Nobrainer’s Think Tank

I may or may not have seen part of SNL on Saturday Night because I went to a party that started at 8 and I lost about 4 games of beer pong. However it has been brought to my attention that SNL might not be dead yet. The following clip about holiday gift suggestions is pretty good.

• I had to take the Girlfriend to the airport today. Charlottesville’s airport is tiny; I like that. I also have no idea what to do with the Girlfriend out of town, but drinking a lot of beer and not shaving seem like great ideas.
• Speaking of great ideas, stealing undies in Great Britain may earn you a spot on the sex offenders’ register. “The point of including theft is because offences such as stealing underwear from a washing line obviously has a sexual motive.” I think the trend of labeling sex offenders has officially gone too far. (I in no way support or approve of the theft of women’s underwear.)
• Firefox has been upsetting me lately. It was hanging up frequently. However, the problem seems to have really been with ForecastFox. (UPDATE: maybe it wasn’t ForecastFox. I hate that Firefox will get snagged while I can open any other browser and it will actually download the pages of my bidding.)
• Since I also just re-installed Google Desktop, I should be able to use that for all my weather related needs. Hooray!
• Firefox 2.0 seems ok. Upgrading is slightly annoying. I really wish it did a better job of importing settings from previous versions. Also, I hate that the quicksearch now doesn’t include “next” and “previous” buttons. IE7 is taking a little while to get used to, but it is definitely leaps and bounds better than IE6.
• OnRebate.com is excessively close to pissing me off. I decided to pay a 10% fee on a $55 rebate so that I could have a check mailed within 3-5 days of rebate approval. It’s been a solid week since approval and their “guarantee” looks disgustingly meaningless.
• Gawker published a list of bad blog-media clichés. If I avoid those phrases entirely, don’t expect much blogging from me for the upcoming year.
• My online Christmas shopping ground to a halt after 3 different retailers were sold out of the items I wanted from them. Gift cards for everybody this year!
• Froogle gets worse with each use. I love the wishlist feature, as it makes it easy to point my favorite gift-buyers in the right direction. It’s getting worse primarily because it too often lists a bunch of vendors I’ve never heard of and don’t want to deal with.

Well that’s enough I guess.

Oh yeah, one more:

• I found out that Steven Tyler (you know, the Aerosmith guy) has more than one daughter. One’s hot. The other looks the same except 100 pounds heavier and goth.

A spokesman for Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, called Diaz’s death a botched execution.

“They had to execute him twice,” Mark Elliot said. “If Floridians could witness the pain and the agony of the executed man’s family, they would end the death penalty.”

The doctors involved said a pre-existing liver problem prevented the first dose of poison from killing the convicted guy. So they gave him a 2nd dose and the execution process took about 34 minutes, during which he “appeared to grimace.”

There are a lot of valid criticisms of the death penalty. However, a convicted murderer allegedly feeling pain for a few minutes just before he’s killed isn’t one them. At least not to me. And I have just learned that the new standard is for the feelings of the convicted man’s family. The next thing we know punishing anyone for anything will have to be outlawed because a convicted person’s family will be the one receiving cruel or unusual punishment.

Somebody give me some Valium and clothe me with bubble wrap. I want my human experience to be defined by a total absence of pain.

[Yahoo news link]

Do you:

A) Keep driving and hope for the best?
B) Stop and give yourself up?
C) Realize you’re in Cincinnati where the police shoot a lot of people and jump off 100+ foot tall bridge into the Ohio River?

If you said C, you’re not alone.

Here’s the link to the cruiser cam that catches the guy jumping (hopefully that launches Windows Media Player). Just keep watching.

(Thanks fark.)

I recently interviewed with IBM. While speaking with someone in the IBM web page management team, I learned that IBM has millions of available web pages. There are so many, in fact, that they don’t even know what most of them are or what they do. Furthermore, the best way to count the number of pages is to let Google do it for them. Apparently Google is better at counting IBM web pages than IBM’s own search engine.

Naturally I was amused by the following news:

IBM Corp. and Yahoo Inc. are teaming up to offer a free data-search tool for businesses, a quirky move challenging Google Inc. and other corporate-search specialists in a blossoming market.

IBM already sells a business-focused search product, OmniFind, that lets organizations comb through internal documents. This free new edition of OmniFind will be limited in the number of documents it can query, but it will combine the results with Web searches powered by Yahoo.

When driving on snow and ice, the worst thing you can do is lock up your brakes.

Just ask this guy in a tank.