My Salad

This week, Vinny’s voice is still on vacation and skype was ripping our audio to shreds, so we kept this one short.

• AOL is planning to launch ISP service in India, and people there know Vinny’s name. Should we start calling him Norm?
• The FDA has no idea if acrylamide is hazardous, but our own EPA and every other country in the world says it’s a carcinogen.
• Bob & Tom — Telemarketer Nightmare. The funniest video we’ve heard in a long time.
• The Bush administration has agrees to give illegal aliens granted amnesty, social security credits. Who said crime doesn’t pay?
• The current administration doesn’t think the White House visitors list should be public information. We own that house, shouldn’t we know who enters it?
• Keith Ellison took his oath of office using Thomas Jefferson’s Koran.
• Some people work in the wrong professions.
• Benny Parsons has been hospitalized.
• MacWorld is this week.
• The Best of iLifeZone is available.
• The Apprentice returns on Sunday…

It’s almost 2007! McDonald’s ruins Christmas, small cars are dangerous, Microsoft sends Laptops to select bloggers, and Saddam Hussein is dead.

• Vinny talks about putting together the best of iLifezone clips.
• Vinny’s Christmas dinner went very well.
• McDonald’s ruins Christmas
• Police steal a camera

, then claim it was abandoned on the street, then refuse to return it. What country are we living in, anyway?

• Wives of the world take notice! The risk of breast cancer is lower if you do housework for 16-17 hours per week.
• North Carolina prosecutors call for Nifong to step down
• Parallels Desktop for Mac - Most Innovative Product of 2006
• Small cars compromise safety. Gasp! Say it isn’t so!
• We talk about our stories of the year, and the people we don’t like in the Blogosphere.
• We discuss the “Microsoft Vista / Ferrari Laptop” blogosphere fiasco.
• Vinny discusses the ethical reasons for not accepting a “reward” for doing a review.
• President Ford Dies
• James Brown Dies
• Saddam Hussein Executed
• PayPerPost purchases parts of Performancing, and a lot of people are not happy.
• AT&T supports Net Neutrality!
• Terri Schiavo’s dad is recovering from a series of strokes

It’s Christmas. The Komodo Messiah is coming, and Santa can’t wear a hat because some think he doesn’t exist.

• Vinny discusses the first Christmas dinner at the “younger” Ferrari household.
• Slobokan discusses the traditional Christmas dinner down in Georgia.
• We talk about the way people act around the holidays.
• Microsoft Rings In The New Year By Securing Apple’s Market Share
• Microsoft Zune. Now with 35% more porn
• Mexicans Sent Home, Everyone Gets A Job For Christmas
• A school in England tells 9 year olds that Santa Claus does not exist
• Watch Santa as he makes his arrival in your part of the world.
• Bus driving Santa shouldn’t wear his hat.
• Christmas time is romance time for single Jews
• Monica Lewinsky graduates
• It’s Christmas time for the Duke Lacrosse team. Sort of.
• Is this the coming of the Komodo Messiah
• One mom with two wombs gives birth to three babies.
• Charlotte Wyatt was released from the hospital this week. But she didn’t go home to her parents.
• Congratulations to Vinny for placing second on the Consumerist Top Posts of 2006
• The authors of Citizen Marketers sent Vinny an autographed copy of the book.

This week:

Santa gets 86′d from Disney World, honor rolls are abolished, and the IRS legitimizes drug dealing.

• Vinny talks about his newest interest… Wine. Slobokan suggests Wine at Woot.com (of course, Vinny was already watching it)
• We re-launched the ISPN Media website. It’s got the same great content, but a great new look!
• Vinny has been doing an awesome job putting together shownotes for the iLifeZone podcast.
• We discuss Lifehacker’s “Best Apps of 2006“
• We both recommend Bloglines and Slobokan also recommends FeedDemon
• We both recommend the free VPN solution, Hamachi
• Slobokan was reading Christopher Null’s website again and found out about Instant Domain Search.
• SQL Server is not compatible with Vista
• A family has trouble, “scraping by on $150,000 a year“
• Stupid Story #1: The happiest place on Earth tells the jolliest man on Earth to leave.
• Mike Nifong Is A Moron
• Head of DNA lab says he and Nifong agreed not to report results
• Why Cell Phone Outage Reports Are Secret
• Stupid Story #2: Woman Shoots Self Trying To Light Cigarette
• Slobokan has a follow up on the Harry Potter Book Banner
• High School Halts Publication of Honor Roll
• Obese should have health warnings on their clothes
• Art Teacher Suspended For Being Artistic
• George Vaccaro gets his refund from Verizon
• Per the IRS: Bribes, kickbacks, and illegal income now taxable.

