No more Republicans

Since there are no more Republicans in the race for President now, is there a chance that a third party or independent candidate can make a decent showing this time? Former Congressman Bob Barr has thrown his hat into the ring. It's unfortunate that he couldn't run as a Republican, but the Republican party appears to be more concerned with big business and protecting it's own skin than with personal freedom and liberty.

And since the former Congressman is supporting the Fair Tax, I'll be taking a serious look at him.

Bob Barr 2008

First production Tesla Roadster rolls of the assembly line today

While Wall Street is losing its mind today over the Bear-Stearns fiasco, some good news was to be had. The first production Tesla Roadster rolled off the assembly line today. It is my feeling that this is the birth of the true American electric car (although it's made in the UK, future models will be made here). While it's got a price tag of a cool 100Gs, it performs as well as cars costing twice that much and more.

Before you dismiss this as just one of those concept type cars that we'll never see or that it's some rich guy's hobby, realize that there are two more designs behind this one. Each of them designed to both lower the price by half and increase the target audience by building a luxury sedan followed by a min suv.

Hopefully, this will do better than my last prediction that the segway was going to take over urban commuting and change the way we build cities. (doh!)

We roll black d20s tonight

Gary Gygax dies at 69. Wow, that really hits home pretty hard. I can still remember being home from school sick and my Dad giving me a copy of the "Monster Manual" for no particular reason. It's one of my best memories.

I mean, just look at those critters just below the surface on the cover! It still makes me want to pull out my +10 hammer of justice and start "judging" them as evil with a swift clonk on the noggin.

Oh, and if you wind up taking over up there, could you do something about those Scientologist freaks? They're ruining Hollywood.

BRAWNDO - The Thirst Mutilator

I can't remember how I stumbled across this stuff, but their ads are hilarious. If I see any, I'm buying some.

Thoughts on CAPTCHA

I really dislike those little CAPTCHA things that make you try to read the messed up letters and numbers and type them in a box in order to post something. I know, some people see them here, but I didn't write the blog software.

I imagine that few people actually enjoy filling out captcha boxes, but the alternative is horrible. No one wants to wade through lots of unconnected comments that are really just attempts to either game the search engines or lure you to some shopping website that will never actually ship you any product if you are foolish enough to buy something.

So, while looking around for some captcha alternatives, I had these thoughts

1. Most of the alternatives seem to expose character based data. If they ever get popular at all, the bots will be all over them just like some of the early captchas.
2. How easy would it be to defeat a comment submission page written in flex/flash? It seems like that might be hard to script a bot for, but could probably be defeated with a mouse/keystroke recorder of some sort if there were no challenge on the page.
3. This one is my favorite. Why not do away with captcha all together, but run your comments moderation through your email spam/bayesian filters. Comments get deleted if they aren't approved in a month, and you could set up a rule to automatically accept any comment that made it through the spam filter. The spam filter on my gmail account works terriffic. I think I might be able to actually set that up here. Maybe I'll give it a whirl if I run out of things to do.

Any thoughts?

Yay! McEwan's is back

Ok, I'm part of a dieing breed, but I was really disappointed when McEwan's Scotch Ale stopped being sold in liquor stores throughout Maryland. In fact, it was getting difficult to find ANY Scottish brew in the state. I'm glad to see it's back after about 6 months.

Here's to your good health!
Slainte Mhath!

ColdFusion dead? It sure doesn't sound like it

Take a peak at the Community Chronicles 0.2 put together by Jared Rypka-Hauer from his interview with Bruce Chizen. It's very uplifting to read an article like this when the "cf is dead" harpies are flapping their gums.

Maybe next year ColdFusion gets its own Super Bowl ad. Well, it's nice to dream, isn't it?

Yahoo Rejects Opening MS Bid

Link to the Guardian article

Generally all first bids are rejected because the company being purchased doesn't want to leave a lot of cash on the table. Personally, I see this merger as being less than inspiring. Yahoo is having trouble competing with the Google behemoth and Microsoft certainly knows how to dish out irrelevant search results. I'm very confident that Microsoft can push Yahoo into obscurity faster than just about anybody else.

I actually liked some of the open apis that Yahoo has delivered in the past year or two as well as their finance page being pretty solid. Unfortunately, that good work always seems to take a back seat to search which doesn't really get me too excited. I think it's difficult to create competitive advantage just with search. It's the SaaS model that continues to be interesting to me in terms of a way to deliver both value to the user and eyeballs to the advertisers.

Generally speaking I don't see this business combination providing much value to users and minimal value to existing shareholders of both companies.

OT:Feed the world from your desk

Help feed the World's hungry and improve your vocabulary at the same time. What a great idea.

Free Rice

OT: iTunes movie rentals and NBC

Well, I don't think netflix has anything to worry about yet from iTunes renting movies. It's a very unsatisfying experience. You only get to watch the film once and you have to finish watching it within 24 hours. That sucks. I think a business model change is in order there.

Also, without the networks putting their best serial tv up on iTunes (especially NBC), it's not as good of an experience. The best part about iTunes with an appleTV was that you could watch shows when you want within a day or two of it actually airing. That was really cool. HD would be cool, too, but I'll have to buy LOTS more drive space to support something like that, although Apple is already experimenting with it.