BREAKING SURF
| Stephenson Asks Fans to Annotate "Quicksilver" Online |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| The Nerve Unsexy List |
| Take Back Your Words |
| English to AOL-Speak Translator |
| Print Your Own Money |
| Athletes Preparing for the World Beard and Moustache Championships |
| Layout-o-matic CSS Layout Tool |
| Open Office 1.1 Released |
| A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words and a Misplaced URL |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
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BREAKING SURF
VeriSign Suspends SiteFinder After Threat From ICANN
VeriSign has finally caved in to mounting public pressure and agreed to suspend its mis-typed domain redirection service SiteFinder. They did this only after having the riot act read to them ICANN, which was in turn responding to widespread technical problems caused by the service and its associated change to the operation of the domain name system. ICANN basically said knock it off or we'll take you to court. This in addition to several private lawsuits which are already pending against VeriSign in connection with SiteFinder. The ICANN statement has the dry official background of the story, while a VeriSign representative has posted their schedule for the shutdown on the NANOG mailing list. A consumer friendly version of events is available from CNET.ICANN Statement: http://icann.org/announcements/advisory-03oct03.htm
Shutdown Schedule: http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg14917.html
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5086101.html
You Can Own the Web - the Entire Web
We're not kidding. Alexa is making the entire contents of its Web crawl available for purchase. Of course, you have to be able to handle 60 TB worth of data, spanning over 3.5 billion unique URLs. The total crawl currently takes about two months to complete. Current customers for this package include the Internet Archive and the Library of Alexandria. Alexa wants to expand its customer list, not only by selling the entire crawl but also selling just about any subset of it you care to define. Alexa's entire archive goes back seven years and takes up 500 TB of space, and expands by about 30 TB per month. How much does it all cost? Alexa prices some data feeds from $50 to about $3,000 per month. We don't know how much it would cost to own the whole Web - you'll just have to ask.http://pages.alexa.com/prod_serv/alexa_crawl.html
Torture has always made post-Enlightenment democratic societies uncomfortable. We pride ourselves on legally condemning its use in our own culture. While we understand that torture is endemic in much of the rest of the world, we don't, perhaps can't, do much about it. Among the many side effects of the war on terrorism is an uneasy new focus on the use of torture as a tool of war, even in a just and civilized society. Should we torture a captive in order to save lives? This is no longer an academic question, most notably in a place like Israel. Against this background, Mark Bowden, best known as the author of "Black Hawk Down", has written a penetrating essay in the Atlantic on the current ethics and practices of torture. He presents many surprises, from the distinctions between psychological persuasion and torture to the surprising ineffectiveness of both drugs and the actual application of pain as useful methods of persuasion. It's a most informative and engrossing examination of this most morally difficult of subjects. Don't pass it by.
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2003-09-11.htm
A group of actors, stuntpeople, special-effects whizzes, and amateur filmmakers in New Zealand have put together "The Fanimatrix: Run Program", a movie set in the Matrix universe. This labor of love cost virtually nothing in monetary terms, and was made in just nine nights of work using a MiniDV camcorder and editing software. The film weighs in at a hefty 170 MB, but is worth the time to download and the 16 or so minutes you'll spend watching it. Picture Neo with a New Zealand accent and you've got Dante, the star of this flick. The Trinity lookalike Medusa is up to something mysterious when she's not beating the crap out of guys in white shirts. Shot at night in parking garages and office warrens, this film is exciting, with well choreographed fights, biting tension, and an ending that begs for a sequel. Over at the Matrix home office, a "The Matrix: Revolutions" trailer is ready for download - the Agent Smith program is out of control, but Neo says it ends tonight....
"The Fanimatrix": http://fanimatrix.net/
"Revolutions": http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/rv_cmp/trailers_rev_frames.html
An anonymous author has released a paper which explains how to disguise your identity on peer-to-peer (P2P) file-trading networks, thus thwarting legal efforts to discover the source of file-trading traffic. The RIAA has been monitoring file-sharing traffic on networks like Kazaa and has demanded that ISPs turn over the names of users, who can be identified by IP addresses. But because P2P networks work by passing file-sharing traffic from node to node (computer to computer, in layspeak), a user can spoof the source of this traffic - the user basically pretends that the files shared come from somewhere else. This hides the true origin of the traffic and makes it impossible for the RIAA to prove that any user shared any given files. This process, even as theory, throws into doubt the identifying evidence the RIAA would present in any court case. A PDF paper has the theory, though you can bet that somebody is already creating a working implementation.
