It's taken them 30 years, but the Japanese have finally constructed their first full size Gundam.

Sadly, no mention is made of its ability to leap hundreds of feet in the air while simultaneously firing its weapons at targets.

Just think, in another 30 years we have finally see the Space Battleship Yamato. I want my wave motion gun!

Let it be known that you are all warned about a potentially serious event which may happen to you. It is an event so unbelievable, you may think this only a joke. But it's not. It's 100% completely real. Woe be to the person who has this happen to them.

Also, this is one of the very few times I cannot, and will not laugh at what happened to me. For as long as I shall live, no joke, smirk, snort, giggle or pleasant feeling shall ever be associated with this event.

Even now, as I write this, knowing what awaits me sickens my stomach and roils by innards.

From the moment I opened my door last night when I got home, I knew something was terribly, terribly wrong. The odor in the air was not the usual one I was accustomed to smelling. No, there was something sinister afoot and immediately, my heart sank.

My cat greeted me. Not too unusual. Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn't. He stood there, his tail held high, the tip lightly moving back and forth. His yellowish-green eyes looked up at me as if to signify he too was wondering what the smell was.

Putting down the plastic bags I used to carry my lunch in, I made my way into the kitchen where the smell increased. My nose automatically followed the smell to the storage room off to the side where I was met with an odor that while not the worst I had ever smelled, was one of those you can't get out of your nose even when outside.

I flicked on the light and saw something I didn't think was possible. Or rather, so unlikely, it had to be man made.

There, on the floor where I had laid it not five days prior, was the watermelon I had planned on cutting open that night, its dark green skin now ruptured, its body in two complete horizontal pieces, its guts spewed across the floor.

I stared at the sight, now believing what I was seeing, the overriding stench of decaying watermelon juice filling the air about me.

"Fuck"

That was all I said. That was all that needed to be said for in addition to having the roughly ten pound fruit broken and rotting on the floor, seeds and pulp now strewn here and there, its juice had poured out on to the floor and into the thin carpet it was sitting on.

I looked at the discolored carpet and saw that the juice not only soaked into the carpet, but ran with the slope of the concrete slab that is my floor. Where the carpet ended (I had previously removed a 1' by 8" section due to a leaking garbage bag) the juice ran onto the concrete which still contained parts of the carpet pad (not much. Just the few spots I didn't scrape down to the concrete) and appeared to run under the wood edging.

I looked about the room and saw that the force of the explosion had sent shards of watermelon on to the side of my cats litter box, some jugs of water and detergent on the floor, the fronts of both the washer and dryer and even a small amount on to the wood trim.

For the next 1 1/2 hours I set about removing 9 square feet of carpeting, cleaned the sides of the cat box, washer and dryer, rinsed off the water and detergent bottles and of course, disposed of the broken corpse of the watermelon.

No amount of baking soda, carpet freshener/odor remover or bleach could compete with the smell that is rotting watermelon juice. The smell was so bad that when I applied a bleach soaked paper towel to the bare concrete, the odor of the bleach was more pleasant.

Tonight, I face my next task of continuing to scrape off the decaying remnants of the carpet pad and throwing it out as well as vacuuming then hand washing the kitchen floor to remove all vestiges of watermelon juice I may have tracked on to the floor as I set about removing the carcass and its aftermath. I will also use a hand-held carpet cleaner to try and, as best I can, clean the carpet where I may have tracked watermelon juice.

You have been warned. Exploding watermelons are no joke.

Are you, your employer or someone you know looking for someone with a well-rounded information technology background, who is highly organized, very personable, who finds solution to every problem, able to train people in a classroom setting and with the ability to adapt to changing situations? If so, I'd like to hear from them.

I will not claim to be an uber-geek nor will I pretend to know more than I do. I have a very simple mantra: When I know, I'll tell you. When I don't, I'll find out.

I am currently employed but completely bored and have advanced as far as I can in my current position. I can feel my brain cells dying every day.

Looking for something along the lines of Junior PM or hands-on work. A variety of tasks would be optimum.

Neither programming nor Linux are in my repetoire though I have fiddled with both.

You know that person who people ask for long after they left because things ran so smoothly when they were around? That's me.

