What will those scientists discover next? Perhaps, "Solar energy helps warm water"? "Combustible quality of gas seems to provide mechanical advantage"?

Josh Cagan is a very funny person with a very funny weblog called "Why I Don't Like You*". Don't just sit there, with your Hello Kitty bike. Go read it!

Los Angeles County has requested that hard drive manufacturers refrain from using the terms "Master" and "Slave" to refer to IDE bus settings. Next thing you know, male to female cable adapters will be deemed pornographic.

Tapestry has lots of comic strips available in RSS format. If you don't know what RSS means, then you probably don't care. If you don't know what comic strips are, well... um... you need help.

My eyes! The goggles — they do nothing!

Proceed to the Smoking Gun if you dare.

So, I've just started running ads here on Ridiculent. Don't freak out, they're Google text ads, and they're down on the lower-right part of the page where they won't bother anyone. I had "registered" for their program a LONG time ago, and was refused without much explanation. Today, I got mail saying I was accepted... Go figure!

Anyway, I'm not going to bug you to click the ads or anything, I don't expect to make money off this site... I'm just really curious how this Google ad thing will work out, because it attempts to spit out "relevant" ads, and considering how incredibly random this site is, they could potentially be quite amusing.

It looks like just about every mobile phone provider except T-Mobile (my latest phone provider) are being bastards about the whole phone number portability regulation thing, and charging ALL their customers to help foot the bill (presumably for future lost business). The funny thing is that the cell phone business suffers from a severe "grass greener on other side" problem, so with all the inevitable "ship-jumping", all the providers will probably wind up with the same amount of customers in the long run.

Anyway, reports vary, so read this Gizmodo report for full info, but at least SOME users have reported the following charges:

Sprint PCS: $1.10 a month for "Federal Wireless Number Pooling And Portability."
Nextel:$1.55 or $2.83 for "Federal Programs Cost Recovery,"
AT&T Wireless: $1.75 for "Regulatory Program Fees"
Cingular: $1.25 for "Regulatory Cost Recovery"
Verizon: Some confused customers charged $0.55, and not sure why.

Playboy is running a feature on the "Women of Wal-Mart"*. Now... I've been to Wal-Mart. I've seen the women who work there. What freakazoid in Hef's cohort strolled into to their local mega-store and said to himself - "DAMN! I wanna see these gals nekkid!" Now, I didn't actually view the feature in question and, to be fair, with 1,400,000 employees, there must be one or two lookers in the bunch, but I still want to know who sees "Wal-Mart" and thinks "Hot Naked Chicks!"

* This is a link to Playboy.com. Click — or do not click — accordingly, based upon your current location, job, and monitor orientation. You have been warned.

This is so cool... Someone made an exact Flash recreation of one of my favorite old DOS Shareware games, called Hexxagon. It's a board game kind of like "Othello" or "Reversi", but kind of different. It's very simple to play and incredibly addicting. Have at it!

Did anyone misplace their shoes in the woods? Seventy pairs of them? Filled with butter?

Ah, the magic of online communication.

A dead fish, Gary Shandling, a rose, a stop sign, Steven Seagal, the stolen remains of Liz Taylor's third husband, and a private dick... what exactly is going on here?

"It's dehumanizing to be treated as a plate"

It seems technology has leapfrogged someone's business model yet again. I've been searching for ringtones for my Sony Ericsson T610, and came across the UK site PhunkyPhones.net. Their business model is typical — you preview songs on their site, and if you find one you like, you call their number and, for a small charge on your phone bill, they send you the song via MMS. Unfortunately for them, "polyphonic ringtones" are really just MIDI files, and their "previews" just link directly to the MIDI file. So, if you have phone which allows direct file transfer, well, just do a "Save As...", upload, and you've saved £1.50.

Whenever you base a business model on a minor arbitrary technological limitation (such as earlier phones' lack of direct upload capabilities), you are setting yourself up for eventual failure.

But what if you have a fear of taking pills?

This whole "thong" craze has gotten out of hand. Now even cell phones are wearing them!



If only they made a nice pair of Sony Ericsson T610-compatible stretch-denim hip-huggers to go with it...

Update: perhaps you'd prefer studded black leather.

Flash cartoon style

This is weird... So, the new "Nokia N-Gage" game system/cell phone apparently requires one to hold the phone in an unusual manner (sideways) when conversing. Somehow, that fact led to this website featuring pictures of people holding... well, just check it out...

You can now buy every Far Side cartoon ever made (and more!) in one giant 1250 page two-volume set. It's on my Amazon wishlist... Crap, where's my webcam?

Skirt Man has a LiveJournal. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Perhaps a little late for Halloween, but not too late for the Fall harvest season... check out this guy's pumpkin sculptures.

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I followed an ad link to "Cheapsville Auctions". At face value, it appears to be a regular auction site, but everything has a MAXIMUM bid of 1% of the product's going price. That is, a Mini Cooper has a maximum bid of $194.25. A Segway Scooter Human Transporter has a maximum bid of $49.99. Now, that may have made perfect sense in 1999 (we'll make it up in volume!) but, naturally, there's a catch. Well, two catches, actually.

First, there's a "bid fee" of $10. So, you pay $10 to place a bid. There are a MAXIMUM number of bids. For the Segway, it's 978 bids. That means, the company will make $9,870 on the "bid fees", making the actual selling price pretty much irrelevant.

OK, so we know how the company makes money, but if it's an auction, with a maximum bid, why the heck would you not just bid the maximum and automatically win? Well, here's the gimmick. The highest UNIQUE bid wins. That means, if 20 people bid $49.99, but you're the only person who bids $49.98 - you win! If there are no unique bids above a penny, and you bid $0.01 - you win!

So, it's not an auction at all, it's really a paid sweepstakes with a bit of psychological strategy tossed in.

Odds are, they're out of business within the month, but it's still a very clever idea. Meanwhile, one of the *cough* auctions is for an XBox, with NO "bid fee", so you may as well play along for free and try to win that.