You all recall, no doubt, the ruckus about Britney and Madonna (and that Christina chick) kissing during the VMA’s this year. Now they’re together in Britney’s new video – and it’s pretty cool.
Anyway, there’s also a bunch of photo’s and such of the two of them – check ‘em out.
Britney Pix, Madonna Pix, Girls Gone Wild (not THAT one)
High school senior came ‘out’ – and was expelled
By Elizabeth Clarke, Palm Beach Post Religion Writer
Saturday, October 25, 2003
JUPITER — Jeffrey Woodard’s parents never took him to church. They certainly didn’t ever plan to send him to a religious high school. But when he was 14, Jeffrey asked his mom if he could attend Jupiter Christian School. He told her he felt God leading him there.
What’s interesting is that the private school accepts school vouchers for disabled children – something federally and locally funded – so you’d think that this would prevent them from discrimination – and it does. As long as it’s race, color, or national origin.
The school has a “legal update” page, which basically says that they don’t think that they’ll lose and that they’re right.
So, if you’re gay, you can’t be Christian? Didn’t Christ teach compassion and caring? I guess that doesn’t matter any more….
Proteron software writes:
There is, however, one issue I must raise. It is regarding a specific feature introduced in Panther. As you are aware, keyboard application switching is significantly improved. What is disappointing is that this “improvement” is a near pixel duplication of a Proteron product, LiteSwitch X. And despite the obvious similarities, Proteron has received no recognition or credit.
Well, Apple has “borrowed” software from shareware developers before – the clock in the menu bar in OS 8 and some of the later builds of Watson, for example. Interestingly, Apple did “the right thing” in OS 8 and acknowledged that they had bought the software.
The only reason I can think of for them not doing it now is that they did manage to come up with something themselves that someone else did at the same time – it could happen. I just hope that if Proteron’s software was the impetus, that Apple will come forward and admit to it.
CNN reports:
Ohio man buys last Concorde seats for $60,300
CHICAGO, Illinois (Reuters) — A Toledo, Ohio, man who bid $60,300 bought the last two seats on this week’s final flight of the Concorde.
They were bought via a charity auction for the Today show – with something lik $35,000+ going to the Boys & Girls Club of America. So, he gets a fancy ride, and they get some money – not bad.
Do I get The Matrix Reloaded in
full screen or in wide screen format? It’s a tough choice – and I don’t understand why they don’t offer both in one set, except that they can probably make more money this way…
I have a VHS copy of The Matrix, but I’m planning on getting the DVD along with Reloaded. Oh, and let’s not forget The Animatrix, which provides some additional points of view and a little bit more of the story line – like how the machines took over and all that.
Ohh, this is gonna be an expensive trip to the store….
Hi! You’ve got one of the most high tech blog I’ve seen… Nice! Tip: Update your blogsnob, it’s changed owners and the home link you’ve got is old and therefore is not working! Ah! 
The Animatrix is way cool, I want to buy it too!
Last night it was pretty cold – so cold that there’s frost on stuff.
So today it should surprise no-one that there’s ice on the roads. You’d think that living in the north east would mean that you’re used to the idea of ice on the roads – I mean, it’s not like I live in Texas or someplace where snow is a fairy tale.
So this morning my commute was fine until I was about 3 miles from my exit – that’s when I happened to be passing the state headquarters for the Department of Public Safety – aka State Police. Guess what? Accident ahead, so everyone’s stuck in traffic. Kind of ironic, what with the DPS building being right there….
Barenaked Ladies Get In The Game – NHL 2002 featuring the members of Barenaked Ladies. I’m not a big “video game based hockey” fan, but if I was, I’d get it just for that alone.
NBC seems to have cancelled tonights West Wing in favor of a re-run of Law & Order: Criminal Intent . While I like CI and all, I wanted to see Martin Sheen kicking some ass.
Broadcast was delayed to the 29th so new episodes wno’t compete with baseball. The ratings for MLB have been very high, so NBC didn’t want to waste good shows.
Makes sense to me, though I was also shocked….
Comatose Florida Woman’s Feeding Tube Removed
By Robert Green
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (Reuters) – A feeding tube was removed from a severely brain-damaged Florida woman on Wednesday after her husband won a court ruling allowing her to die, despite her parents’ plea to continue life support.
I find it hard to believe that the family is fighting over this. As a parent I can see how they feel that they’re in the right, but as a husband I think that I know what my wife would or wouldn’t want – especially in a case like this, since we’ve actually talked about this kind of thing before.
I can only hope that the courts don’t interfere any more at this point – its not the first time she’s been taken off of life support, but it seems kinda cruel to take her off for a day or three, and then put her back – even if she is in a coma with no hope of recovery.
Telemarketers may target cell phones
Tracking down wireless numbers will soon be easier
By Olga Kharif
BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE
Oct. 13 — Ben Swinburn, a resident of San Francisco, answered his phone 18 months ago to hear a recorded ad for a casino outfit that operates in Las Vegas and elsewhere. He hung up, but the casino hasn’t taken the hint: It has been leaving messages for Swinburn at least once a month ever since.
Tonight I read this article. About 30 seconds later, I was busy registering my home and cell – and my wife’s – phones on the National Do Not Call list. Hopefully it won’t be an issue, especially since I plan on taking my cell phone number with me when I switch carriers later this year.
