Accord­ing to The Reg­is­ter “In a move that has sur­prised naïve observers, the US Patent Office has announced that from now on it will con­sider ‘seri­ous’ appli­ca­tions to patent spe­cific inte­ger numbers.”

As far as I’m con­cerned this only means one thing; I own the num­ber 101 because it’s the sec­ond half of my often used moniker on Instant Mes­sen­ger. From now on any­one that uses this par­tic­u­lar num­ber inte­ger will have to pay roy­al­ties in the form of $.50 for every instance used of said num­ber. Fail­ure to com­ply with this “patent” will result in an auto­matic court sum­mo­nance (not optional by the way).

Con­sider the exam­ple above a silly one, but some­thing that will even­tu­ally make sense if the US Patent office is seri­ously con­sid­er­ing this pre­pos­ter­ous idea. 

The ques­tion on everyone’s mind these days is whether or not Jell-O is made from ani­mal hides and bones. Well, look no fur­ther because accord­ing to Snopes.com “Some­times the most innocu­ous of food­stuffs con­tain con­stituents whose ori­gins are less than appetizing.”

The spe­cific arti­cle in mind sheds light on this pon­der­ing explain­ing that “under­neath JELL-O’s jig­gly whole­some­ness lurks a secret many con­sumers are dis­con­certed to learn: JELL-O is made from gelatin, an ani­mal prod­uct ren­dered from the hides and bones of animals.”

Accord­ing to the arti­cle, cre­at­ing gelatin begins with the process of boil­ing the skins, hides and bones of cows and pigs which secretes a pro­tein rich col­la­gen. This sub­stance is then boiled and fil­tered numer­ous times and then ground into a fine pow­der and accord­ing to Gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion the result is nei­ther cat­e­go­rized as ani­mal or meat.

The pop­u­lar rumor is that Jell-O is made with the hooves of horses and cows, which accord­ing to par­ent com­pany Kraft is a mis­con­cep­tion con­sid­er­ing the hooves do not con­tain the nec­es­sary ingre­di­ents for the col­la­gen.
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Today marks the 75^th Birth­day of Mickey Mouse, pop cul­ture icon orig­i­nally cre­ated by Wal­ter Elias Dis­ney in 1928. I can hon­estly say that Mickey Mouse for me was the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of all that is, was and always will be Walt Dis­ney. The char­ac­ter has sym­bol­ized the pro­fes­sion­al­ism of Dis­ney through­out the 75 years since Mickey was orig­i­nally con­ceived by Mr. Dis­ney himself.

Accord­ing to http://www.geocities.com/disneysmouse:

“Mickey Mouse was born in Walt Disney’s imag­i­na­tion early in 1928 on a train ride from New York to Los Ange­les. Walt was return­ing with his wife from a busi­ness meet­ing at which his car­toon cre­ation, Oswald the Rab­bit, had been wres­tled from him by his finan­cial back­ers. Only 26 at the time and with an active car­toon stu­dio in Hol­ly­wood, Walt had gone east to arrange for a new con­tract and more money to improve the qual­ity of his Oswald pic­tures. The mon­ey­men declined, and since the char­ac­ter was copy­righted under their name, they took con­trol of it. ”

… So I was all alone and had noth­ing,” Walt recalled later. “Mrs. Dis­ney and I were com­ing back from New York on the train and I had to have some­thing I could tell them. I’ve lost Oswald so, I had this mouse in the back of my head because a mouse is sort of a sym­pa­thetic char­ac­ter in spite of the fact that everybody’s fright­ened of a mouse includ­ing myself” Walt spent the return train ride con­jur­ing up a lit­tle mouse in red vel­vet pants and named him “Mor­timer,” but by the time the train screeched into the ter­mi­nal sta­tion in Los Ange­les, the new dream mouse had been rechris­tened. Walt’s wife, Lil­lian, thought the name “Mor­timer” was too pompous and sug­gested “Mickey.” A star was born!“
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“A fad, for pur­poses of this arti­cle, is an idea or tech­nol­ogy which is briefly pop­u­lar, but can’t out­last its own nov­elty value. Once peo­ple get over the new­ness of it all, there isn’t really any­thing spe­cial left.”

