from Joystiq:

My talent? Dressing up as Mario!

Super Mario PostIt!

Mario, all strung out

The morning started out ill. Our usual allies had abandoned us. Our enemies had struck a hard blow not long before and now lay seige to our stronghold. The high-tech weapons with which we had been supplied did not function, and we were forced to use the most rudimentary of devices. While we were able to inflict minor damage with these simple weapons, it was likely that the enemy would receive reinforcements before we would be able to make any serious headway.

A neighboring peoples, seeing our plight, lent us a WME. With the use of this powerful weapon we were able take back many of our lands, though sadly we must report that in our enthusiasm we were… incautious and the lights of innocents were extinguished. Their body parts still lay strewn across the battlefield.

By early afternoon we were too tired to carry on the fight, and we regrouped at HQ. Luckily fortune shined down upon us, and the bodies of our enemies began to melt in the sunlight. Even so, the enemy stubbornly holds ground. Particularly, our secondary vehicle remains under enemy control. I'm afraid that will have to be a fight for another day.

Translation:

The city plow came after the driveway plow and left a three foot wall of snow at the end of the driveway. I couldn't get the snowblower (WME = Weapon of Mass Expulsion) to work, so I had to use a shovel. It was slow going and it would have snowed before I was done cleaning up the mess.

The next-door neighbor saw I was having trouble and lent me his snowblower. I was able to clear most of the driveway and the sidewalk, but as I was doing the sidewalk I forgot about the little solar lights that I hadn't brought in last fall. The snowblower chewed them up and spit them out all over the front lawn.

By early afternoon the sun began to shine and the snow started to melt. Even so, Dad's car is still under a pile of snow.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I've begun delocalizing my web-oriented data. While having access to my bookmarks from any location is nice, the real driving force for this was the fact that I follow a rather large number of RSS feeds (77 to be exact. I believe they're all RSS, some could be ATOM…). Everything was fine when I was working on just one computer, I would use RSSOwl to download all my feeds and keep track of the stories that I had read. The problem was that when I went on travel, or especially when I started using two computers in parallel, the information about which stories I had read did not transfer. I began looking for solutions, but there were certain perks to having a non-web-based client that I did not want to give up. One in particular was having a notifier so that I would know when new items were available to read. It turns out that Google has a rather open API and so programs like Google Reader Notifier are able to be created. GRN puts an icon in your system tray, checks Google reader for new stories and changes the icon accordingly. It's almost the best of both worlds, though I wish I could download a full blown client like RSSOwl on my main computer and use it with Google Reader. I don't see why it couldn't be done, but I also don't see it getting done.

For my bookmarks, I am using Google Bookmarks which combined with the firefox extention GMarks works pretty darn well. GMarks acts almost exactly as bookmarks do in Firefox (with a few extra perks) but separate from them, which is a little bit annoying. All the data is stored on Google servers, so the data can be accessed from any computer, with or without GMarks. So at least in this case I have data stored non-locally and it can be accessed through a full client on my computers and through a web-based client anywhere else. That's exactly how it should be with all web-oriented data/programs.

When I started writing this post I was at school and knowing that I wouldn't have time to finish it there, I wrote it in Google Notebook.This way I was able to access and finish writing it when I got home. They even have a Firefox extension for GN.

When it comes to email, I am torn. I really like using Thunderbird, and GMail works very well with it. GMail not only allows for POP3 access (allows you to download emails to a standalone client), but also SMTP access (allows you to send email from a standalone client). The only problem is that information about which emails you have read/deleted is not uploaded back to the server. I could competely switch over to using the web-based client in tandem with Google Mail Notifier (an official Google program), but that means giving up some of the conveniences of Thunderbird. Right now I'm just using both.

Amidst the deluge of media coverage of dead playmates and pop-stars gone mad, you might have missed this minor story about the murdering of a homeless man by teenagers.

Knowing the media's penchant for placing all blame on video games, one of the boys involved mentioned that the killing was like playing a violent video game. Gabe from Penny Arcade responded with this (scroll down to the article entitled “Here we go again”). The response to which was this (scroll down to the article entitled “A rare opportunity”).

The one thing I do want to say about all this is that unless this kid has a mitigating mental problem (which is a distinct possibility), then the primary blame lies with the teen. The primary blame does not belong to his parents (all though they may share in the blame), and it most certainly does not belong to video games.

You can catch a link to the full story in the My Diggs block on the right, but I found this quote in particular to be interesting:

“Amillia's incredible story will reignite the debate over Britain's abortion laws, which campaigners say must be updated in the light of recent medical advances.

Babies can still be aborted for non-medical reasons at up to 24 weeks. Recent evidence shows that, of those born at 25 weeks, half of them manage to live.”

I know I'm preaching to the choir, but why does ones right to life depend on current medical science? How can that possibly make sense to anyone?