News You Can Bruise for 2002 June 14

MoreSensationalistExaminer.com: "City Hall Gift Rift" from a few days ago should be "City Hall Grift Rift"

Funny new article coming this evening; stay tuned.

ACLU Congratulates People of North Dakota For Defending Their Privacy
"We'll Be Congratulating Each Of You Personally," Vows ACLU Head

Am I crazy, or did the semantics of caps lock change? I used to think it changed the default case of letters you typed, such that if you had caps lock on and typed a letter with the shift key held down, it would be in lowercase. However, on my computer it makes all letters uppercase, regardless of modifiers. Since the name of the key says, pretty plainly, Caps Lock, I'm inclined to believe that it always worked that way and I never noticed. However, my num lock key behaves the opposite way, the way I thought caps lock worked: if you turn on num lock and hit shift-8, you get an up arrow key event. I can't speak for what scroll lock does when you use it in conjunction with the shift key, since the only thing I've ever used scroll lock for is to turn on running in the old DOS version of Rogue.

I don't really want the old behavior back, since I don't make a habit of using caps lock. I just want to know whether I'm crazy, or, if not, whose idea it was to change the behavior.

Andre the Giant may have a posse, but Rachel Richardson has a weblog. Now every member of my immediate family has one.

You know the song that Frodo makes up in Lórien to mourn Gandalf? It can be sung to the tune of the pre-chorus of Dar Williams' Are You Out There?.

He stood upon the bridge alone
and Fire and Shadow both defied;
his staff was broken on the stone,
in Khazad-dûm his wis...dom...died!

It's the self-filking song!

I'm amazed that (as far as I can tell) no one has done this before, but here it is. The first entry in my new series Doctor Virtual's Cyber-Couch, entitled Probing the New Collective Unconscious. In this episode, the good doctor brings his analytical skills to bear on a troubled patient indeed: the stream of search requests that constantly trickles into crummy.com.

How do you reconcile some problems at home?

"robots from hell"