About two years ago, I met up with an old friend around Halloween. At the last minute, we decided to have a costume party at his place on the beach. Little did I know that the idea wasn’t as last minute as I thought. He had earlier picked up a Fred and Barney pair of costumes for us. I’m Fred on the right.

This picture was taken fairly early in the evening before the kegs of Newcastle began to sink in. I think that later on, I was actually only wearing the costume with nothing underneath. I just know that this picture is VERY tame considering some of things that occurred later. Thank god those pictures haven’t surfaced yet. I guess whoever took them is awaiting my run for office. Just a little slice from the Llama life.

I have been testing Nick Bradbury’s FeedDemon for the last week or so. This RSS headline reader from the creator of HomeSite and TopStyle simply has me floored. I have never been this addicted to RSS feeds since they were invented by Al Gore. As always, Nick includes a well thought out GUI with pleasant looking icons and functional button placement. What you notice off the bat is that Nick spent some time thinking about how people read, organize and use RSS feeds.

The basic paradigm at work here is the concept that all channels will fit under a listing. The listing serves as a categorical designation to group channels with a common them together. This works very well and keeps the information overload to a bare minimum. Along with this listing/channel paradigm come 2 of my favorite features.

The Watches work as search channels. You can create watches that will scan all updated feeds for keywords that you supply. In a sense, it is a search that acts as a metachannel synthesizing relevant info from the bundles of RSS feeds that are available.

Another ingenious idea is that of the News Bin. These News Bins are places where you can store articles for later reading or just because you particular like that article and want to make sure it doesn’t get pruned or deleted.

I don’t want to get to deep into all the features, but there is a beta available for download and evaluation. I think this is the finest RSS reader out there and from past experience with Nick and all his projects, it will only get better. You should certainly check out the newsgroups and leave any feedback that you have or just read some of the ideas floating around. I will let you in on a small secret: soon there will be a community-based site surround FeedDemon and the other Bradsoft products.

Yes gang, our first ever contest. Does the winner get fame? Fortune? Special treatement? Well, no, not really. But we will give the winner a prize. We will send you this very t-shirt from the SpittingLlamas Oasis. Who wouldn’t want official LlamaWear?!?

One of the sections of this site is the venerated LlamaTails. Now you get the chance to play along. We provide the photo, you provide the LlamaTail.

Here are the rules:
We are not looking for simply a picture caption. Quite the contrary. If you are not sure what the Llamatails are, then hop over to that section and read the intro.

Post your entry in the forum thread dedicated to this contest. One entry per person, so make it a good one. When we select the winner, we will mail them their prize, add the image and their caption (credited to the winner) to our LlamaTails section.

The winner will be chosen by the owners of this site: Taranis, Cosbysweater and Jetteva. We will apply completely arbitrary guidelines that will constantly change. Meaning, we’re going to pick the one that fits in with the Llamatails and makes us laugh the most.

We’ll notify the winner by email in order to get the proper mailing information to send the prize. I’m sure a booking on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno will soon follow.

Head over to the forum to see the image and post your entry!

This column was written by the collection of Llamas, Cosbysweater, Taranis and Jetteva, working together on an idea - the idea of another New Deal for America to fix the economy, help our huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and reclaim America for the people. Read the whole column here.

Corporate Geese
Grow the economy. That’s been the goal of every administration I can remember. Clinton got in the White House with, “It’s the economy, stupid.” However, recent attempts at an economic recovery have been treating us, the average Joe, like we are the stupid ones. Acting like a beneficent hander-down of the holy bread, politicians have been expecting us in the middle and lower classes to chitter and chirp gleefully at the meager gains they give us. Meanwhile, in their towers the corporate geese gather their golden eggs for when the omelette maker comes.

Not long ago, I was at a local food pantry where I spoke to the mother of two school-age children. This woman who worked full-time said she loved when school was in session because her children got to eat breakfast and lunch for free. The problem was that her minimum wage job barely paid her enough to supply her family’s minimum needs. It’s very sad when people rely on our school system to not only educate, but to feed their kids. Indeed, the free lunch program began because children were so impoverished and malnourished that they were nearly incapable of learning. What does it say about our country when the Army has to throw away expired MRE’s and our children lose brain function because of lack of food?

Read the rest here.

Over the weekend as I was driving to and fro, tending to the errata of errands to get my through my weekend, some yahoo cut me off. Being the levelheaded American I am, I gave him the finger and laid on the horn like Richard Simmons on Harvey Fierstein. But I was darting around in my little Mazda and I thought, if this guy knew what kinda man I am, he’d never dare to cut me off in traffic again…

Worry no more. Now you can show your jewels to any who would dare test your testosterone on the streets. In the form of Truck Nuts, no one will doubt your manhood again.

Displayed on your truck, car or bike in a variety of colors (the blue balls are my favorite), you can announced to the masses, don’t mess with me, I’ve got balls.

The makers of these fine gems have clearly paid attention to detail — one hangs lower than the other. Why do I have a feeling most of the people who have these are also NASCAR fans?

This is the new site design. There is still lots of tweaking to be done. I am sure there are pages hidden in places that will be using the wrong style sheet or will be just altogether broken. In the coming days, I hope to take care of most of them.

Also, we will be fiddling with the font sizes and such to make sure the readability stays where we want it to be. So, for the next week or so, bear with us as we work out the kinks and polish up this new design.

The site should be fairly compliant for both XHTML and CSS standards and most modern browsers should render it almost identically.

Since our meager and humble beginning three years ago, we swore we would never bow to the scourge of banner advertising. We wanted this site to be driven by content and we wanted our readers to be free of assaults by banner ads, pop-ups, pop-unders and all the other ways advertisers are raping the Web.

