Sometimes I run across code that former employees or contractors left behind years ago and realize why they are former employees or contractors. Sometimes I'm pissed off enough to leave a comment on their shit-brained logic in the software's source code for all those to follow (proprietary information blanked out).

"Alright, this friggin ------ vs ----- code crap is all over the place like a water weenie covered in baby oil. Screw this. I'm not spending another minute deciphering this Escher painting. I'm querying right up front whether or not this is a damn ----- or ----- and superceding the convoluted three-ring circus happening below. Signing off, Angry Jeremy is angry."

I later explained my solution in an email to my boss:

"...It's tiptoeing through the donkey crap with sandwich bags on your feet instead of cleaning up the crap, but your mom is buried in the crap and you might stab her with the shovel if you try to clean it. Worst analogy ever."

I was reviewing my google search referrals for today and noticed one for the phrase "jew and improved," which led someone to this post from a couple months back. I was curious where my link ranked, so I ran the search myself. Lo and behold, my site is the first link returned. But above the search results, was the curious assertion, "We're disturbed about these results as well."



For a moment, I was flattered. "Google thinks I'm offensive! Nee haw! I've finally made it, Conan!" Then I realized it was because the search had the word "Jew" in it. As Google explains in the link next to their message, "Jew" is frequently used in an anti-Semitic, Mel Gibson-ish fashion. It's hard to argue with that, but I find Google editorializing its search results a rather interesting move.

I was also curious if they showed a similar message for patently offensive, pejorative terms used to describe people of various races and religious backgrounds. You know the words I'm talking about, so I'm not going to reprint them here. Oddly enough, not a single one came back with a similar message. Maybe because people using those search terms already expect disturbing results?

You may have noticed that photos and other images aren't always displaying properly this afternoon. I host most of my images on Picasa, which appears to be having some major difficulties at the moment. I keep telling them to lick my balls, but I'm not getting a response. You get what you (don't) pay for.

FIXED! Stuff your cod with that, momma's boy!

I'm blogging to you live from the cf.Objective() conference at the Crowne Plaza in beautifully overcast downtown St Paul. There are a lot of nerds here. I keep searching the room for the hugest nerd, but I can't see -- oh, wait. OH. MY. GOD. Look at that dude! Ha ha! Oh, who dressed you, Sparky, your mom? Oh, Lordy I -- oh, that's a mirror. *cough*

UPDATE 9:47 AM: Well, the conference is off to an interesting (and hopefully not unfortunate) start. I didn't quite see what or who went down, but someone a couple of rows directly in front of me had a medical emergency during the keynote in the ballroom. They have cleared the room to give the ambulance crew room to work. Hope the person is OK.

UPDATE #2: Dude that collapsed during keynote evidently was OK. He walked out of the room on his own.

First suburban Pittsburgh residents Aaron and Christine Boring sued Google for using photos of their home in Street View. Then their neighbors Janet and George McKee learned that Google's photo snapping Street View vehicle drove all the way up their driveway, practically snapping photos from their front yard. Now another neighbor, James Hawburn, has come forward after he learned that as he slept soundly in his home, Google's mapping van drove onto his private property, up his driveway, through his front door, into his master bedroom, and all the way up his ass. Hawburn has no plans to sue Google, as he says the photos showed a suspicious polyp that his doctor will be scrutinizing carefully. "Google's photo mapping of my asshole may very well have saved my life," said Hawburn.

On the heels of Toshiba's decision to pull the plug on HD DVD, Afterglide Media Thingy, LLC (AMTLLC) has announced that they will now distribute their short films exclusively on Blu-ray. "That's right, bitches! We knew Blu-ray would win this thing all along," said AMTLLC spokesperson Jessica Labestein while surreptitiously sliding a large pile of HD DVD copies of Pee Problem behind a curtain. "So all you Blu-ray haters can suck it sideways."

Labestein also announced that AMTLLC has declared bankruptcy and will be liquidating its assets, including a half-million HD DVD players and several thousand shares of stock in Toshiba for "fifty bucks OBO."

On the heels of Apple's MacBook Air comes this revolutionary new product.

by Lester Zweitmueller

God fucking damn it, you illiterate shit-brained ass stains, it's a SLASH. It's not a fucking backslash.