I can remem­ber Point­cast, the screen­saver tech­nol­ogy as men­tioned in the fol­low­ing arti­cle and eLOL.com, both pro­grams that fea­tured “push” tech­nol­ogy. While Point­cast brought to your desk­top news and stock quotes, e-LOL (e-laughing out loud) pre­sented var­i­ous jokes, comics and quotes to brighten your day.

With that in mind, Frozen North via kuro5hin.org presents the Top 10 Inter­net Fads. 

For those who are curi­ous in regards to imple­ment­ing a photo blog into their web site, Quixotic Pix­els’ Tuto­r­ial for Cre­at­ing a Pho­to­blog pro­vides excel­lent step-by-step instruc­tions on imple­ment­ing a pho­to­blog with MT(Movable Type).

While it’s not nec­es­sary to have Image Mag­ick installed on your server it does pro­vide added func­tion­al­ity to post­ing pic­tures to the blog. Image Mag­ick allows the user to upload a pic­ture and spec­ify the siz­ing of the pic­ture within the back­end. MT(Movable Type) auto­mat­i­cally resizes the pic­ture and even allows for an “actual size” fea­ture wherein the user can select the photo at full size.

Very cool. 

You might not have heard of this yet, but accord­ing to E! Online the movie “Six­teen Can­dles has been granted a birth­day wish–a sequel.” That’s right, Sam Baker and Long Duk Dong will return in a sequel to the hit 1984 movie star­ring Mol­lie Ring­wald and Anthony Michael Hall.

In other news, direc­tors Steven Spiel­berg and Richard Don­ner have report­edly pur­chased the script to the sequel to Goonies (1985) and MTV(Music Tele­Vi­sion) reports that Goonies 2 will reunite the orig­i­nal cast.

The MTV arti­cle men­tions that “the new group is called the Groonies, because they hap­pen to live in a town where [Data], the Chi­nese kid, lives … and he’s got an elec­tron­ics repair shop and all the kids hang out at his shop. He has this Chi­nese accent and he calls the Goonies the Groonies, and so the new kids call them­selves the Groonies.”

Fur­ther proof that Hol­ly­wood is out of ideas. 

Nap­ster, the infa­mous file-sharing soft­ware that folded a cou­ple years back (recently brought by to life by Roxio) stirred con­tro­versy with its busi­ness model; allow­ing the gen­eral pub­lic to swap files (music, movies and appli­ca­tions) for noth­ing. Truth be told in the early 1900s there existed a sim­i­lar ser­vice that allowed peo­ple to dis­trib­ute music over the tele­phone line.

“Wilm­ing­ton, Delaware, is enjoy­ing a novel ser­vice through the tele­phone exchange. Phono­graph music is sup­plied over the wires to those sub­scribers who sign up for the ser­vice. Attached to the wall near the tele­phone is a box con­tain­ing a spe­cial receiver, adapted to throw out a large vol­ume of sound into the room. A mega­phone may be attached when­ever ser­vice is to be given. The box is attached to the line wires by a bridged tap from the line cir­cuit. At the cen­tral office, the lines of musi­cal sub­scribers are tapped to a man­ual board attended by an oper­a­tor. A num­ber of phono­graphs are avail­able, and a rep­re­sen­ta­tive assort­ment of records kept on hand.

When plugged up to a phono­graph the subscriber’s line is auto­mat­i­cally made busy on the auto­matic switches with which the Wilm­ing­ton exchange is equipped. Sev­eral lines can be con­nected to the same machine at the same time, if more than one hap­pens to call for the same selection.

Each musi­cal sub­scriber is sup­plied with a spe­cial direc­tory giv­ing names and num­bers of records, and the call num­ber of the music depart­ment. When it is desired to enter­tain a party of friends, the user calls the music depart­ment and requests that a cer­tain num­ber be played. He releases and pro­ceeds to fix the mega­phone in posi­tion. At the same time the music oper­a­tor plugs up a free phono­graph to his line, slips on the record and starts the machine. At the con­clu­sion of the piece the con­nec­tion is pulled down, unless more per­for­mances have been requested.”

