The inimitable Nyx has created a great T-shirt via CafePress: The Open Discussion of Doubt.

Hmm, looks like the same pro-Kerry morons have changed IPs. Seems they’re attacking the old Refer script, at /refer/index.php, using some scumware app by a little fly-by-night company called StarProse.

[I'm pretty sure that one day when the two 18-year-old crank addicts that comprise StarProse were sitting in their momma's basement, one of them decided that using that there Interwebnet thing was a great way to make some drug money, and was probably more fun than torturing cats or molesting children. Maybe. And they didn't even have to steal from Mom again! ]

Luckily, I’ve created a happy deterrent for anyone trying to spam for johnkerry:

< ? php

if ( eregi (" StarProse|kerry", $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER' ]) ) { header ("Location: http ://tubgirl.com "); }
?php>

You’ll have to take some of the spaces out to get that to work. Also, be sure never to ever go to tubgirl.com. Ever.

Another nice thing that works is a .htaccess file:

For your .htaccess file in the Refer directory:

order allow,deny
deny from 172.144
allow from all

You don’t want this in your webroot, unless you want to block all AOL users.

I’ve always assumed that over the course of a large number of generations of digital copies, data would always get lost or corrupted. I never had any scientific evidence to back up or disprove that assumption until now

Here’s a hint, Mr. Kerry: If you want to win votes, you’ll police the assclowns at johnkerry.com to keep them from filling up my logfiles with fake referrals.

Not that you had my vote in the first place, you communist swine.

Oh, and look, it’s an AOL IP:
host 172.132.98.191
191.98.132.172.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer AC8462BF.ipt.aol.com.

Typical.

My first girlfriend mailed me a little stuffed hamster/beaver/thing. It was doused in her perfume, ‘to remember her by’, since she lived two hours away and I only got to see her every other weekend.

Twelve years later, I have no idea what became of that girl, and the beaver is now a thoroughly-masticated dog toy.

There’s a parable in there somewhere.

Because Laura’s the best girlfriend ever, she got me a Roomba for Christmas. It took a while to get here, and I wanted to test it for a while before writing a glowing review.

In short, the Roomba sucks.

And that’s exactly what it’s supposed to do. It sucks without my intervention, except a few times when it got stuck or trapped, and it does a damn fine job of sucking. It sucks up cat hair, cat litter, cat feces, cat barf, cat dandruff, and all the other various parts of cat that are strewn around my house. It sucks up sand-dune sized litter drifts without a complaint, and it sweeps up the gnawed corpses of toilet paper rolls left by the dog. It handles 2/3 of the floorspace of my house in about an hour, and has some battery charge left over.

The main reason the Roomba is so cool, so utterly awesome, is the fact that with a slight amount of prepwork — no more than what I’d do if I were going to vacuum with a regular vac — I can turn it on, let it start vacuuming, and then I can go do something else.

In all fairness, the downsides are: the Roomba ain’t smart. I’ve had cellphones with more brains. It probably doesn’t need to be very smart anyway, but it could stand to have a little more in the “how do I get out from under this chair” department. It also gets very dirty, what with all the cat chunks it’s sweeping up.

You’ll notice in the picture that I added NOS to my Roomba. Actually, it’s just a sticker, but stickers seem to fool most of the kids here in Atlanta. My NOS sticker decreases cleaning time by a full 50%.

Once I add the aluminum-and-cardboard spoiler, the neon undercarriage lights, and the racing stripes, my Roomba should be able to clean my whole house in fifteen seconds.

Remember, kids: Stainless Steel is not for swords.