Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

-William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18

I love you like a fat kid loves cake.

-50 Cent, 21 Questions

From The Miscellany of a Japanese Priest (Being a Translation of Tsure-zure Gusa):

All this medley of beauty and magnificence coming and going allows me little time to look at (the procession itself). But at sundown where have all the lines of carriages and ranks of people gone to? In a moment hardly any are left. The rattle of carriages is heard no more, the blinds and the mats are all cleared away, and while I watch nothing is left save solitude, reminding me touchingly of life itself. Truly indeed to watch the high road is as good as looking at a procession.

I recently purchased a copy of The World’s Great Letters at a local book sale for $1.50. The book was published in 1940 and contains the text of letters written by:

• Alexander the Great
• Saint Jerome
• Christopher Columbus
• Leonardo da Vinci
• Michaelangelo
• Henry VIII
• Benjamin Franklin
• Thomas Jefferson
• George Washington
• Thomas Paine
• Napoleon Bonaparte
• Ludwig van Beethoven
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• John Keats
• Robert Browning
• Edgar Allen Poe
• Dostoevsky
• Charles Dickens
• Abraham Lincoln
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Emily Dickinson
• Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
• William Randolph Hearst
• Mark Twain
• George Bernard Shaw
• Lenin

As if purchasing a collection of such letters for $1.50 were not already a bargain, I found a postcard advertising The Sporting News. The text of the postcard reads as follows:

DON’T MISS THIS!

You can have the next TWELVE BIG ISSUES of The Sporting News for only $2.00.

You will receive coverage of all developments in all pennant races in the minors as well as the majors, including World’s Series Games. Mailed direct to your home or office for just $2.00.

Send remittance within five days and receive THIRTEEN issues instead of TWELVE.

C.C. Spink & Son

2018 Washington Ave.

St. Louis 3, Mo.

Click past the break for scans of the postcard.

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April Fool’s Day always promises at least a few online chuckles. Here are this year’s best jokes:

Blizzard:

• StarCraft II: Introducing the Terra-tron
• World of Warcraft Dance Battle System Revealed
• New Diablo III Character Class: Meet the Archivist

Google:

• CADIE: Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity
• Gmail Autopilot by CADIE

ThinkGeek:

• Buzzword – The Shocking Speech-Recognition Wristband (My personal favorite)
  
• Interactive Portal T-Shirts
• Squeez Bacon
• Tauntaun Sleeping Bag
• The ThinkGeek Secret QR Code Shirt
• Timmy’s Psychic Gift Finder
• USB Pet Rock
• Ultimate Assassins Weapon Ice Mold
• Unicorn Chaser

Other:

• April Fools: Nintendo releasing M-rated Smash Bros.
• Photobucket (Screenshots: 1 2)
• The World of Quake Live (Screenshot)

UPDATE: Find links to more April Fool’s Day articles on the following sites:

• Anime News Network
• Autoblog
• Legal Insurrection
• Web Distortion

UPDATE: Check out ThinkGeek’s past April Fool’s Day jokes here.

Fear not! I still have great plans for Brainstorm Warning, but have recently suffered a few setbacks that have slowed those plans.

The most severe setback was the sudden death of my notebook’s display. I’m now using an old desktop computer with only 256MB RAM, which means it takes at least twice as long to do everything I did on my notebook computer. I hope to have a replacement notebook by mid-March.

I have a list of topics for articles written out, so stay tuned to Brainstorm Warning. Topics for articles in the queue include web content filtering, the role-playing genre of video games, and favorite anime. It should make for an interesting mix.

When I first set up Brainstorm Warning, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do with it. The site was a blank canvas; I had only a vague plan for sharing personal news with family and friends. Nearly all of my early posts were visible only to users who registered an account. The bulk of posts are still private, though the frequency of public posts has increased.

The first two images I uploaded to the gallery, aside from test images, were icons marked with the text Private and Public, respectively. Included in the logos were the kanji for honne and tatemae. Wikipedia explains honne and tatemae as follows:

Honne (本音) refers to a person’s true feelings and desires. These may be contrary to what is expected by society or what is required according to one’s position and circumstances, and they are often kept hidden, except with one’s closest friends.

Tatemae (建前), literally “façade,” is the behaviour and opinions one displays in public. Tatemae is what is expected by society and required according to one’s position and circumstances, and these may or may not match one’s honne.

As I begin the next stage of Brainstorm Warning, I plan to invest more time in the public face (tatemae) of the site while continuing to make private (honne) posts viewable only by friends and family with registered accounts.

Just as 7/8 of an iceberg’s mass is underwater, so is most of this site’s content marked “private” and only available to approved users.

I don’t mind sharing my thoughts on import anime pricing, tips on popular video games, or random factoids with total strangers, but I’m not going to share drafts of my short stories, personal news, or pictures of geese with just anyone.

If you know me, whether in the real world or the virtual, then send me an e-mail (if you know me, you know at least one of my e-mail addresses or my cell phone number) with the username and password you’d like to use for the site and I’ll set up the account.

On a related note, I’m hoping to start writing technical “how-to” guides, opinions on technology and entertainment, and other content fit for public consumption soon. At the same time, I plan to dip my toe into the ocean of web site monetization and see if I can make a few bucks with this site. My search for a job in the traditional job market has not fared well, so I thought I might give a more non-conventional approach a whirl.

Got a sore throat?

Pour 8 oz. very hot water into mug.

Pour 1 tbsp. kosher salt into mug.

Mix.

Gargle salt water for 10 seconds.

Spit.

Repeat.

Do NOT put 2 tbsp. kosher salt into mug. Trust me.

Yuck.

The phrase, “The fish rots from the head,” is sometimes used to express the idea that all problems in a company or country can be traced back to its leadership. The phrase suggests that corruption enters a country through its leaders, filters down to its citizens and, in some classic tragedies, even affects the environment. The example that immediately comes to mind is Agamemnon.

But does the phrase “The fish rots from the head” hold true in a republic like the United States, where all citizens have the right to vote?

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Until recently, my wife and I were using Nokia 6102i phones. The phones weren’t anything special–the shell was fragile (which can be forgiven, since the phone was Nokia’s first clamshell design), the menus were laggy, and the phone had very little storage space. The features, on the other hand, were pretty good. MP3 ringtones, Java games support, speed dialing, Bluetooth support, and, best of all, voice dialing. When driving and using my Motorola H700 headset, I could tap the button on the side of the headset and issue a simple voice command and the phone would dial out. I could make calls safely and conveniently while driving.

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