(source: http://earlyradiohistory.us/1909musi.htm) 

My one and only brother Matt will be head­ing into the Navy start­ing Mon­day. He will be trav­el­ing to the Chicago area for boot camp and then even­tu­ally trans­ferred to A-School for his edu­ca­tion. As far as naval ter­mi­nol­ogy is con­cerned he will learn code words (or Navy speak) for things like the bath­room (the head) and candy (geedunk).

“GEEDUNK — To most sailors the word gee­dunk means ice cream, candy, potato chips and other assorted snacks, or even the place where they can be pur­chased. No one, how­ever, knows for cer­tain where the term orig­i­nated, but there are sev­eral plau­si­ble theories:

1. In the 1920’s a comic strip char­ac­ter named Harold Teen and his friends spent a great amount of time at Pop’s candy store. The store’s owner called it The Gee­dunk for rea­sons never explained.

2. The Chi­nese word mean­ing a place of idle­ness sounds some­thing like gee dung.

3. Gee­dunk is the sound made by a vend­ing machine when it dis­penses a soft drink in a cup.

4. It may be derived from the Ger­man word tunk mean­ing to dip or sop either in gravy or cof­fee. Dunk­ing was a com­mon prac­tice in days when bread, not always obtained fresh, needed a bit of tunk­ing to soften it. The ge is a Ger­man unac­cented pre­fix denot­ing rep­e­ti­tion. In time it may have changed from getunk to gee­dunk. What­ever the­ory we use to explain geedunk’s ori­gin, it doesn’t alter the fact that Navy peo­ple are glad it all got started.”

(source: www.sgaus.org/hist_fac.htm)

I wish the very best of luck to my brother and wanted him to know that he’s been my clos­est friend for years and will always be. Hon­estly, I couldn’t have asked for a bet­ter sib­ling if there was a Sug­ges­tion Box for it. Many years of mem­o­ries includ­ing pre­tend­ing to be the knights from Medievil Times to record­ing pup­pet shows, it’s all locked up here in the files of my memories.

I know he will enjoy his time in the Navy and have plenty of adven­tures and expe­ri­ences to share when he is relieved of his duties some­day. From those that I’ve talked to who have been a part of the mil­i­tary very few share expe­ri­ences that devi­ate from mak­ing them a bet­ter per­son. From their very first wakeup call at 3am to watch­ing the sun­rise to form­ing new friend­ships, learn­ing about them­selves and their nation the mil­i­tary is an expe­ri­ence that deserves recognition.

Good luck, I love you brother. You’re grown up to be a great per­son and I can’t wait until you come visit us. 

The ani­mated series ReBoot was the first tele­vi­sion series “pro­duced entirely with com­puter graph­ics. It pre­miered in the [United States] Sep­tem­ber 10, 1994 on ABC. It has been shown in 70 coun­tries includ­ing the U.S., Canada, South Africa, Aus­tralia, and those in west­ern Europe and South Amer­ica. The show has been dubbed in sev­eral lan­guages, among them Span­ish, French, and German.

Freed from net­work cen­sor­ship, ReBoot took on a much more seri­ous look and feel in sea­son 3, which began air­ing in the U.S. March 15, 1999. AndrAIa and Enzo under­went major upgrades, Enzo now call­ing him­self Matrix. The rela­tion­ship between he and AndrAIa devel­oped from puppy love into a seri­ous romance, and Megabyte and Hexa­dec­i­mal became bru­tal — even ruth­less — in their attempts to con­quer Mainframe.”

The char­ac­ter Phong was my favorite. I even attempted to cre­ate an alter­nate ver­sion of Pong with Tiki masks as the pad­dles and named the game “Phong” after the ReBoot char­ac­ter. A few years back a ReBoot game debuted on Playsta­tion (orig­i­nal fla­vor) and while it wasn’t ground­break­ing like the show it did man­age to enter­tain me for a few weeks.
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