Recently I've been having fun customizing the look of computer stuff I use. I downloaded some new themes for my Pocket PC and the mp3 player on my Pocket PC. Firefox has some nice themes. I downloaded a bunch of them, but this is the one that I'm using now. You may also want to check out Pimpzilla. Here is a guide on how to skin Gmail. I didn't like the stylesheet I downloaded for it, so I think I'll leave it how Google designed it. I would like to customize the look of Windows XP, but there's no good way to do it without buying third party software. So, I downloaded a live cd for Kubuntu, which uses KDE for the desktop environment. KDE has tons of skins and themes. Good times.

Update: Now I'm using this Firefox theme. I think it's pretty slick, and it's related to the KDE project.

Late Show: Top ten signs you may not be the most popular kid in school presented by Napoleon Dynamite.

(via Sleepless Nights)

Clocks Ranked According to the Ease With Which One Can Tell Time From Them (Easiest to Hardest)

What the . . .

This site combines terrible web design with a very unusual business. And you can view it in English and Japanese.

(via The Daily Sucker)

20Q.net - I know I've talked about this before, but it deserves an update. This computer is getting better. I thought of 'car tire' and it guessed it in 19 tries. And now they've put the game into a handheld device and they're selling it for $14.87.

I've exchanged a few emails with a friend about protest and when it's appropriate. I thought I should share this passage from Wendell Berry's What Are People For?.

Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone's individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence (Berry 62).

I'm more optimistic about the potential of protest to bring real change than Berry seems to be here. But, I thought his conclusion about the real value of protest was especially germane to our discussion about war protest.

Tonight I start my Network+ training. I'll be at Foss Training Center after work for the next two weeks. I'm excited about the class and I've been going through the first few chapters of the textbook.

I've always liked listening to cassettes, but I hate that you have to place the cassette in a player. I just want to plug my headphones directly into the cassette. Now I can buy the Mobiblue DAH-220 and do that very thing. It's a portable mp3 player shaped like a cassette tape. Listen to it with headphones, or pop it in your tape deck and control it with the stereo controls. Ok, I don't think I would ever want one of these, but it is a cool idea.

(Via Accordian Guy)

If you use Bloglines or something similar to watch for updates on this site, then you probably haven't seen anything for several days. But I have been updating. I made some changes to the brendoman.com robots.txt file to try and keep search engines from spidering the admin area of b2evolution. Little did I know that I was also blocking them from my RSS feeds. So, I basically told the Bloglines indexing bot to go away and never come back. It took a couple of days to catch my mistake and a couple of days after that for the bot to come back, but all is well again.

William H.T. "Bucky" Bush, uncle of the president and youngest brother of former President George H.W. Bush, cashed in ESSI stock options last month with a net value of nearly half a million dollars.

"Uncle Bucky," as he is known to the president, is on the board of the company, which supplies armor and other materials to U.S. troops. The company's stock prices have soared to record heights since before the invasion, benefiting in part from contracts to rapidly refit fleets of military vehicles with extra armor. (Read the whole story - LA Times)

William Bush still owns over two million dollars worth of stock in Engineered Support Systems Inc. The company claims that having Bush on the board hasn't helped them get any of its lucrative no-bid contracts. Even if that's true, it's worth noting that that a close relative of the president is making a huge profit off of the war that Bush conducted.