RIGHT: "Just go to www dot getyourgoddamnheadoutofyourfuckingasshole dot com SLASH fuckleak to get more information, sir."

WRONNNNNGGGGG!!!!!!: "To log into our online banking system, go to www dot learntherightwaytogiveawebaddressyouwasteofazygote dot com BACKSLASH twatblood."

NO!!!!! Fuckers, it's slash! SLASH!!!! Did you fucking hear me, tampon drip?!???

Lester Zweitmueller lives in Cottage Grove, MN and is a senior software engineer for Thomson West. He is a practicing aromatherapist and arbiter.

By Darren Halling

After a long battle between multiple platforms for human life, experts have declared adults the winners. "Just throw away your babies now," says Sony VP Chad Lehtman. "They're obsolete." Lehtman then corrected himself, adding that the babies should actually be recycled instead of thrown away outright. For millenia, humans have furrowed their brows, deciphering reams of documentation and technobabble trying to figure out which format is best for them. Babies were long thought to be the superior technology, being more compact and easier to transport, but as society moved forward, babies stayed the same. Consumers eventually realized that babies might have some benefits on the front side, but they are black hole for consumables. Babies are inexpensive to produce, but like cheap printers have expensive ink cartridges, cheap babies have expensive -- well, everything.

For the month of January, 2008 sales of babies were down nearly 90% compared to January, 2007. Large manufacturers like Sony, Samsung, and Toshiba have taken heed and started mail-in recycling programs to make it easier to dispose of unwanted babies. It is predicted that in February alone, nearly 15,000 babies will be recycled into products like Hot Yoga Instructor and Friendly Hotel Doorman.

Darren Halling is a Minneapolis-based freelance writer and is not an employee of afterglide.com because he used all of the office toilet paper and didn't tell anyone until it was too late.

A child model recreates Georges Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte as the 2000W bulb slowly roasts his tender flesh.There is no shortage of high-falutin' gee whiz electronic googaws here at CES, but it seems like and overwhelming amount of floor space is devoted to home entertainment and communication -- televisions, audio components, mobile phones and accessories, etc. That's why yesterday it was so refreshing to stop by Hasbro's booth and see a re-imagining of an old friend. That's right -- Lite Brite is back, and this time it's in high definition. Hasbro's literature says the new model will be full 1080p resolution, or 1920 x 1080 pixels. Though I surmise they are still tweaking the hardware, as the sample model on display appeared to have a 4:3 aspect ratio rather than the 16:9 ratio a 1080p display device would have.


Lite Brite HD pegs shown next to quarter for scale.The new Lite Brite HD isn't all sunshine and lollipops, however. The rumor swirling around the show was that the child model hired to play with the beta unit was rushed to the hospital after he swallowed a handful of the nearly microscopic, needle-like pegs required for high resolution images. In the emergency room, it was also discovered that he had suffered third degree burns from the Lite Brite HD's 2000 watt lamp. You'd think they would have used cooler, more energy efficient LED bulbs. But this is CES, where the illusion of a finished product is crucial to capturing the attention of the press.

More CES 2008 coverage here.

Some of the biggest buzz here at the Consumer Electronics Show centers around an offshoot of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) called One Laptop Per Senior (OLPS). OLPS takes the OLPC concept several steps further, making an even simpler user interface and a vastly streamlined set of hardware features. OLPS spokesperson Tanya Saylette said of the project, "A minuscule donation of $120 can give a senior citizen access to the internet and a closer connection to their family, their friends, and the world. They can watch a game of automated cribbage, click buttons, scroll up and down, and even get plain text email descriptions of YouTube videos that their friends with real computers saw." OLPS is currently taking donations and has already distributed over 127,000 laptops, most of which were returned by confused elderly recipients who thought they had ordered diabetes medication.


More CES 2008 coverage here.

