Hamster power!

In a meeting with my boss at CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research), she was trying to show me something on an old laptop that was actually working quite slowly. Just to laugh, I suggested to get the help from a hamster that would supply the extra power needed to make this computer work properly by running in a wheel. Doing a bit of research on the matter on Google, I found that site describing an apparatus linking the cage of "Skippy" the hamster to a night lamp that would be lighted using the power supplied by the little furry animal during its night time favorite activity: wheeling!

Then, I have just been thinking: how many hamster running together in wheels would it take to supply a sufficient amount of power to the new Large Hadron Collider to make it work?? Bets opened!

I just found that joke about a hamster I think is worth keeping!

Ernie the Hamster

If you have raised kids (or been one), and gone through the pet syndrome including toilet-flush burials for dead goldfish It's a long story but one that will have you laughing out LOUD!!

Overview: I had to take my son's hamster to the vet.

Here's what happened:

Just after dinner one night, my son came up to tell me there was something wrong with one of the two hamsters he holds prisoner in his room.

"He's just lying there looking sick," he told me, "I'm serious, Dad. Can you help?"

I put my best hamster-healer look on my face and followed him into his bedroom. One of the little rodents was indeed lying on his back, looking stressed. I immediately knew what to do. (Call my wife.)

"Honey," I called, "come look at the hamster!"

"Oh, my gosh," my wife diagnosed after a minute. "She's having babies."

"What?" My son demanded. "But their names are Bert and Ernie, Mom!"

I was equally outraged. "Hey, how can that be?! I thought we said we didn't want them to reproduce!" I accused my wife.

"Well, what do you want me to do, post a sign in their cage?!" She inquired. (I actually think she had the gall to say this sarcastically.)

"No, but you were supposed to get two boys!" I reminded her (in my most loving, calm, sweet voice, while gritting my teeth together).

"Yeah, Bert and Ernie!" My son agreed.

"Well, it's just a little hard to tell on some guys, ya know," she informed me. (Again with the sarcasm, ya think?) By now the rest of the family had gathered to see what was going on.

I shrugged, deciding to make the best of it. "Kids, this is going to be a wondrous experience," I announced. "We're about to witness the miracle of birth."

"OH, Gross!" They shrieked.

"Well, isn't THAT just great! What are we going to do with a litter of tiny little hamster babies?" My wife wanted to know. (I really do think she was being snotty here, too. Don't you?)

We peered at the patient. After much struggling, what looked like a tiny foot would appear briefly, vanishing a scant second later.

"We don't appear to be making much progress," I noted.

"It's breech," my wife whispered, horrified.

"Do something, Dad!" My son urged. "Okay, okay."

Squeamishly, I reached in and grabbed the foot when it next appeared, giving it a gingerly tug. It disappeared. I tried several more times with the same results.

"Should I call 911?" My eldest daughter wanted to know," Maybe they could talk us through the trauma." (You see a pattern here with the females in my house?)

"Let's get Ernie to the vet," I said grimly.

We drove to the vet with my son holding the cage in hislap.

"Breathe, Ernie, breathe," he urged.

"I don't think hamsters do Lamaze," his mother noted to him. (Women can be so cruel to their own young. I mean what she does to ME is one thing, but this boy is of her womb.)

The vet took Ernie back to the examining room and peered at the little animal through a magnifying glass.

"What do you think, Doc, a c-section?" I suggested scientifically. My son appeared impressed by my observation.

"Oh, very interesting," he murmured.

"Mr. and Mrs. Cameron, may I speak to you privately for a moment?" I gulped, nodding for my son to step outside.

"Is Ernie going to be okay?" My wife asked.

"Oh, perfectly," the vet assured us. "This hamster is not in labor. In fact, that isn't EVER going to happen Ernie is a boy."

"What?"

"You see, Ernie is a young male AND occasionally, as they come into maturity, like most male species, they um .... er ... masturbate, just the way he did, lying on his back." He blushed, glancing at my wife. "Well, you know what I'm saying, Mr. Cameron."

We were silent, absorbing this.

"So Ernie's just ... just ... excited?"! My wife offered.