This week:

Verizon Wireless needs a math lesson, CNet shouldn’t make predictions, and nurses don’t want you to fantasize about them.

• Vinny took some awesome photos
• Vinny put together some awesome shownotes for the iLifeZone podcast again this week.
• Slobokan spent the week tweaking Movable Type
• We remember James Kim
• Charlotte Wyatt To Be Placed In Foster Care
• We discuss the Iraq Survey Group Report and the firestorm from the right of the blogosphere.
• Cnet predicts the iPhone will fail. We aren’t taking their prediction too seriously… They also predicted the iPod would fail, so go figure.
• Christopher Null had a link to E-week, Half of American Business PCs Can’t Run Vista :
  

  About half of the average business PCs in North America are unable to meet the minimum requirements for Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system, while 94 percent do not meet the system requirements for Vista Premium.

  Within these figures, 41 percent and 78 percent, respectively, require RAM upgrades to meet the minimum and premium system requirements of Vista, says a new study by Softchoice Corp., which is expected to be released later this week.

  In comparison, when Windows XP was released, some 71 percent of the PCs met its system requirements, Softchoice services consultant Dean Williams said in an executive summary of the report.

• Verizon can’t understand the difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents, and after 22+ minutes, it doesn’t seem any more likely they understand. The highlights of the call? The Supervisor explaining that he’s worked at Verizon for 2 years (obviously not able to calculate hasn’t impeded his meteoric rise to the top) and another person explaining that despite notes clearly stating what the man was quoted, she boiled it down to a difference in opinion.
• Stupid Story #1 : Intestinal Turbulence Brings Down Plane
  

  Flatulence brought 99 passengers on an American Airlines flight to an unscheduled visit to Nashville early Monday morning.

  American Flight 1053, from Washington Reagan National Airport and bound for Dallas/Fort Worth, made an emergency landing here after passengers reported smelling struck matches, said Lynne Lowrance, a spokeswoman for the Nashville International Airport Authority.

  …

  The FBI questioned a passenger who admitted she struck the matches in an attempt to conceal body odor, Lowrance said. The woman lives near Dallas and has a medical condition.

• Stupid Story #2 : Boy Arrested For Opening Christmas Present
  

  A fed-up mother had her 12-year-old son arrested for allegedly rummaging through his great-grandmother’s things and playing with his Christmas present early.

  The mother called police Sunday after learning her son had disobeyed orders and repeatedly taken a Game Boy from its hiding place at his grandmother’s house next door and played with it. He was arrested on petty larceny charges, taken to the local police station in handcuffs and held until his mother picked him up after church.

  …

  “It was only to teach my son a lesson. He’s been going through life doing things…and getting away with it.”

  …

  The boy’s case will be presented to Department of Juvenile Justice officials in York County, who will decide what happens to him, Bollinger said. His mother hopes he can attend a program that will finally scare him straight.

• Stupid Story #3 : Sexy nurses are getting a rise out of real ones… At a restaurant called “The Heart Attack Grill”:
  

  Several nurses have complained to the Arizona attorney general’s office, and a national nursing group has repeatedly asked Heart Attack Grill owner Jon Basso to stop using the outfits.

  “Nurses are the most sexually fantasized-about profession,” said Sandy Summers, executive director of the Center for Nursing Advocacy, based in Baltimore. “We’re asking people, if they’re going to have these fantasies, please don’t make it so public. Move these sexual fantasies to other professions.”

  So sexualizing nurses is no good, but sexualizing “other professions” is fine. People, lighten up.

