John Lamansky

You’ve probably noticed that Burger King stores were selling Star Wars toys when Star Wars Episode III appeared in theaters. Burger King also had a “newsletter” about Star Wars, and I have a few… complaints, the first of which I will be discussing here.

On the back of the newsletter, they have an activity where you specify if a certain Star Wars character is on the Light or Dark Side. I have determined that the basic rule is: if it’s not on the Light Side, it’s automatically on the Dark Side. Now that is what I call sterotyping. (I suppose it could also be called oversimplification.)

According to Burger King, Watto is on the Dark Side (oh, come on people!). Jabba the Hutt is classified as being on the Dark Side also. I thought Jabba was just a fat ugly gangster, not a Sith! All I know is that he certainly would not be dexterous with a lightsaber.

1. What inspirations led to the invention of the wheel?
2. How are new languages created?
3. How did our numbering system get to be base-10?
4. Are there any sounds that can be spoken by humans that cannot be spelled out with the English alphabet?
5. Who organized the letters in the alphabet anyway? Why were they organized that way?

Hmm… food for thought.

Despite the decline of VHS (and TiVo’s “VCR burial”), some people are finding some creative and… shall I say, rather odd… uses for the aging technology.

Wired News has an interesting article about some of the worst software bugs. One interesting note is that in the last bug example (the National Cancer Institute, on page 2), when the bug resulted in deaths, it was the software users (doctors) that were blamed, not the programmer(s) that created the bug. Interesting.

As for me, the worst bugs I’ve experienced (or should I say “created”) as a programmer have resulted in data deletion. However, in those cases I had a backup, thankfully.

Where oh, where oh, is that John?
I wonder, wonder where he’s gone.
The haven’t been many posts lately.
Nope nope, not a single one
(well, except for a post about a rotten potato or something like that…)

The main reason I haven’t been posting much lately is because I haven’t had the time - I was working on version 3 of the Disciples with Microphones website. But now the new version is done, and now I have much more time to devote to my other hobbies and projects, such as blogging! Be sure to check out the site and the great Catholic podcasts there!