"Exactly," the vet replied, relieved that we understood.

More silence. Then my vicious, cruel wife started to giggle. And laugh. And then even laugh loudly!

"What's so funny?" I demanded, knowing, but not believing that the woman I married would commit the upcoming affront to my flawless manliness. Tears were now running down her face.

"It's just ... that ... I'm picturing you pulling on its ... its teeny little ..." she gasped for more air to bellow in laughter once more.

"That's enough," I warned.

We thanked the Veterinarian and hurriedly bundled the hamsters and our son back into the car. He was glad everything was going to be okay.

"I know Ernie's really thankful for what you've done, Dad," he told me.

"Oh, you have NO idea," my wife agreed, once again collapsing into laughter.

Enough said.

Some anti-Microsoft rantings (part 2)

This is a joke I love about Microsoft. Actually, I'll try to post more of them, something like one per week! I could have a section: Anti-Microsoft Liberation Front Jokes!


If Microsoft Build cars

1. A particular model year of car wouldn't be available until after that year instead of before it.
2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you'd have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would just die for no reason, and you'd have to restart it. For some strange reason, you'd just accept this.
4. You could only have one person in the car at a time, unless you bought a Car 95 or a Car NT. But then you'd have to buy more seats.
5. Sun Motorsystems would make a car that was powered by the sun, twice as reliable, and five times as fast-but it would only run on 5 percent of the roads.
6. The oil, engine, gas, and alternator warnings lights would be replaced with a single "General Car Fault" warning light.
7. People would get excited about the "new" features in Microsoft cars, forgetting completely that they had been available in other cars for years.
8. We'd all have to switch to Microsoft gas.
9. The U.S. government would be getting subsidies from an automaker, instead of giving them.
10. New seats would force everyone to have the same-size butt.
11. The stereo system will only be able to listen to Microsoft FM and play Microsoft cassettes.
12. To turn on the air conditioner, you will have to shut down the car for two minutes and restart it.
13. Occasionally, your car will stop and fail to restart, and you'll have to reinstall the engine to get it going again.
14. When you call the service department, they will tell you it's not their fault and blame it on the company that made the tires.
15. Before the airbag deploys, it will ask "are you sure?"
16. To make right turns, you will have to upgrade to Microsoft SteeringWheel 2.0.
17. Apple will make a car that's faster, more reliable, and easier to drive, but it will only run on five percent of the roads.
18. If you can't afford to buy a new car, you can just borrow one from a friend and copy it.
19. If you are involved in a crash, you will have no idea why.
20. Damage from frequent crashes greatly limited by agonizingly slow speeds
21. MS-AAA mysteriously knows where you are and what you ran into before you even call.
22. Lets you e-mail viruses to jerks who cut you off in traffic.
23. Sure, you *own* the car -- but your nerdy 17-year-old nephew is the only one who can figure out how to drive it.
24. Engine trouble? Just execute a Ctrl+Alt+Honk and the car repairs itself.
25. "Crowby," the annoying, animated crowbar, keeps changing the radio station.
26. It doesn't matter how good it is, those techno-snobs with the free Linux cars always look down on you.
27. It's a royal pain to try to pull into a non-Microsoft gas station.
28. Now only takes THREE MINUTES to start.
29. Whenever you leave your driveway, the little paperclip guy jumps out of the glove box and says, "It looks like you're going to work! Can I help?"
30. You have to reinstall the entire engine once a month.
31. After putting it in park, it shakes and rattles for a couple minutes before you finally get the signal that it's safe to turn off the engine.
32. Despite reassurances of improved security from Microsoft, hackers can easily gain entry by simply using the door handles.
33. You can't lend it to someone else; they have to purchase their own.
34. You have to pull to the side of the road, turn off and restart the engine whenever you change CD's.
35. The radio would be computerized, but you'd need to install 64 Meg of RAM, a new sound card, a game card, a new video driver, a CD drive, and type C:\radio\talk\rush*.* to get it to play.
36. The entire engine wouldn't be in the bay at once, and the car would have to keep stopping and starting to load in the relevant parts.
37. The speedometer would read 70 even though you are only doing 50. 4. You would have to have a full service every 500 miles.
38. Your car would refuse to start with a message "Abort, Retry, Fail?"
39. For some reason the engine controller would need a 1G hard disc and would take 5 minutes to boot up.
40. The steering wheel would be replaced with a mouse and you'd need to memorize the keyboard short-cut for "Brake".
41. They wouldn't build their own engines but form a cartel with their engine supplier. The latest engine would have 16 cylinders, multi-point fuel injection and 4 turbos, but it would be a side-valve design so you could use Model-T Ford parts on it. There would be an "Engium Pro" with bigger turbos, but it would be slower on most existing roads.
42. The U.S. government would be forced to rebuild all of the roads for Microsoft cars; they will drive on the old roads, but they run very slowly.
43. You would be constantly pressured to upgrade your car.

