News You Can Bruise for 2004 October 22

Yesterday I wrote a little toy called Your Spam Name. In a coincidence that boggles the mind, it turns out that Kevan wrote the exact same toy a couple weeks ago and never told anyone about it. Because I think my toy looks nicer than Kevan's, I'm going ahead and releasing it anyway. After all, what spammer would settle for just one spam name? Anyway, if we don't get the word out people will just keep writing them.

I can feel it in my bones (or in the fact that I inhabit a world of near-permanent darkness); it's almost time to flip the DST bit in my time zone's time struct. Most daylight-savings-time sufferers know the mnemonic for which direction you go when going on or off daylight savings time: spring forward, fall back. But since the two changes cancel each other out, I could never remember whether the purpose of daylight savings time was to bottle the bounteous daylight of summer, or to hoard the precious daylight of the winter months.

Then I realized that you could use the exact same mnemonic to remember this as well. In spring you go on Daylight Savings Time, and in the fall you go off it. Spring on, fall off. Pretty slick, no? Too bad they already gave out the Nobels this year.

The other thing you can do is live in the UK, where the name of the Daylight Savings timezone is British Summer Time.

People are going to Canada to get flu shots. Can flu shot spam be far behind?

Monday Update: Kevin got Flu shot alternative! As the alternative, Kevin recommends getting the flu.