OK, I’m probably the last person to hear about this, but this is insanely funny. In response to the Kansas State Board of Education’s ridiculous and backwards decision to teach Intelligent Design (essentially Christian Creationism dressed up as science), somebody has created a parody religion called “Flying Spaghetti Monsterism”, which has gained a huge following in the past few months. This open letter to the Kansas School Board describes the religion and states that is is just as much science as Intelligent Design....

Yesterday afternoon we drove back from San Diego to San Francisco. Overall, the trip was pretty smooth - except for one major annoyance. I had brought my laptop along, and the day before the trip back I had downloaded some podcasts for myself as well as my kids. However, when I synced those to my iPod using iTunes, something went wrong, resulting in a corrupted iPod. The iPod still showed that it was half full, but none of the music showed up....

Microsoft has announced details on the pricing and packaging for the Xbox 360 that is expected in time for the holiday season. Unofrtunately, Microsoft has decided to offer two different bundles for $299 and $399 respectively. The $399 bundle includes many features that were previously expected to be standard Xbox 360 features (20GB hard drive, wireless controller, Xbox Live membership), plus a headset and remote control. The $299 bundle includes a wired controller and none of the features above (most importantly no hard drive)....

Someone on the Pragmatic Programmer mailing list recommended this website: Clientcopia It’s a massive (3300+) collection of stupid client comments from all fields, many of which I’m sure you can relate to. Just hit “Random” a couple of times; it’s quite entertaining.

While looking for some quality examples of applications built using the Ruby on Rails framework, I came across Odeo. This San Francisco based company organizes, synchronizes, and publishes podcasts (although it it still in beta and the publishing part isn’t live yet). I’ve only briefly looked at it so far, but it looks very promising. Individual podcasts are tagged, similar to the way bookmarks are tagged at del.icio.us. I have not tried this, but apparently signing up allows users to assign their own tags to podcasts....