google goes a long ways towards assuaging terms of service fears by changing them for the better:

“Updated – In response to recent feedback regarding the Google AdSense Online Standard Terms and Conditions, we have made clarifications to this agreement in the following sections: Prohibited Uses (section 6), Confidentiality (section 8), Payment (section 12), Publicity (section 13), and Miscellaneous (section 17).”

i’m not a lawyer and i don’t even play one on tv, but it looks like i might move forward with giving the program a shot on the {bio,medical}informatics section.

well alrighty then. i’ll show my age by citing the cramps’ “mad daddy” from ‘songs the lord taught us’ in the title of this post. it seems that, “Want to get rich? Get taller”:

“Tall people earn considerably more money throughout their lives than their shorter co-workers, with each inch adding about $789 a year in pay, according to a study released on Thursday.”

at this point, i guess i could show my age even more by calling forth the ghost of minor threat and humming “small man, big mouth”.

so, i guess it really does pay to be 6 foot 4, lower back problems notwithstanding.

sam ruby is embedding foaf in atom:

“Having this information within a feed would enable aggregators to display additional data about the author of the entry being viewed, for example: their personal info, online accounts / IM, projects and groups.”

[ via decafbad ]

RIAA Sequentially Repeating Edison’s Mistakes:

“After watching the RIAA’s public Dance of Death closely for only about a year, everything they do is so predictable that I’m beginning to wonder if they even have any control over their own destiny. For some inexplicable reason, they seem compelled to follow through until the final scene, perhaps unaware that there’s been a rewrite in the ending over the last 90 years.”

[ via scott andrew ]

you really, really, really have to feel for the guy.
he’s super sorry

:

“A police guard was posted outside the suburban Northbrook home where he lives with his parents. His brother-in-law — who read the statement to the media — said Bartman was “hiding somewhere.”

o.k. i stole the “new everything” title from blogzilla, which has a complete list of all the new mozilla-related goodness, including new releases of firebird and thunderbird. if you didn’t see the new firebird website, you’re out of luck because it’s been rolled-back to the previous version, due to howling protests from the masses. be sure to check out dave’s rationale for contributing to the mozilla.org redesign. it’s a good read on Doing The Right Thing.

sweet mary mother of perl. what have i done to deserve this? my ibook has gone down for the count again. if you’re keeping track, this is not the first nor the second nor is it the third time it has gone into the shop. nay, i say, it’s the 4th fucking time in 1 year?!@

what a piece of shit. this time, just to keep things interesting, instead of the usual new logic board, it seems that the hard drive has just crapped out. not that any of the available disk tools would tell me that it was on the verge of crapping out. no, i’d just get the occasional clicking sound and things would go on as usual. this morning it got worse quickly and in the process of troubleshooting with tech support, it just died. now all i get is a the dreaded blinking question mark folder. no utility will even recognize that the drive exists.

of course, i’m such a dumbass i didn’t back everything up between the last outtage and now. that’s 5 months ago. i was going to do it tommorrow. i’m sure you know how it goes. something tells me i won’t be seeing any of that data anytime soon.

i’ve really grown to enjoy os x, but my opinion of mac hardware reliability could not be lower. my experience is that it’s total and complete shite. here’s a clue. buy better components.