davidgagne.net — The personal weblog of David Vincent Gagne

• What kind of drug are you?
• If you have an iPhone and a guitar, you simply must get the Gibson Learn & Master Guitar app.
• James Dean was seriously one badass dude.
• The Japanese apparently have a game show for every conceivable challenge. I never realized that the old “yank a tablecloth” trick was something you could turn into a competition.
• “The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled that once emails have been received by a third party, no Fourth Amendment protection applies to any copies.” Maybe this will be the first step in getting people to stop adding those absolutely ridiculous and pointless signatures to their messages.
• Let’s just say that — for whatever reason — you’re the first human ever to make contact with an alien civilization. Are you prepared to handle it? Make sure to read this handy tip sheet so you won’t make us look like idiots.
• Tons of terrific tales can be found at the Illinois Poison Control Center blog. There’s the story of the woman who accidentally grabbed toothpaste instead of lube when having sex; and don’t miss the episode about the boy who super-glued his fingers into his nose!

There’s an excellent Kia Sorento commercial right now featuring a sock monkey and a monster (and some other kid toys). They go bowling and the sock monkey gets a tattoo. The best part, though, is the song. It’s How You Like Me Now, by The Heavy. You can find it on the album The House That Dirt Built on iTunes.

Sidebar: I just noticed that the latest version of iTunes now lets you easily post a song or app to Twitter or Facebook. (Savvy guys, those Apple engineers.) But here’s something extraordinarily odd: The URL that iTunes provides for the link is absurdly long. The one for the song mentioned above is http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the-house-that-dirt-built/id328490302, which is seventy characters. Twitter only allows 140 characters! Why in the world isn’t Apple running their own URL-shortening service?

• Hugh Hefner: Teen Cartoonist
• Have you ever ordered any of these secret restaurant menu items?
• Congratulations to the Gators, who won their first NCAA Indoor Track Championship this weekend. (It’s nice when the football team has a running back who spends the offseason being one of the fastest sprinters in the nation.)
• A solar-powered iPhone charger is a pretty cool idea.
• Almost everyone I know uses a computer on a daily basis. Almost nobody I know understands the differences between files, applications, and websites. That’s why Apple is doing the smart thing by hiding all of that.
• “Bad programming is easy. Idiots can learn it in 21 days, even if they are dummies.”
• The best way to learn about database design is to design databases. It sounds simple. It gets more complicated when you try to design a database to manage gay marriage.
• There are quite a few pearls of wisdom in the 2009 annual letter to shareholders from Warren Buffett.
• Somebody needs to buy me these boots. They are awesome. Size 11, please.
• This was a sort of depressing headline to see in my feed reader: Once-revered South Carolina lawmaker freezes to death alone.
• “Faced with a flood of headlines on an ever-increasing variety of topics, we shut off. We turn to news that doesn’t require much understanding — crime, traffic, weather — or we turn off the news altogether.”
• I’ve been looking for a way to run three displays from my MacBook Pro for over a year now and not found any that weren’t ridiculously expensive. And then I came across this guy running four displays!
• Geek out with this awesome CSS3 Generator.

I think I will stab myself in the stomach with a fork if one more person sends me a stray chicken or cat or whatever it is that people keep sending me; but it’s worth reading this seriously fascinating psychological analysis of why people play that annoying game.