This alarm clock was covered on MemeStreams back when it was a prototype. Now its a product you can order! I think if I had this it would roll under my bed and it would be a huge pain to get it out.

The alarm clock that runs away and hides when you don't wake up. Clocky gives you one chance to get up. But if you snooze, Clocky will jump off of your nightstand and wheel around your room looking for a place to hide. Clocky is kind of like a misbehaving pet, only he will get up at the right time.

Clocky is now available for sale!

A Wisconsin man in town for a dart tournament apparently was goofing around Saturday morning at the Minneapolis Hyatt Regency when he crashed through a window and fell 16 stories

Lucky we stay in short hotels :)

Man Falls From 17th Floor at Minneapolis Hotel, Survives

I want this shirt...One of my friends bet me ten dollars I wouldn't wear it in public :)

You've Got Some 'Splaining To Do!

In the summer of 1975, I was asked by Robert Goldman, President Ford’s in-house intellectual, to participate in a discussion on ethnicity at the White House, one of a series put on for the edification of the president.

a lovely euology to Ford

A Meeting With Gerald Ford - New York Times

Happy New Year everyone.

At the start of each year I've traditionally posted the previous year's awstat web server statistics. This year I'm doing something different. There are three reasons.

The first is that posting awstat information contributes to a lot of referral spam. In fact, I'll bet this post will end up getting picked up by spammers in web searches and sent a lot of bogus traffic simply because the text awstats appears within it. I have no idea what these people think they are accomplishing, but they seem quite persistent. Sanitizing the stats information so that it doesn't attract them has become a fair amount of work.

The second reason is that the statistics that are individually important to you probably haven't changed much from last year. Kimbo Slice is still the top search term that brings people in from Google...

What has changed is our Google rank. We've gone from about 40,000 monthly unique visitors in the earlier part of the year down to about 20,000, with a slight bump at the very end of December from people looking for information on the execution of Saddam Hussein. This is about where we were in 2005 prior to a national press incident involving one of our users. Nearly all of this traffic change can be attributed to Google. I'm not terribly bothered about it, as there are still an awful lot of people randomly falling in here from Google, and a reduction in our rank shelters us from link spam to a certain extent.

The third reason is that awstats information hasn't traditionally told us what we really want to know: How many people REALLY read MemeStreams. 20,000 or 40,000 is a heck of a lot of people. Mixed up in those statistics are the Google tourists, web crawlers, spammers, etc... How much of it can be discounted?

Rattle made two changes that help tremendously in understanding this question. The first was improvements to the sessions layer, which provides the information boxes you now see around the site that tell you who is currently online in 15 minute intervals. The second is the addition of Google Analytics, which includes a visitor loyalty statistic that I think provides the most accurate view of the size of the real MemeStreams reader community that we've yet seen. Unfortunately, these statistics exclude RSS readers. Its difficult to make accurate estimates about RSS readership, but we do know that the main page and the blogs of most of the regular posters on MemeStreams are pulled by RSS readers thousands of times a month. Given the frequency of RSS, however, that may represent less than 100 readers. Here are our visitor loyalty statistics for the month of December:

Visit Number Visits
1 14353
2 623
3 169
4 124
5 95
6 76
7 72
8 61
9-14 304
15-25 404
26-50 452
51-100 473
101-200 231
201+ 17

This chart shows how many people have visited the site a particular number of times... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

2006 MemeStreams Usage Statistics

The Marshmallow Shooter is an excellent addition to the office arsenal, shooting calamitous confections over 30 feet. It is easy to fire and reload, making it perfect for quick attacks (or rapid defense). The Shooter holds up to 20 marshmallows for extended office campaigns, and is capable of rapid fire for laying down cover for coworkers.

Awesome!!

Marshmallow Shooter

Of all the places that sexual predators could end up after prison, the worst is out of sight, away from the scrutiny and treatment that could prevent them from committing new crimes. But communities around the country are taking that risk, with zoning laws that banish pedophiles to the literal edges of society.

As the areas off limits to sex offenders expand to encompass entire towns and cities, if not states, the places where they can live and work are shrinking fast. The unintended consequence is that offenders have been dispersed to rural nowhere zones, where they are much harder to track. In confined regions like Long Island, they have become concentrated in a handful of low-rent, few-questions-asked areas — an unintended and unfair imposition on their wary neighbors.

The problem with residency restrictions is that they fulfill an emotional need but not a rational one. It’s in everyone’s interest for registered sex offenders to lead stable lives, near the watchful eyes of family and law enforcement and regular psychiatric treatment. Exile by zoning threatens to create just the opposite phenomenon — a subpopulation of unhinged nomads off their meds with no fixed address and no one keeping tabs on them.

I recently read another article about this same matter and registry issue they have run into recently. This is an interesting quandary

Sex Offenders in Exile - New York Times

The Chimney Safety Institute of America (CSIA) is a non-profit, educational organization dedicated to chimney and venting system safety. CSIA is committed to the elimination of residential chimney fires, carbon monoxide intrusion and other chimney-related hazards that result in the loss of lives and property. To achieve these goals, CSIA devotes its resources to educating the public, chimney and venting professionals and other fire prevention specialists about the prevention and correction of chimney and venting system hazards.

Wow! I did not believe it but there is in fact a Chimney Safety Institute of America

Chimney Safety Institute of America

After years of toiling and desperation, our engineers at ThinkGeek Gift Labs(TM) have finally invented something so unique and innovative, it perplexes even the brightest minds as to how global society might be impacted. We'll explain it to you but if your brain explodes, we warned you. You see, we have taken the flesh of a tree, mixed it up with some water and other patented goos. Then we took both some organic and inorganic pigments and dissolved them into a solvent. We took those pigments and applied them to the top of the modified tree flesh using very specific and highly intelligent patterns, and then coated everything with a nice protective finish made out of a special liquid that contains a low percentage of pigment and dries to a nice luster. We then folded these new creations and packaged four to a package and are selling them to you at a very affordable price so that you can turn around and use them to cover up things you want to gift to other people so that they might be surprised in a controlled manner.

Half of the humor is the description above :)

ThinkGeek :: Geeky Wrapping Paper

Catonic wrote:
This website will let you create your own South Park characters.

Here's me, Tis the most accurate representation we could come up with!

RE: Create your own South Park Characters