If a company does something unethical, people defend the company saying: It's a business, it has a legal obligation to increase shareholder value, and as long as it's not illegal, the company must do it. These are just "good businessmen".
If a person does something which a business believes is taking money away from them, they raise the "ethics" flag, trying to guilt people into agreeing with new and harsher laws to make the ethics construct into a legal one.

Double standard much? Not really: it's just the business behaving unethically again which we already agreed was Ok, as long as it's legal and raises shareholder value.

Corporations are just a mechanism to allow bad people to go to church on Sunday...

Ok, I'll admit it. NOT having sex is the only surefire way of not getting a woman pregnant (unless of course you're Mary Magdalene in which case you're, um, screwed). It's absolutely, 100% guaranteed to prevent pregnancies as well as contracting unwanted critters and afflictions.

However (you knew that was coming, didn't you?), to say that abstinence is the ONLY thing kids (and hell, let's throw in supposed adults as well) should be taught is right up there with claiming psychics work (they don't. If they did, why would they need your money?).

What makes this subject so delightful to me is once again I get to show the hypocrisy of my own party and its supposed "Family Values" campaign. I mean, there was Ronald Reagan and his divorce (nice way of sticking it out big guy), Newt Gingrich (way to show class by handing your wife divorce papers while she lay in bed recovering from surgery), and of course the king of family values, Rush Limbaugh and his two (soon to be three) divorces.

Beyond all that, we have this gem from an interview from this morning:

"It's kind of a fine line that we're walking on,"... "sharing [name deleted]'s experience with other teenagers -- sharing the mistake she made a year ago," and helping other girls to learn from it."

In case you haven't guessed, the person in question is none other than teenage babe of the moment, Bristol Palin. The above quote from her father raises so many questions, this text field isn't long enough to list and answer them all.

My only two comments will be these: Bristol now has the pleasure of telling her son when he's old enough that his grandfather considers him a mistake and can we finally, once and for all, get off this nonsense of abstinence-only education? It doesn't work! Period. Every study done on schools who have an abstinence-only sex ed program shows the teen pregnancy rate has risen since implementation of the program.

Enough of the hypocrisy! Show a woman giving birth. Hear the screams of pain. Show the purple, slime-covered alien popping forth. Or, as the character Rachel from 'Friends' so classically put it: Why is that baby torturing that woman?

How hard is it NOT to fuck things up? I'm looking at a story and wondering why I can't see all the threads as I used to be able to when I realize there's some shitass option on the left side of the page telling me how many full and partial threads there.

There's no explanation for how to see the threads the way you've been seeing them for the last SIX YEARS and if you dare to click on the Comments header, POOF!, everything collapses.

This constant screwing around with what amounts to a simple interface is exactly why you don't let programmers anywhere near the development process. I can't tell you how many times I had to deal with problems created as a direct result of programmers who think they know what they're doing.

It's bad enough one can't easily see if they have any new moderations from comments or get to said comments without having to jump through hoops. Now this ball of shit comes up.

QUIT FUCKING WITH THE CODE!!!

To those who kept harping on George Bush for his occupation of Iraq, see now the fruits of his labors. This is what the nearly 4300 men and women of the armed forces were fighting for: spreading the American way.

It's so heartening to see other countries following our lead. After all, Christianity is a peaceful religion so our occupation has shown the way to this muslim country .

Let us celebrate the crowning achievement of our occupation. Rejoice in knowing that in Iraq, just like the U.S., being born gay can get you killed.

This isn't really about Mozilla but the icon is the closest thing I could find for this story.

Before I give you the link, I want it known and on the record that someday I will hug one of these cuddly, wuddly descendants of dinosaurs. The trick is in the timing.

CNN link

And now you know, the rest of the story.

I am just so bummed. All the planning, all the arrangements for airfare, transportation, hotel room, all the gifts I were going to bring are now a crumpled mass of paper in the wastebin of life. I can't believe it actually happened.

I just want to curl into a ball and rock myself to sleep, my life now a shell of its former self. I was so sure things would work out. How could I have been so wrong?

For those that have ever watched Dragonball Z, the Hollywood version will be released in less than 2 months in the U.S. though asian fans will get to see it next month.

This article from Mainichi Daily News talks about some of the changes the producer made as well as comments from three of the actors playing characters.

