And people wonder why the US is the fattest nation…

It looks like someone has defeated the hamdog, which I’ve mentioned before, at least in terms of pure grossness.

Pa. Eatery Offers New 15-Pound Burger

The burger war is growing. Literally. Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub, which lost its crown as the home of the world’s biggest burger earlier this year, is now offering a new burger that weighs a whopping 15 pounds.

Dubbed the Beer Barrel Belly Buster, the burger comes with 10.5 pounds of ground beef, 25 slices of cheese, a head of lettuce, three tomatoes, two onions, a cup-and-a-half each of mayonnaise, relish, ketchup, mustard and banana peppers – and a bun.

Oh my god, you killed Star Trek! You bastards?

Orson Scott Card had a pretty good commentary on the current “end” of Star Trek.

His basic position is that it should have gotten better with subsequent versions of the show, but ended up getting stuck int he 60’s television mindset of keeping it dumbed down and not making it “good” science fiction. I can’t say I disagree with him as it certainly has not improved with each spinoff.

Here’s my favorite line from the article:

Nimoy was the only charismatic actor in the cast and, ironically, he played the only character not allowed to register emotion.

Greylisting

Recently, I was asked to write an article on greylisting for a slightly non-technical audience. Through the editing process it became a much smaller article and had its focus slightly changed. I still like my original version and got permission to post it here. Actually, I hate the second paragraph, but I couldn’t figure out how I wanted to fix it.

Comments, corrections, etc, welcome.

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Greylisting: another tool in the war on spam

As anyone who uses e-mail knows, getting spam is a constant problem. In the spam arms race new technology is being created all the time. One of the newest technologies on the side of e-mail receivers is greylisting.
Continue reading Greylisting

Rue the day? Who talks like that?

Your Linguistic Profile:

70% General American English
15% Upper Midwestern
10% Yankee
5% Midwestern
0% Dixie

A post on Jess’s blog pointed me at this test. Its a fun bit of fluff, but it has one thing wrong with it. The question on what you call a water fountain should also include the term bubbler which is popular in Wisconsin. Although, I’m not sure where it would fit into the categories it puts your speaking style into.

Scrapbook

My firefox extention of the week is Scrapbook. It allows you to make local copies of web pages, sections of web pages, and keep them locally. This is nice for fast access when you aren’t online. The other neat feature is you can annotate those local copies with notes to yourself. It has a few other features, but those are the two I’ve used the most.

James Coates wrote about Scrapbook in his column last weekend. Its the only useful bit of information I’ve ever gotten from the column. As my friend said when I brought this up to him, “Coates’ column is like a car wreck, you can’t help but stare at it even though you don’t really want to.”

Do you have any super powers?

Having read comics for a long time and being familar with the Elongated Man (Ralph Dibny)1 and Mr. Fantastic (Reed Richards) I never thought that stretching was all that great of a power.2 However, that all changed on Sunday night when Sarah and I watched The Incredibles.

Having watched Elastigirl in action, I have to admit that I totally underrated that power. I don’t know if it was a lack of imagination on my part or having just not read enough comics featuring the aforemented gentlemen.

I have two questions to put to you.

  1. What super power did you once underrate that you now think is pretty cool and what changed your mind?
  2. What character’s powers would you want?

I answered the first one above, so here’s my answer to the second: I’ve always been partial to wanting a Green Lantern ring. I don’t really want to have to answer to the Guardians though. (Blue little fuckers! Okay, you caught me, I just wanted to say “blue little fuckers!”) Think about it, the ring can practically do anything you can think of. Not really too bad of a power to have. You just need to remember to charge the ring. I remember to charge my cell phone, I think I could handle charging the ring.

1. R.I.P. Sue
2. Plastic Man doesn’t count as he’s really more of a shape shifter then a stretcher.

Things good and bad…

Here are some things that have depressed my lately in no particular order. They depress me so much I don’t even want to expand on my thoughts.

  • Pharmacists refusing to give birth control to their customers/patients
  • The fact that there is still a fight about creationism vs evolution in schools
  • My high cholesterol
  • That we’re STILL talking about Terri Schivo
  • Politicians focusing on totally the wrong stuff: steroids, etc.
  • The increasingly more oppressive fallout from the FCC crackdown over Janet Jackson’s breast
  • The seemingly inevitable stuffing of DRM down our throats by vendors

Here are some things that I’m encouraged by that I don’t feel like expanding on….

  • My daughter is walking
  • The backlash over some of the Republican’s moves during the Schivo thing.
  • The fact that the presidents social security plan has no traction with the public
  • Its staring to get warm out

Keith's attempts to fix the cable of life