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~123456789/p2p_entrapment.pdf
Hacker Steals Half-Life 2 Source Code and Leaks It to the Net
It's almost traditional that copies of widely anticipated software make it onto the Net long before the official release. It has just happened to Half-Life 2, easily the most awaited game scheduled for release later this year. The big problem is that the source code was stolen, not merely the game. A hacker grabbed the code after cracking the internal network of developer Valve Software, thanks to the various security holes in the Microsoft Outlook e-mail client that Valve managing director Gabe Newhall uses. That's what Newhall admits in a post at Halflife2.net, and he adds that the company has been the target of denial-of-service attacks recently. The source code that is now floating around the Net is slightly out of date, but many folks are concerned that hackers will begin to take it apart in order to develop cheats for the wildly popular multiplayer game. This is a hard blow for fans who don't appreciate their gaming experience being ruined by cheaters, but how many of them will continue to use Outlook anyway?http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?threadid=10692
Software Monopoly, Security, and One Lost Job
Should the world's computer infrastructure rest upon a monopoly? That's the issue taken up in "CyberInsecurity: The Cost of Monopoly", written by several computer security experts, including Bruce Schneier, founder of Counterpane and author of "Applied Cryptography". The report reaches a simple conclusion: reliance on commercial software designed for market share rather than security - i.e. Windows - makes one vulnerable to attack. This past summer, Sobig and Blaster demonstrated the ease with which virus and worm writers can expose and exploit Windows vulnerabilities. The report calls for Microsoft to open its software to users rather than bind users ever more tightly to Windows with even more cumbersome and vulnerable security software. One of the report's five authors lost his job after the report became public. Dan Geer used to be chief technical officer at @Stake, a software company that works closely with Microsoft on a variety of projects. Although @Stake denied that Microsoft demanded Geer's head, the firm made it clear that Geer's participation did not imply that @Stake agreed with the report, and fired him. CNET has more on that. The dilemma of market versus security is not easy to solve. nor will it go away."CyberInsecurity": http://www.ccianet.org/papers/cyberinsecurity.pdf
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1009-5082649.html
At first blush, you might think these folks are mad, but when you think about it, especially in light of the insecurity of snail mail pointed out by Robert X. Cringely recently (see NSD 9.36), the idea is not entirely outrageous. Planetwide, an Australian company, is offering to receive your snail mail, scan it, and forward the scans to your e-mail address while safely storing the original for you. Planetwide is pitching this service to travellers who need to keep up with bills and such from Net terminals around the world. The company also has a related service called FollowMe that just forwards snail mail. Despite its location, Planetwide works across the globe at a fairly reasonable cost. Given the labor-intensive nature of the services, we wonder whether they can sustain any reasonable volume of customers with acceptable levels of service.
Planetwide: http://www.planetwide.net/
NSD 9.36: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v09/nsd.09.36.html#BS3
Fortune has sponsored a super experiment, in which three geeks were unleashed in the home of a family mired in pre-Clintonian tech. "Airport? My husband is at the airport." You get the idea.... This is one fun read. When geeks invade, total chaos is not far behind. Getting the remotes to work turns out to be the hard part. Well, that and trying not to yell. The article concludes that life on the leading edge of tech is not easy, but can be accomplished with time and free tech support.
