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The site Free After Rebate proclaims that “The best things in life are free, after six to eight weeks.” The site lists deals for products that end up being free after sending in the rebate form, although shipping and handling are usually extra. Still, there were a couple of deals on the page that caught my eye. Might be worth a look…
I posted previously about how obsessed some people can get about Disney, and I didn’t think that I could find anyone to top the personalities in that article. Until now. I’ll let the proclamation on “Disney Tattoo Guy” George Reiger’s page speak for itself (note the annoying, self-absorbed use of the third person):
George C. Reiger Jr. is proclaimed by the worldwide news media as the #1 devoted Disney fan of all time ! He is the only person in the world with over 1,500 (1,501 to be exact) Disney tattoos. He is also the only person with a custom built Disney House in the world with over 19,000 Disney items. Mr. Reiger has been on numerous television shows both local and national. George Reiger (The Disney Tattoo Guy) is by far Disney’s #1 fan !!!
There are plenty of pictures on his site detailing this obsession; I stand dumbfounded…
Once you get past the bad Engrish and new windows generated by the web site, you can download Pac-Man and Space Invaders Excel spreadsheets that run the actual games in Visual Basic (I think; make sure and enable macros). Pretty cool…
I’ve noticed that over the years movie credits have gotten longer, but I had no idea that they’ve gotten this bad.
Although this is so last week, I had to mention Dave Letterman’s hilarious Top Ten List from last Tuesday:
Top Ten Messages on Britney Spears’ Answering Machine
10. “This is the printing company. Your wedding announcements are ready”
9. “Hey, it’s Christina Aguilera, did you get married or did I?”
8. “It’s the printing company. Your annulment announcements are ready”
7. “Rush Limbaugh here. I’d love to try whatever you were taking the other night.”
6. “So other than the embarrassing marriage and annulment, how was Vegas?”
5. “Hey, it’s Paris. You don’t need to get married to get attention. Just have sex on the internet.”
4. “This is Kenny from high school. I have a couple of hours free on Thursday if you want to get married and divorced.”
3. “Honey, it’s Liza. Next time, instead of an annulment, hit him with a bottle.”
2. “It’s Jessica Simpson. Thanks for making me look like a genius.”
1. “Pete Rose here. I bet 10,000 dollars on your marriage lasting a week”
I think I agree with Fimoculous that #2 was the funniest… 
The BBC reports that “Professor Simon Blackburn of Cambridge University is trying to ‘rescue’ lust, arguing it has been wrongly condemned for centuries, the Sunday Times says. His campaign is part of an Oxford University Press project on the modern relevance of the seven deadly sins [lust, anger, envy, gluttony, sloth, pride and greed].” Hear, hear! Gotta love those randy Brits… 
Adding to its extensive array of web search features (including some new ones I mentioned last month), the Google Weblog reports that there are even more number search options at Google:
- Area Codes, e.g. 650, bring up maps.
- UPC codes, e.g. 073333531084 or 036000250015, bring up some information about the product.
- Flight numbers, e.g. usair 50, provide links to flight tracking
- Vehicle ID (VIN) numbers, e.g. JH4NA1157MT001832, link to a CARFAX report on what kind of car and its status.
- U.S. Postal Service tracking numbers link to package status.
In a series of interviews that are included in Pulitzer Prize Winner Ron Suskind’s new book The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O’Neill, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill had little good to say about W’s administration. He contends that he never saw any evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that W had planned on invading Iraq before 9/11 even occured, and that in cabinet meetings W was “like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people.” Burn!
Update: The Borowitz Report broke a related story: “Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill was captured Sunday night in a surprise raid on the CBS studios in New York, the Pentagon confirmed today…‘We got him,’ a coolly confident Vice President Dick Cheney announced to the press moments after Mr. O’Neill was apprehended.” Hilarious…
Waxy.org reports on some great finds in the Internet Archive. The series is a great time capsule of cool videos and stories about computers and computer gaming in the ‘80s. I gave up on trying to paraphrase the post and decided to just reprint it here:
Nearly every episode of Computer Chronicles, the influential and long-running television series, is freely available on the Internet Archive. If you browse by year, you can find plenty of classic geek nostalgia dating back to 1984. A few of my favorites are below.
Computer Games, February 1984. Steve Kitchen demos Activision’s Space Shuttle, the most complex Atari 2600 game ever created and the only one to reprogram all of its switches. Electronic Arts’ Bill Budge shows off the classic Pinball Construction Set for the Apple II, while EA/3DO founder Trip Hawkins shows off Dr. J and Larry Go One on One, the game that paved the way for EA Sports.
Computer Games, January 1985. The authors of Sargon and Millionaire demo them on the original Mac, and talks to Pitfall creator David Crane about Ghostbusters and David Lebling discusses Zork and other text-based adventure games. The short piece on the fledgling Lucasarts (then named Lucasfilm) is great, which had just released its first two games a few months before, the groundbreaking Rescue on Fractalus and Ballblazer.
Software Piracy, January 1985. A spirited debate between an Activision exec against a developer of a cracking utility, a surreal interview with John “Cap’n Crunch” Draper taking an anti-piracy stance, and a demonstration by the pseudonymous “Frankie Mouse” of a pirate BBS on a 300 baud modem. (Look at that text scroll!)
Operating Systems, 1984. The big highlight is Bruce Tognazzini, then an Apple engineer, shrinking himself to give a guided tour inside an Apple IIe.
The “Random Access” news segment at the end of each show is also entertaining, if you haven’t had enough geekery. I’ve only watched a fraction of the episodes so far, so post a comment if you find any particularly good moments.
I’m sure that you’ve all heard ways to make your own pinhole camera out of a Quaker canister or something similar. Well, in 1979 Czech inventors Martin Pilny, Mirek Kolar, and Richard Vyskovsky created a “functional pinhole camera made of stiff paper, designed for 35 mm film, which resembles a real camera” and published it in the magazine ABC mladych techniku a prirodovedcu (An ABC of Young Technicians and Natural Scientists). Courtesy of pinhole.cz, you can download an Adobe PDF file and make your own Dirkon pinhole camera. This sounds pretty cool…
