Random

I am loath to describe anyone as stupid.

Principally because I am acutely aware of my own stupidities. They are several and reveal themselves most days -- last night, for example.

However, I feel sure that several people will consider using this hard, unforgiving word to describe the reported behavior of Steven Wardle.

Wardle is a 35-year-old man who lives in the Midlands of England.

As the Daily Mail tells it, he is something of a thief.

His penchant was stealing close-circuit TV cameras -- perhaps, who knows, to re-sell them.

Still, it isn't necessarily easy or wise to … Read more

Some people reek of passion. Some, merely passion fruit.

There are those, though -- often with ideas above their hairline -- who smell of nothing but fake sincerity.

Hosanna, then, for Samsung.

For the company that is so keen to respect the world of patents has patented a phone that pumps fragrance into the atmosphere.

I am indebted to Ubergizmo (which in turn sniffs a credit to Engadget). The latter points to this page of the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office's Patent Full Text and Image Database. So it must be true, right?

Oddly, Engadget also offers that … Read more

Amazon always offers such delightful surprises.

Often a box is lying on my doorstep and my heart leaps because someone has sent me a gift. Only then do I realize that, yet again, I did some late-night online shopping after a small nightcap.

One can imagine, though, that Seth Horvitz of Washington, D.C. must have felt giddy when the flat-screen TV he had bought through a third-party vendor on Amazon arrived at his apartment.

As MyFoxDC dispatches it, Horvitz eagerly opened the box, only to find a Sig Sauer SIG716.

This happens to be, as the Sig Sauer Web site declaims: &… Read more

It's not good when someone is moved to go onto Facebook to call you "the worst of humanity."

It's most definitely not good when you are an airline and you're supposed to make humanity sit back, relax, and enjoy the cramped conditions and that slightly smelly thing known as food.

Yet Alaska Airlines is this morning faced with having its name being brought into disrepute, with the evidence still a little unclear.

As the Associated Press reports it, Cameron Clark, an Oregon concert promoter was so incensed by what he believes was ill treatment of … Read more

"I think it's going to be horrendous."

This is how much Steve Wozniak is sitting on the fence, when it comes to the cloud.

Somehow, the idea of storing all his data on remote servers over which he has no control appeals to him about as much as the producers on "Dancing With The Stars" once did.

Joining Mike Daisey on stage after his one-man show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" in Washington, Woz offered his usual breezy honesty when answering questions.

According to Agence France-Presse, Woz laid bare his … Read more

People generally have children in order to reproduce their own imperfect selves and try to make them more perfect.

This is a legitimate, if slightly warped, activity -- yet we tolerate it for what we imagine is a social good.

However, less of a social good is these parents constantly thrusting images of their progeny into the exclusive preserve of our Facebook pages.

They don't imagine that others might find these pictures annoying, dull, or -- dare one say it -- visually displeasing. They do it to wave their own fecundity into your every day.

There is now relief from this discomfort, a tool that has interesting ramifications.… Read more

You have to be careful which band you book for your wedding. Your choice carries with it a message.

If you book the Libertines, your wife may look at you askance. If you tell her it's the Porcupine Tree, well, please imagine her face.

So one wonders whether sufficient thought went into Amazon Senior Vice President Brian Valentine's choice of Tom Petty. When your Valentine brings you something Petty, trouble may ensue.

In this case, it apparently did -- but from an unexpected source.

I hear down the Geekwire that Valentine thought he could book Petty online. Amazon'… Read more

As the tech world's volunteer psychiatrist, I sometimes struggle with people's motivations.

In the case of Adam Smith, I find myself having to write this lying down.

Should you have taken the long way around back from Kim Jong Un's wedding, you might not be aware that Smith is the man who rolled up to a Chick-fil-A drive-thru, ordered a free water, and then began to berate an utterly blameless Chick-fil-A employee.

Let he who has never berated the blameless cast the first stone-cold chicken sandwich. However, Smith saw himself as a crusader against the anti-gay views of the chain's President Dan Cathy … Read more

Do you have premonitions? Do you sometimes just know bad things will happen, even though you have no idea how or why?

Please, then, show solidarity with Chance Bothe.

He both had a premonition that chance would not favor him and lived to tell the tale.

It seems that Bothe, a college student from Granado, Texas, was driving along a road and texting when something struck him: perhaps he shouldn't be driving along a road and texting.

As Today.com has it, he was having a texting row with a friend. Then he caught himself and texted: "I need to quit texting, because I could die in a car accident."… Read more