One thing is clear at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas -- thin televisions are so 2007. The running theme of the upcoming crop of high definition televisions is that thin form factor is no longer a high priority for discerning consumers. When asked about this dramatic shift in thinking, Jacob Winford, spokesman for Samsung said, "What is clear from our consumer surveys is that buyers are mostly concerned with diagonal screen size, features, picture quality, and wood grain cabinets for their televisions. Thin televisions are viewed as effeminate and weak, whereas unwieldy, massive televisions are sturdy, powerful symbols of status and quality." Samsung, Mitsubishi, and Toshiba all say they plan to have televisions with cabinets at least three times as deep as the screen size (a 60-inch set would have a cabinet at least 180 inches, or 15 feet, deep) for sale in 2009. Sony, on the the other hand, claims they will have a 72-inch set with a 30-foot deep cabinet available in Q4 of 2008.

More CES 2008 coverage here.

Stay tuned this week as afterglide reports from the Consumer Electronics Show in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. Not to be outdone by Technology Evangelist, Jeremy will be roaming the booths and bringing you what's going to be hot in 2008 tech. But mostly he'll be going to strip clubs and hanging out with minors wise beyond their years (and miner's wise beneath their years).

1. Wait until your girlfriend gets to your house before you do.
2. Log into your home computer remotely from work.
3. Crank the volume on your home computer's speakers.
4. Go to this website and start randomly clicking buttons.
5. Wait for her to call your cell and tell you she's going to kick your ass.
6. Laugh hysterically.

Back in high school, I never thought I would have much use for algebra or geometry. But today I find myself using both of them yet again for the I've-lost-counteenth time in my career. I'm recreating an electronic signature capture program in a different programming language to make things easier for us to maintain and for our users to use. So I need to capture this signature, translate it and save it as a series of coordinates, and then recreate the signature later using simple geometry when it needs to be displayed again. Such an endeavor requires complicated test signatures to make sure the program works. Here is the signature I captured and saved earlier today.

I can't say I ever see using calculus though. The last time I used that was when I wrote a simulation program in college that given variables such as air temperature, altitude, and body temperature, and volume, would calculate how high of a structure someone would have to shit, piss, or puke off of for the said matter to freeze solid before it hit the ground. I sold it to Microsoft for $15 and a punch to the nuts.

When attempting to send "Have fun on your trip" last night, the autocomplete on my phone first gave me, "Have fun on your vagina." I was tempted to leave it, but it would have been wholly inappropriate given the sentiment I was trying to convey. Plus it makes a vagina sound like a jet ski or something. "Have fun on your vagina. Wear your life vest and observe the no wake rules. Don't hit any manatees! Cuddles then!"

After nearly a decade of computation by a powerful supercomputer, mathematicians at the University of Florida have solved every possible outcome for the board game Chutes and Ladders. The computer, nicknamed Deep Chute, generated the last game outcome in early June. The university will fly the computer system and several engineers to Vancouver, British Columbia in November to compete against the world's premier Chutes and Ladders players in the 2007 Brown Chute Climb Challenge. The event will be held at Simon Brown Preschool in Coquitlam. Cookies and grape-flavored Kool-Aid will be served.

Apple's wildly popular iPhone, released on June 29th, already has a firmware upgrade available for download. The upgrade allows the onscreen keyboard to be used in landscape mode, improves the efficiency of wireless communications to increase battery life, and ads a new option for the touch screen interface. Users may now use the phone by rubbing their wangs on it. In fact, the multi-touch interface allows multiple dicks to be rubbed on the iPhone at once. iPhone owners may visit the Apple website to order a special penis-friendly squeegee designed to remove pre-cum and gonorrheal pus from the glass screen.

Remember that laptop I ordered from Dell last week? Well, the damned thing wasn't going to get here until well into the first part of August. Apparently the wave of orders for that $480 bargain caused Dell to run out of a few parts. Much like sexual contact with a live partner, that didn't fit in with my stopwatch of instant gratification, so I said fuck it and canceled the order. I'll take care of it myself (still using sexual metaphors).

Friday after work, I did some research online and found a Compaq on Best Buy's website that seemed fairly decent. It was $630 with tax, but it was that or spend maybe $100 less to buy a shitty Acer or so-so Toshiba that would probably fall apart if I sighed too loudly. Ugh. I didn't want to spend an additional $150, but I knew the clock was ticking on Gobot Nolo Poody Toot, the official name of that computer on my network. Yes, I'm a very weird soul.

