While looking through the web stats for this site, I’ve noticed that a lot of people, maybe even the majority of them, have come here from a google search for cheap fisheye lenses made from door peepholes from the hardware store. Just to gratuitously fish for more web hits, here’s that picture again:

People from as far away as Thailand, Estonia, and the Philippines have reached here with that search. Isn’t the internet cooool?

I’ll add another fisheye picture as soon as I remember where I put the lens!

Also, I have to mention that I just saw in my access logs that I have two hits from someone web browsing on a Commodore 64. No lie. I am gratified to have such an honored elder visit this humble site. Glad to see the old fellow keeping up with the times. Such determination! :)

So an entire two posts back (hey, that’s over a month!) I declared to the world my dislike and distrust for cable companies. Had I been a slight bit less terse, I might have mentioned that I had no desire for any more television channels to soak up time, and no interest in sending money to yet another monopoly.

However, I’ve now waited seven years for DSL to become available to this location. There’s even a nice, probably non-monopolistic DSL provider in town, but out here in the sticks (three miles south of downtown Nashville) DSL service has yet to appear.

So I gave in. I’ve now got limited basic cable, and finally broadband at home. Ain’t I a little hypocrite! Wheee! Anyway I’ll be ditching Earthlink shortly, and then the landline phone, probably.

My previous post was a half-hearted, lame attempt to patch together three links that caught my eye today. Ignore it.

Don’t ignore the last link, though. It links to an article by former NBC Dateline reporter John Hockenberry. It’s a long, fascinating, and saddening look at what has become of network news.

P.S. Happy Introvert’s Day. I plan to celebrate by putting on some headphones and enjoying a cup of tea. Like I do most nights.

[edit 2/24/08: fixed dead link on the introvert story.]

I dislike cable companies: link

I distrust cable companies: link

Eh, why watch TV anyway? link

Grumble.

On the walk home from the bus stop every night I can catch a glimpse of downtown Nashville. Currently most prominent in the skyline is what most locals call the “Bat Building“, because its resemblance to Bruce Wayne’s alter ego was obvious to everybody except, it seems, the architect.

The building really was called the BellSouth Tower until Bellsouth was assimilated by the Death Star AT&T not too long ago. And it was this past week that the bright blue AT&T logo was lit on the building, replacing the Tennessee tri-star logo, and looking for all the world like a creepy glowing cyclops eye.

Which reminds me, I really oughta stop giving money to those shmucks.

Today at work I was trying to find a good, high-resolution scan of Isaac Newton’s original illustration of his cannon thought experiment from Principia Mathematica. There are a lot of small images, and hardly any big enough for our purposes.

Anyway, on an idle whim I tried just going straight to www.newtonscannon.com only to discover the domain name had not been registered.

Well, I fixed that right away.

No idea what I’m going to do with it yet. Stay tuned.

I was about to post this message to my under-used myspace profile:

On rare occasions I find it more convenient to have a myspace account than not have one. However, I have neither the time nor the inclination to look through all of the ten or so friend requests I get weekly on the remote chance that one of them isn’t from an ersatz 22-year old in her underwear. If you are someone I know, then you already have multiple other ways of getting in touch with me that don’t involve what may very well be the most poorly designed major web site in existence.

Henceforth, friend requests go to /dev/null. Now get off my lawn.

But at the last minute I decided to cancel the account altogether. I’m going to go be awkwardly old and unsociable on facebook instead.

So tonight on NOVA is a 2-hour program about Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the ‘Intelligent Design’ trial in Pennsylvania which ended just shy of two years ago. I’ll have to watch, but this topic almost always gets me irritated. (That said, the judge’s ruling on the case is a really good read, considering that it’s, well, a court ruling.)

Meanwhile, I came across a new review of the Creation Museum in Kentucky complete with a Flickr photo album. It’s an interesting review, if maybe a little long. Really the whole thing boils down to one, highly appropriate, word. I wonder if you can guess which word that might be.

Hey lookee, an actual post after lo these many months!

A few days ago I put together a cool little telescope kit from Japan, given to me by my boss. I’ve took some pictures while putting it together and have posted them here. It’s a surprisingly nice low-power scope, given the tiny little box it came in.

Another Fark Photoshop contest entry.

The clutter on my desk is 100% genuine.