worth a view.

Sorry about the unexpected downtime over the last two days. Turns out my brother’s website doesn’t play well with others on the shared server we used to be on. They sent a nice email thie weekend saying how sorry they couldn’t meet our(his) needs and good luck finding another provider. We figured we had a week or so to get things moved. On Monday the volume on his site used up resources so our accounts were suspended and told they wouldn’t be turned back on, ever.

Cue the mad dash to move our sites over to a new home. We’re on a virtual server now which means we’re sharing hardware but not OS (it’s kinda like VMWare). We’ve got the run of the place and no one to blame but ourselves. MY brother is working on his code and hopefully we can make a home here instead of being the vagabonds of the Internet moving from provider to provider after wearing out our welcome.

Part of the appeal of Kevin Smith is his willingness to let people see his life from the inside. He’s a good storyteller and I understand his speaking engagements are something to hear. Now he’s posted on his blog in 9 parts the entire cycle of Jason Mewes’ addiction to heroin and oxycontin. It’s a great story of about a kid embracing addiction, bottoming out, and eventual sobreity that spans over five years and tells you a little bit about who Jay and Silentbob really are. Well worth a read even if you find his humor sophomoric and crude.

Sometimes people take advantage of a crisis situation in order to change the status quo but it doesn’t really have anything at all to do with the crisis. Case in point: what possible terrorist defeating tactic is showing your driver’s license to the hotel clerks? Not really anything but now they’ve got your driver’s license on their files along with your credit card.

Another example is from a columnist who posted a blurb in the Pittsburg Gazette that I thought was funny. It’s short so I’ll just quote the whole thing here:

My son and I woke up Sunday morning and drove a rented truck to New York City to move his worldly goods into an apartment there. As we made it to the Holland Tunnel, after traveling the Tony Soprano portion of the Jersey Turnpike with a blue moon in our eyes, the woman in the toll booth informed us that, since 9/11, trucks were not allowed in the tunnel; we’d have to use the Lincoln Tunnel, she said. So if you are a terrorist trying to get into New York from Jersey, be advised that you’re going to have to use the Lincoln Tunnel.

Somebody just didn’t want trucks in the tunnel anymore and used 9/11 as an excuse to get their way. I leave the exercise to the readers out there to extrapolate any other things small and large that have been done in the name of 9/11 or terrorists or security that really have nothing to do with making us safer.

Discovery news is reporting that the recently captured capo di tutti capi, Bernardo Provenzano, used small paper messages to communicate with his organization called “pizzini”. He encrypted (and I use the term very losely) all the names in the pizzini by converting the letters of the alphabet to numbers, adding 3, and writing down the numbers. So a message saying we need to whack Paul Tobia would be encrypted to we need to whack 1942415 201855124. This is the kind of code worse than a cereal box decoder ring especially since he never changed the “adding 3″ part in all his messages over many years.

Just goes to show you you don’t need to be a genius to run a criminal empire.

Daniel Solove has taken Harvard law professor William Stuntz to task in a rebuttal essay for his article in the New Republic titled: Against Privacy and Transparency. If you have interests in the extent of government surveillance and usage of that information both articles are a good read. It is scary to think that people like professor Stuntz actually believe that a more intrusive government is a better government and the concepts of privacy and transparency are a “liberal” issue that conservatives should be against.

I’ve been hearing rumblings about folks starting up new workout routines of late and decided I should weigh in. (See the nifty pun here?) Continue Reading »

Yeah it’s old, but still damn funny. What if World War II was played out in a game of Command and Conquer? Might look a little like this.