Ladies and Gentleman, I give you the better of two evils, a candidate that casts a blind eye towards justice, stands up for chicken rights and family values… it’s Mike the Headless Chicken.Org.

As most of you know, from a previous story on thLocust, Mike the Headless Chicken was decapitated for dinner on September 10, 1945… but then he didn’t give up. Rather than over-reacting and “running around with his head cut off”, he calmly jumped off the stoop and began pecking for cracked corn. (These are called “phantom” pecks, by the by). Mike then rode a wave of fame (pulling in up to $4,500 a month) until dying in a chicken-feed induced bender while on the road.

This is the sort of hard-fought determination I respected John McCain for! We need a leader like Mike, and I’ll be the first to say it. “I Like Mike!”

(p.s. – rumours that Mike frquently called his captors “crackers” are unsubtantiated)

Hey folks, I just got my interview with Adam and Jase from Does Humour Belong in Technology? back! And boy is it long… You can check it out here.

For those of you who don’t know what DHBIT is, it’s a Canadian LIVE technology web-streaming radio show. Whew! They give a show each Sunday at 7PM PST, and you can listen to it with any MP3 player, and even interact in a chat room while listening. Check them out here.

By now, no doubt you have noticed the drastic redesign of theLocust.org. Well, frankly, the old style was pretty ugly, and somewhat graphics heavy.

So, i went through and ditched everything that did work, or didn’t need to be here, and here we have it. I also slaved away to make the page look as much the same as I could in both browsers (which, I might add, it still doesn’t work quite well in Netscape, because NETSCAPE SUCKS.) That’s right, I said it… Netscape 4.75 sucks. Go check out Mozilla or get the Preview Release of Netscape 6, which is based on Mozilla. The site now looks the same in Mozilla/NS 6 and IE. Yee-haw. Thank god for standards.

But, a more pressing matter is this: “Does it look good to you?” I hope it does, I think this looks much more stylish than the previous funk, and not to mention the fact that it loads faster, too!

So, let me know what you think, oh, and if you should have any ideas for additions to the site, let me know.

Oh, and for Ronen, I added the functionality if you should happen to forget your password, you can have it reset via email. Enjoy!

You know, i’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about teaching. I think I would enjoy teaching, not English or Math or whatever, but teaching. Like maybe high school, maybe college. I wouldn’t mind being a teacher, or a professor even. Now, it SOUNDS cool, but what are the ramifications? I wouldn’t probably make as much money, etc, but would the benefits of teaching outweigh it? I’m not entirely sure.

Here’s an idea I had. I would like to attempt to teach a group of high school kids how to do good web development. Perhaps it would be a two-year program, the first year is just basic stuff, and then the second year, we would get a local company to let us do some web development for them, pro-bono (for free, that is). Now, this wouldn’t be your “chalk and talk” class, but a hands-on class where each student has an account on a webserver (Linux, no less, tee-hee) and they could do what they wanted with it (and the lesson plan would involve their own sites). It wouldn’t take that much hardware, as most schools already have a computer lab of some sort, and the server wouldn’t need anything crazy (just like theLocust.org -snooch!)

It’s all just a pipe dream really, but I think optimally i would work for a couple of years, perhaps get my MBA or something, and then try teaching. But IS IT WORTH IT? Could I get the job I wanted? I don’t know. I view the established schools around here as a little stodgy, but anything could happen. Perhaps at Manual? But I’d really like to do it at Eastern, you know. Show that any bunch of kids could do this stuff, as long as they work at it.

Well, what do you think?

The Funky Flynn wrote in about the “I Look Like My Dog Contest“, to quote the Flynn “Ah, the inhumanity …”

Amazon.com was one of the first (if not THE first) online booksellers, and in many terms, defined what made a good e-commerce site. They keep in contact with their customers, charge decent prices, and in general make things pretty easy for Joe Schmo to buy a book (and now movies, music, toys, etc) online.

Well, a while back, they got a patent for 1-click shopping (which in my mind is a bunch of hooey), which also raised some eyebrows. Well, now they have gone yet another step further, and are charging different users different prices, for DVDs, anyway. According to the article, prices for the same DVD changed based upon browser type (higher for Internet Explorer users than Netscape).

This, in my humble opine, is pretty damned brave. They say they are just conducting an experiment on consumer trends, etc. Well, one could also assume from their test cases that people who use IE are stupid, too. Or Netscape users are cheap. Or Amazon likes Netscape better. Is this all some anti-Microsoft ploy? Well, all of those are probably completely false, but to make my point, this could turn out badly for Amazon, unless they cough up some answers.

Well, this has to be one of the weirdest stories I’ve heard in quite some time. The is a segment of our population that would like to see one or more of their healthy limbs cut off! This Salon article profiles a few of these people, in typical Salon fashion.

Of course, as any good Salon story, this article starts out to explain the disorder, and then throws in the gratuitous sexual references. Throw in wacked-out MDs that have records that put Jack Kevorkian to shame, fetishists, and knife-wielding Mexicans, and it makes for an interesting bit of a story.

Hey all, it’s back to school for me. “But ben! What about work!” you say. Well, i’ll be working, too. Full time. And at school full-time, too. Oh dear! Yeah, well, thanks to the deal I have with Corvus, I can work from home. Whew. It’s gonna be rough, but none of my classes are too terribly crazy.

Anyway, for me birthday (the 18th of August), my good friend hunter, (who, strangely, doesn’t have an account for thelocust.org) has offered to start posting new Revolver columns. The Revolver is a series of posts that Hunter had written to our friend mailing list called appropriately “theList”.
Well, i couldn’t be happier. So, i’ve started to add stuff to the site, like the User Accounts, a User Directory, and soon the ability for users to submit articles to a queue for review by the admin users here. If anyone, ANYONE, ANYONE! has any ideas about what you would like to see on this site, let me know.

Oh, and a word about the focus of this site. Originally, I had set out to make this site like Slashdot or NerdPerfect, and for the most part, it has. However, I knew that most of my friends aren’t too terribly interested what kind of processors Intel will release next or if the new Linux Kernel has been released. However, i do like the way that they are set up, and I haven’t seen any other sites that focus on non-technical stuff.

So! Here is my call to you, gentle reader, to get involved! Make conversation, give us news, drive other people to the site! I REALLY REALLY want to make this site as fun, informative, and user driven as possible.

Thanks

First off, i didn’t realize that there was such a following behind Lego trains, and secondly they had their own organization. But, that aside, I’ve loved Legos for such a long time. They are just so goddamned cool. Now as I’ve grown older, I’m more into the moving parts and such, so this train thing is just too neat.

Also, check the webcam here to see the current state of the track. It’s huuuge!

While we are on the subject of LEGOs, check out the Lego Mindstorm HOWTO, and the Public, Real-Time, Actual, Honest-To-God Magic 8Ball.

Are you afraid of clowns? Well, thanks to WebClowns, you will know what to do.