• New York City becomes first municipality to ban trans fats. More nanny-statism in action
• We talk about reality shows, Amazing Race, Survivor, and Heroes.

This week, we talk about race issues, stereotypes, morons, and bear cubs. Join us, wont you?

• Vinny completed his novel for Nanowrimo.
• Vinny is now doing the shownotes for the iLifeZone podcast for the TwiT network.
• We talk about the iPod Shuffle
• Vinny talks about the best text editor for the Mac, Textmate
• Slobokan received his Google Adsense check for $39.26.
• Slobokan is moving back to Movable Type
• Michael Irvin goes off on a very Jimmy the Greek-esque tirade on ESPN…Here’s what he said (via Stop the ACLU)
  

  “Somewhere there are some brothers in that line,” Irvin added. “I don’t know who saw what, where. His great, great, great, great grandma ran over in the ‘hood, or something went down.”

  Patrick cut in, “That’s the only way to be a great athlete?”

  “No,” Irvin replied, “that’s not the only way. But it’s certainly one way. Great, great, great, great grandma pulled one of them studs up outta the barn. ‘Come here for a second.’ You know, they go out and work in the yard. You know, back in the day. Something like that.”

  Ironically, Jimmy the Greek said pretty much the same thing in 1988:

  “During the slave period, the slave owner would breed his big black with his big woman so that he would have a big black kid, that’s where it all started.”

  Jimmy the Greek, a white guy, was of course fired immediately, while Irvin, to the best of my knowledge hasn’t been. That’s not to say I think Irvin should be fired, just that he hasn’t been.

• Michael Richards lost his stupid mind and then proceeded to grovel to every black person in America…
• Heather Mills kicks off a shoe auction and no one shows up.
• PC Watch points out that men are the new “N” word:
  

  Frances Kemp booked an aisle seat on a recent British Airways (BA) flight because she had a bad leg that required extra space. Her 76-year-old husband Michael occupied the middle seat. A nine-year-old girl took the window position. When a stewardess asked Frances to switch seats with her husband, she declined. The stewardess explained that the seating arrangement breached the airline’s child-welfare regulations and moved the child. Michael is a retired journalist with no criminal record; he made no contact-physical or verbal-with the girl; no complaint or request to move was received; the child’s mother was elsewhere on the plane. The girl’s welfare was deemed to be in peril solely because Michael was male.

  And then this paragraph:

  If an airline restricted the seating of blacks because the 2004 Bureau of Justice data states “blacks [are] disproportionately represented among homicide victims and offenders”, there would be a backlash of rage. It would make no difference that the parent or loved one of a white passenger had requested the `safety’ measure. But, over the course of decades, Western culture has so thoroughly identified maleness itself with violence and abuse that major airlines feel free to openly treat them as predators. In response to the Qantas incident, Worsley stated, “Men are being demonized in the media for a long time now. I think probably this is just society’s reaction-they think, `We’d better start tightening up on everything.’ It’s getting to the stage when all men are viewed with distrust.”

• Tom Bonnell Should Be Fired
  

  Savannah police say two 14-year-old prep school students accused of taking a homemade bomb to school have been arrested.

  Police say each was charged Monday with possession of a weapon on school property and reckless conduct. They also face a charge of possession and manufacturing of an explosive device.

  A hearing is scheduled Tuesday morning in Juvenile Court.

  One student made the bomb out of firecrackers, BBs and metal shavings and gave it to another student at Savannah Country Day School on November 15, according to a police report. The other student took the bomb home, but took it back to school three days later at the urging of an administrator.

  School officials kept the bomb for nearly 24 hours before contacting police. Headmaster Tom Bonnell said that he should have called police immediately.

Troy Gentry pleads guilty to killing a captive bear.

Troy Lee Gentry pleaded guilty Monday to a misdemeanor charge of falsely registering a captive bear as being killed in the wild.

More morons try to ban books, this time in Wisconsin.

Check out Librivox.org and the Project Gutenberg.

• Disgusting: BenQ uses smoldering 9/11 ground zero WTC ruins to sell MusiQ MP3 player. We will be boycotting anything BenQ is associated with, from here on out.
• We talk a little NASCAR, very little.
• We talk about reality shows, Amazing Race, Survivor, and Heroes.