Check out: Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeroes

Some anti-Microsoft ranting

This is a love-hate story between Microsoft and I. See, like everyone else, I use Microsoft Office and Windows. And I have also been using MSM Passport and Messenger. While I'm still using the former, I have decided to give up on the latter. I'll give up on all Microsoft products when I'll be able to learn how to use Linux or if I decide to switch to Mac OS and other programs. Which could happen sooner than you think! Are you hearing me Bill?? But here is my piece of ranting!

So, here I'm, trying to get a new email address that wouldn't be such a give away about who I'm to everyone finding it on the Net. I thought a new email with Hotmail would be ok. All went pretty well to get my new profile. But things started getting nasty when I tried to cancel my former account. There was simply no links whatsoever to the personnal settings on the main pages! Absolutely no link! The only way to get there is a tiny link under the form to sign in on the MSM passport! When, after more than an hour of desperate research I figured that out, I went to my personnal settings and asked MSM to cancel my previous profile. When I thought I had done it and would have everything clarified, here that suddenly, as I sign in again on Messenger, a window pops up telling that there is a new message in mailbox. When I click on it, appears another window in which I'm congratulated on reserving an account and kindly asked to activate it...Activate it???? Didn't I just told the system I wanted to cancel it? Does this means that once you've created a profile, you can't delete it? Now, my messenger is all messed up, because he never knows with which profile it has to log on MSM. Moreover, I'm also getting confused because I don't know anymore which password I have to use!
Well, I sent an angry message to MSM, but since I'm sure they won't give a damn about it, I have decided to migrate on Yahoo! There I get a 2-Go account and with the same profile, I can log on to the groups I'm a member of. So, I said "Bye bye" to MSM and "Hello" to Yahoo!

YAHOOOO!!!

As long as there is life (and humor), there is hope!

When the Western media address the political situation in the Middle East, thesy tend to focus on Palestinian terrorists, the living conditions in their camps or the occupied territories on the one hand, or on the military actions taken by Tsahal against Palestinian terrorists and on the colonies, whether to be evacuated or that are being created. And in the middle of all this, there is, of course, the wall being built by the Israelis. Basically, they constantly talk about what separates Israelis and Palestinians. And, according to this American Palestinian humorist, Ray Hanania, these topics are, unfortunately, also often the only center of the conversations among the individuals from these two people. But why does one have to always talk about what separates them? Why can't one also talk about what they have in common? He asks along a growing number of people concerned with the political situation in the Middle-East. In an article about "Things Palestinians and Israelis share", he notes, for example, that in both cultures it is common to have over-protectives mothers, to enjoy too much good food (obesity seems to be a common plague), to blame everyone else for their problems and to act against the most obvious common sense, even when it is dancing naked in front of their eyes, because of a propensity to extreme emotionality that leads to total irrationality. He cites a particularly funny and ironic parable that illustrates perfectly the absurdity of some aspects of the conflict between these two people:

The scorpion asks the frog to give him a ride across the lake
(which symbolizes peace). The frog says sure, but cautions, “I trust you won’t
sting me because we will both drown.” Halfway across, the scorpion stings
the frog and before they both die, the shocked frog asks why? The scorpion,
not very creatively, replies, “Because this is the Middle East.”

The only problem with that story, of course, is that we both think we’re the frog.

I think it is plain clear and doesn't need much more comment!