Some of you guys know I have a pager. I pay for basic numeric service but I have always been able to use the internet paging service that’s supposed to be only for alphanumeric pager. Of course, it won’t work with letter, just numbers and dashes.

So by crafting a URL like this
http://207.245.224.97/PAGESCRIPT?pin=MYPagerNumber&message=YourNumericMessage
You can bypass the web form. But more importantly, you can bypass the connection issues MSN Messenger has been giving me lately and even reach me for the few minutes in a day when I’m not in front of a computer.

I also use this occasionally in a script triggered by a mail rule to be warned of a message by a special someone.

Ce soir, alors que la neige tarde de faire son apparition unanimement annoncée par les grands sages de la télévision, je me penche sur des questions fondamentales, telles « suite au réchauffement planétaire, la neige ne sera-t-elle qu’une légende que nous raconterons à nos petits-enfants? »; « faut-il craindre le bonheur afin de réduire le vide qu’il laissera s’il venait à disparaître? »; « quels sont les éléments fondamentaux qui distinguent les amitiés durables de celles qui, même dans leurs forces, ne sont vouées qu’à être passagères? » ET LA QUESTION : « Seek a-t-il abandonné Manual::Override???? ».

Ah…tant de questions en attendant que les doux flocons fassent leur apparition…..

I woke up last night. and I had an thought on mind. I doesn’t make anymore sense now than it did 6 hours ago though. I was wondering why there isn’t the equivalent of the Dewey decimal system for supermarkets.

A couple things: first, why was I thinking about something like this in the middle of the night? Secondly: will not happen because it’s actually profitable to have clients helplessly wandering through the aisles foraging for a specific item.

It would still be nice if shelves and rows in a supermarket had numbers. I could check my grocery list against the store catalog and get a little map with the required stops in the most efficient order.
There already are those little bar code scanners in most stores so they don’t have to mark the prices on individual items, is it such a big deal to do some sort of a reverse lookup and search for an item by name and have it output the location?

Wouldn’t be too good for customer retention, but I’d love it. And since I can get the necessary stuff done with faster, I could spend more time looking at the bakery stuff or the beer section, to which I never give the attention they deserve. I don’t think I’ll ever buy into the online grocery shopping thing but this would be an interesting in-between.

Yeah, we did it.

It is quite striking that the ad I got at the bottom of the page was for the Chevy Avalanche The North Face edition which is a notorious gaz guzzler.

I must say that I’m a bit surprised by the brand association between an outdoors equipment manufacturer (another kind of OEM) and such a beast. I guess The North Face knows their market all too well… Sad.

This does a pretty good job in illustrating the song « We didn’t start the fire ».

It has always somehow fascinated me that this song does indeed fast forward through 40 years of american history.

The little flash thing isn’t perfect. Or maybe it’s my player. It seems to miss a couple verses though. Maybe it’s my permanent-beta flash player

Anyways, is this a copyright infringement? It does contain the whole song… and quite a few of these images are also copyrighted. Enjoy while it’s still up. As far as I’m concerned, it’s pretty educational though.
There was an great page on AOL that hyperlinked the lyrics with relevant web pages but it’s 404 now. Fear not, here’s the Wayback machine to the rescue.

[don’t know who to credit for this, I saw it all over the place last week and this w-e I remembered about the hyperlinked lyrics web page (that I originally saw on Memepool) which made this a somewhat value added post]

Well I personally think it’s quite creative to prove mathematical theories using beer. Some people hovever think this research and a few others are worthy of public derision.

Thanks for the reminder Fizzz

I found a link to this at a perfectly legitimate legal weblog. I have no comment on them, just thought that the pics were different from what we usually see (alright, and kind of funny too). Can it just be art? (Ok… there is somekind of social message in there but me not getting into that…)

Enjoy! It’s Friday!

you really find out about anything on the net…

Had the Lessig’s, Jiro Kokuryo, Sen, Yoon and Neeraj over for Thanksgivings Dinner

Ok, this is definitely a voyeuristic bit of trivia, but the process of following a chain of three links (talk about lowered expectations) that made me discover something funny and unexpected, although not vital, was nice. And that was without hitting a single pop-up or annoying ad. This is what I remember from my Mosaic days…Viva la blogosphere

[via A frog in the valley > Marc’s voice > Joi Ito]

Q. How many calories are there in an average American Thanksgiving dinner?

A. Enough to power a 27″ TV set for 49 minutes.

This and other interesting and useless bits of trivia on the November 2002 Harper’s list.

Ok, no blog yesterday, it means I worked more right? Well kinda… I did read two very interesting articles though, including one that made the connection between privacy and DRM, arguing that a architecture to protect private info is essentially a DRM where control is in the hands of an individual. I’m glad because I was expressing that idea in my thesis and I felt like a weirdo because I had seen no one making that connection that clearly before. I’d link to the articles but I forgot my briefcase and the articles at Make’s place yesterday night. I think I had too much pi jiu (chinese beer) with dumplings and a very local version of mapo dofu. which brings me to the main topic of this post: bubble tea!

My task is easy: Memepool has a post on the topic. You can buy it online, it’s apparently a phenomenon. I don’t really know about that, but it sure is popular in southern china. Had it for the first time in Chengdu (ok, not really south) and brightblue made me discover that I had been missing the boat for a couple years because it’s quite easy to find in Montreal. I really like the honey dew kind.

[via Memepool]

After the infamous Bonsai Kitten, I proudly present the Pint Kitten. Hey, it’s Friday…

How’s that for a first publication? Can’t wait to see the St-Christopher Copyright Extension Act extend retroactively to the 14th century!

What appears to be a 700-year-old picture of Mickey Mouse has been discovered on a church fresco in Austria.
[…]
« It is most likely to be a drawing of a beaver or a weasel. »

[…]
However, Carinthia’s tourism office is already thinking of ways to cash in on the sketch.

Siggi Neuschitzer, manager of the Malta Tourism Association, said: « The similarity of the painting to Mickey Mouse is so astounding that the Disney concern could even lose its world-wide copyright licence.

« Our Mickey Mouse is 700 years older than Disney’s and we will get it legally examined. »

Dream on!

[via Ananova’s quirkies]

L’ambassade de France au Portugal met en ligne une poignée d’expressions dont elle explique sommairement les origines. Une lecture de moins de cinq minutes qui vaut le détour.

[Via la Grande Rousse]

So a certain someone said that someone wasn’t too enthusiastic about going to someone’s someone’s cottage in a few weeks. That second someone would just like to clear his or her name by saying that this someone is very much enthusiastic about hanging with these someones for a day or two. Just that since this so called gathering is still so far away, this someone can’t maintain the expected level of enthusiasm til then.

But just to make things clear, let it be known at this moment that this someone has self-assigned the role of bringing a cake to the gathering! Beat this kind of enthusiasm!