My wife works in a hospital in New Haven, and always has interesting stories. Some are about patients and their families, but most are about co-workers. They’re good. Very good. Like this one, which she shared with me tonight:
It seems that this one woman had been parking her car on the city streets – it’s cheaper than using the garage, but with obvious problems – i.e. the risk of having your car stolen or broken into is a bit higher. She was willing to take the chance.
One night she came back to the floor and asked “What would you do if you saw two guys driving away in your car?” in a rather easy-going manner, causing everyone to think she was just kidding. She wasn’t – she followed it up with “Should I call the police?”
It turns out that she had left the keys in the car, and they had apparently broken in or just opened the possbily unlocked doors to get in and drive away. If she’d been a few minutes earlier, it might not have happened to her.
She called the police and filed a report, and did all that other fun paperwork. A few days later the police called to say that they had found her car, still being driven by the two who had taken it. It turned out that they were apparently drug-dealers or something, and so the police were quite pleased to have the chance to arrest them.
She got her car back in reasonably good condition, minus a lot of her things. They had even gone to the trouble of getting the oil changed and getting the noise in the engine repaired – so they hadn’t just taken it for a joy ride or two. She was advised by the police officers to change the locks at her home due to the fact that the theives had her home/car keys, and there had been some mail and other things with her home address on it in the car when it was taken.
The best part of the story?
The two who’d been arrested tried to get out of jail by telling the cops that they were only borrowing the car from their boss, who was the head of the drug running/selling operation. So…. the police came a-calling and brought her in for a few minutes to find out what, if any, involvement she had with them and their business.
I had hoped to tape Futurama tonight, but that apparently didn’t happen. FOX was instead covering the fact that there was a postponement of tonights Red Sox/Yankees game due to rain. For 45 minutes.
Now, I have to wonder…. why does it take 45 minutes to convey that the game is postponed? Can’t you just do a live stand up of some schmuck in the rain on the field saying it’s been postponed, then do a little ticker on the bottom of the screen for the rest of the night?
Actually, this taps into a slightly larger problem: the networks and advertising. If there’s a breaking news story, they’ll wait until the show you’ve been waiting all evening to watch is on, then interupt it with the news. They won’t do that to their precious commercial advertisers, but the show that gets them a billion eyeballs a week – or whatever – will be turned off (and then brought back, “already in progress”) so that some guy with helmet hair can tell you that there’s a fire or car accident or something, and they’ll be back as soon as they can with more details than you care to know in just a few minutes.
Grrrrrr.
I have the comment system on my site wide-open, basically allowing anyone to post things to my site. I’m starting to reconsider after receiving several “blog spams” – or “blams” as I like to think of them over the last few days. I wouldn’t mind so much if it wasn’t for the fact that a) it’s for some kind of pre-teen porn thing and b) it’s MY F*CKING WEBSITE. If they wanted to do it elsewhere – and they are (here and here and here and here and here or even here) then I might not mind so much. Well, actually, yes I would.
So what can I do? For now, I’m blocking their IP’s, which won’t help much, but there is going to be a solution tomorrow. I’ll be installing it as soon as I can, and then probably wishing that I could link all my MT installations to one set of plugins somehow.
But will I be protected? I don’t know. I can hope. I have seen some of Jay Allen’s other plugins, so I’m guessing it’ll all work out fine, but it will be an interesting thing to watch. I like the fact that you can publish your block list to a text file, but I think that might be a bad thing too – perhaps the blammers will be able to search to see if they’re being blocked and change URL’s or something. Of course, I guess it’s a good thing in another way – I’m only dealing with one URL at the moment, but it would be nice to see what other people are blocking so that I can integrate their lists in with mine and cut some of the crap out BEFORE I have to deal with it manually – it’s a bit of a chore.
More tomorrow after the software is out and I can play with it….
The FBI is convinced that I’m an Internet service provider.
Declan McCullagh received a letter from the FBI indicating that he had better keep good records of his interviews with Adrian Lamo, a hacker who’s facing two criminal charges. The problem? The FBI is classifying him as an ISP (Internet Service Provider).
It’s interesting on several levels, not the least of which is that the FBI apparently warned him, in the letter, not to discuss the fact that they’d even written to him about this issue.
Normally I’d think that the lawyers would hash it out and the FBI would realize it’s a big ol’ violation of the First Amendment, but what with all the acts and resolutions and what not that are taking effect to combat terrorism, there might be some sub-sub section out there that over-rules even the Constitution – not that we’d be allowed to know about it…
In a fit of…. ennui, I guess, I changed the individual links – so guess what? A bunch of stuff broke. Oh well.
The links now go to something like “/2003/10/11/Ch-ch-changes.shtml” or other. If you wanted to see all the posts from a specific day, you could simply go to “/2003/10/11/” and get an index page. I don’t know if this is going to help or hurt my efforts, but what the heck, right?
In other news, I tried to have the cam online again the other night, only to discover that I had maxed out my disk space quota. Since I’m administering the server for myself, I could have just bumped it up, but it occurred to me – where the heck had the 250 mb gone to? It’s not like I have a ton of photos on the site, and most of what I do have are fairly small, size-wise. I haven’t figured it out just yet, but when I do, I’ll probably whack myself upside the head for accidentally uploading a Photoshop file or some such.
In the mean time…..
James 12:26 on 2003/10/29 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Amen. I’m working on a long blog entry about this that should be up sometime today. I’m practically frothing at the mouth about this sort of thing…
By the way, I can’t find anything on CNN about this, though there was a story about it yesterday and even this morning. Searching on their site turns up nothing. Very weird…