For some reason, the top two searches that get people here are “4×4” and “tuning”, with “4×4 tuning” not far afterwards. Apparently I’m now a light truck expert. Variations on rigged PowerBall are a close second.

Two lists today: searches that amuse me, and searches that amaze me (by giving me such a high Google rank).

Amusing:

1. allowed nude home open windows? (1/435,000)
2. porten park (1/186,000)—hey, does this really exist somewhere?
3. guy holding starbucks tray (4/58,800)—can’t imagine what this guy was looking for
4. best way to win on keno mathematically (8/16,500)—just like War Games, the only way to win is not to play
5. diseases frequently bought by flight attendants (9/341,000)
6. how to measure for drapes (11/479,000)
7. animated cochroach (12/152,000)
8. naked window dorm penn (15/215,000)
9. vast Jeff wang (not in top 100)
10. sleestak (not in top 100)

Amazing:

1. jews at microsoft (1/1,220,000)
2. blue apple conspiracy (1/1,150,000)
3. arrogant bastard telecom (2/16,400)
4. best new yorker cartoon ever (3/573,000)
5. jewish redheads (3/181,000)
6. groh vs. ramirez (4/10,100)
7. roosevelt conspiracy (5/1,010,000)
8. l’enfant loews plaza website (7/16,800)—I love that my “Loews is really pissing me off” post comes up so high.

This cartoon might be a great reason to start waking up on Saturday mornings again.

I wrote about Quinn Norton after I met her at CFP2006 last year—specifically, after I met her while she was taking telephoto pictures of NSA headquarters through a chainlink fence. I just found a video of a fantastic speech she gave on functional body modification at Chaos Congress in Berlin, but I’ll warn you that it’s a 184 meg M4V download before I link to it.

Hey, did you know that the FBI has lost 75% of the documents that were requested under FOIA in 2006? No wonder Alberto has so much trouble remembering things; he has so little to read.

Tomorrow is the deadline to register a complaint with the FDA over their plan to redefine chocolate to include all sorts of crap. Yes, there is a difference between what can be called chocolate, chocolate-flavored, or chocolatey. If you think this matters, then let your government know. Reminds me of my favorite George Carlin quote: “You know what ‘real chocolatey goodness’ means? No fucking chocolate.”

I’m a fan of creative displays of quantitative data, but this one takes the cake: this graph of home values since 1890, adjusted for inflation—as a roller coaster.

Hey, did you know that approximately 100,000 people (Jeff estimate) can look up what prescriptions you’re taking, pretty much whenever they feel like it? It’s all to make sure you’re not getting stoned with your meds, which is amusing, since it looks like marijuana is a great way to slow cancer, and you can’t have any.

Aside from showing how to peel an egg in eight seconds, this has gotta be the greatest kitchen hack I’ve ever seen. Plus, you can also peel a raw egg.

Daylight Saving Time erroneously puts a kid in jail for two weeks.

Curious to know whether your headache and nausea is a hangover or bird flu? Go ahead and track your symptoms to see if this is self-inflicted or epidemiological.

It’s official, I have one more reason to hate people who drive cars.

I just ran several of my blog entries through Gender Genie, and the results were 4 out of 4: I am a girly blogger. Even my TidBits article is eligible for Lifetime Channel broadcast. The only entry that came up male (and that was borderline) was my post here that was a copy of a comment I left on I Should Be Sleeping.

I guess arguing raises my testosterone just enough.

The New York Times with a graphical accounting of deaths by gun, on a daily basis.

Somehow I managed to miss this until I heard about it from Bill Maher:

Take Monica Goodling, who, before she resigned last week, because she’s smack in the middle of the U.S. Attorneys scandal, was the third-ranking official in the Justice Department of the United States. She’s 33 years old. And though she never even worked as a prosecutor, she was tasked with overseeing the job performance of all 93 U.S. Attorneys.

How do you get to the top that fast? Harvard? Princeton? No, Goodling did her undergraduate work at Messiah College. You know, Messiah, home of the Fighting Christ-ies? And then went on to attend Pat Robertson’s law school. Yes, Pat Robertson, the man who said that the presence of gay people at Disney World would cause earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor, has a law school.

Announcing my latest cockamamie idea: EOTD, the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In blog format. One entry a day. With snarky commentary. Suitable for RSS feeding.

As of this writing, you too can become a postbellum whore in New Orleans (it’s surprisingly easy), engage in sleazy stock transactions, read about a town in Germany named “town” (I think), and read about three random 19th-century Europeans.

Why am I doing this? I wrote about that, too.

Hat tip to MacDevCenter: check out the driving directions to get, for example, from one major world capital to another.

I don’t keep kosher for Passover, but tonight as I was shopping for my usual bagels, pasta, and popcorn, I suddenly had a hankering for matzoh. Unfortunately, this being the first night of Passover and an hour or so after most seders have concluded, every Jew in the tri-state area with an ounce of sense had already purchased their Pesach supply and my supermarket was sold out.