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/personalfortune/articles/0,15114,488957,00.html
In another first for technology, students at Algoma University have managed to communicate over the Internet using bongo drums to transfer data packets. Some may ask why. Others may ask why not - after all, it's been done with carrier pigeons, so why not bongos? The accelerated computer science and information technology degree students found motivation in a dare thrown out by professor George Townsend, who offered bonus marks to anyone who could prove that it could be done. Student Daniel Reed accepted the dare and demonstrated the capability some eight weeks later. Townsend's point was to prove that the lower layers of the OSI communications model are flexible enough to accommodate just about any medium without affecting the higher layers in any way. This kind of rig isn't likely to show up in computer science labs, but it's kind of neat in a really pointless kind of way. What's next, we wonder? Smoke signals, or semaphore? If you want to find out how it's done, read about the experiment's phases at the Bongo Project site. Nerdiness doesn't come any nerdier than this, and we mean that in a good way.
Bongo Project: http://eagle.auc.ca/~dreid/
Pigeon: http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/
Paid Inclusion: the Dirty Little Secret of Search Engines
Everybody is familiar with keyword-triggered targeted ads on search engines. What fewer people know is that some of the top search engines charge just for getting included in the search results at all. For example, MSN, Yahoo, and Lycos all have so-called paid inclusion programs. If you don't pay, your search ranking takes a dive, thus depriving your Web site of clicks and your business of possible revenue. Google is conspicuously not part of this crowd, and in fact its search rankings serve as an effective independent check of how other search engines mess with rankings. Business Week has an expose of how all this works and how it impacts businesses in search of Web traffic.http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_40/b3852098_mz063.htm
Targeted Ads Can Lead to Trouble
Automated targeted advertising is a growing trend on the Net, but it has its pitfalls. A woman browsing the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) site used the site's search facility, powered by Google, to find child pornography info. In addition to the information she sought, the Google-generated search results page displayed ads for a defense lawyer and porn. Unwilling to appear to endorse any specific lawyer, the NCAC finds itself in the ironic position of asking Google to censor its ads. Either the ads or Google will disappear from the NCAC site, says the organization's executive director. A CNET article covers the complicated headaches involved in serving targeted online ads. Automated ad servers just don't - dare we say "yet" - understand the legal, ethical, or moral dimensions of specific searches.http://news.com.com/2100-1024_3-5083067.html
DDoS Attacks Tackle Spam Blacklists
Some days it seems as if the Internet parasites are winning all the wars, defeating all attempts at community and cooperation. Sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have hit sites that host spam-blocking lists. As CNET reports, two such sites were recently forced offline as a result of DDoS attacks, and a third shut its list down in fear that it would be next. Spammers seem obvious culprits, but there is no proof. Some experts also blame spammers for the Sobig worm. Some governments have enacted anti-spam legislation, but some folks about an ultimate cost to Internet freedom. Slashdotters have proposed a slew of solutions. Spam blacklists could be distributed over several computers, which would make them much harder to attack. Other posters blame authorities for a lack of action against spammers and ISPs for not shutting down spammers. Blacklists can also have nasty side effects; one story attests to the calamitous business impact of getting erroneously blacklisted. With no blanket solution on the horizon, we're left to just keep on deleting the things.CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1032-5082728.html
Slashdot: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/24/132216
Time to Vote for Scott Adams's Annual Weasel Awards
Yes, it's time to vote for the 2003 Weasel Awards, run by the guy who does Dilbert. Who's the Weaseliest Individual? Weaseliest Country? Weasliest Company? In the all important Weasliest Behavior category, we like "blaming fast food restaurants for making you fat". The poll is open until October 15. Californians may wish to wait until after the recall election to make their choices. After all, you can stuff a lot of weaselage into a week of political campaigning.http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/shop/html/weasel_poll.html
Bush Regime Decks of Cards Start to Proliferate
In response to the US government's most-wanted-Iraqi deck of cards, you will recall (see NSD 9.17), someone invented a similar deck of Bush regime cards. A US company even went on to sell a real deck of such cards - but only after a long search for a printer who would manufacture them. Now the French and Russians are also getting in on the act. The French deck appears to have the highest craftsmanship of them all. We couldn't find a link to the actual Russian deck, though a Reuters story at Yahoo has a copy of one card with President Bush as Jack of Hearts in cool Russian costume. Jack of Hearts? A story at Gateway to Russia tells us why.NSD 9.17: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v09/nsd.09.17.html#BS20
US deck: http://www.regimecards.com/
French: http://www.reseauvoltaire.net/bushregimedeck.html
Yahoo: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20030925/od_nm/cards_dc
Gateway to Russia: http://www.gateway2russia.com/st/art_142154.php
The Excellently Presented Case for ISSN Numbers for Weblogs
