Mr. Speaker

Greasemonkey is enabled! Or so it says when I mouse-over the little monkey face that sits at the bottom of my browser. Greasemonkey is an extension to Mozilla Firefox that lets you apply your skillz to munging up web pages in ways that will make graphic designers cry and cause web-enabled, P2P, e-commerce, tech oriented, um, solution providing, pro-active businesses to issue cease-and-desist orders.

It will mostly be used for good however, and here, by way of demonstration, I’ll do something nice and add some functionality to the WordPress blogging software.

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Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs. Windows vs. Macintosh. After a decade of intense psychological duelling, a clear winner has emerged in the ultimate operating system battle: “Calculator Chicken”…

…One thing that computers can do fairly well is calculate. Give them two numbers - even really big ones like 383821 or 64342 or 128793 - and they can add them up fast. They can subtract, multiply or divide them really fast too. And it’s easy for programmers to make them do it. It’s like, one of the first programs you learn to make - a calculator. It was probably the first program made for Microsoft Windows, and probably the first program made for Apple Macintosh.

Computers have changed a lot since those calculators. Macs look all shmick and super cool, Windows looks like a shiny MacDonald’s playground, and they certainly look a lot better than they did in 1990.

But do you want to know something weird - until recently they both contained the same calculator programs they’d had since the beginning of computer time. Check them out:

<-Old School Windows


         Old School Mac->

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“Think about it: how would you feel if you saw your hard work being passed off as the property of someone else?” I’m sure the folks at Apple have been pissed about that for years. Perhaps they could take the opportunity to enter Microsoft’s short film competition on intellectual property theft: “Thought Thieves”

Yep, if you’ve put a CD you own on your iPod, or taped Home and Away to watch when you get home, you are not just infringing copyright - you are a thought thief.

Thankfully, with Microsoft leading the way on Digital Rights Management, they can be our very own thought police. In fact, thanks to juicy chunks of the Free Trade Agreement we got - you wont have to be afraid of accidentally making a backup of your songs. Windows wont let you. And if a naughty song manages to gets on to your mp3 player, DRM will delete it for you. So you’ve nothing to fear.

And don’t worry about the rights to the short film you make getting into the hands of those evil thought thieves - the thought police handled that in rule 7 on your entry form:

I will formally licence on terms acceptable to Microsoft, all intellectual property rights in my film and agree to waive all moral rights in relation to my film if requested to do so.

They thought of everything. I just hope they got permission to use that title from Orwell’s publisher.

ull time employment. The destroyer of spirits, and crusher of dreams. What is it for? Surely it serves a purpose greater than paying your taxes. For we all know that wherever dark, oppressive forces rule - the flower of nobility and art sprout through.

And for the employee, that flower takes the form of the Friday Afternoon Beer. The closest most of us will ever come to pure enlightenment.

So to ease the quotidian burdens that lay ahead, here’s a handy tool for tracking your time ’till enlightenment: Beer o’clock - The Firefox extension. A little app that sits patiently, alerting you periodically, reminding you of your purpose in life. Keeping you focused. A great productivity tool.

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Us humans are pretty handy with our beloved decimal systems, but computers just don’t dig it. It doesn’t compute. They love that ever-so-wacky binary system. They’ve got good reasons too - Why be a normal human, only able to count to five on one hand, when you can become a faux-cyborg with the ability to count to 31 with only your measly earthling fingers.

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“Hey you, you with the teeth. Come here… That’s better. Do you know me? Of course you do. That’s because I’m famous.”

Mr. T’s Be somebody, or be somebody’s fool takes the viewer on an emotional, philosophical and educational rollercoaster ride through space and time. It’s solid variety-show-in-the-hood, featuring New Edition and vocal arrangements by Ice T. One can only assume it was made to fulfill some community service obligations.

Through song, verse and even soliloquy, Mr T lends his collected wisdom on a myriad of topics of top concern to the youth of the 80’s. Much is still highly relevant today. Here’s a summary, so you can refer to it daily.

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