A friend of mine went to Africa a while ago and brought me back an odd, but cool souvenir. It’s a soft drink made by Guinness called Malta. Here is what it looks like:

While this may sound like something you may want to try, he said it is a “very acquired taste” (i.e. it tasted horrible to him).

None the less, being a Guinness fan (and knowing a lot of people who read my blog are), I thought you might want to know about this random Guinness product.

(Malta seems like it might be a classification of drink as opposed to a brand name)

However, today I came across this uncorroborated post that Yahoo ads might be distributing malware.

Thinking back, I saw a broken Yahoo ad on their site yesterday, and in place of the ad was an iFrame with the typical IIS error message and something about localstart.asp. I thought nothing of it at the time. But today it dawned on me that there was some recently reported huge IIS SQL Injection Attacks… I am not sure if one plus one equals two in this instance, but to be on the safe side I have turned off all Yahoo ads from my site.

My proxy apologies if you experienced any oddities.

This seems kind of silly to me. I mean you have physical costs with a Sandwich that you need to cover. While with music you do have physical costs, today you can make an album with GarageBand that is almost as good as the big studio guys so the “pay what you think it’s worth” makes more sense to me.

Same with software. I mean both music and code are manifests of “non-real” things - a song and an idea. They are just concepts put out in a distributable form.

A sandwich and a cup of coffee though…

GUINNESS GUINNESS HOUSE
HOUGHTON STREET, LONDON,
WC2A 2AE, UNITED KINGDOM.

GUINNESS STOUT - NEW YEAR GREAT INTERNET AWARENESS PROMOTIONS 2008.
Attention.

We are pleased to inform you of the result of the just concluded 2008 New Year draws held on the 1st of March 2008 by GUINNESS EXTRA STOUT Worldwide Internet Awareness Promotion, your email was among the 30 lucky winners who won GBP (One Million Great British Pounds) £1,000,000.00 each on the GUINNESS COMPANY.

However, the results were released, and your email was attached to ticket number (GUI45856CS89) and ballot number (BN: 6220914657/HBZ-T). The online draws was conducted by a random selection of email addresses from an exclusive list of 250,031 E-mail addresses of individuals and corporate bodies, picked by an advanced automated random computer search from the internet. However, no tickets were sold but all email addresses were assigned to different ticket numbers for representation and privacy. In other to claim your GBP £1,000,000.00 winning prize, which have been deposited in a designated Finance Security Company here in United Kingdom. However, you will have to fill the form below and send it to the Promotion manager of Guinness Worldwide Internet Awareness Lottery Company for verification and then you will be directed on how you can claim your won prize as it has already been deposited in your favour.

NAMES:
AGE:
SEX:
MARITAL STATUS:
HOME ADDRESS:
COUNTRY:
MOBILE PHONE:
OCCUPATION:

Completely fill the form above and send it immediately to our promotion manager through email for prompt collection of your fund using the contact details below:

CONTACT:
Name: Mr. Smith Greg (PROMOTION MANAGER)
EMAIL: ID. :mrsmithgreg_1759@yahoo.com
Tel: +447031857509
Yours faithfully,
Mrs. Alma Hyman. (Secretary)

Ah if only our currency was the British pound, I would go for it - seeing I won the "online draws" (those English / Irish people are known for their bad grammar). It’s also too bad Guinness can’t afford a Guinness.com email address and has to resort to using a yahoo address. These are rough times they are.

VLC is a media application that can play almost any kind of media file - it’s a great program.

The security report says upgrade to the newest version to fix, but there are reports that the newest version also has the bug.

So it’s best not to play untrusted movies with subtitles until they get it sorted (or download the nightly build).

Some of these newer games are visually stunning - they are breath taking; however, I just don’t have time to get into them. I’ll play two or three complex games a year, often on my Microsoft® Xbox™. (I do enjoy watching other people play new games though. I am fascinated by the programming skills it would take to create such things.)

Every once in a while I like to just unwind and play a game. Something more than solitaire, but not quite as intense as Doom 3, Half life, Halo or what have you (and those are the easy ones to figure out). At times like these I often turn to my retro nintendo. Square controller, 2 buttons, four point joystick, and a game cartridge the size of small child’s face - heaven.

Well, now instead of going into the family room and waiting for the TV to warm up, turning the dial to 3, and switching the A/B controller to B to play the games, I can do it online.

They have most of the games I have, and a few I don’t. The only question I have is - is this legal?

I would say these guys are absolute kooks, but I have this incredible desire to join so I am a bit torn (and I fear for my sanity for thinking how totally awesome this is).

Here is the Church’s web site.

If you’re feeling up to it, you can help write a gospel or 10 Commandments for Yoda (Ok, this is getting out of hand).