This week Eva Longoria broke our hearts, Charlotte Wyatt’s dad gets a chance to care for her, and lots of geek stuff.

Here’s what we tossed up this week:

• Vinny gives us an update on Nanowrimo.
• Vinny highly recommends The Melting Pot
• Slobokan is pissed at Google Adsense.
• We both highly recommend Text Link Ads.
• Josh Wolf lost a request for a re-hearing.
• Charlotte Wyatt’s father is staying at the hospital with her to demonstrate he is able to care for her, but now it seems she has an infection
• The Zune launched. Reviews have been universally lukewarm, moreso because of the horrible software than the hardware itself, which is to be expected. After all… Microsoft is excellent at overpromising and underdelivering in the area of bloatware. Sales have been steady though.
• There is a flaw in the Broadcom wireless driver on many wireless computers.
• Breaking the hearts of thousands of men around the world, Eva Longoria announced she will NOT be starring in a lesbian movie.Eva Longoria is shooting down rumors that she plans to star as Beyonce Knowles’s lover in a new movie.
  

  “Stop the madness” Longoria tells PEOPLE exclusively about the false reports that she and Knowles will play a couple in an adaptation of Sarah Waters’s love story Tipping the Velvet. “Believe me, I would love to work with Beyonce one day. She’s so talented. But this is definitely not something we are doing together. It’s completely and absolutely not true.”

• Borat makes people look bad in his movie. Oh well.
• We talk about reality shows, Amazing Race, Survivor, and Heroes.
• Are there only problems with electronic voting when Democrats lose?- Montana — Where a Democrat won his Senate race but the Republican won the House (1 up for election total)
  - Indiana — Richard Lugar maintains the Senate, but losses in the house to Democrats.
  - Ohio — 12% victory for Democrats in the Senate, and Dems swept governorship and house.
  - New Jersey — Democrats walk away with the Senate, the House, and the Governorship
  - Colorado — Democrats win 4 / 7 House races, and the governorship

  Wonder why we haven’t heard more about the problems?

• We have a new candidate for best ad of the election campaign; this time the utterly ridiculous Vito Fossella from Staten Island, NY. (http://www.insignificantthoughts.com/fosella.mp3)
• It seems you are lord of your castle everywhere, except Colorado.
  

  Colleen and Rodger Sauve, both smokers, filed a lawsuit in March after their condominium association amended its bylaws last December to prohibit smoking. “We argued that the HOA was not being reasonable in restricting smoking in our own unit, nowhere on the premises, not in the parking lot or on our patio,” Colleen Sauve said.

• Pahrump, Nevada passed a law making it illegal to fly a foreign nation’s flag by itself. Do we really need more laws? Seriously…
• By the time you hear this podcast, the Nextel Cup champion will have been decided. Jimmie Johnson leads Matt Kenseth by 63 points, Kevin Harvick and Denny Hamlin are back 90, and Jr is back 115. No one really has a shot at the title.

This week we’re coming off our high from the “International Election Craptacular”. We discovered there are far more stupid people in the world than we thought. This one moves fast, so hold on.

Here’s what we tossed up this week:

• Vinny talks about Nanowrimo.
• Slobokan talks about moving his blog back to Wordpress.
• w.bloggar is Slobokan’s blogging tool of choice.
• We chat about our International Election Craptacular
• Pledge Banned at California College
  

  Student leaders at a California college have touched off a furor by banning the Pledge of Allegiance at their meetings, saying they see no reason to publicly swear loyalty to God and the U.S. government.

  The move by Orange Coast College student trustees, the latest clash over patriotism and religion in American schools, has infuriated some of their classmates — prompting one young woman to loudly recite the pledge in front of the board on Wednesday night in defiance of the rule.

  …

  Bell said the ban largely came about because the trustees didn’t want to publicly vow loyalty to the American government before their meetings. “Loyalty ought to be something the government earns through performance, not through reciting a pledge,” he said.

• Hips Don’t Lie
  

  A New Jersey woman who fell off a wet bar and injured herself while dancing in a “Shake-It-Like-Shakira” contest is suing the Manhattan bar that sponsored the shake-off.

