“Nothing you have ever experienced can prepare you for the unbridled carnage you’re about to witness.”

- Louis Winthorp III (Dan Aykroyd), on the way to the NYSE stock market trading floor, Trading Places (1983)

The Treasury’s plan to bailout the failing banking and lending sector equals:

$2,324.50 per American.

I’ll take a check.

(By the way, that’s Korean for “please give me a lot of money.”)

Written with lipstick for added poetry.

h/t: Blue Hampshire

Every time I sync my Zune — every time — it pushes another copy of The Last Poets - “Mean Machine” onto the device. It’s like my Zune is trying to warn me about the Man, which considering its origin, is pretty ironic.

I have 33 copies of the song on there right now as a result. This means that “Mean Machine” comes up inordinately often in shuffle mode. Sure, Zune software has pushed other dupes, but this one is really egregious.

This ordeal is only punctuated by the fact that the very first sounds in the the track are the words “Driving me NUTS!” And, fittingly, the title of the album this track appeared on was This Is Madness.

Maybe my Zune is trying to be a mean machine. Again, irony abounds.

Stealing your time, smooth and slick
with the latest trick to get rich quick
from nonsense at your mind’s expense
as your mind digs the scene
from the Mean Machine
designed to drive your brain insane

Does anyone think it’s tacky, or… just plain inappropriate, for Wikipedia’s Featured Article of the Day today to be United Airlines Flight 93? The Picture of the Day is also of the WTC.

Somehow it seems opportunist to me, or somehow demagogic. They don’t usually pick Featured Articles and Pictures that are related to what day it is, as far as I’ve noticed. That’s what the “On this day” section is for.

I note that Google refrained from, say, turning the “L” in Google into the Twin Towers.

Every time I download Dia, I think, maybe, it’s gotten better than the last time I used it. It’s open source, so that means lots of user feedback and stuff, right?

Nope. Not a bit. Dia is the poster child of open source software pitfalls. It’s pretty clear from using the application that the only people deciding how Dia should be are the people who develop it, who have already decided once and for all what Dia’s functional space needs and doesn’t need and refuse to introduce anything else.

Visio is just one of those things that OSS simply can’t (or won’t) come anywhere near close to emulating. Compare with Gimp or Audacity, which are comparatively awesome. Even Visio 4.0, from the early 90s, wipes the floor with Dia. (In fact Visio 4.0, which was the last release pre-MS ownership, is the pinnacle of the Visio line. Everything added to Visio since then has been pretty pointless.)

Unfortunately MS Visio is like $3984765.