Topless Time (Why Didn’t I Think Of That)

This “World Clock” speaks for itself. All you really need to know is it was designed by Charlotte Van Der Waals and is available right chyah.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. How I Wonder If There Are Life Sustaining, Earthlike Planets Orbiting You As We Speak.

There has been some speculation lately… every few years actually about which of our neighboring stars is most likely to have an “earthlike” planet orbiting it. Perhaps you’ve seen the articles. Though not likely what with Nick and Jessica’s divorce heating up again.

Anyway, I will fill you in on the top 5 (gathered from this article ) and why they don’t/and do matter.

1) beta CVn 2) HD 10307 3) HD 211415 4) 18 Sco 5) 51 Pegasus (above)

Ah 51 Pegasus, you get another 15 minutes of fame after all. Am I right people. (you can tell I just watched The Colbert Report)

Ok, they don’t matter and here is why. Many of the articles you read/won’t read will talk about how there’s a pretty good chance these stars warm planets with life on them or how these solar systems are just like ours and that stuff is wild speculation. Don’t get me wrong It is all based in fact, but it basically amounts to "this sun is too hot, this sun is too cold, this sun is j-u-s-t r-i-g-h-t" these scientists are salesmen too and getting money to look at stars is a tough business.

The stars they are talking about are 20+ light years away. You need to consider what a light year is... 5,865,696,000,000 miles. Nearly 6 trillion ya get me. Your first thought might be “you couldn’t possibly get a whole lot of useful information about a point in space 120 trillion miles away.” That first thought would be right. But…

eventually some Zefram Cochrane wanna be is gonna design an engine that can travel at immense speeds and maybe while he is at it he will also develop a ship that will protect its passengers from the crushing forces created by those immense speeds (though I tend to doubt it.) But if he does there is gonna be a whole lot of squabbling about where to go first and with this list astronomer Margaret Turnbull is calling her galactic “shotgun!” loud and proud.

Should we choose her destinations when we boldly go? Sure why not, look at her consummate scientific method in a couple of quotes:

“These are places I'd want to live if God were to put our planet around another star," Dr Turnbull said.

And she said of another promising star “It has enough intrinsic luminosity to suggest good prospects for a habitable zone but not so bright as to overwhelm attempts to take images of the planet with telescopes."

So we are looking for life where the lighting is best.

Somebody get me a star chart, a monkey and 5 darts. (that was mean… sorry monkey.)

The PSPeople's Court

The PSP made a short appearance on The People's Court today. The defendant used his PSP to show the judge the damage to his car. She called it a Gameboy. The bailiff corrected her that it was a Playstation. Once again proving that GNF is bitter that it will never top the traffic it garnered from the PSP NYC subway map and must resort to daytime television references.

Pass The Olympic Torch

I am sure I am not the first guy to do this.

UPDATE: Let's go ahead and call it a caption contest. Any takers?

Big Bang For Your Buck

Think of it as killing two birds with one stone. George Deutsch might even like this one. And for Christ's sake have a sense of humor about it. :)

What Were You Thinking?

You tape one god damned episode of Modern Marvels and Tivo thinks you want to watch every episode of Monster Garage. Order a scarf on Amazon and they are suddenly recommending places to get your ass waxed. “If you like this record you might like this vegan treat.”!?!?

The internet has proved to me over and over that it's predictive algorithms do not work. Or at least do not work on me (he said smugly.)

Well, My good friend IKE recommended www.pandora.com and I'll be damned it works pretty good. Unlike so many other music suggestion “programs” it seems to know that the fact I like Clutch means I know Nickleback is utter crap.

Give it a try. It looks good. Works good (well pretty good.) And it is FREE.

One Pixel for One Dollar (Not 100 Pixels At One Dollar Each)

Here is an idea I have been sitting on for months. Why? Well because it seemed like a really good idea. I thought it might be a money maker, but like so many good ideas implementing it turned out to be a real pain in the ass.

Basically it is just another “pixel page” like The Million Dollar Homepage successfully implemented by Alex Tew in which one sells pixels as advertising/links on a single page.

There are a slew of these pages, but they all suffer the same impediment. You cannot actually buy 1 pixel for 1 dollar. The reason being… 1 pixel is too small to represent a company logo or ad and the resulting page is just a mess of multicolored pixels.

In my version you actually buy 1 pixel for 1 dollar. That pixel is represented by a reasonably sized jpg that is displayed in the center of the page when your pixel is “moused over” (see above.) The added bonus is that the first person to buy a pixel owns every pixel on the page. When a second buyer comes on board he splits those pixels with the original buyer, so on and so forth. So early joiners will enjoy large bits of real estate before the page becomes crowded.

If you like this idea and think there is still time to earn in the pixel world (there isn’t) feel free to take this idea and run with it.

Texting 1, 2, 3

Do you Text message? More and more people are doing it every day. It is a lot like Tivo and Google in that if you get people to do it once, they get hooked. I text like crazy. “where r u guys?” “Im on my way.” I sometimes text even when I am sitting right next to the person “do you believe this loser?” or “dude, thers sumthing on yr nose.”

On that note here’s a URL from Google where you can send text messages from your computer, from the internet. Yes, its old tech but this one is easy, and free and works.

Try it out: HERE.