We have a new Pope, a German guy. Rat singer, like the pied piper, only different... ;)

It was Ethelred's journal which reminded me of this fact.

http://www.666man.net/

This goes back to the pope and religion, just read this.

http://www.666man.net/

What would one have to do to qualify for a /. free day pass?

Why?

Well, I just got one for some reason... Just had to watch a ThinkGeek ad and I got to see into the future.

You've probably seen this going around...

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

A book on asbestos.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Friday from Heinlein's book of the same name. Or the girl from Glory Road

The last book you bought is:

The story of Pi, for my Aunt's Birthday.

The last book you read:

Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep, again.

What are you currently reading?

How to Buy & Sell just about everything.

Five books you would take to a deserted island.

The Bible, a book on building straw houses, the complete works of Shakespeare, the unabridged Encyclopaedia Britannica and Friday.

Looks like the pope has died, hope we get a more liberal pope. Although there are many conservative Cardinals.

webhat writes "After all the discussions on slashdot about HDTV, a BBC News article
now reports on "A seven-point plan to tackle Britain's 'digital divide' has been unveiled by the government. It will try to remove barriers such as cost, lack of training and confidence that keep some people off the internet. ""

For April fools I decided to be a karma whore, so I took the three posts, didn't bother to read them and searched for posts already posted by a different user when a similar subject was brought up. These are the scores:

Revenue will be their biggest challenge 5, Informative Novell's Race Against Time

Most important "new feature" 2, Informative Mac OS X Tiger Goes Gold

The eventual decline 2, Interesting Sony to Make an "iTunes for Movies"

The funniest thing, because of these posts I actually got the "No Karma Bonus" checkbox, which I hadn't had before. This must mean I officially have KARMA TO BURN!!!! ;)

I posted this to slashdot:

It seems that the wesite for the webcomic Little Gamers has been shut down by the MPAA because it "... facilitates the illegal downloading of copyrighted motion pictures via so called 'Torrents'." It has the smell of a practical joke, it being April fools and all.

Brian McWilliams - writer of "Spam Kings" - that's the guy who I helped on the article I previously mentioned in a JE.

I was watching CNN, while trying to stop Firefox from crashing on an xsl transform, and saw the Pope was getting worse.

As some may know I am not a great believer in God, and don't really like the policies of the man, but it always saddens me to see somebody die(-ing).

So with my love of Yahoo! I thought I'd look to see if anybody had started a deadpool on the pope, just because. There are loads of them.

Which brought me to a story of a deadpool I know from a hospital where a friend of mine worked on the ICU. (not a candidate for snopes) They would bet on when patients would die, which is macabre to say the least, what makes it worse is that the hospital administrators banned the patient deadpool as there could be an incentive for nurses or doctors to cheat.

This brought me to another point, as I wanted to quote the "First do no harm" dictum. It's not even really in the Hippocratic Oath. [1] I never knew that.

For those interested in the xslt, code similar to this was causing the crash:

XML:

<tag> \
text here \
</tag>

XSLT

document.write("<xsl:value-of select="tag"/>");

Looks like something to do with the backslash, this seems to work fine in IE, although it prints the backslash in the page.

I actually had the believe that it was obvious that Darwin believed in a God, but after reading this article, which I was brought to by little-gamers, of all things, I wondered what the rest of the world thought; did darwin believe in god? Or is he an athiest like me?

The Christian Right, have some funny answers to this, but can't avoid the fact that he believed in God, iow he's agnostic, but they miss quote him to make him out to be something other than a Christian - which hits the mark - and incorrectly conclude that this means he didn't believe in God. Naturally Wikipedia using the complete quotes is quite convincing in the fact that Charles Darwin was agnostic.

So how can Ray Mummert make a stupid comment like:

"There is such a complexity in life, and science wants to hang its hat on a belief that life somehow started -- they say there is no creator, no order ..."

Darwin basically states there is no Biblical Deity, but doesn't seem to doubt that there is a God at all.

I'm a fair Meta Moderator, I try to read the Context all the time, take into account how others have moderated and MM on that basis, even if I don't agree with the comment posted. Today I saw 2 on topic jokes and a posting about an alternative, marked offtopic.

I'd already decided to be extra careful with things marked offtopic, troll or redundant, I never see the need to moderate anything as offtopic, troll or redundant. I also never see the point of up modding an already moderated post, unless the moderation is clearly wrong. I try to avoid modding people in my friends list, as that would be a little unfair, although I do sometimes. I even moderate at -1 AC. Now I'm getting mod points once every 2-4 days.

As it seems many people are modding stupidly I could just save my time and sell my mod points.

My last month at Sun Microsystems in Zurich started today, naturally I'm busy finishing up documentation and stuff, but it has been such a blast. I never expected that the time would go by so quickly, I've worked here for just over 3.5 months now on a project for a huge setup of Directory Servers and learned so much about Sun's JES internals, although most are the same as the Netscape DS internals.

When I'm finished here I'll be going to spend all my hard earned cash in South-East Asia. And will probably go and help in the Tsunami area, even if it is only to support the local economy.

Then in September it looks like I'm going to Leeds to do Directory Service and Meta Directory stuff for the NHS project there, at least it still looks that way.

The only thing I won't miss about Switzerland is the keyboard, they have the Z and Y switched. I've started making mistakes with the keys on my US keyboard now too...

After seeing this article on slashdot I contacted the company and got one. After having had it 3 weeks I discovered some problems, but none serious.

1. There are some problems with magnetic fields, mostly in areas with low hanging power cables,lthough it doesn't cut out the quality is less than perfect. Other sources of magnetic fields cause similar problems.
   
2. There are some Nokia compatability problems, these can be solved by using an adapter with is usually included, although I didn't get it with the sample I was send. I've tried it with a number of other phones including Toshiba, NEC and Siemens, and have had no other problems. BTW this is NOT a problem with the headset, but with Nokia socket. (I solved this with a $2 adapter with the regular jack socket replace with the small jack socket soldered on and a heat shrink cover.)
3. The documentation wasn't clear on how to turn it off, so I decided to leave it at home for my trip to the UK. There is a way, the photocopied documentation didn't contain this information.

Soon this will also be rolled out in Europe, probably not by me, sadly.

After talking to the company who are doing the European roll out I shall probably be doing at least some of the roll out in the Netherlands. This should turn out to be quite a lot of fun.
I have already got a couple of interested parties, large chains and single telecom shops. The only problem ofcourse is that the Nokia adapters are not being sold in some of the big chains anymore. So I might have to find a sollution for this.