Booyor’s BLOGgh!

That is the subject of the spam e-mail that my school address got. The message then went on to say:

We offer kayaking, diving, and treks.

Well, that’s a relief. But I do hate their lack of parallelism! It should be “trekking” to add to The Flow.

The e-mail that followed this one?

Orcs will take you all the way.

Upon receipt, the duct tape is removed and the paper copy of the datagram is optically scanned into a electronically transmittable form.

This was sent by osasa Vuong. She is a member of the Intendent caste.

These e-mails are not the first, so now I have a category called Kitschtech, where all of my blargh tech stories can hopefully bring a smile to your osasa-Vuong@autopartner-streubel.de faces.

Have you seen this company?

They make brainscanners and neural mappers. They also make Force-controlled Darth Vader games.

Behind the mask is a sensor that touches the user’s forehead and reads the brain’s electrical signals, then sends them to a wireless receiver inside the saber, which lights up when the user is concentrating. The player maintains focus by channeling thoughts on any fixed mental image, or thinking specifically about keeping the light sword on. When the mind wanders, the wand goes dark.

Engineers at NeuroSky Inc. have big plans for brain wave-reading toys and video games. They say the simple Darth Vader game - a relatively crude biofeedback device cloaked in gimmicky garb - portends the coming of more sophisticated devices that could revolutionize the way people play.

Technology from NeuroSky and other startups could make video games more mentally stimulating and realistic. It could even enable players to control video game characters or avatars in virtual worlds with nothing but their thoughts.

Adding biofeedback to “Tiger Woods PGA Tour,” for instance, could mean that only those players who muster Zen-like concentration could nail a put. In the popular action game “Grand Theft Auto,” players who become nervous or frightened would have worse aim than those who remain relaxed and focused.

NeuroSky’s prototype measures a person’s baseline brain-wave activity, including signals that relate to concentration, relaxation and anxiety. The technology ranks performance in each category on a scale of 1 to 100, and the numbers change as a person thinks about relaxing images, focuses intently, or gets kicked, interrupted or otherwise distracted.

The technology is similar to more sensitive, expensive equipment that athletes use to achieve peak performance. Koo Hyoung Lee, a NeuroSky co-founder from South Korea, used biofeedback to improve concentration and relaxation techniques for members of his country’s Olympic archery team.

For being from the future their website needs a little help.

In Twilight Princess, when I’m trying to rescue the kid by horse-chase and then a showdown joust over a spanning bridge, I don’t want to play worse because my mind is singing “Meow Meow Meow Meow” or “I am I, Don Quixote, the Lord of La Mancha! My destiny calls and I go!”

On the topic of hearts racing…
Google is also getting into the mind-reading. They’re actually being challenged by Internet “guardians” for wanting to put public government records online.

Meet Flute Hero.

Stephen Hawking got to experience 4 minutes of weightlessness.

He was helped by a zero-g company in Florida that does commercial flights. One of the cool parts of this is that Virgin Atlantic is expanding its fleet to be called Virgin Galactic.

Here is a quiz to determine if the words given are a German Babel-translation or Faulkner’s words.

(Run through Babel it’s “Here a Quiz is to determine to if the given words are a German Babel translation or words Faulkners.”)

John McCain? John McClane!
Here’s my movie trailer idea.

“Well, yeah” you may say. But today I went in to the bank. Before all that: First I must say, “Thank you, group.” I’m really glad that I came to group last night. I never would have thought to ask for the finance charges to be removed. You saved me quite a bit of money as the bank manager refunded all of the service charges. (Yes, all $100 of them.)

I truly feel that God was at work here. It was not based on my smooth words. I think I uttered, “Please…fix…now….”

(I may have also thrown in a, “Fire…bad!” as I searched for Igor.)

Thanks again for praying with me, my friends. (And for watching my daughter while my wife is out of the country.)

This was tough to find, but I’m a friend of a friend to the three guys and I don’t want this story to disappear:

ANKARA, Turkey Apr 22, 2007 (AP)— A court jailed five suspects Sunday on murder charges linked to the killings of three Christians who were tied up and had their throats slit at a publishing house which had drawn protests by nationalists for distributing Bibles.

Six others were released pending trial, the court said. It was unclear what charges the six faced and a trial date has not yet been set. A 12th suspect, who tried to escape from police by jumping from a fourth-floor balcony at the scene of the killings, remains hospitalized in stable condition and was expected to be charged later.

The three victims a German man and two Turks who converted to Christianity were killed Wednesday at a Christian publishing house in Malatya.

The attack added to concerns in Europe about whether the predominantly Muslim country which is bidding for European Union membership can protect its religious minorities.

Christians make up just a fraction of 1 percent of Turkey’s population of 71 million.

Christian leaders said they are worried that nationalists were stoking hostilities against non-Turks and non-Muslims by exploiting growing uncertainty over Turkey’s place in the world.

The uncertainty and growing suspicion against foreigners has been driven by the faltering EU bid, a resilient Kurdish separatist movement and by increasingly vocal Islamists who see themselves and Turkey as locked in battle with a hostile Christian West.

People that I talk to about this respond that it’s what to expect from organized religion. Crusades, witch trials, and all that. But I know that there have been murders where the criminal had no religion. Conversations that I have had recently share a theme: people boycott religion because it has been used for evil.

But if I searched the Internet, I might find the cause for the war in Iraq as being a fight over oil and petrol. Those same people who so quickly boycott religion are reluctant to give up driving a car.

Ideologies of convenience are just as dangerous to the world.

Check it out…here

Editor jumping in: Watch this with your sound off. I’m assuming that’s what you did, Slade.

Here’s a grammar/usage list.