Complete Chicken Genome Sequenced

Due in large part to the help of the folks at www.subservientchicken.com scientists have sequenced the complete Chicken Genome.

What will we do with the chicken genome? We’ll learn about how to reduce chicken health problems, see how chickens and humans are related genomically and also learn how to make a better chicken salad sandwich. People for the Treatment of Edible Animals were extatic about advances in super-chickens and chickens in military uses.

One professor at Deep Southern Rural Alabama School of Holy Oaks Baptist Theological Traditions Seminary who requested annomininininiimimity was quoted as saying, “T’ain’t so. God didn’t make no super-chickens off the ark.” However, Princeton Seminary professor countered, “If Jesus were alive today he’d be all for making more chicken breasts cheaper to feed the hungry.”

PodCasting: Not Just for MP3 Junkies

Nick Bradbury released the latest beta of FeedDemon which does something that no other person I’ve read talks about: PodCasting without the iPod. Maybe I missed something before, but I thought that to use PodCasting you had to have one. However, to clear up any misconceptions, I’m going to say it officially: With FeedDemon you don’t need an iPod. Or any other MP3 toting device (though it would rock if I could get them into my Nokia 3300 MP3 friendly cell phone, but I digress). What is so cool is that FeedDemon will suck the RSS enclosures onto your machine and it will add them to playlists for your Windows Media Player or iTunes!

So, here’s what you do

  1. Buy FeedDemon if you haven’t already
  2. Download the beta
  3. Setup the FeedStation (Tools | Open FeedStation)
  4. Subscribe to feeds that have Enclusures (included in the beta, make sure you subscribe to the PodCasting Channel Group)
  5. If you set FeedStation to download the files at some time you’ll have to wait until they’re downloaded, otherwise once the downloads are there the playlists will be available in their respective players. No iPod or Rio needed!

Rock on Nick!

Crappy Convention

World Toilet Summit. Basically this story is about how ‘Westerners’ are fond of porcelain.
My favorite session:
“Toilets as Tourism Attraction,” by Seok-Nam Gang of the Korea Clean Toilet Association

Since I spend a fair amount of time on the toilette [reading!] I figure I should join some North American Toilettes Used for Reading Annonymously League, or NATURAL for short.

Mozilla Firefox Start Page

If you haven’t seen the new Firefox browser, give it a whirl, it’s stable as it ever has been, but it also is loaded with happy Googleness: Mozilla Firefox Start Page. What it immediately made me think, which I don’t know as fact (rumor reports are not normally part of this site): Mozilla.org could be getting funds from Google search ads. And you bet I hope that’s the case. If Google is sharing its income with those who will host ads on their sites, then why not with mozilla.org? Sure, it’s only a guess, but I hope so, because it would be a nice way to support mozilla.org.

Arafat Dead at 75

Arafat has died. I would say that this is an end of an era, but in truth this is probably just a gnarly transition from one extremist to another. It is like switching from an all bean diet to a beer, cabbage and egg diet. Basically, this stinks. Fortunately I’m sure we’ve got a crack intelligence team that has figured out most everything thing there is to know about the next leader (who should probably figure out where Osama Bin Laden is).

Valuable Flash Function

Jeffrey Veen writes about a really good function for Flash intro pages: Skip Always. The idea is that when a site employs a Flash intro (also known as demon possession in some web development circles) that they offer a ‘skip always’ link that will set a cookie so that they get to the actual home page in subsequent visits.

Tele-Propa-Cram Calls

That’s what I call the proliferation of telephone calls from political entities trying to persuade me to vote for one or more candidates. Making A Call, by Eric Meyer, is another person who’s tired of it, what scares me is the number of trackbacks in the comments from other people writing the same thing.

I am going to write to my congress people to add their politicial drubbings to the list of parties not able to call me when I’m registered on the national ‘do not call’ list. Why is it that they are absolved of this sin simply because they’re ‘educating’ the masses?