I was looking over StatTraq today (a really cool statistics tool for the WordPress blog). I noticed I’d gotten a lot of hits from search engines for my Crazy Boromir post. I looked at the post and, what to my surprise, the links didn’t work! So, I scoured the web until I collected all the files for myself. Now, here they are for your viewing pleasure. (Also, the original post has corrected links.)

Boromir’s Imaginary Phone

Boromir’s Ninja Wizard Plan

Boromir’s Catapult Plan

It’s not real often I get serious (No, I mean it this time.) but I read a story this morning that just hits a little to close to home.

You probably know that Tammy and I work with the youth at our church. We both spend a lot of time on Xanga and MySpace keeping up with the kids’ lives and doing our best to look out for them. 99% of the time, it’s all good fun as we leave each other silly and encouraging comments. But once in a while, we have to sit the kids down and remind them that we live in a scary world. (I won’t name names, but you girls know what I’m talking about.)

Now, all you kids, I want you to read this and please try to let it sink in for more than 20 seconds. We love you all and want you to be safe. (Bracketed text added for clarity).

[Mr. Wonderful] contacted the [14 year-old] girl through her MySpace Web site in April, telling her that he was a high school senior who played on the football team.

In May, after a series of e-mails and phone calls, he picked her up at school, took her out to eat and to a movie, then drove her to an apartment complex parking lot in South Austin, where he sexually assaulted her, police said.

This particular Mr. Wonderful was actually 19, but even if he had been 17 or 18 or 35, what difference would that have made? What the heck was a 14-year-old doing talking to, much less meeting, a stranger that she met on MySpace. Judging by the fact that he picked her up from school, I’m guessing that she hid the whole thing from her mom until it was too late. Sound familiar?!

Two other similar MySpace rapes have happened just in the last year or so:

• Connecticut – 27-year-old man raped a 13-year-old girl.
• Wisconsin – 22-year-old man abducted a 14-year-old girl and raped her six times.

The article concerns a lawsuit filed against MySpace by the girl and her mom. The sad thing is that blaming MySpace for what happened is like blaming Ford when you get drunk and slam your car into a tree. It’s the old “Guns don’t kill people” argument and it’s just as true about the internet as it is about guns. It is your responsibility to make sure you (or your kids) are safe.

It breaks my heart that our young kids have to make such mature decisions, but if they don’t make grown-up choices, they may face very serious (more than just grown-up) consequences.

War is hell. No doubt about that. When a war lasts over twenty years, it’s even worse. Such is the case with personal computing platforms. The road is strewn with the corpses of the fallen: IBM, Commodore, Tandy, even Atari. We are left with the “Big Three”, Macintosh, Windows, and Linux. For years I’ve lived in the Windows world, and peered into the other two from a distance, rarely reaching out to touch the grass greener. At my last job, I brushed closest to them. I managed the web servers with Red Hat Linux and our primary client was a school district running entirely on Macs.

In that torturous year (torturous for more reasons than OS platforms) I gained a pretty good understanding of the philosophy behind each of the Big Three. Now for the first time, I have formulated a metaphor which, I believe, best describes how these things “think”.

Imagine your computer is a car, a utilitarian piece of machinery who’s sole purpose is to get you from point A to point B. When you slide into the driver’s seat, you are confronted with the operating system. The OS, then is the system of communication between you, the driver, and the mechanics of the car.

Let’s start with the left most end of the spectrum, the Macintosh. When you climb into your “iCar”, the first thing you notice is how plush it is. Soft, comfortable seats; huge windshield giving you a fantastic view of the road; and the best car audio system on the planet. Sure, it’s a little pricey, but what a ride! Once you’ve taken it all in, you decide to take it for a spin, but what’s this? There is no steering wheel! There are no peddles. Instead you have a single, big, shiny, back-lit button. It say’s “GO”. You press the button and miraculously the iCar drives you to work. “Brilliant!” you marvel. You press the button again, and the iCar drives you home. You never even had to look at the road. Then you decide to go out for dinner. “I think I’ll try that new Tex-Mex place,” you say. You press “GO” and before you know it, you’re sitting in front of the world’s best (and most expensive) Italian restaurant. “Wait. No. I want to go the the new Tex-Mex place. Besides, Italian gives me gas!” You press “GO” and the iCar promptly drives you to a newer, less reliable Italian place. “Are you deaf?! I said, ‘Tex-Mex’!” Before you know it, your parked outside of Pizza Hut. “Curse you, iCar!” you shout, banging the “GO” button with all your might. The iCar then promptly locks its doors trapping you inside until, hours later, you manage to kick out the side window and walk home.

