maximus2357:
http://www.comingofage.org/imagelib/_joyful-woman-web.jpg
this lady is having a mountain dew day
and so can you
(with just 4 easy payments of 39.99)

To begin with, have an amazingly fantastic and generally awesome day.

Then again, it’s Monday (or was when I wrote this). Good luck with the above.

topic 1
Google Trends is good for a lot of things. Predicting marketability of product x, for example, based on annual search volume. One of its less lucrative uses is to discover new ways to mock other countries. Gazelles, for example. Did you know that the Dutch Netherlandfolk have searched for gazelles more in the last four years than Belgium, Austria, France, Denmark, Germany, United States and United Kingdom combined?

kurt:
They’re gazelles, man. Who doesn’t want gazelles??
ikebowen:
granted, but why the freaking dutch?
(which, by the way, is going to be my new expression of frustration and rage. “what-the-freaking-dutch.”)
kurt:
They’ve only got Amsterdam going for them.
They need something new and exciting like gazelles.

topic 2
I don’t mind the internationals here. It’s just that they have no concept of personal space.

And it doesn’t help when they approach the cafe in pairs, then ask for a payphone in halting English.

A bit of background, though. An obscene number of people come to the cafe every hour looking for a bathroom. We were discussing ways to effectively answer this question – among them pulling out this large sign with directions to the nearest facilities (having them in robocode would be fun), or (for maximum entertainment) sending them four or five blocks down to the nearest Starbucks.

The couple I referred to weren’t students; I imagine visitors from somewhere. Guy: “Where is … payphone?” Coworker: “You know, I’m sorry, but we don’t have any payphones here.” Me: “Although there’s a Starbucks down the street…” Suddenly-Very-Excited-Guy: “… Starbucks?!”

Heh, and off they went. In search of a payphone at your local Starbucks. I regretted that for about ten minutes. Then I realized that he was so happy about there being a Starbucks to begin with, I may have done him a favor after all.

Things to teach young children: “The closely spaced tracks on the readable surface of a Compact Disc cause light to diffract into a full visible colour spectrum” – Wikipedia

topic 3
I’m not going to write ad nauseam about this (you’re welcome), but let it suffice that I give you the following link: Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day. Go read the thread. Dystopia, anyone?

topic 4
This site gets some really odd referrers. Really odd. And because I yam who I yam, I check for them often. :) There was a hit earlier this morning from pressemitteilung.ws, apparently something to do with ike_slideshow. (However, searching the site results in search tips put in terms of blue smurfs. Which is funny on several levels.) Then, of course, there was someone who searched a Mandarin image site for blow and ended up with a photo from a fairly old entry. In comparison, having someone manage to end up here from a literally no-name lending service is less odd. Even though there’s no conceivable reason for someone to land here from investigating an easier financial life.

topic 5
My CS201 prof used Netscape in class to show this week’s lab writeup. And not the Firefox derivative either (while we’re on the topic, whythefreakingdutch did they wrap Firefox in a new skin and release it as version nine of an old sucky browser?) – this, baby, was version four, circa 1996. Of Mosaic Communications Corporation fame. Back when CSS did not exist and it was still cool to do quasi-3d logos with 8-bit gifs.

Math prof: I mean, if space aliens were going to attack us if we couldn’t find the third value, we could probably come up with it. Fourth value, if everyone worked on it. Fifth one, we’d have to fight.