FAREWELL GEORGE

George Carlin
1937-2008

"If I had my choice of how to die, I'd like to be sitting on the cross-town bus and just suddenly burst into flames."

"Thanks to our fear of death in this country, I won't have to die...I'll pass away. Or I'll expire like a magazine subscription. If it happens in the hospital, they'll call it a 'terminal episode'. The insurance company will refer to it as 'negative patient care outcome'. And if it's the result of malpractice, they'll call it a 'therapeutic misadventure'."

"When I die, I don't want to be buried, but I don't want to be cremated either. I wanna be blown up. Put me on a pile of explosives and blow me up. Or throw my body from a helicopter. That would be fun. One stipulation: wherever I land, you have to leave me there. Even if it's on the mayor's lawn. Just let me lie there. But keep the dogs away."

"The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What's that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you're too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating...and you finish off as an orgasm."

FIREFOX 3 IS OUT TODAY

And they added exactly the feature I needed: ability to save all tabs on close. No longer will I have to kill the process from the task manager to avoid reconstructing my 25-tab setup in a new session.

The tab scrollbar is pretty sweet too.

Mozilla promised that they would make Firefox3 use less memory, I can see some improvement already. As I closed Firefox 2 to update, I had 20+ tabs open and the program took up around 160,000K. Firefox 3 has cut that nearly in half, down to 87,800K.

On an unrelated note, Mozilla is hoping to set a record for most software downloaded in a 24-hour period coinciding with Firefox3's release. So if you were thinking of switching, now's a good time. This geek recommends it.

HE COACHES THE BLACK MESA EMPLOYEE BASKETBALL TEAM

So I've been watching the NBA Finals. Normally, it's something I wouldn't care about, except:
1. Massachusetts resident.
2. Celtics.
3. Lakers.

So naturally it's unavoidable.

While watching, I couldn't help but notice something...interesting...about Lakers coach Phil Jackson.



Doesn't he look kinda like Half-Life 2 villain Dr. Wallace Breen?

Mmm...Nah. Not that much. Still, I can't seem to shake that first impression.

WISH I THOUGHT OF THIS

www.youvebeenleftbehind.com

The premise: six days after The Rapture(TM), the website will send out emails to everyone on a subscriber's address list, informing them that they've been left behind.

"We have set up a system to send documents by the email, to the addresses you provide, 6 days after the "Rapture" of the Church. This occurs when 3 of our 5 team members scattered around the U.S fail to log in over a 3 day period. Another 3 days are given to fail safe any false triggering of the system."

Many questions come to mind.

How dense do they think we are that we won't notice that a significant number of people are gone for six days?
What would happen if two or less of the operators get raptured and keep logging in to keep the system going?
Could a bit of coordinated mischief cause a false positive? Malicious crackers and script kiddies could have a lot of fun here.
Why does it only let you inform 62 people at once? I guess fundies wouldn't want to associate with that many unsaved people. Even so, would you have to get a second account for more people?

But most importantly, why didn't I think of charging fundies $40/year for a glorified (no pun intended) FTP server/mass-mailer that will likely never be used? I bet the guy who thought this up could easily have charged $20/month and evangelicals would have dutifully paid.

So here's my proposition for a similar premise: Customers can pay $5 to add an email address to the list. And the mailer sends out this:

Dear Friend,

If you're reading this email, then the Rapture hasn't happened yet. But a concerned Christian, (insert the name of whoever signed this email up), wants you to know that there's still time.

(and here we have some stock give-your-life-to-Jesus boilerplate)

from your friends at RaptureMail

Daily. Or better, for a higher price, you can pay to send the email every 6 hours. But the real beauty is that the spammed knows who's ultimately responsible and can "thank" them accordingly.