Politics we can all agree on

Wish I could give proper credit for this. All I know is that a friend of mine sent it to me on Facebook.

Apple claims jailbroken iPhones could prove catastrophic, good for drug dealers

  Image courtesy of here.

It's old news by now but if you hadn't heard, Apple is trying to make jailbreaking iPhones illegal because, "In short, taking control of the BBP software would be much the equivalent of getting inside the firewall of a corporate computer – to potentially catastrophic result."

As reported by Wired, they imply that jailbreaking iPhones could be a threat to national security. They also say it would be ideal for drug dealers since you can change phone identification to avoid tracking.

The iPhone: threat to world peace, weapon of mass destruction and tool of drug dealers everywhere...

...except that it can't do picture messaging.

The arguments to Apple's "points" about unlocking the iPhone are too obvious to go into here, so I'll let you do so in the comments. I must say, this makes me particularly excited to see what the iTablet is capable of.

A sawed-off shotgun, a stray cat and an awesome fu manchu

If you heard a news story about a drunk guy who tried to shoot a stray cat in his yard with a sawed-off shotgun because the cat was chasing away the birds in his yard, what do you think this person would look like?

You're absolutely right. He'd look like this:

At first glance it seemed startling that a person with a patch over his eye was shooting a gun. (You know - the whole depth perception thing.) Then it occurred to me that you close one eye when aiming down the barrel of a gun so, in reality, it might actually be easier for this guy to aim a gun than the rest of us.

The lesson from all this? Don't judge people just because they have an eye patch.

That, and have a good weekend.

 The full story, and image can be found at KSL.

This label cannot lie

As the meat ages, ammonia is released which changes the label. After a certain time (the expiration date) the bar code becomes unscannable at the register so it can't be sold.

Via swissmiss.

Ninja Parade

Love The Onion.

Via That's So Sweet!

Backpack for the iMac (it's not what you think)

Why not use the space behind your iMac to stash your external hard drive? Great idea from here via SwissMiss.

Some people are Oregonians; the rest are not

Image courtesy of ahp_ibanez

Check out this hilarious customer service story about a tourist in Portland asking if they'll get a refund if it rains. HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA!

*Wiping a tear*

The bird that caught a ride to work

Animals are just getting plain lazy.

I was sitting under the overpass to get on I-80 on my way to work when a bird landed on the back of my car (you can see the bird's tail in the above picture). I looked in my rearview mirror and made eye contact with the driver behind me who was smiling. I shrugged. She shrugged. The light turned green and off I went, assuming my feathered friend would fly off the car.

He didn't.

As I accelerated up the on-ramp the bird held tight. By the time I was starting to merge onto I-80 I was doing about 45 mph.

50 mph.

55 mph.

The bird was flapping and flailing in the wind but wouldn't (or couldn't) let go.

60 mph.

65 mph.

Impressed at the strength of the bird's talons, I snapped the picture.

70 mph.

It finally fell off.

I heard it and watched it in my mirrors. The poor guy rolled down the back of the car, off to the shoulder of the road (thankfully), tumbled a couple times and, if I wasn't mistaken, stood up.

Fortunately, it looked like the pigeon may have been OK despite the fact that it was traveling at speeds no pigeon ever traveled before (Rob, correct me if I'm wrong here).

Unfortunately, it didn't make it all the way to downtown, which I can only assume was its final destination since it landed on my car and that's where I was going.

Really unfortunately, the stupid bird scratched up my car.

Insurance papers

Image courtesy of unk's dump truck.

I spent part of today on the phone with my wife trying to figure out everything that needed to be included on a large stack of insurance forms. Since we had a baby this year, and we have to itemize each doctor's visit, prescriptions and medications for each person it was rather time consuming and frustrating - a royal pain in the butt.

That made me wonder...

Do I have to list said pain in the butt on the insurance forms as a preexisting condition?

Freaking awesome apartment with a big clock

Awesome "loft" in Brooklyn. If you consider a 6,500 square foot apartment a "loft," this one can be yours for just $25 million.
Bonus: you'll never have to wonder what time it is.

Really, this is just cool.

It's definitely worth clicking here for more pictures via Apartment Therapy.

That's one profane Gmail iPhone app

Never thought I'd need to show ID to buy an email application.

Here's to the crazy ones

Anyone else think Apple has strayed much from this standard?

Twitter goes down, nobody can tell anyone

Twitter and Facebook went down today at approximately 6:00 am Pacific Time. A DDOS (denial of service) attack was suspected, although nobody knew about the outage because Twitter was down.

David Hoskins, a 25 year-old social media expert and part-time waiter at TGI Fridays, was shocked to find out about the outage.

"Twitter and Facebook were down?" he asked incredulously. "How was I supposed to know? Why hasn't someone tweeted about this? Does anyone know what the hashtag is?"

Hoskins appeared confused and disoriented when his iPhone Twitter application wouldn't publish his Tweet, notifying his 2,744 followers that the popular service was down.

"But how will they know?" he asked as panic began to set in.

Throughout the rest of the morning Hoskins was seen repeatedly responding to the question, "What are you doing?" by furiously typing, "Trying to tell the world that Twitter is down!"

At the time of publication, Hoskins had resorted to calling people he actually knew to talk to them directly. In many instances his calls went to voicemail. It's suspected that those he called didn't know what to do when their phones made a distinct ringing sound and wasn't followed by a text notification.

More as this story develops.

Doesn't this smilie face look devious?

Every time I see one of this particular smilie face at the end of a sentence it recasts the statement it proceeds in some kind of devious light, as if the author was up to no good.

Since emoticons can be used to convey tone and meaning in an online conversation I think it's important to point this out. It's hard enough to convey emotion and meaning when writing online and having split-personality emoticons doesn't help.

Let's look at the emotions evoked from two similar emoticons:

To me, this says,  "I have a chainsaw and a butcher knife (in case the chainsaw runs out of gas) and I'm hiding in your closet. I already cut the phone lines. You are going to die."

Emotions evoked = fear, deviousness, psychopathedness.



Now take a look at this emoticon which follows the exact same statement:

To me, this one is a bit more... hopeful. You know, the kind of emoticon you'd want to see if you were hanging off a cliff by a tree limb and had just sent a message asking for help. Or the kind you'd want to receive if you were on a bad date and had sent an SOS SMS to a friend.

Emotions evoked = hope, friendliness, not death.

Am I nuts or do you feel the same way? Leave your emotional reactions to these emoticons in the comments.