Typo of the day, found on a student recital program: Puccini’s O Mio Babino Casio.

I suppose this would be the aria in which a love-struck robot pleads her father, an electronic keyboard, to let her marry the machine of her dreams.

Hee. One of my friends sent me this link, and music geek that I am, I simply had to share it with the world: Tales from Band Camp.

You know you’re a band geek if you even get half the jokes…

Whee! For once, AOL seems to have done something right: they’re offering some of the more popular Super Bowl ads from this year’s game in downloadable QuickTime format on their website, with no subscription required.

Shame they don’t have the Fed Ex Cast Away ad or Budweiser’s canine dreadlocks or zebra ref, though. Maybe Ifilm’s Superbowl page will post those, and maybe they’ll be in a downloadable form…although I wouldn’t count on it.

UPDATE [11:06 pm]: Yet another site, Advertisement Avenue, has posted some of the Super Bowl ads in RealVideo form. However, these stream via HTTP, so if you feel competent enough, you can fiddle around with your download manager’s settings and save the clips to disk if you want.

Interesting link, via Memepool: Jim O’Connor of the Cuss Control Academy suggests that we all try to clean up our language in public situations just a bit— while admitting that there is nonetheless a certain time and a place for expletives, something with which I tend to agree.

Happy Stupid Day from all of us RinkWorks fans… Be sure to enjoy the new Computer Stupidities and Things People Said.

More strangely ironic news via Fark:

A small Christian college in Kentucky wants to change its phone number. Why? Quite simple, really: the current one starts in 666.

Oh my.

One of Mercer’s students just sent out one of those (in)famous e-mail hoaxes involving the merger of two prominent technology companies. You know the one, right? Forward this to x number of people and a “tracking algorithm” (obviously very secret, since it doesn’t exist!) will be used to award you some amount of money…

Apparently the student in question didn’t realize that sending out a message to approximately one tenth of the entire Mercer population (only the surnames A through C would fit into the recipient list), using Mercer’s address book server, was not, in fact, a good idea. The list of recipients was over 70kb in size— larger, in fact, than the actual text of the message!

Yes, the list of recipients included, among others, several members of the technical support staff, several computer science and engineering professors, and even the editor of the school newspaper. Ouch.

And if that weren’t enough, all Mercer user names are in the format lastname_f. Which means that it’s very obvious who the sender was from the username alone, and as a result, very easy for students and faculty to find the sender’s room number and phone number in the campus phone directory.

What was this person thinking, exactly? The only thing she’s won is the enmity of numerous computer-savvy students and faculty…

Time for a useless personality test, albeit one by which I was quite amused…

Which Kind of Driver Are You?
by Don’s Windshield Replacement

Originally, incidentally, I was a “Smart Driver”— but then I realized, hey, I wait for the intersection to be almost completely clear before I turn. Still, though, where was the option for “make three right turns instead”? Now that’s more like me…

Heh. From the popular satirical web site BBspot: Bush Administration’s Bright Shiny Object Fascinates Americans.

Ooh, shiny objects! ::stares::

From this week’s News of the Weird:

The Merced (Calif.) Sun-Star reported on Dec. 10 that an unnamed man was taken to a hospital in Modesto, Calif., after his head was split open by a brick. Police, called to the scene, were expecting to find foul play, but witnesses said the man was merely trying to see how high up he could throw a brick, and since it was dark (2:30 a.m.), the man lost track of the brick’s flight and could not get out of the way when it came down on his head. Police said alcohol appeared to be involved.

The lesson, of course, should be obvious to all RinkWorks fans.