…the Brain Bullet! It’s good to know that snake oil has successfully evolved with the digital age. I would love to meet someone who’s actually purchased this.

Wait, strike that. No I wouldn’t. Anyway, click the link, it’s good for a quick laugh. The software purports to do…well, many of the things snake oil would purport to do, if it were re-imagined as a digital product.

An enterprising family member could get me this thingamajig for Christmas. OK actually I’m kidding, though I could see this being useful if you had a fenced in yard and left the dog at home during the day. Depending on the breed it shouldn’t be too hard to train the dog to dump the ball in the bin again too. It’s a dog toy that automatically plays fetch with your dog, for those of you too pressed for time to click on the link, goes for around $150.

I’ve been an ebay member for a long time, 7 years according to my profile but I think it’s actually been longer than that, I had to switch identities years ago when an email address I had was no longer accessible to me.

Anyway despite that long usage, and hundreds of transactions, I’ve never been ripped off until now. I’ve had a few questionable trades (one guy sent me a cell phone charger when I had purchased a palmpilot cable and I ended up having to cover the shipping, another guy claimed a chess set I sent him was wrecked in shipping but failed to file the required insurance paperwork), but recently I was flat out ripped off for the first time. It was only $10 or so, for a graphic novelization of a short story by George RR Martin, but it’s not the money, it’s the principle. What kind of person expends the effort it takes to get an ebay account, build up positive feedback, photograph items and list them, all so they can rip off someone for $10? It makes no sense, even if they do it to a bunch of people, which this person seems to have done. You would make more money for less effort working as a clerk at walmart or something. But whatever, I just thought I would mention this since I know a lot of my friends have actually been ripped of more than once on ebay, one for a fairly large sum of money, so I’ve sort of felt lucky until now. Meanwhile, I still need a copy of the Hedge Knight.

For family wandering through, yes, it’s done – I’ve posted this year’s christmas wishlist. For non-family, I’ve tried to be my usual snarky self so you might get a kick out of some of it, but mostly it’s pretty boring stuff.

I’ve mentioned once or twice my mild fascination with the Curta mechanical calculator. I’m still angry with myself for not picking one up when I first became aware of them back in 1992 or ’93 – at that time you could get one for under $100. At the time it was a lot of money to me and I never went for it. Now you’re lucky if you can get one for under $1,000. Anyway today I happened across an interactive flash simulation of a Curta. Check it out if you’re curious. And a note for the family – the Curta is very high on my personal fetish list. They’re exorbitantly expensive, but if someone wins the lottery or happens across a way to acquire one on the cheap, this is the absolutely perfect gift for me.

Who needs the yellow pages when you have local.google.com? Like most of their stuff it’s still in alpha, but this is still a very useful and functional tool. Looking for a local taphouse? Google’s likely got the answer. Google has become the acme corporation of the info age.

Sorry folks. Bastard spammers are onto me bigtime. I just looked through my logs and it isn’t a pretty sight. For now I’ve had to turn off comments. I have not rebuilt my templates, meaning the links to comments will still be present in most of the posts, for the time being. Very sorry for the inconvenience. It’s not like most of you readers comment much anyway though so not much harm done I guess.

While I rather like the current design of my weblog, I’m in the habit of redesigning it about once a year as an exercise in keeping my html chops solid. I’m about a month overdue on a new design so I’m starting to look around for stuff I like that I can use. I’m partly tempted to use the wikipedia.org design as the basis of my site, in part so I can stitch in a mediawiki-engine wiki right into my site (I’ve been experimenting with it at work, it’s really solid), but then I’d look rather cookie-cutter.

Anyway, I’m open to suggestions. There’s some urgency, in that the comment spammers are really attacking my site – (look through the archives and you’ll see that magically over the past month or so 10-12 comments from spammers have been added to the posts – it’s destroying the value of what few real comments there were) – and I need to switch engines or update MT to deal with this problem.

So – got a cool url? Send it along and I’ll consider it.

Check out the shopping list feature. Build your buying wishlist from thousands of vendors instead of just Amazon’s partners, and use price comparison tools to help you find the best deal. They should buy resellerratings.com and integrate their merchant reputation tools – if they did, this would be almost perfect.

This is well worth a look, especially if you want to do your part to contributing to the economic armageddon I mentioned in an earlier post today. Rack up those credit cards with christmas shopping and do your part, you know you want to.

The Boston Herald is running a story about recent comments by the chief economist at Morgan Stanley indicating his expectation that we’re…ummm…hosed. As in 90% likely to be hosed, most likely in the short term. The basis of his beliefs are the same we’ve been hearing for years now – runaway deficits combined with huge personal debt loads combining to wreck the economy. While I’m glad to not be a numbers geek working the stock market, stuff like this really does make me wish I understood the dynamics of economic systems better such that I could draw conclusions I can trust. I have no idea if this guy is right or wrong. Should I hold off on buying a house? Should I buy a metric ton of processed cheese food, saltines, and a shotgun and prepare for the end of times? Or should I just assume we’ll muddle through this as we have for the past decade or more (I first became aware of these deficit-related predictions when I was in college). I have no idea. Anyone with any sage wisdom on the subject?