In the center of the spectrum is Windows. The Win-mobile is exactly what you have come to expect from a car. Steering wheel, accelerator, brake, etc. There’s a radio, but each station plays more commercials than songs. There’s a CD player, but it destroyed your favorite CD last month, so you’re afraid to put another CD in it. You get behind the wheel and drive to work, battling traffic the whole way, bruising your behind on numerous pot-holes (program errors), cursing the tailgaters (pop-up ads), and around every corner is another construction zone (security update). After a grueling commute, you grudgingly get back into the Win-mobile to drive to dinner. You arrive at the Tex-Mex place only to find there’s a two-hour wait to be seated, because everyone in town decided to come to the same place to eat. The food is great, but was it really worth all the trouble?

Finally, on the right end of the spectrum, we have Linux. To your surprise, the car is totally free! You just walk up to the dealer, get in “car” (Linux is not real concerned with catchy names. Who needs marketing when it’s free?), and drive away. However, “car” also has no doors, no windshield, and no seat belts. If you want those, you’ll need to buy the Red Hat “car”. You decide it’s worth it. Now you feel a little more comfortable behind the… umm. Where’s the steering wheel? Oh, well, that comes standard with Suse “car” (but Suse has no doors), but if you really think you need it, you can get the wheel for free and bolt it on yourself. You do have you’re own wrench set, right? You manage to survive your commute, though you had to stop two or three times and tighten the bolts on your steering wheel, since the wrench wasn’t really the right size. Now it’s time for dinner. Where is that Tex-Mex place? Voila! You’re “car” comes with a phone book (man page). You open the book, look up “Tex-Mex”. Instead of directions to the restaurant, you find the following instructions. “Put fajita meat in tortilla. (These can be downloaded for free). Frozen margarita is strongly recommended. The tequila is in the trunk. Once you’re drunk, you should avoid the cops. Just in case, there’s a gun in the glove box.”

I have posted about the danger of talking and driving a couple of times. But just to set the record straight, here’s the research.

University of Utah study: Cell phone distraction causes 2,600 deaths and 330,000 injuries in the United States every year. A 20-year-old driver with a cell phone has the same reaction times as a 70-year-old driver who is not using a cell phone.

University of Toronto study: Drivers talking on cell phones are four times more likely to cause an accident than non-phoning drivers. The study also found that “hands free” devices do not have any added benefit.

Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study (conducted in Australia): People using a cell phone were four times as likely to get into an injury accident, regardless of whether they were using a hand-held or hands-free device.

So, multiple studies across the globe with nearly identical results. Talking and driving makes you four times more likely to be in a wreck, which is roughly the same statistic for drivers with a 0.8 blood alcohol level. Yes, people. No matter how safe you think you are, when you’re on your phone, you are equivalent to a drunk driver. (See even more related studies here.)

Finally, some local governments are doing something about it. Lawrence, Kansas is looking into a city ordinance to ban all cell phone driving, hands-free or otherwise. Obviously there are enforcement issues, but at least they’re doing something. In Lawrence, if you are in a wreck and the city can prove you were on your cell phone, expect to receive an additional $120 ticket for inattentive driving along with a $100 fine for violating the ban.

New York became the first state to ban cell phone use by drivers four years ago and several states have followed suit, but all still allow hands-free devices. Thus the Lawrence ban would be the strictest ban so far.

If you talk and drive, (Do I have to say it again? Apparently so.) STOP IT!!

I couldn’t possibly let today go by without commenting on it’s (non)significance.

Today is, of course, June, 6^th, 2006, or 06/06/2006 (to use Y2K compliant notation), or 2006-06-06 00:00:00 (if you’re talking to a SQL database), or 6/6/6 (if your just a lazy American). Naturally, our society, which is founded on a firm misunderstanding and strict misinterpretation of the Christian Bible, totally freaks out when there are three sixes in anything. Commence the dooms-day rhetoric!

I teach Sunday school for 8th grade boys (Yeah, I know. Pray for me.) and we are nearing the end of my study on the book of Revelation, where this mysterious number is mentioned quite a bit. As 8th grade boys are wont to do, they’ve told me about every urban myth and camp fire horror story concerning this number.

Yes, there are three “sixes” in every UPC bar code in the world, sort of. Yes, the guy who invented the bar code has six letters in his first, middle, and last name. Yes, in the Hebrew numeral alphabet, the letter for W is also the number six (thus WWW = 666). Yes, the Roman emperor Nero’s name using another numeral alphabet adds up to six hundred sixty-six.