The International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) is an eight-digit number that identifies periodical publications, like ISBN numbers do for books. The ISSN organization assigns numbers to magazines and periodicals. Until recently, nobody had really thought much about the appropriateness of assigning ISSN numbers to blogs. Some ISSN registries do in fact do that, some refuse to. Nevertheless, many bloggers are adamant that their weblogs are really serial publications and therefore should have an ISSN number. Joe Clark summarizes the bloggers' case. Should you care about the issue? Nah, probably not. But you should definitely note Clark's write-up as the perfect example of how to organize a written argument. We wish more people were this clear in making their case, whatever it may be.ISSN: http://www.issn.org/
Joe Clark: http://www.fawny.org/issn/compatibility/
NSD, Bag in Hand, Needs Your Help
No, we don't need a monetary handout. We want candy. Or pennies. Or nude pictures of Saddam from his early porn career (Oh! The Horror!!). Yes, it's that month again, and we're starting to work on that one annual NSD that we love and hate the most, the Halloween issue. It's easy for you to lend a hand (don't worry, we'll bandage the stump) to our endeavor by dumping your favorite spooky and gruesome and just plain bizarre Web sites in our plastic jacko'lantern - except by dumping, we really mean send e-mail to pressroom@netsurf.com - and do include a URL. Forgetting to do so is too cruel a trick....ONLINE CULTURE
Stephenson Asks Fans to Annotate "Quicksilver" Online
In case you have been off-planet, Neal Stephenson has a new novel, "Quicksilver", a 900-page first volume in his new Baroque trilogy. Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and Robert Hooke are among the characters. Rather than simply post a FAQ for the novel, Stephenson is trying something different, the Quicksilver Metaweb. Stephenson is inviting individuals to annotate the novel as a part of a community (see his Metaweb Introduction page). Think of a metaweb as a collective blog. Stephenson is trying to use this project to help bring commentary and content rather than sales and marketing to the forefront of the Web. It is bloggish in a hypertext kinda way - someone wanting to know more about Newton could start at the Quicksilver Metaweb and perhaps find a link to John Maynard Keynes's famous statement that Newton wasn't the first scientist, but the last of the Magi. From there, you might get a link to info on the Sotheby's auction at which Keynes purchased Newton's alchemical manuscripts in the 1930s. Metawebs may be the next step in bloggerdom, and in any case should interest more than historians of natural philosophy.Metaweb Intro: http://www.metaweb.com/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=Metaweb:Metaweb_introduction_(Neal_Stephenson)
Quicksilver Metaweb: http://www.metaweb.com/wiki/wiki.phtml
"Quicksilver": http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0380977427/netsurferdigest
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The New Humanists: Science at the Edge
Monstrous Regiment
Napoleon's Expedition to Russia: The Memoirs of General de Segur
Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web DesignSURFING SITES
User-Feedback-Based Search Engine Can Play with the Big Boys
Most of us would love a search engine that reads our minds and then forms the perfect search-phrase. The nearest thing to that may have arrived, called WhittleBit. It's simple to use. Just enter your search term, let the engine know how good its top ten results were by pressing the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons provided, and then click on the Whittle button to obtain a set of search results refined by your feedback. You can repeat the process as often as you like. Surprisingly, Whittle certainly outperformed the big-name search engines when we ran it through some basic tests. It might be worth bookmarking for that day that you just can't find the ideal answer to your search.http://whittlebit.com/
Some Folks Really Hate Northwestern Mutual Life
The site belonging to Policyowner Protection Services, Inc. (PPSI) has not only some real meat, but a big bite. The site's built and operated by former Northwestern Mutual Life (NML) insurance policy holders. Want to see what can happen when a company truly pisses off its customers? Trek over here - it's an astounding indictment. NML would probably love to have this place go away, but it doesn't look as though there's much they can do about it. This place has loads of information, and if you're considering a policy from these folks and read this, your head will explode. It's worth a visit even if you've never heard of NML, because the info provided gives you a great basis for dealing with any insurance company. Several agencies and organizations are investigating NML in part as a result of PPSI's allegations. NML acknowledges that it is currently under investigation by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), but blows that off as a general investigation of the entire industry. If the allegations on the site are off the mark, why doesn't the company respond? You definitely need to check this out; think of all the money you could save on Zantac.http://www.nmlcomplaints.com/
The creator of the Covers Project candidly admits that his site is the product of too many late nights of too much free time. The site is a database of titles of cover songs (songs performed by an artist other than the original), which contains a staggering 42,693 songs by 16,065 different performers. True to the circumstances of its creation, this site is a fantastic late-night timewaster. Did you know, for example, that Judas Priest's "You've Got Another Thing Comin'" was covered by Pat Boone on his 1997 release "In a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy"? The great thing about this site is that no matter how well you think you know an artist, you can count on several surprises when you look them up in the database - we are still in shock after finding out that Hawkwind covered Velvet Underground's "White Light/White Heat". Another fun thing you can do here is make cover chains, where each song is a cover of a song by the band that covered the preceding song. The current record is a 157-song chain, which will take a lot of late nights to beat.