In the Passover aisle, that is. A few aisles over in Ethnic, they had the regular matzoh, the stuff that’s available year-round, that’s marked on the side NOT FOR PASSOVER USE.

And I stood there for something like ten minutes, looking back and forth from my bagels to my ersatz matzoh, thinking that there was Just Something Wrong with buying it. Knowing for a fact that I was being very silly. I’m still not entirely sure why I’m silly, but I’m definitely sure about it.

It’s simply cruel that this is a hoax. I’d probably buy it with this clock to save shipping.

The BBC wants to know if you can smell cheese?

Windows insecurities exploited that can truly invade your privacy.

If you need a new ISP, I’m hearing good things about this one.

A small error imperils an upcoming poker tournament.

Threat Alert Jesus. I’d buy this, and I’m Jewish.

Giles Turnbull on the great new productivity app coming its way to Macs.

Google finally goes analog, and it’s about damn time.

A good history of April 1st hijinks, dating back centuries. There’s even a meta-prank courtesy of Boston University. Turns out that some pranks have been superceded by actual events.

And I’ve gotta say, I’ve been to Providence. If they closed for the day, who would notice? Although I did make the mistake once of going to Belgium on the day it closed.

It’s on my perennial list of things to do to get a daily feed of The Daily Show and Colbert Report into my regular media schedule. In the meantime, I rely on web clips like this one.

What Jon didn’t mention is that the McCain website wasn’t “hacked” — instead, McCain’s campaign pulled something sleazy. They had a response button on their page that was completely lifted from someone else’s code; the license for the code said it was kosher to do this, provided they kept his authorship intact. The campaign instead stripped his authorship, and pulled the code each time from the author’s site, whacking him with the bandwidth fees.

So the author, Mike Davidson, swapped in the image with the new McCain platform. No hack at all, as the campaign itself had said, “go get that image from the other guy’s site.” I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether the actions of the campaign reflect poorly on McCain himself.

My local forecast:

New rainfall amounts between a tenth and quarter of an inch, except higher amounts possible in thunderstorms.

In other words, “You’ll get a little rain, unless it’s really raining where you are, in which case you’ll get more.” Which I guess has the advantage of being accurate.

…turn a fishtank into a deep fryer. With the fish still in it. Also demonstrates how to blow up a glass of water.

…be certain that you’re hiring a good designer.

…create art from construction paper and OCD.

…treat your skull like a word processor. Or, as the case may be, a food processor.

…make the American South even more medieval for the women unfortunate enough to live there.

…have sex. No, really.

One artifact of having been around for the start of the home computer business (back when we called them “microcomputers”) is that I have certain memory sizes stamped into my brain. 143K, 400K, 800K, 1.4M: the amount you could fit on various disks back in the days no one had hard drives.

I get a small dose of future shock whenever I see sustained Internet throughput at (one old disk) per second. Today I hit 800K downloading an Apple update, and I had this sudden image of a toaster-like device, with Apple and Comcast logos on it, firing 3.5″ floppies across the room while my laptop danced and pirouetted to catch them flawlessly.

I remember when downloading a 143K disk image was a “leave the computer on all night” endeavor. Now I’m wondering how long it will be before I get 800Kbps over a cell phone.

Some thoughts after having spent a few days bedridden with a low-grade fever:

There’s long been a fascinating line of study into parasitology and epidemiology that shows that certain diseases can cause their victims to behave in different ways, with results that are beneficial to the parasite. I’m reminded of a breed of ants which, when infected by a certain intestinal bug (or whatever passes for intestines in an ant), have an uncontrollable desire to climb up to the top of a blade of grass, where they get eaten by birds. The birds, naturally, deposit the ant remains and the still-living intestinal bugs some distance away, and this is how the wee beasties get around to new communities.

Therefore, I believe that poker is the result of a similar mind-alteration by disease. Think about it: you sit around a table for hours, passing small round objects back and forth with everyone else at the table. Invariably, you touch your face and eyes as part of your unconscious tell system, which also conveys anything on the chips from your hands to your mucous membranes, where they can wreak havoc.

Or at least, that the best explanation I have for why that coughing bastard was sitting at the table with me at Bally’s last week, who apparently passed along his cough along with several stacks of his chips. Granted that the amount I won is greater than my cost of meds since then — but sheesh, talk about a good reason for Internet poker.

Dear Sirs,

Considering that your hotel in-room products are, by definition, designed for customers who have not yet had their first cup of coffee, it would be splendid if you changed your packet design so it is more obvious which is creamer and which is sugar, especially for your customers who are so obstinate that they will pour in two packets of sugar waiting for their coffee to lighten.

Best regards,
Jeff Porten

Huh. I know the next president of Harvard.

Personal anecdote about Drew Faust: I was in her survey class, Am Civ 7: The American South, back when I was an undergraduate at Penn. Unlike most of my American Civ classes, this one was huge; fulfilled a lot of requirements and very popular. Maybe 300 students in the class.

