Is it bad that I thought this clip was hilarious? Brought back memories of wrestling with my cousins and my brother. Man, I miss that stuff!

So I was sitting at my desk in the office, sipping my coffee when I found this comic strip. Talk about depressing! It was really the kick I needed to start focusing on school again. The first comment is hilarious though.

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So I bit the bullet and bought a Lenovo x61 Tablet PC yesterday. I’m really looking forward to tooling around with it, as I haven’t owned a tablet PC before. I’ve messed around with tablet features in Windows XP, but I was wondering what Microsoft has done to improve the features in Vista. I found this nifty YouTube clip pointing out the new features in Vista, and it looks very interesting, especially that “tossing” feature, where you use the pen to scroll through pages by a natural hand gesture. I wonder if that feature extends to other applications that I use (Firefox in particular).

I consider myself pretty concerned with privacy, and so I try to watch what I do, whither it’s tearing my mail up, or doing what I can to hide my search history. In fact, nothing scares me more than the permanent list of interests, concerns, health issues, and peccadilloes that your search history creates. There are no rules as to how long this information is held, and I talked about this very issue previously.

That’s why I applaud Ask.com for not keeping a list of search queries for the individual. At least saying they don’t. This raises two thoughts though. Are they really not keeping your search history. Will the search term I just entered on their site magically disappear? Obviously not, I mean, their marketing guys would flip, not knowing what keywords are worth, advertisers would balk, etc. I’m assuming they mean my search term will only be used in aggregate with other search terms to track usage statistics of the swarm.

I also have to wonder how Google handles this. They already let you delete your search history, or remove certain entries, but I find this extremely misleading. I mean, the search terms may be removed from my sight, but are they removed behind the scenes as well? To what level? Does the CIA/FBI/XYZ already have a list of my search terms? These are the types of things that remain unanswered.

In the meantime, my favorite way to search is still Scroogle which scrapes the
search results directly from Google. They even have a search engine plug-in for Firefox. Now if I could just unhook myself from gMail, gCal, Google News, Google Reader, Google Maps, and Google Notebook, I’d be good to go…

There’s a great article on a FP that outlines the fall of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s power in Iran. He is seen as a joke by his own people for his nonsensical talk (think of the Iranian form of “Bushisms”). He is disliked for his rants that isolate Iran from the world, and also for his abhorrent economic policies that have decimated the national economy. His supporters are beginning to step away, and soon enough, he will be in lame duck status.

This brings us to his hate-filled U.S. rhetoric. The guy is in desperation mode, seeking to unite different factions of the government behind a common enemy. Do you remember the recent British hostage crisis? Or the attempted Australian one? These were simply political theater, attempts to spark Iranians hatred against an outside threat, which would make him out to be a hero. He didn’t want half of his country blown up over the issue though, and when his own people began to question the issue, he let the prisoners go.

Fears of outside threats do great things for national unity. Think of terrorists if you’re American, the English if you’re Irish, the Huns if you’re a Roman history buff, or aliens from outer space if you watch movies. Ahmadinejad is attempting to use that fear to his advantage. What’s the easiest way to counteract? Do nothing. Absolutely, positively nothing. Don’t respond to his threats, don’t rattle sabers, don’t give him the global stage, just brush off your shoulders and let his voice fall on mute ears. All of this talk of attacking Iran is simply playing directly into his hands, and it should be stopped.

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Someone on Digg found this nifty site that determines your presidential hopeful based on your views and theirs. It’s pretty straightforward on how it works, but the results are startling. Mine ended up being Kucinich, who I’d never really looked at before.

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This is not my list, it’s taken from a blog that is currently suffering from a severe case of the Digg Effect, so it may be up and down for the next couple hours. This is one list that I can’t really point out any fallacies, they are all actually good. Ted and Sara can probably give you the episode number of each quote.

My personal fav: Brace yourselves gentlemen. According to the gas chromatograph, the secret ingredient is… Love!? Who’s been screwing with this thing?

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I’ve got a great idea that I’ve been fleshing out lately, and I’m still up in the air on what to do with it. Should I begin thinking of starting a company? Should I try to sell my idea to larger companies? Should I begin developing a prototype? It seems like the obvious place to start is to patent the idea, so I’ve been researching my options, especially the ones that avoid the costs associated with hiring a lawyer (I am going to be a broke student after all). Then I saw this thread pop up today that I read every once in awhile. Hopefully some good discussion will come out of the question they posed:

If you decide you need a patent, is it safe to apply for it yourself, without a spendy lawyer?

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I’m sure this seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but as a chief executive, don’t you have better things to do than troll around some Yahoo forum posting non-constructive arguments about your company under a pseudonym? I’m all for corporate openness, but insight isn’t gained from lines like: “”If you are waiting for Trader Joe’s or Wegmans to slow down the Whole Foods express train you’re going to be waiting the rest of your life. It ain’t [going to] happen.” I’ll admit, I used to troll around internet forums, posting random flamatory messages with no regard for their content in discussion.  Yea, I used to do that…in junior high.

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I’m torn about Ayn Rand. It seems she strips civilization down to the most primal urges and builds up her philosophy from there. Regal the laws of civilized society to the back of the room, while pushing forward anything that will serve our own self interests. But then again, who am I to say that’s wrong? Maybe I am truly driven, or should be driven, by “The Virtue of Selfishness“. In any case, I recently read an article that Ayn wrote, and it mirrors the situation we face today in the U.S. I’ll leave with this quote:

Throughout history, no tyrant ever rose to power except on the claim of representing “the common good.”… Horrors which no man would dare consider for his own selfish sake are perpetrated with a clear conscience by “altruists” who justify themselves by-the common good.

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