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Well, another poor crop of trick-or-treaters graced our doorstep this Halloween. It seems that gone are the days of roving hordes of kids, surging from house to house in search of confectionary delight. Perhaps it’s a function of where I’ve lived for the last decade or so. We never had many kids in Madison either.

Still, I found myself falling into an impromptu system for distributing candy to those that did come. Little kids got to pick what they wanted from the bowl. This is mainly because I can trust little kids to be polite and only take a few peices. The one time many years ago that a teen decided to grab a meaty handful has prompted me to choose for older “kids” in recent years. And that’s where the system comes in. As usual, if there is anything left over after the pumpkins are extinguished, I can be expected to consume the lions share of what is left.

Not all candy is created equal.

So when someone older comes to the door, barely wearing anything resembling a costume (or just in plain clothes), they get the Milk Duds.

Don’t get me wrong, Milk Duds are not total dross. It’s just that once I’ve had two or three… that does me for the year. The truth is, I believe Milk Duds are a dentistador conspiracy, designed to push people into the local drill-monkey’s lair for some emergency filling replacements. After all, those boat payments still need to be made.

Well, maybe it’s just the weather this year. Or the terror alerts. I hope my boys will get to have the kind of fun I did on Halloween night, oh those many years ago.

Well, after Cheney said “Go f*ck yourself” in the Senate, this one finger salute from Dubya shouldn’t be a surprise. You can use my local mirror if the original is too swamped. Fun!

Just a quick bit of WWW humor: Best 404 Page Ever, There may be better ones actually, but this one is pretty clever. I have to reserve the title of best error message in a software package for AIPS: “Task ____ purports to die of unnatural causes.” Sublime.

I’ve seen articles about these devices for the last couple of years, but they’ve always seems limited and something for the future. This article briefs us on the current state of the art, and it looks like these systems are getting much closer. Imagine this combined with high quality audio and head-tracking capability… not the holodeck, but certainly closer than we were before.

I’ve updated the links on this site to include Boing Boing, and some additonal comics that I read (sorry it took me so long to list them Chris!). Boing Boing is notable because it’s a great source of offbeat stuff on the net. Out of the 30+ items they post (there are 4 authors) daily, I find at least 3 - 4 items that are interesting and worth passing on. The prior post on the missing explosives is a good example… found it on Boing Boing. Lots of neat stuff there, so put it on your RSS subscription list.

Ok, I think everybody is familiar with the missing explosives story that has been in the news. Now we learn that an embedded journalist and camera crew may have footage showing the explosives were present when US forces arrived at Al Qaqaa. Just so everyone is clear… the oil fields were secured before anyone thought to lock these goodies down. Just a demonstration of priorities.

Five more days.

You may recall the ad campaign for Apple that featured PC users telling their tales of why they switched to Apple for their computing needs (and why they’re happy with the switch). Well, the same guy (Errol Morris) responsible for those ads has produced (in conjunction with Move On) a series of “Switch” ads featuring Republicans saying why they’re switching to Kerry in 2004. Some of them are quite good.

NASA did a crash test with a large airplane with dummy passengers. Coudal Partners had a contest to edit the footage to music. The results of the contest are pretty neat!

Kudos to Heather for sending me Boom Chicago Amsterdam’s video on the Florida Voting Experience. It’s hillarious and well worth the 1.8 MB download!

I’mm a big fan of the Daily Show on Comedy Central. This interview of Jon Stewart on CNN’s Crossfire is a great… glad someone is holding their feet to the fire!!!