http://www.coversproject.com/
The Sears Catalog will one day prove itself to be an invaluable source document for future historians of the consumer age. What will they learn from the fall 1971 edition? Well, they'll find out that that was the year of the slick, wet-look polyurethane knee-length boot-sock - a sock that instantly transformed any shoes into a pair of boots. They'll observe that it was a great year for patented man-made fibers like Estron, Dacron, and Acrilan, and see that this was THE year of the Perma Prest pantsuit. What they will make of it all, however, is another matter entirely. The catalogue is scanned here in all its dubious glory for you to speculate on what they heck they were thinking back then. By the way, the women's undies are on page 23.
http://www.aperfectworld.org/page_one.htm
Compleat Diagram of Strange Persons
This graphic at Alana's Dear Blog charts the relationships among various communities of strange people. For example, from Fat People Who Like Anime, you can go to Trekkies, then Linux Users, then Alien Abductees. Many links jump over other relationships - you can also get to Linux Users straight from Fat People Who Like Anime. You can find communities like Goths, Comic Book Enthusiasts, Balloon Fetishists, and other oddballs, but, at press time, bloggers are conspicuously missing. We confidently predict the diagram will grow into a monstrous community-produced chart as various subcultures fight to be included. (And no, "compleat" is not misspelled, it's just archaic - look it up).http://www.alanapost.com/weblog/archives/002425.html
A nation's flag is more than just a piece of cloth. It's an emblem and a symbol of the essence of a country - something to inspire pride and patriotism in its citizens, and to rally around in times of hardship. It's just too bad for some nations that their flags really suck. This site grades the flags of the world from A (inspired design) to F (should only be used as a tea towel). The site also uses special codes for certain standard failings - for example, a little Christmas tree icon will appear next to a flag with an overly busy design, and a gun icon indicates a flag that features weapons (the flag of Mozambique has a picture of an assault rifle on it). Of course, this is all very subjective, but those flags that score highly do tend to be simple yet striking designs in strong but not overwhelming colors. So what is the worst flag in the world? Take a look at Northern Mariana Islands' flag and then see if you can do better in 30 seconds using clip art. We think their flag-design committee took 45.