But, if you’re going to get freaked out about a date, today is not the day to worry about. Our calendar is all scientific and stuff, but I strongly doubt that the numbers we have assigned to count the passage of time amount to a hill of musical fruit in God’s grand scheme. I would imagine the watches worn by the Heavenly hosts would not synch up well with even the most accurate atomic clocks here on Earth.

Will there be bizarre cultic rituals performed in dark basements today? Sure! But, will Satan’s spawn be born today? Only in a movie remake. (Tell that wasn’t marketing genius!)

If it will make you feel better, when you brush your teeth tonight, look in the mirror. If you don’t have some strange, permanent mark on your forehead that wasn’t there when you brushed your teeth this morning, you can sleep peacefully knowing that you have better than average dental hygiene. Also, you are probably not doomed to the fires of hell. Or are you?

This is so wrong. Wronger than wrong. Wrongest! Eww! Icky-poo yucky-ville.

MARSEILLES, France — Skirt-chasing playboy Daniel Anceneaux, calling himself “The Prince of Pleasure”, spent weeks chatting with a sensual woman on the Internet, going by the name “Sweet Juliette”. The two were genuinely falling for each other.

“The conversations even got a little racy a couple of times. But I really started to fall for her, because there seemed to be a sensitive side that you don’t see in many girls. She sent me poems she had written and told me about her dreams and desires, and it was really very romantic,” the chat room Casanova said.

She even sent him a picture: a super hot, barely clothed model that just happened to be featured in a men’s magazine.

He finally got up the courage to arrange a romantic rendezvous at a remote beach.

“I walked out on that dark beach thinking I was going to hook up with the girl of my dreams. And there she was, wearing white shorts and a pink tank top, just like she’d said she would. But when I got close, she turned around — and we both got the shock of our lives. I mean, I didn’t know what to say. All I could think was, ‘Oh my God! it’s Mama!'”

That’s right. This playboy hooked is own mom! But it got worse. Just as the mortified mother and son realized the error of their ways, a patrolman passed by and cited them for visiting a restricted beach after dark. And, since police reports are a matter of public record, a local TV station got hold of it.

“The next thing we knew, our picture and our story was all over the 6 o’clock news. People started pointing and laughing at us on the street — and they haven’t stopped laughing since,” said mom Nicole.

And what about Dad? Paul, Nicole’s husband of 27 years, wasn’t too happy when the story hit the news and his beer-drinking buddies made him the butt of their jokes.

“Dad was ticked for a while and he forbid Mom to talk to anybody on the Internet ever again,” said embarrassed Daniel.

*Groan* Why, oh why, do people think that chat room romances are a good thing?!

I am Geek. There is no question about that. But I am not nearly as Geek as I could be. In case you need any proof of that…

I did not have a Klingon wedding.

I did not have a renaissance wedding.

And I do not own a 20-sided die, much less one on a ring.

You can click on the D20 ring image, if you feel you must own one for yourself. They also sell a D12 if your hands are too dainty for the D20 (which, if you think you need one, is probably true).

First, let me say that I am strongly in favor of the death penalty. It has nothing to do with deterring future crime. It has nothing to do with hate or vengeance. It has everything to do with the fact that a dead rapist will never rape again.

BUT in the case of a radical Islamic militant, a life sentence is a VICTORY for the prosecution. You have to understand that not everyone in the world views life the way we do. (Yeah, I know. Stop the presses.) For an Islamic militant, death equals martyrdom which equals heaven. Sentencing Zacarias Moussaoui to death would have been giving him exactly what he wants. Instead, the U.S. justice system gave him the one thing he didn’t want. He will not go free to plot the downfall of the infidel. He will not be given a free pass to 40 virgins in heaven (that’s Mohamed’s heaven, not mine). Instead, he will spend the rest of his life in a concrete cube with a black and white TV listening to American propaganda and, if God really wants to get even, Robert Tilton. (I heard this morning that while SuperMax cells have TVs they only have educational and religious channels. I’m guessing the Koran does not make frequent appearances. *Evil laugh*)
On his way out of the court room, Moussaoui spouted off that America lost and he won. Please don’t be offended by this. It is the equivalent of the skrawny punk on the playground running off crying with a bloody nose and then, from the other side of the fence shouting, “Oh yeah?! Well you stink!” To the person who delivered that bloody nose, it is icing on the cake. And I loves me some extra icing!

Ewwww.

From Engrish.com

Q: Why do programmers get Halloween and Christmas confused?

A: Because 31 OCT == 25 DEC

* Don’t be upset (or even surprised for that matter) if you don’t get this joke. In fact, you might be a healthier human being if you don’t. If you do get it, then sit back and remember those glory days in Discrete Math and laugh until Mountain Dew squirts out of your nose and ruins your “Seven of Nine” mouse pad.