In other words, this site is a labor of love that we have poured our ideas, thoughts and money into for the sake of prompting good discussion among people who like to talk about a variety of issues. With more than 1,200 readers a month, I’d you all agree!

Fear not fellow Webizens, we won’t fall to the dark side. But, In the spirit of capitalism and an attempt to augment the growing expenses of the site, we have opened a small but growing store with a handful of products. I think you will enjoy them. My favorite is the thong. Yes, the SpittingLlamas.com thong. What wonderful lady wouldn’t want it??

We plan on growing the store exponentially over time with a variety of products and limited time only specials. In the past we have received many emails from people suggesting we do this - encouraging us to apply our humor and point-of-views to bumper stickers, t-shirts and coffee mugs. Mostly we lacked time to get it started. (And we can’t forget our wonderful wives that have tolerated our growth and the expenses that have come along with it.)

Currently the store is hosted at CafeShops.com but we plan on moving it to our own e-commerce package in time. These products will also be given away as prizes for contests we plan on running in the future. We are also working on a major revision to the site that we should have ready soon. Yep gang, we’re taking it up a notch!

So why don’t you wander over to the SpittingLlamas Oasis check out some products, and maybe support our site a bit. Tell your friends. And keep an eye on the store. Like I said, it’s going to change quickly!

By now, you’ve probably heard about Orrin Hatch suggesting that copyright holders have the ability and legal right to destroy your computer remotely should their material be found in your possesion without your legal ownership of said material. In other words, Metallica will blow up your new iBook when they find St. Anger stinking up your harddrive.

Surely, you would delete that Metallica, because, frankly, it sucks. Old Hatch even suggests that copyright holders would get an exemption from the anti-hacking law so that they could go about cyber-bombing your home. The whole idea of someone destroying your property because of you breaking a law is something that has precedent.

Early on in the “War on Drugs,” prosecutors and DEA agents realized that it’s not all that terrible for someone to make hundreds of millions of dollars, spend 3 years in jail, get out and live like a king for the rest of his life. No matter where you stand on the fight against drugs, you have to admit that the above method is fairly ineffectual.

To combat this problem, the government decided that they could take anything belonging to the convicted drug dealer under the guise that it was bought with money made from the sale of illegal substances. That’s OK I guess, but what if it was something that person owned before selling drugs. This little hiccup didn’t slow down the DEA.

I suspect problems like this would plague Hatch’s idea even more so. If my friend emails me an mp3 as an attachment, and I delete the email, that mp3 is still on my machine, in the cache of my mail client. Suppose Lars and the boys see their shitty music on my machine and zap my entire harddrive into molten goop. Now, I have been found guilty of and punished for a crime that I did not knowingly commit.

Now, not only have my privacy rights been abridged, my property rights have been abridged, and all my rights of the judicial system have been abridged. In truth, I have been treated as some sort of serf in a kingdom of overbearing beauracracy. Like little more than a Russian peasant on the Zhivago farm, I have been subjected to the whims of a brutish mob given sanction by the state.

Hatch then has shown us his hand. The monkey on his back is corporate greed. When thoughts like this even exist within his brain as not only plausible but practical, the people of Utah and the US need to realize whose interests are being protected. He has no more concern for the people of his state and their property than he does for the Constitution. Maybe someone should remotely destroy the old bastard’s pacemaker.

I fear he is simply indicative of the greater ignorance of our country’s leaders when it comes to technology. We can’t expect 60-year-olds to understand the intricacies of modern computing, but we also shouldn’t be beholden to their ham-handed attempts at legislating its use. The time for new blood in our nations halls of democracy has come. We need some younger, more technology-literate leaders and we need them

In two other posts, (here and here) we have explored the issue of the so-called Jesus-box - the ossuary that was reported to hold the bones of Jesus sometime after his death.

The small brown stone box has the words, “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus” carved on one side. But recently officials with Israel’s Antiques Authority announced Wednesday that while the box may date from the correct era, the inscription is a forgery added at a much later date.

The real question for me regarding relics like this is: what are people really trying to find? Often I wonder if the hope that lies behind the relic to be a real artifact of religious importance is more a personal quest of inward hopes being expressed.

There were many contradictions surrounding the box to begin with. One, if Christians really believe the Bible’s account of the resurrection then there would be no bones left to place in an ossuary, as the Bible story tells of an empty tomb. As Taranis noted in his original post:

So, the discovery of this tomb has taught us that Jesus had a brother who didn’t rise up to heaven after 3 days. Jesus’ mother didn’t stay a virgin. I don’t know anything about the Bible. If Jerry Falwell reads this, I might get some nasty email. Science creates more questions than it answers.

But what is not empty is our search for hope. In rough times our search for a glimmer of light can surpass all. Was the ossuary an incarnation of a people’s search for optimism?

Also, while we claim to be tolerant people, open to all religions, there yet lies a deep-rooted desire to prove our religion is “the right one” no matter what religion you are. Everyone wants to point at a spot, or hold an object, and say with certainty, “this was the work of [insert prophets name here].”

Or are we trying harder to convince ourselves? This age of political statistics and quantifiable truths, combined with the “prove it” nature inside of humans, asks us to find evidence. Yet with the complete lack of evidence we hold religion closest to our soul.

Not to long ago, I read The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown. Supported by his amazing research, he details how so many people have been searching for the Holy Grail. But ultimately it comes down to the same thing. What do we need to prove in order to believe?

I’m not sure if its the mercury in the fish they eat, the radiation in their soil, or just the fact that being an island country makes you rather insular, but this is the last straw.

I guess it sells something or is a commercial parody. Anyone out there who read Kanji and can tell us the gist of this?