And then here’s an interesting take on how to determine the seriousness of the new Sine Flu from Paul Wilmott, the celebrity death test:
It is almost impossible for the layperson to rationally determine the seriousness of any new disease and whether it has the potential to be the next Black Death. I’m thinking of the new Swine ‘Flu…
So I have my own way of determining the seriousness of any new threat to human life, it’s called the Celebrity Death Test, and I hope you find it useful. The way it works is simple, if a Celebrity dies from the Threat then it is to be taken Seriously, if they don’t then it’s probably nothing to worry about. Bird ‘Flu, fine. AIDS, not fine. I can remember when Rock Hudson died, that was the moment when AIDS became real for me. (I’m also a fan of Doris Day, read into that what you will!) You see how it works? It’s just a statistics thing. If a Celeb suffers from it (and assuming it’s not something that has a natural correlation with Celebrity or is self inflicted) then it is statistically significant for the rest of us.
BeeJive IM, a popular instant messaging application, saw an update to its iPhone variant this week which added Facebook support to its corral of services. In the hours after the release, reports began to trickle in that something wasn’t quite right. For what seemed like a random group of people, the screen would read “PC LOAD LETTER” whenever the user tried to establish a connection to any IM service, then quickly switch to a Youtube clip from the movie Office Space.
What had happened? Had Beejive been hacked? Was it an easter egg gone awry? Turns out, it was completely intentional: it’s an anti-piracy measure.
This evening, we’ve received an official statement from Beejive on the matter:
We have recently implemented new anti-piracy measures in BeejiveIM for iPhone. We have tried to keep our approach fun with an error message and a video. But we hope our message is clear: please respect the work of developers.
Somebody at Brightleaf Square has apparently set up a camera looking out their office window, trained on the bridge — probably, we’d suspect, to capture these moments, which thankfully have been all-fun and no-injuries to date. And now, they’ve been set into a compilation, a greatest-hits montage of the bridge’s greatest truck encounters.
This week the viral video hit the popular web site Autoblog, and it didn’t take readers very long the site to narrow this down to our own Bull City. Ah, something we can all be proud of. Er, sort of.
