Somehow, somewhere, today I ran across the longest domain name on the internet:
wiemenschlichmenschensindzeigtihrumgangmitdermuttersprachefrsch.de
And that’s with the “http://www” taken out! Anyone who can pronounce, spell, or even read that: you deserve a medal.
Naturally, it’s in German. Everything is longer in German.

Stop the insanity!
Blogs are hotter than heat right now, so apparently every new web venture is a blog. Like this one.
Now, I like cars, and I even like some of the articles on that site, but that is not a blog. What is a blog?

Mantra:An online Journal
Feed for all:Blog is short for weblog. A weblog […]

It’s sad but true: Steve Jobs is a valley girl.
Jobs, chief executive officer of both Apple Computer and Pixar Entertainment, used the ultimate valleyism “you know” not less than 19 times in his recent podcast with ABC news (transcript).
Valley girl-ese is a well-known sub-dialect of teen girls in California’s San Fernando valley that features extensive […]

Dr. Seuss blogs too … as I just found out as Teresa was reading to our son, Aidan.

He just spells it a little differently - but then again, Dr. Seuss does everything a little differently.
This is in the book The Shape of Me and Other Stuff.

It’s not everyone who sees an uncle on a tomato.

My uncle Cor - Cornelius Houweling - came from Holland in the 50’s with not much besides a knowledge of flowers and growing. He started a greenhouse operation, it grew, and his sons took over when he, perhaps 20 years ago or so, started to slow […]

OK, this is pretty cool.
More people should do stuff just to do stuff. It’s better than zoning on teevee.

Had the cool experience a couple of days ago of meeting Alexandra Samuel on a flight back from Minneapolis to Vancouver.
She’s a freelance writer/academic/and more, and a fellow Mac user. I saw her pecking diligently away at her 12″ iBook on an early trip back to the lower-class WCs in the back of the plane […]

As I was wandering around downtown Columbus, Ohio last week, I ran across this life-size replica of the Christopher’s ship, the Santa Maria.

Notice how bluff the bow is … this ship would have had a lot of fun (NOT) sailing dead-on into seas of any significant size at all. I wonder if it would […]

sparkplug9.com and Sparkplug 9 would like to congratulate Gabrielle Renee Koetsier, age 8, on winning the prestigious Scholastic Canada Lucky’s Magic Treehouse Be An Author Contest!
One of only 10 recipients in Canada, Gabrielle (who recently turned 9) received a Magic Tree House Bookshelf Collection—complete with 28 books from this favourite series and a treehouse bookshelf […]

BBC is usually very clueful, which makes it even more annoying to see unmitigated drivel like this.
A brief quote, from the sub-lead:

Deafblind people find technology difficult and frustrating to use, a survey has found.

Who woulda guessed!
Note:
The other reason I’m blogging this is because this is the first time I’ve seen the word deafblind. What on […]

Q: What makes a slow car on a single-lane road go faster?
A. Two lanes.

Don’t let anyone tell you unicorns are mythical creatures. I’ve seen the evidence, in Columbus, Ohio.

And the culprit herself (note the shape of the hoof, near the bottom of the shot):

I ran acros a weigh scale for buses - I kid you not - near the Columbus, Ohio, science center. (I suppose their bridges are so bad, they need to weigh the buses to know where to go!)
It was enormous … filling up half the road. The driver, presumably, can glance at the digital readout, […]

While I’m here in Columbus, Ohio, to attend the national PTA convention (we’re exhibiting a new product here), I’ve been exploring the city a bit.
Can’t say I see a ton of these in downtown Vancouver:

Is it just me or do Ohioans not count too well?

The Ohio Supreme Court is a great new-old building … old, […]

Tonight I had the pleasure of watching the 1930s silent film Metropolis in Columbus’ old Ohio Theatre, built in 1928. The theatre is incredible - probably seats around 2000 or so, and is decorated to the nth degree inside.

Perhaps 1000 were in attendance, all us having having paid the non-princely sum of $3.50 for […]

I’m in Columbus, Ohio for the National PTA convention …
Funny how the Northwest airlines logo, with the stylized NWA, reminds me of the old rap group. I’m sure they’d be amused to see their initials flying all over the skies:

I saw these lights by the exit sign in the airplane that I don’t think I’ve […]

Saw an interesting light show today, so I grabbed the camera and started shooting:

Check out the ‘complete’ photoset on Flickr.
10 brownie points to the person who can figure out what the heck these shots are of. And no, there’s no post-capture processing, aside from a very small amount of judicious cropping, and one Unsharp Mask […]

A couple of days ago David Boone came past our offices. Dave used to work in my department, and still handles all our domain purchases and management.
He’s followed a really interesting path. I hired him at 19 for a programmer’s job, which he did an amazingly good job at. Three years after that, he decided […]

According to exit polls in the last US election (as reported by the New York Times) half of all gay people in the US don’t care about gay marriage:
Excerpt:
Only about a quarter of voters surveyed in the national exit poll following the election favored same-sex marriage, and interestingly enough, only about half of gay and […]

It’s the color of the cup, silly.