Certainly better than those damn urinal adverts, put your advertising message in a place most men are bound to glance.

Very-bad-taste public service note: If you’re planning to kill yourself by getting hit by a train, don’t try to do it from within your huge durable American 4×4. A little 1984 Fiero or Daewoo would be a better idea (at least he didn’t use a Volvo). Also, for the suicide to be really effective, it’s important to stay inside the vehicle.

If you don’t follow these two simple suggestions, your failed suicide attempt will probably result in a massive train wreck and lots of dead people who aren’t you. The news story above says he’s facing 10 counts of homicide. What are they going to do, kill him?

Australia’s foreign minister, Alexander Downer, demonstrates his innate ability to state the bloody obvious. Here’s an excerpt:

THE fatal bomb blast outside the Australian embassy in Baghdad appeared to be aimed at the Australian embassy, Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer said today.

Well duh! If they were trying to hit the French, they were certainly in the wrong neighbourhood.

Later in that same press conference, Mr. Downer stated that beef comes from cows, ice cubes make drinks cooler, and no one found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He then dropped his pants to demonstrate gravity.

This is for my Australian friends, a country currently mostly in drought conditions.

After a couple of weeks of low temperatures and snow, Vancouver’s getting hammered by record rain. Houses are being lost in massive mudslides (with more to come ), traffic is a total mess, and, inland, rapidly melting ice is overrunning small towns. Insanity! If the airport’s not flooded, Vancouverites, Australia’s having summer now…

In a previous life, I had a bit of a run-in with Dave Winer while he was controlling some software called Frontier. In my opinion, he was running it into the ground, but he felt otherwise. Time has proven me right, I think.

So anyway, flash forward to now. Dave has come up with something called “Podcasting”. Well, he didn’t really. But he named it, and that’s what counts, apparently. There’s one podcaster who is (gasp!) having fun with the medium, and managed to fool Dave and his buddy Adam Curry. When they found out they’d been fooled, they overracted in a typically Wineresque way. The Register, of course, has all the yummy details.

Screw Brad and Jennifer to the sticking place. The Bard probably had syphilis. I’m sure this rocks your world as much as it does mine, gentle reader. Miss Eisner, my 11th and 12th year English teacher, is probably aghast.

So there’s now a Mac for my mum, an iPod for my partner’s daughter and an alleged productivity bundle for no one that I can figure out.

But the one thing I wanted, didn’t happen: No PowerBook upgrades. Damn. Steve! Didn’t you get my email? I would have been happy with a speed bump, even one of those dual-core G4s I was hearing about a few months ago. But nothing! This old iBook is on her last legs. I wasn’t seriously expecting anything like a PowerBook G5, but—wait a minute.

Just hold the phone.

What’s this?

PowerBook G5 in Q2 2005?! iBook G5 in the same timeframe??!! Sorry, what? How did this happen? iBook G5?

Upon calmer reflection, I think this “iBook G5” is actually the PowerBook 12”, which does have more in common with the iBook line than with the higher-end PowerBooks. But wow. G5s in PowerBooks in 3 months? I was thinking about a used PowerBook 12” to tide me over, but maybe I’ll just wait for this baby…

I don’t know if I’d call these the worst ever – I’ve seen worse ones – but this is a pretty good collection of really bad album covers. The website also rates highly on the “really bad website names” scale. What was he thinking?

Due to the efforts of mangy network terrorist scum, I disabled comments here for a while. Well, they’re back now. Don’t all post at once.

The trick is that there’s a new input field. Simply type into that field the number that appears in the box over it. Mangy network terrorist scum generally use computers that can’t do this trick.

High-five to James Seng for coming up with this lovely little hack.

Want to buy a company that’s lost nearly a billion dollars in the past four years?

Lenovo did.