The actor who played Mola Ram in Temple of Doom, Amrish Puri, died on Saturday.

Much noise was made when the Shmoo group pointed out an obvious flaw (obvious, as in the designers knew all along) in the Internationalized Domain Name system. The long and short of it is that there are characters in other alphabets that look just like letters in our latin alphabet, and you can use these to visually spoof domain names to users, and pretend for instance to be paypal.com. There were a number of suggestions to disable IDN support in Firefox, but almost all of them were temporary fixes (due to bugs in Mozilla). This site has instructions to permanently prevent this from happening using the wonderful Adblock extension for Firefox.

(Yes, I know it’s a fake…)

I noticed a crack forming in my windshield the other day… It has gotten progressively worse, and fortunately the insurance company is sending someone out today to replace it. MA mandates zero-deductible glass coverage for comprehensive insurance, so I don’t have to pay a dime (or, at least, I don’t have to pay a dime more than I already pay for car insurance.. :P). It is nice just sitting at work while someone comes to the parking lot to replace your windshield… When I got a new windshield for Maude I had to take her to the glass place.. This is much nicer. :)

The U-2 is the cover story of the latest issue of Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine…

Well, despite all of my negative expectations regarding the subject, we not only got our yearly bonuses today, but they were much higher than I was expecting.  The past two quarterly meetings the execs were setting up everyone for disappointment, but I guess some business worked out earlier than planned and we ended up hitting our goals and even maxing out a few categories.  So I got a 5.7% bonus, but that’s of my pro-rated salary for last year (since I started in March).  That still works out to quite a pretty penny, which I will use to line up the last stake in my credit card debt, which will subsequently fall to zero next month.  I called today to cancel my old Parda FCU accounts and credit card (from when I worked at Warner-Lambert).  When I got that credit card I needed to have an account with them, so I opened a savings account with 5 dollars in 1996.  In 8-9 years I earned a whopping 69 cents in interest.  :)

On The Matter Of Gay Space Frogs

Here are those two SNL clips I talked about.  I will leave them up for a few days, so grab them soon.  Trust me on this one, they are great.

• Exclusive Connections
• I.T.F.

I am finally getting over the aforementioned cold…  It really kicked my ass for awhile, I felt like I was getting better for a day but on Saturday it smacked me back down…  But I rested this weekend and came out on the other end of it.  Yesterday I picked up my Twisp and Catsby print from the frame shop, it looks totally rad, and fits into the living room (even likes it!)

There were two sketches in this weekends SNL that were especially funny to nerds.  Since most people have probably given up on SNL, I will encode them and put them up here when I get the chance.

I know that some of you will be offended, but relayed one of the better jokes I’ve ever heard to me the other day:

“Do you think it’s inappropriate to do the wave at the Tsunami Benefit Concert?”