A few weeks into the term, I had a question about something or other and showed up at her office hours. I’d been the front-row-sitting, ask-a-lot-of-questions kind of student in the lectures, but still expected to introduce myself. She looks up from her desk and says, “Hi, Jeff, what can I do for you?”

I’m thinking the Crimson made a good call.

With the rumor mills working overtime in preparation for MacWorld, I’ll take a chance at throwing my hat in the ring with a few predictions. Notably, the last time I tried this, I completely debunked the idea that Macs would switch to Intel, so hey, caveat lector.

Mac hardware: can’t say that I’m expecting much on this front. The Mac laptop line was recently refreshed to Core 2 Duo models, iMacs are already pretty sweet, and the desktop Mac Pro is already frickin’ fast. There’s talk of an LED backlight in new laptops, which has interesting implications for longer battery life, but in the meantime I’ll settle for toying with underclocking my Mac.

OS X 10.5 (Leopard): man, I’m seriously looking forward to this one, but no one is saying it’s ready yet. One or two components are already available in previews, though, and I have a strong suspicion that certain features will vastly change the way people work with their computers.

iTV: I’m expecting a more featureful preview of the iTV, a real product name that won’t conflict with El Gato’s EyeTV, and a ship date. With video iPods and the Apple Store already geared up, there’s just too much money potentially sitting on the table for Apple to miss this window for much longer. It would be nice to see something taking advantage of (or at least enabling) the 802.11n high-speed wireless for those of us with recent vintage Macs, but if I had to guess I’d expect this to be a Leopard feature.

iPod: I’m not an iPod guy, but I’ll comment in brief on the speculation about the “real” video iPod release — the current one being deemed “fake” because of the small screen. I’ve got a Palm TX that does beautiful video on the sort of screen that people want for their iPods — that is, one that covers the entire face of the device. Problem is, if you hold the gadget vertically you get the same small screen display (scaling a 4:3 or 1.85:1 video with the long edge along the width of the handheld), and it’s not physically designed to be held horizontally. I expect Apple could do a better job of this, but I’d expect to see this on a later generation of iPods rather than a current refresh.

iWork spreadsheets: this would be nice, as Microsoft Office is pretty much the only game in town at the moment. (I’m running a port of OpenOffice instead, but I don’t expect many other people would.) But what I’d really like is lightweight table support in TextEdit, so I could fire up a few numbers and sums without launching a huge bloated app. Application launch time for Office, OpenOffice, or Pages is annoying when I’ve always got TextEdit documents open anyway.

iPhone: this is the bit of kit I’m really hoping for, and I’m likely to be a day-one purchaser. As I rarely get tired of mentioning, my current phone sucks eggs, and my smartphone is showing its age. I’m extremely ready for a new handset, and iPod features would be nice.

Everyone seems to agree that it’s going to be a GSM worldphone with iPod software included; rumor has it that there are separate batteries for the two features so you can’t kill your phone by listening to podcasts. I presume it will rock with Bluetooth and EDGE data, hopefully with Mac integration that won’t require 3rd party support to use as a modem. It’s been a while since a really solid phone came out of the box with perfect iSync and Bluetooth modem features, and who better than Apple to sell me one?

But a phone needs a network. My thinking on that topic in roughly descending order of probability:

1) There was talk for a while that on launch, the iPhone would only work with Cingular despite technical compatibility with any GSM provider. As a T-Mobile customer who thinks their data plan is still the best deal around, this would be a bummer. But I don’t think this will be the case — this would require locking the phone down with crippled firmware, with the sole advantage going to Cingular. I don’t see that as a standard Apple strategy. I’d sooner expect to see an unlocked GSM phone on sale immediately at Apple Stores, Best Buy, and whichever carriers wanted to pitch it.

2) I think there’s enough disenchantment in the cellular industry, and that Apple’s got sufficient positive mindshare and retail footprint, for them to make a serious move in selling their own phone service. But the catch is that their entire target market already has phone service and might be reluctant to switch carriers. This announcement therefore wouldn’t surprise me, but I’m not expecting it.

3) There are interesting possibilities with VoIP, though — Apple already has an investment in video clients with iChat, and their market is now well-acquainted with using Skype to reach landlines. The problem with VoIP handsets, though, is their lack of coverage: no wifi hotspot, no phone service. Folks like me are happy to reconfigure their handsets accordingly, but I wouldn’t call that a mass market technology.

On the other hand, take the same handset and give it Bonjour, and you can have it automatically handshake wirelessly with your laptop or desktop. Now you can tell your customers, “if your computer has an Internet connection, your cell phone gets unlimited minutes.” That’s something that people can easily grasp. I think it might be a bit too Star Trek for Apple to try it — but then again, the lack of players in this arena might very well be the best reason for them to do so.

Okay, Steve. We’re waiting — what’s the “one more thing”?