Day 1. Hotel room contains two queen beds, each with the usual number and placement of pillows. Pillows are highly inadequate. We grab the pillows from the other bed and double-layer them. All is good. *sleep*

Day 2. The pillows from the unused bed are stacked on the side of the bed we slept in. We laugh, and move the pillows atop the other set. *sleep*

Day 3. The bed is made… with the pillows already double-stacked! (They’re learning!)

Well, we made it to San Diego, and if you’re reading this, we managed to scrounge up an Internet connection. The drive down was fairly uneventful, and we arrived too late to do much sightseeing, but we still managed to find some interesting sights.

For example, when we walked into our hotel room, we found a pizza flyer shoved under the door, and the following stand-up card on our table:

[Long card all about how illegal garage pizzaa parlors are pushing fliers under doors and you should rely on the hotel to choose your pizza place]

OK, so they have deals with some places, but come on! Garage operations with “unsafe” pizza?! I suppose it’s possible, though.

For those Babylon 5 fans, here’s an excerpt from the dining guide:

[Ad for the Zocalo Grill]

And we encountered another relative of Boba and Jango Fett at dinner:

[Part of a receipt indicating Medit Fett]

While driving back to the hotel, we missed a turn and ended up driving through the seedier part of town (we passed no less than three nudie bars). We also spotted a restaurant calling itself “Extreme Pizza” (which might explain the card in our room) and a movie theater with an interesting cross-section of Hollywood:

  • Hellboy
  • Kill Bill
  • Passion of the Christ

Sadly, we didn’t have a chance to capture either on fil– uh, pixels.

CNET writes about a new model of the Roomba automatic vacuum cleaner and its application of technology iRobot originally developed for mine sweeping (real mines, not the game), touching briefly on the state of the consumer robotics field. Amazingly it includes the following sentence:

On the other end of the spectrum, the Roomba cleans up the living room and, in all likelihood, could not be used by a mad scientist to take over the Earth.

It sounds like someone’s been reading recent Sluggy Freelance comics!

Here are several humor articles that have been posted to the SpamAssassin discussion list over the past week:

The TechWeb Spin: All spam is true! (Fredric Paul, Internet Week, June 29, 2004): Yes, you read it here: it’s all true! The author explains about all the money he’s gotten from deposed Nigerian dictators, the software discounts, the combined advantages of certain pharmaceuticals and dating services, and more! [Edit: Sadly the article was deleted before the Internet Archive got to it.]

It’s true, I read it on the Net! (author unknown): I remember seeing this way back when, under the title “The Ultimate Chain Letter.” It’s kind of like the parody of the Good Times Virus (remember that one?) in that it combines everything. All the urban legends about stolen kidneys, rats at KFC, needles in pay phones, and satanic business leaders. All the email hoaxes about Bill Gates giving you money and dying kids asking for email. All the typical chain letter threats about not breaking the chain.

Spam is out of this world (Adam Turner, Syndey Morning Herald, April 1, 2004): An April Fools’ piece about the Mars Spirit rover being crippled by spam traffic: “The rover’s limited onboard artificial intelligence was foolish enough to apply for an shonky online marketing diploma. Soon after offers of cheap WD40 and antenna enlargements began clogging the link between Mars and NASA’s Deep Space Network.” It goes on to explain that Beagle was taken down by a Martian Nigerian scam.

Welcome to Spam University: a parody of a school site with ridiculously low entry requirements (At least four years of elementary school, No more than three felony convictions), course descriptions (Harvesting Addresses, Covering Your Tracks, Spamming Ethics – Canceled), alumni testimonials and more!

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