I was born with ears that stuck out worse that Prince Charles. I was teased about them all through school.

In college I had my ears "tucked," which basically made them lay flat against my head. I had generous grandparents.

Anyway, the point is that to do this, (the following not for the queasy), they slice open your ear, take out the cartilage (which is what forms all the unique bumps and curves of your ear), manually reshape it, stick it back in, and then sew you up.

Not only did my ears finally not stick out, but they looked totally different than they did before: none of the curves matched, and even my earlobes are a different shape (the bottoms are trimmed a bit and then stitched back to your head.)

This is not terribly expensive surgery, and while a bit painful, if I were a criminal trying to beat a set of "earprints" somehow left at the scene of a crime, I'd have it done in a second.

Duh! If you wanna look at The Sun without risking your eyesight, just do it at night! Problem solved.

It took about 30 seconds with Google to establish that you are Timothy Lord. There's an MP3 I found of you giving a talk where you even identify your Slashdot ID. So we can get that right out of the way.

Now then.

I Googled Timothy Lord, Tim Lord, both with and without quotation marks. You know what?

There are roughly 7 billion (Timothy Lord) and 10 billion (Tim Lord) hits on that name without quotes. It goes down to close to 100,000 hits to 17,000 hits when you add quotes.

Timothy Lord isn't that uncommon a name. "Tim" and "Lord" by themselves are very common. I have a hard time imagining any employer going through all those search results when there's not really any way of knowing that the Tim Lord they're reading about doing something somewhere at a university computer some time in the past is the Tim Lord they're interviewing for a job. And even if they did, you could always deny it, unless you're under oath or something, but I guess that's a moral question you only have to think about if they went through the hassle of Googling you and getting this hit to begin with.

If your name were, oh, "Cornelius Mytzlplyk" I'd say you have a pretty valid concern here. But "Tim Lord?" I don't think so.

Remember the Thinkpad 701 with the folding, "Butterfly Keyboard?" Combine that screen with this keyboard and you'd have quite the portable "transformer." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj-5OI2tPlY

I have a small-but-nice vintage arcade game collection in my living room, and it occurred to me a few years back that these old upright cabinets would make for a pretty good coffin, especially my beloved Sinistar.

Then genius struck: remove the monitor (and I guess the boards too - let another collector use 'em), slap my lifeless remains in there so my face is right behind the glass, and BOOM, we have the makings of a great open-casket for what will surely be a somber wake.

Extra points for the nerdy friend who manages to get the game's synthesized voice to occasionally cry out BEWARE! I live!.

I love my old keyboards, and not just the Model M's.

I have 4 Model M's, and two of them have the EraserHead/Pointer Nipple dealie built-in like a Thinkpad. I have one classic Chicony AT with similar bucking springs inside. And I have 5 First-Generation Apple Extended Keyboards (model M0115) which I use with modern computers with an ADB-USB Converter from Griffin. As a professional writer, I've come to learn that a great-feeling keyboard actually adds the the writing experience, and makes the time pass by much more quickly.

That said, when I work in a cubicle farm (which happens from time to time as a tech writer), my Model M's are a problem. Their "clickety-clackety" machine-gun staccato usually irritates the hell out of everyone in earshot, and it doesn't take more than a hour or so for someone to ask me to use another keyboard. So do consider asking your office neighbors about it before shelling out big bucks for one.

On top of that, and this sounds like something right out of Office Space, but a Model M destroys the illusion of "constant productivity." Good managers know that you can't be typing for 8 hours straight, but Pointy Haired Bosses have no clue, and soon start to figure out when you're typing and when you're browsing Slashdot when you use a Model M. Quiet keyboards don't give your down-time away.

A good Apple M0115 (now nearly 20 years old) is a good combination between great key action and relative quiet, (it just goes "tappetty-tap") and as a bonus, it still works on your old Apple IIGS!

A new Muppet Show is obviously on the way...

I'm...going...to...see...it...again...and...again.

+1 if you get the reference.

(Hint: SNL)

First of all, let's not resort to namecalling here.

Neil tested the the software on 12 different infected systems, and found that one resulted in an endless-loop problem requiring support, whereas it installed and worked properly on the others. That right there alone is a better than 90% success rate for Norton. That's hard data. What hard data have you come up with after your extensive testing of av products, Killall? Yeah, I didn't think so.

But this isn't a story about the program's performance (that's in the linked product review). This is a story about the failure of support and a support staff's overzealous attempts to make an extra buck from a desperate customer.

No one expects any free or retail software to clean out all problems all the time, but when you pay for a retail software package, a modicum of free support is part of the deal after a failure to install. Contrary to the tech's assertions, the purchase price include support to install a retail product. If the tech doesn't want to go through the hassle of installing AV products on infected systems via telephone or remote, then the tech should search for another line of work. (And I know - I did this sort of support for 5 years.)

If there were truly no free solutions (and it turns out there were) AT A MINIMUM the tech support person should have offered the option to refund the customer's money after establishing the software wouldn't install. That's not great "tech support," but it at least fair "customer support."

There's also the matter of the tech offering paid services rather than directing the user to free services offered by Norton themselves for just this sort of problem. Offering paid support services for free products is an established business model (SugarCRM anyone?), but ignoring free solutions offered by your own company in order to make an extra buck with a paid solution for a retail product is simply disrespectful to the customer, as is not offering a refund, and Neil called 'em on it. What is your problem with that again?

And finally, there's the little act of plagiarism where the tech represented a third-party free antispyware cleaner as a Symantec product. Also disrepectful, especially when Symantec has its own free tools that are supposed to do the job too. And again, Neil called 'em on it.

Most product reviewers just rewrite press releases without any real testing these days - Neil is one of the few that really tests these things out on banks of infected systems, and then goes through the trouble of pretending to be a normal customer going through tech support to see how it works. There just aren't that many tech reviewers doing that anymore. Personally, I can only think of one other, and modesty prohibits me from mentioning who.

So let's direct that anger to Symantec rather than the reviewer, eh? Symantec dropped the ball on this one.

I guess I am missing something, but Boxee is ultimately software, right?

So why can't the Boxee people program their software to look like a regular web browser on a regular computer to Hulu's servers, making Boxee indistinguishable to those providers who would care?

Sort of like a User Agent Switcher for a media player? It seems to me that would be a big "FU" to the content providers, a big win for viewers, and Hulu is left out of the loop altogether so they're not to blame.