Sometimes, the wisdom of the ages comes to roost in the most unsuspecting places. Who would have thought that a teenage mother with a dropout father/boyfriend would come out with the following inciteful comment:

"Like, your whole priorities change after having a baby."

I guess they need to push that idea a bit more in those abstinence-only classes.

BTW, did I mention that the author of such wisdom is Bristol Palin?

She also couldn't let it go with how badly the "evil" media treated her and her mother during the campaign after the news of her pregnancy broke.

Four years after losing their court case to have a religious precept be taught as a scientific principle, the folks of Dover, PA now get to have their noses rubbed in the dirt a bit more thanks to a sign posted a mile from their border on Darwin's birthday.

To emphasize how much these folks are sore losers that they couldn't push their religious views down other people's throats, here is a quote from William Buckingham, a former school board member who voted to have an Intelligent Design book used in a science class:

"It would be nice if free speech applied to Christians, too. This wasn't a trial; it was a fix. We didn't lose it. It was taken from us. And that judge is still a jackass."

It should be noted that the judge in question, John E. Jones, III, was appointed by Bush senior and is a Catholic (I think).

The full text of the article from my local paper may be found here.

And nizo, it's not about wanting an argument. It's about having the people who think an unknown, omnipotent being created everything to provide some evidence for their idea. NOT ask science to show its evidence, which is abundant, but for those who think Evolution is flawed to present their evidence to support their side. That's all.

To date, no one, not even the Discovery Institute, has ever presented any evidence to support their claim.

Apparently technology which changes ads based on who you are isn't geeky enough, but showing your art when the Google van comes by is.

Reminiscent of scenes from Minority Report, advertisers are starting to use technology which identifies who is looking at ads on video screens and change the ads accordingly.

Using small cameras embedded in the screens or along the edge, software determines who is looking at ads, for how long, what gender they are, approximate age and in some cases, your ethnicity. If the software identifies you as a young male, they might show ads for video games. For a young woman, cosmetics.

The manufacturers say their systems can accurately determine gender 85 to 90 percent of the time, while accuracy for the other measures continues to be refined.

here I am, stuck in the middle.

I think we can all remember a time when we were much younger and would surreptitiously put a note on a person's back saying 'Kick me'. Maybe some of you still do this.

Apparently I have such a sign on the back of my car which everyone else but me can see which says, "Hit me."

For the third time time since owning my car, and twice in the last month, I was rear-ended. The damage itself wasn't significant but there was paint transfer and my bumper cover is scratched about a yard wide.

This time it was a taxi and the guy admitted he didn't see me. Which is funny because a) I was the last person in the line of cars and had my foot on the brake, b) there were two lines of cars with their brake lights on, and c) it was at a red light.

Now, here's where it gets fun. Because every car I have driven someone has hit me, I've gotten to the point where I both know the routine and get ticked off more and more each time it happens. The other night was no exception.

I teed off on the guy who told me it wasn't a big deal, he didn't hit me that hard and it would buff out easily. Which completely misses the point that his incompetence caused damage, however slight, to my car.

Granted, my being angry got him angry but it was fun writing down his license plate and other information and watching his tune change. Especially when I told him I was getting a police report.

While we were waiting, I refrained from teeing off more on him and he asked if there was some way we could work it out, that he didn't want to go through his insurance because he already had points and one more claim would probably make him lose his insurance and thus his job.

Sob stories such as this don't work on me but I agreed to let him pay for the damages after the police report was filed. The cop came, wrote everything up and away we went.

Today I got all the information, estimate plus car rental, and the total will come to just under $500. I called his home phone number and left a message giving him the details and said I would front the deposit the rental company would want (obviously I would get it back so there's no loss to me). How much money do you folks want to wager he'll actually cough up the money?

I look at it this way: if he doesn't want to pay or can't, I'll go to the insurance company anyway. If it means he loses his job, I guess he shouldn't be running into people.

Listen up audiophiles, have I got a product for you. For only $64,000, you can get a four-arm, handcrafted turntable. Made from aluminum, bronze and stainless steel, a technician will come to your location to assemble, install and calibrate your new toy. It will even have your name engraved on it!

But act quickly. This is a limited time offer. There is a $27,000 one arm model for the cheap asses among you.