One of the reasons, aside from cost savings, that I typically build my own desktop computers is that when you buy a PC brand new from a vendor or store, it is inundated with preinstalled shitware. 30 day demo of Norton!!! Would you like to try AOL? No? Earthlink? Sandwiches from Jimmy John's! FR33 P3N1S F0R Y0U!11!!! Motherfuckers, just give me what I ordered and can the fucking ads! I realize these partnerships probably allow the companies to keep the costs of the machines so low, but keep that shit out of my face. Unfortunately I can't build my own laptop in a similar fashion, so I wiped everything on the hard drive and reinstalled Windows so I could start with a clean, shitware-free slate.

Finally last night I had enough time to dick around and finish setting everything up how I like it. But as I was searching around for drivers and other information about my new laptop, I stumbled back onto Best Buy's website and noticed they were now selling the same model for $455. What the fuck?!? Thankfully it a appears that the 'Buy has a price match guarantee if the price drops on a laptop within 14 days of the original purchase. I'm going to stop there tonight and will hopefully walk out with about $150 back in my bank account.

And here's an update on my current situation with the new brain pills I was prescribed last week. After a couple of days, things really settled down. For the most part, there have been no further episodes of twitching or spastic gesticulation. However, alcohol seems to amplify the negative side effects. Wednesday evening's episode may have been exacerbated by the beer I consumed. And Friday night, I went to the Overheard in Minneapolis anniversary shindig at Mac's Industrial Sports Bar and had a Stella. Not long after I finished it, I began to feel very uneasy and downright paranoid. I don't know how else to describe it. Needless to say, I think I will completely avoid alcohol for the next few days and perhaps will try drinking a single beer at home this weekend to see what happens.

Another thing I've noticed is that the effects of caffeine seem to be amplified. On Saturday, I drank two big cups of coffee in the morning, had a couple cans of Diet Pepsi in the afternoon and felt lightheaded and shaky. I had that same feeling today after a mocha from Caribou early this morning and two glasses of Diet Pepsi while out for lunch. On the way back to the office, I felt that same lightheaded, shaky feeling. Perhaps I need to cut my caffeine intake or give up completely again.

UPDATE: Best Buy refunded me $160, which includes tax, on the price difference on that laptop. Sweet fucking ass! This now ended up costing me $10 less than the Dell laptop, and I get instant gratification. Up yours, patience and virtue!

Tonight I realized it was time to let my poor laptop go into the abyss -- kind of. It's not that the computer itself is too slow. It's only a Pentium III that's logged nearly 7 years of dedicated, but all I use it for is surfing the web and writing, so it's more than adequate. The problem is that my wireless options for internet access have become increasingly limited. First the PC card slots started shorting out, so I could no longer use my wi-fi card. Luckily I had a USB wi-fi adapter sitting around, but after several months of bumping around, the USB adapter kept coming loose. Pinching the adapter with pliers helped, but the fix could only last so long. I soon had to abandon being truly wireless and opt for a shitty ethernet to wi-fi adapter I had discarded in a closet. Because it was shitty. Did I mention it was shitty? Well, it's shitty. It has to be plugged into an electrical outlet to function and is slower than a baby raised in gunny sack fully of bus fumes. If I wanted to wait a couple of minutes for a page to load, I'd stop spending $45 every month on broadband and just yell the address to my neighbor and ask him to tell me what it says. "Yeah, just... No... NO... I said www dot ChicksUsingDildosThatAreActuallyShellackedTurds dot com, not www dot ChicksUsingDildosThatAreActuallyShellshockedTurds dot com. Ok, yeah... what? No, I didn't hear you. It's a picture of what? Sick, dude! Ha ha haaaa! Huh? Oh, sorry, man! I didn't know your kids were standing there. Uh... why don't we try cnn dot com instead."

And with that, I searched for laptop deals online and found a Dell with a dual core 64-bit processor, a gig o' RAM, and an 80 gig hard drive with free shipping for $450 plus tax, which came to just shy of $480. I hate to spend the money, but the old one is next to impossible to use as a true laptop. Plus it won't be put in the graveyard quite yet. I will repurpose it as my home automation server, moving all of that crap off of my desktop and freeing up resources to calculate complex math required for running simulations for potential cancer cures. And 3D butt porn.