My friends, I am beset on all sides by malfunctioning electronic equipment. My desktop computer keeps rebooting itself for no good reason, the voice mail light on my phone won’t stop flashing, the right speaker on my stereo keeps cutting in and out, my vibrating bed no longer functions with the necessary subtlety, and my laptop is so pressed for resources that it is starting to swell up and leak fluid like a blister. Meanwhile, old web browsers and email clients are crashing, hardware drivers are not working, and none of the technical sites I bookmarked three years ago to solve my problems show as having valid addresses.

All is not lost, however, due to the efforts of a courageous few:

The 404 Research Lab
The code “404” is HTTP talk for “File Not Found”. If you follow a bad link or type in an invalid address on an active server, your classier websites will come back at you with their own customized 404 message telling you the link is outdated, or that you typed it in wrong. (My website does not have one of these pages.) The 404 Research Lab is a compendium of the finest “File Not Found”s on the World Wide Web.

Errorwear
Errorwear takes advantage of 404 and its assorted erroristic friends by transplanting them straight from the computer screen onto high-quality cotton T-shirts. Included are new favorites such as “403 Forbidden” and the legendary Windows Blue Screen of Death?, but who can forget such classics as “Bad command or file name_”, or Macintosh’s “Sorry, a system error occurred.”? Nobody, that’s who. Not if we keep them alive via the means of wearing them as T-shirts on our bodies!

These brave websites show that only by confronting our difficulties can we gain a new perspective on the past — and move forward into the future.

The prime number shitting bear has re-entered my life in a big way. I have decided I am going to try to beat the top score. The top score is determined by the highest prime number that one can prove one has seen. This in turn is largely determined by the length of time one’s browser has been running without crashing or reloading. As of this moment, the bear has been on my screen (sometimes in a minimized window, in the interest of full disclosure) shitting prime numbers for approximately forty-two hours and twenty minutes. Despite having run it this long, I am still far from the prize. The current top record is 167,901,421. That’s a pretty big number, and you know what?

It is only divisible by one and itself.

What a fat, lonely number.

I am just going to let the sucker run until my computer crashes, and to be honest I’m surprised it hasn’t crashed already, given my tendency to squeeze more and more data onto my hard drive until finally one can hear it squealing like a pig. But I am going to let it run, and damn the consequences. And if I don’t win, well, at least I will have had a good run, and also I won’t have actually wasted my time doing anything.

I am a fat, lonely person. And I love myself!

Finally, a useful webpage!

www.fakedrpepper.com

This site is devoted to listing and rating generic Dr.Pepper-type beverages. For example: Dr. Wow gets a three-Dr.Pepper-can rating, while Dr. Cheaper earns only a one-can rating. Meanwhile, Dr. Riffic leads the pack with a five-can rating!

I can’t believe I had never thought about this before! Now, I can’t get it out of my head!

Ok, I was going to post something thoughtful and mildly witty in response to this article on the World Social Forum and some other goofy stuff to do with the political scene, but I got sidetracked.

Instead, here’s a funny boner story.

I don’t think it’s really true.

It’s the Prime Number Shitting Bear!

I have no idea what this is, yet I find it strangely captivating. Take a look at it, will you? If you somehow discover what it is or what it means or what it is supposed to do, please let me know, because I really am floundering about on this one.

Why am I downtrodden? I will never ever get to bed at a sensible hour ever again at any point in my life in the future.

That said, Happy Halloween! I hope you get the shit scared out of you, you punk kids. My costume this year is a bowl of cereal. With milk. I’ll be wearing it inside my stomach. Unless I have a few drinks at the office Halloween party, you know how it is.

Some links to enjoy:

• Stories From The Bible Re-Enacted With Legos
• Antibubbles: What Are They? How Are They Useful?

Separately, two interesting sites. Together, ONE HUNDRED PERCENT MINDFUCK.

Okay… I’m probably, once again, the very last person to be in on this meme, but I saw this site for the first time last night and thought it was pretty funny. After the WTC attacks on September 11 a picture circulated purporting to have been taken on the observation deck just before the first plane hit, and allegedly was developed from film in a camera that was found in the rubble. Of course, the picture is an obvious fake:

Somebody came up with the clever idea of taking the fellow in the above photo and inserting him into other famous photos, as seen here:

Some person decided to put a collection of these photographs online, and thus was touristguy.com born. It has a rather large gallery, and most of the altered pictures are just famous movie posters with the guy’s head pasted in there somewhere, which isn’t really all that funny – it’s pictures like the above, where he’s just there in the background, that I find to be more humorous. Enjoy!

Can you tell the difference between people of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean descent? Take the test and find out! I scored an 8 out of 18 on my first try. Not very good, huh? Oh, but my heart was in the right place. I’ll do better next time, I promise.

I made the Honor Roll! I got all A’s and B’s on my report card. Hooray for alternate me!

This is possibly the best Flash-animated interpretation of Shakespeare I have ever seen. Bravo!