  Megan Zacher, 22, of Delanco, N.J fell inside Calico Jack’s Cantina on 42nd Street at Second Avenue on July 8, 2006. Her lawyer, Lawrence Simon, said the fall caused a torn ligament in her left knee and required surgery.

  Simon said Zacher and two friends had been in Calico Jack’s about an hour. Zacher had finished one drink and was working on a second, and was dancing on the bar, vying for the $250 “Shake-It-Like-Shakira” prize, when she fell.

  Shakira, pop songstress from Colombia, South America, who also has Lebanese ancestry, is famous for her belly dance moves. Her latest hit is “Hips Don’t Lie.”

  Zacher’s lawsuit says the bar’s operators should have known the contest atop a wet bar was “dangerous.” The lawsuit asks unspecified damages from Calico Jack’s.

• Hot Air introduces Absolute Moral Authority cards! YAY!
• We talk about reality shows, Amazing Race, Survivor, Heroes, and the “cancellation” of 6 Degrees.
• Mac users need to be scared of viruses?
  

  There are reportedly more vulnerabilities that can be exploited in Windows XP than Mac OS X.

  Doesn’t reportedly convey the possibility that there aren’t, but that people just think there are? It does to me.

• We highly recommend AVG Anti-Virus
• Sprint’s Ambassador Program
  

  On the surface, Sprint’s Ambassador Program seems like a great way to get valuable feedback from high-profile mobile users: give free phones and wireless service to 400-odd bloggers in exchange for regular reports concerning their pros and cons. Unfortunately — at least according to two former Ambassadors — there are more strings attached than those that are spelled out in the contract; both designer Eston Bond and consultant Michael Mace claim that they were kicked out of the program because they didn’t write anything positive about the Samsung A920 they were given to test.

• No NASCAR update this week

Join us in this special edition of Information Salad as we chat with Spencer and Stageleft about this year’s election results.

More geek news this week, with talk about Ubuntu 6.10, Firefox 2.0, and Microsoft changing the licensing structure for Vista. We touch on a few political topics as well.

Here’s what we tossed up this week:

• Vinny talks about Nanowrimo.
• Slobokan talks about problems with Ubuntu 6.10.
• Vinny talks about issues with the Google Toolbar and Firefox 2.0.
• Virus Disables Windows Firewall
  

  Hackers have published code that could let an attacker disable the Windows Firewall on certain Windows XP machines.

  The code, which was posted on the Internet early Sunday morning, could be used to disable the Windows Firewall on a fully patched Windows XP PC that was running Windows’ Internet Connection Service (ICS).

  …

  The attacker could send a malicious data packet to another PC using ICS that would cause the service to terminate. Because this service is connected to the Windows firewall, this packet would also cause the firewall to stop working

  Oh yeah, but only if…

  the attacker would have to be within the LAN in order to make the attack work, and, of course, it would only work on systems using ICS, which is disabled by default. Furthermore, the attack would have no effect on any third-party firewall being used by the PC

• Windows Vista now supports moving from machine to machine.
• Vinny is testing Second Rate Hosting and our “high traffic” customer, Flopping Aces.
• Texas Border Watch Test Site
  

  As part of the Virtual Neighborhood Border Watch Program, the State of Texas has been testing video surveillance cameras in different environments along the 1240 miles of Texas/Mexico border using the internet to transmit the images. The last stage of the test is to stress the system by providing public access to eight surveillance cameras.

  I think it’s safe to say the system is “stressed”, I haven’t been able to view a camera all day.

• We have some fun with statistics, in reference to John Kerry’s statements from 1972 and again this week.
• We discuss the NY Times article and their admission that Saddam had a nuclear weapons program.
• We both highly recommend GMail for Mobile.
• We talk about reality shows, Amazing Race, Survivor, Heroes, 6 Degrees.
• NASCAR: Robby Gordon Penalized
  

  Gordon, who owns his own race team, was docked 50 driver points and 50 car owner points, and fined $15,000 for throwing a piece of roll bar padding onto the track during Sunday’s race at Atlanta.