Science Addiction

You know those people who even spend their time picking apart charity? When my story about geek charities was reported on at Slashdot there were people in the comments there who spent time picking apart my motivations and so on.

Then there are others who pick apart open sourcey communities and people who would spend their times in them. To them, I say go forth to The Onion where altruism is being mocked.

[...] said freelance writer Eric Bergstrom, who was eating at a local diner when he saw Eisenfeld buy the confused man a cup of coffee and ask him where he lived. “Because, you know, it’s not like there’s cops or emergency workers trained to do that stuff. Must be nice having all that free time to be a big hero. What a stuck-up prick.” As of press time, Eisenfeld’s ulterior motive had not been determined.

It seemed as though yesterday was an overactive April Fool’s day; maybe because it was a Saturday or because I was actively seeking pranks. And I found many.

Some of my favorite pranks for this year: Read the rest of this entry »

If you have a GMail account (and who doesn’t these days?), Google has a quirky little advertisement for your enjoyment. Go to your GMail account and click on the “Spam” link in the left sidebar. Read the rest of this entry »

In my Bookmarks toolbar in Firefox I have a folder called ‘Daily’. Every morning when I start my computer, I open my browser, right-click on this folder and click ‘Open in Tabs’. This automatically opens the following in individual tabs:

• My Wikipedia Watchlist
• My Wikimedia Commons Watchlist
• My Bloglines page
• My Flickr page
• My Yahoo! Finance portfolio page
• Two web email accounts (with much effort cut down from a previous high of 5)
• and finally… Woot!

Or should I say W00t? In either case, this is hands down the most addictive web site in the history of our consumer culture. If you find yourself inexplicably drawn to gadgets, deals on gadgets, the local electronics/gadget store and that new cool device that everyone will have in 6 months but you need now, the Woot is for you. Also, at about 12:03AM Central Time on an idle Tuesday you will also find yourself descending into a profound depression as you see the “Sold Out!” sign on Woot.com for that days wooot and find that you are not alone. Not by a long shot. In fact, there were thousands of others who fell upon Woot.com up to 3 minutes earlier than you did and snapped up that snazzy talking, wi-fi enabled coffee maker or trendy toaster. This is what Douglas Adams would have called as having descended into the long, dark tea-time of the soul. Read the rest of this entry »