Chad’s happy application of the day: AM-Deadlink.
Sounds pretty cool huh?
What it does is go through all your browser shortcuts, lets you know which ones don’t work anymore, and the coolest feature: Updates all the favicons. I never had more than one or two at any one point in time. Now my favorites is filled with color!
And its freeware. I’ve been meaning to write this exact utility, but this rules. Thanks to the author!

As the regular PK readers know, whenever I happen upon a useful little application I will make a point of posting about it.

An application doesn’t need to be elaborate or complex to be useful. I appreciate simplicity… and compact code. Some of the best little appz I’ve ever written in my life were the result of participating in "1K Contests".

Anyway… this morning, I recieved an email directing me to this web page.  Autoruns is an MSConfig-like application from SysInternals.  It is a simple App, but useful.  I’ve only had it in my collection for 30 minutes, and I’ve already found 2 uses for it.  If you’re part of a desktop support crew somewhere, then you’ll probably find it especially useful.

Arrggh… go and visitCap’n Z for grog and commentary!

The 60th anniversary of the atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Japan is covered by a movie on the propaganda channel Sundance

The footage is most startling at first because it’s in color — unusual for 1945 — and because of its rarity. Filmed images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the days after the bombings (Nagasaki was hit Aug. 9) are almost nonexistent. The sky is a lovely blue. The knoblike mountains around town are a delicious green. In the destroyed zones, the valley where Nagasaki lay, the trees are leafless and shorn off. Everything appears a lifeless brown, just dirt, concrete and rubble. Factories are reduced to nests of collapsed steel girders. There are wide shots of sections of town, where everything is just gone.

Later on the film, when a trolley car jammed with people trundles past the camera, the instinct is to jump, to suddenly realize that, in the aftermath of the most destructive force ever unleashed, cable cars in outlying parts of town kept working. People woke up, got dressed, went to some sort of work each day. Life, horrid as it was, went on.

In fact, hour after hour, as the military filmmakers traveled across Japan to capture images of sumo wrestlers, children playing, open-air markets doing business, a family eating a formal dinner at home, you have to keep reminding yourself that this is post- A-bomb Japan. It looks so normal that in “Original Child Bomb,” filmmakers used the postwar footage to depict the pre -bomb days.

Why is it propaganda? Re-read the last sentence of the quote. They are using post bomb footage as pre-bomb footage. I’m sorry, but no matter how important your film may be, this fact means that the entire film is now a complete lie.
The filmmakers could have worked around it. But changing reality to meet preconceived political notions is always wrong.

I knew it. Deputies: Slain wife told GI of affair
Although the spin on the story tries to make it sound like the war did it, PTSD, etc., I’m sorry, it is obvious that if you came home from the war and found out the mother of your child was a stripper, and having a long term affair, well, you’d be pretty damn upset also.

But I will not buy coffee from a store. Occasionally I’ll get coffee at a restaurant, but normally only a diner. Most coffee people buy from stores tastes like it was made from what I scrape out of the bottom of a charcoal grill. Here’s a site that sells good coffee to explain why:

Next time you’re at one of the big coffee chains here in the USA, ask for a nice, lightly roasted cup of coffee. What you will get, according to any good coffee connoisseur, is more and more like a dark roast. Ask for a dark roast and the coffee will be virtually (or actually) burnt.
Why oh why did this happen? We have a theory…

A few decades ago, coffee chains had a brilliant idea to revolutionize coffee as we know it…

First, coffee had to change. Lightly roasted coffee known around the world as “American Roast”, had to vanish. In came coffee roasted so dark that all of a coffee’s natural flavor gets burned-off for oily, bold, smoky flavor (e.g. Full City, Italian, Espresso, French roast).

Why do this?

…

Follow the link for more details. I’ve never had these guy’s coffee ever, I just happened to visit the site and I agree.

From the Gazette:

FORT COLLINS - A Fort Carson soldier who returned from combat duty in Iraq last week killed his wife Wednesday and then fatally shot himself, Army officials said.

This one is easy. She was fooling around on him while he was in combat.
When I got back from the war zone, I saw how many wives had fooled around, divorced, or left their husbands in only 6 months. Of course the husband didn’t know how hard it was to be left alone in the comfort of their own homes for all that time, of course they had to cheat. The soldier just doesn’t understand how difficult it is!

OK, so it is a little early for Halloween. But reading the letters to the editor of the place I moved from, makes me glad once again I left.

Frightland’s billboard scares passing children

As I was driving from Middletown up U.S. 13, my children were horrified by the billboard that reads “Got blood?” I realize that Frightland is only advertising for its annual festival. But does it have to do it in such a manner? I don’t think it paints a very good image.

I have enough trouble trying to explain to my children why there is a big skeleton on the silo of the farm. It’s a very scary- looking place. Not everyone enjoys blood and gore.

Emily Holcroft, Middletown

“Its a very scary looking place,” she says of the attraction known as Frightland. You know what, I really do hope that this is merely a prank by the owners so that they can generate interest. I really hope that someone isn’t this stupid. Nah, thats Delaware for you…

start.com is a new portal page from Microsoft. What is nice is the very clean interface, and it doesn’t have MSN or Microsoft written all over it.
Click the “start” in the left side and you’ll be able to add feeds.
You can even add custom feeds, such as ours!

Well, it won’t be for every movie, but if you saw certain flicks by Sony, you can get a partial refund due to a
class action lawsuit… All because Sony used a “virtual” film critic. These are the movies: Hollow Man, Vertical Limit, A Knight’s Tale, The Animal or The Patriot. Of course, I’m sure they can’t prove who did and didn’t see the movies, so it is essentially 5$ to anyone who sends in their info.

When moving out to the midwest, one of the things I was very grateful for was the complete lack of people putting “In Memory Of…” crap on their car windows like this…

At first glance, Patty Jenkins’ white Jeep looks like a typical vehicle. Fairly clean and without scratches, it would be unlikely to attract attention next to other cars on I-95.
However, a second glance reveals a decal on the back window. “In Loving Memory of My Dad” reads the white script. It also lists the dates on which Jenkins’ father, John Patrick Hart, was born and died. White angels flank the text.

I’ve seen them so overdone and ornate that you can’t even see through the damn windows.
They’re annoying, and I’ve seen other bigger idiots try to drive while attempting to read what they said. Most of them I’ve seen have the years listed be less than twenty, which means that their idiot kids did something stupid 99% of the time.
Unfortunately the article continues…

“It used to be only an East Coast thing,” Winslow said. “It’s going west.”

Nooooo!!!