Recently in Humor Category
Think social networking sites are fun and useful? See what happens when things get a little out of control for one social networker who might just be over the whole social network thing. Let the social networking wars begin!
One day a Google bot sent me a message to welcome me back to Orkut. I hadn't been there for ages and couldn't recognize the place, for all its walls were covered with some alien language I couldn't read. I then learnt that it was portuguese and the aliens were Brazilians who had taken over the place.
Fast forward six months from now, and LiveJournal's walls will be covered with cyrillic.
(And big hairy, scary bears will be wandering in its datacenter.)
I wish I had found the Make My Logo Bigger Cream when doing those redesigns. I would have bought the whole package at least twice, one each for the communication and marketing departments ;-).
[Via John Gruber, “From the book of “It’s Only Funny Because It’s True”.”]
When I read it on a friend's blog I thought it was a joke. But it's not, the new Google Translate defies all dreams in Artificial Intelligence (Google bots may not dream of electrical sheep, but they can show some humor).
Screenshot for posterity, since I don't doubt that someone at the French presidency will understand what "suggest a better translation" means and click on it to suggest something else.
Hide it in a Zune! Be sure to check the FAQ.
(Will their next product be a Hide-a-Wii that looks like an Xbox?)
Really funny:
From Martin Hardee's blog.
Via Parisist I found this hilarious list of ten tourist tips for the Métro.
It's obviously been written by someone who know the parisians and their subway very well. I stopped counting how many times I was just about to kill someone for one of those reasons (and numerous others, like someone taking freaking ages for entering the car while all the empty seats get snapped before your eyes). Now I'm much, much happier on my bike though.
One useful, handy, serious tip I can share: to calculate how much time you need between two subway stations, count 1 min 30 s per station (or count the number of stations and add 50%) and add 5 min for each interconnection between two lines if any (more if you don't run walk as fast as a parisian ;-) ). It's been working just perfectly for me for years.
On Xmas eve, a little web technology silliness* for fun, offered by Tim Mansfield who had the idea of validating the Vatican home page (which has the wicked cool URL www.va) through a hypothetical religion validator (on the model of the W3C validator). Enjoy:
No God found! Attempting validation with Jehovah 4.01 Transitional. The God Declaration was not recognized or is missing. This probably means that the Formal Public Identifier contains a spelling error, or that the Declaration is not using correct syntax. Validation has been performed using a default “fallback” God Definition that closely resembles “Jehovah 4.01 Transitional”, but the religion will not be Valid until you have corrected this problem with the God Declaration. You should place a God declaration as the very first thing in your Jehovah religion.You have used the doctrine named above in your religion, but the God you are using does not support that doctrine for this belief. This error is often caused by incorrect use of the “Strict” God with a religion that uses frames (e.g. you must use the “Transitional” God to get the “target” doctrine), or by using vendor proprietary extensions such as “marginheight” (this is usually fixed by using heresy to achieve the desired effect instead).
This error may also result if the belief itself is not supported in the God you are using, as an undefined belief will have no supported doctrines; in this case, see the belief-undefined error message for further information.
He also noted that the design is so last century (but hell! it's not as if they'd absorb new science that fast :p) and that no one has updated the metadata since JP II passed over.
(*) His site has been down for the past few days, I retrieved the post via his RSS feed.