http://ahpc-jp30.st-and.ac.uk/~josh/flags/index.html
Yesterday I Was a Fountain Pen, Today I Am a Web Page
The bar mitzvah, or bat mitzvah for girls, is a rite of passage into adulthood. The occasion is often marked by an over-zealously planned party with cheesy entertainers and perhaps a ludicrously over-decorated themed cake, with plenty of relatives on hand with cameras to preserve the occasion for and provide a lifetime of reliving adolescent embarrassment. Bar Mitzvah Disco is where these photographs surface when the blackmail money isn't paid. The site actually is a lot more than a Jewish version of Mullets Galore, or so its creators claim. They are keen to stress that these photographs tell important stories of past shared experiences, and are currently writing a book about bar/bat mitzvah experiences over the last 50 years. But given the "potent cocktail of ritual, acne, insecurity and hormones run amok" involved, humor is very much at the fore in the various themed albums, and site users can even submit their own captions to the photographs. Sounds like serious sociological inquiry to us.http://www.barmitzvahdisco.com/
Superman's busy. Batman's unavailable. Spiderman's trapped. And you're in trouble. Don't panic. From somewhere in the world, another superhero is on the way. You'll find your rescuer at An International Catalogue of Superheroes, devoted to men and women of steel, mutation, or whatever, across the imperiled globe on which we struggle in ignorance of these specially empowered do-gooders. Have you ever heard of, for example, Taddeus Tenterhook, a.k.a. Photonik, the French "Man of Light" whose base of operations is New York? What about la Bruja Blanca (White Witch), a Tarzan-ette from Mexico, or Shakti, once a normal housewife and now a three-eyed fury who fights for justice in India. It's fun to jump from heroic bio to heroic bio here. Many of these folks, such as Australia's Southern Cross, are sketchy or ghostly - often, a thumbnail of a cover graphic draws you onto a page devoid of detail, probably because the fanman couldn't get his claws on copies of the original comics. Fight disappointment. Drop in, and you'll find a world of superheroes beyond Marvel and DC.
http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/
The History of Cinema and Popular Culture
If you know someone who could benefit from a museum visit, take them online to the Web site of the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture, a brick-and-mortar public museum and an academic research center at the University of Exeter. The Virtual Tour gets you started; models from "Toy Story", "Jurassic Park", and other blockbusters are the focus of one-paragraph movie/cultural histories. Show this to aliens if you happen to make first contact; it'll help them get up to speed. The Young BDC section, for kids, has nifty sections such as Behind the Scenes (check out the shadow puppet pages) and Movie Trivia, where we learned that "The film is known as Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone everywhere except the USA and so every scene in which the Philosopher's Stone was mentioned was filmed twice, once with the actors saying 'Philosopher's' and once with the actors saying 'Sorcerer's'." The Web site also has a long list of relevant, mostly scholarly books for sale at Amazon.com. We have not visited the museum in England but are indeed impressed with its four-year-old electronic companion.http://info.ex.ac.uk/bill.douglas/
The Internet is jammed with sites that pay homage to some of Hollywood's most beautiful and talented women. Cult Sirens provides a unique twist in that while the subject matter is sexy women, they remain mostly dressed. Here you'll find a tribute to the women of horror, SF, B-movies, Z-movies, and Euro-trash. Showcasing primarily women who reached their peaks in the 1960s and 1970s, this site will give you a quick glimpse into some of the silver screen's scream queens. View the complete guest listing for a look at all the women this site pays tribute to. Visitors will appreciate the noteworthy facts the creator of Cult Sirens has gathered. Several images supplement the concise write-ups on each woman. Everybody knows Ursula Andress, Lynda Carter, and Raquel Welch, but here you can bone up on Edwige Fenech, Allison Hayes, and Chelo Alonso as well.
http://www.cultsirens.com/
Had Frodo Baggins visited this Web page before setting forth for the Cracks of Doom, the hobbit's journey might have been less arduous. A Yahoo Maps-like approach shows the route from the Shire through Middle Earth, complete with printed directions and mileage. How easy is that? The page also offers helpful hints - like advising you to find out if any wars are about to break out, or whether the enemy is pursuing you. Good advice, great maps.
http://www.ooblick.com/text/tomordor/
Television has its share of failed programming. Charmings.org pays homage to a little-known show that originally aired on ABC in 1987 and 1988. "The Charmings" took the fairy-tale characters of Snow White and set them in 1987 California after a thousand-year sleep. If you're a fan of this quirky sitcom - and we think that merely remembering it qualifies you as one - then you'll appreciate this site. If you're not a fan, but you're curious in a rubbernecking-at-the-highway-pile-up kind of way about the details of this show, then you'll find plenty at this tribute to bring you up to date. Twenty-one episodes of "The Charmings" were produced before it was pulled from airwaves in its second season. Is it possible, as the creator of this fan site claims, that putting it in a time slot against the highly popular "The Cosby Show" caused its downfall? yeah, that's the ticket....
http://www.charmings.org/
A Site to Kill Time for Those Who Like It Better Dead
Need a quick retort? Brilliant flames? Want to prove your point with dumb quotes? Unless you're Shakespeare or Jay Leno, you probably can do no better than to harvest choice keepers at Insultmonger.com. "Our mission," the home page states, "is to raise the standard of insult to an art form." Celebrity, politics, marriage - nothing here is sacred. This site has just about everything you could want for putdowns and comebacks, although here and there, to be sure, you may need to suspend good taste. Hide out here when you need, say, a clever association or vulgar refutation. Prudes might want to start with the Slang page, especially if they never got educated on the street. The Joke Server contains more than 2,000 jokes in 19 categories, plus a Randomizer. Wake up your audience with cracks about pedophiles, sorority girls, men.... Take a peek, and you, too, may believe the site's assertion that its more than 34,000 insults "have permeated all realms of popular culture, and can be seen and heard everywhere."http://www.insultmonger.com/
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
Too many celebrity-of-the-second references ruin what could easily have been a timeless list of things now and forevermore unsexy. Still, can anyone argue with the awful unsexiness of things like fan fiction or cats?http://www.nerve.com/regulars/quickies/unsexy/
One of the axioms of modern culture is that corporate and political interests hijack language. Here's your chance to hit back at the scurvy knaves and reclaim words in the name of the vernacular.
http://www.wordpirates.com/index.cgi
English to AOL-Speak Translator
DA TRANSLA2R WIL TAEK ANY G3MS U WISH 2 PAN OR BOROW AND TURN THEM IN2 DA LANGUAEG IN COMON US3 MONG 12-YEAR-OLD AOL US3RS11111!1 OMG LOL FOR ADAD REALISM A NUMBR OF CHAT ABREVIATIONS R LIEBRALY AP3NDED1!11!1! WTF LOL ITS KIND OF CUTA BUT U WONT AD DA SIET 2 UR BOKMARKS!1!! U PROBABLY RUN IN2 3NOUGH APAERNTLY PRE-TEN AOL US3RS AS IT IS!!1!! OMG WTFhttp://ssshotaru.homestead.com/files/aolertranslator.html
OK, it's only Monopoly money, but still.... Hasbro has a page with PDF files of all the currency denominations from the game.
http://www.hasbro.com/monopoly/pl/page.treasurechest/dn/default.cfm
Athletes Preparing for the World Beard and Moustache Championships
Carson City, Nev. will host the World Beard and Moustache Championships Nov. 1. We're not sure, but this may be a ruse designed to lure Osama bin Laden out of the mountains. Some of the wax jobs these guys apply to themselves add new nuances of meaning to the phrase "get a life!"http://www.worldbeardchampionships.com/
Layout-o-matic CSS Layout Tool
Layout-o-matic is a simple Web-based multi-column CSS-layout starter kit. Choose the number of columns, some width parameters, hit the button, and you can download a modern Web page template.http://www.inknoise.com/experimental/layoutomatic.php
SOFTWARE
This is the latest release of the Sun Microsystems-backed open-source office-productivity suite, a free alternative to Microsoft Office that is rapidly gaining converts in the business world. This version includes the ability to export data in several new formats, including PDF, Macromedia Flash, and several mobile device formats. It also boasts improved compatibility with Microsoft Office, new accessibility options, and faster load times. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Solaris. It's a killer download though, over 60 MB of data, so you may want to obtain a CD-ROM from a distributor.Open Office: http://www.openoffice.org/about_us/1.1press_releaseb.html
Distributors: http://distribution.openoffice.org/cdrom/#cdrom
CORRECTIONS
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words and a Misplaced URL
Last issue, we played a version of Hide the Pickle with you, but we hid it too well for some readers. The URL for A Picture's Worth wasn't at the bottom of "Pictures and Words" where it was supposed to be. It was hiding at the end of the UFO art blurb. Anyway, here it is again. (Hmmm, Hide the Pickle. Is that anything like Trap the Clown?? - A)http://www.1000words.net/