I had never been to Detroit, Michigan before… until this past Saturday. Unfortunately I had the pleasure of visiting this city for the North American International Auto Show, or as some call it, the Detroit Auto Show.

According to the locals that I met, Detroit is literally nothing but the headquarters for GM. The area below, circled in red, is GM’s headquarters. The blue circle is the convention center. The only two places deemed safe to be for many.

Each day as we entered the convention center, there were crowds of police, bomb sniffing dogs inspecting every bag coming into the building. It’s completely unheard of for people to be outdoors during the night, past maybe 6 PM. One of our cab drivers actually laughed at us when we mentioned wanting to visit a bar after working.

Directly across the river from the hotel is Canada, which did nothing but shine light on how miserable the city of Detroit is. It seemed like land of beauty, despite the numerous smoke stacks and factories puffing smoke into the skies along the border.

Feel free to roam around the two buildings I spent 99% of my time in.

Today’s Myspace announcement by “Tom,” the robot behind official myspace user announcements, was chock-full of perfection.

For those of you who haven’t logged in recently, or don’t have myspace, here’s the segment of his message, verbatim, that I feel should be analyzed.

p.s. if you’re getting friend requests from people you dont know and it bugs you, go to your account settings and set it so they have to know your last name to send an add request.. that’ll slow that stuff down!

Mr. Myspace himself, said some pretty amazing things. Lets break down his complex and grammatically correct statement.

if you’re getting friend requests from people you dont know and it bugs you

Nobody should be getting spammed. There should be a registration filter, CAPTCHA script, or something logically created to prevent the creation of said fake accounts.

go to your account settings and set it so they have to know your last name to send an add request

Really? Well thank you Tom for such an insightful answer.

You know, I had never thought that, say, maybe it would prevent any legitimate people who weren’t high school pals, college room mates from being able to add me.

I think I will follow your solution and limit my friends to the closest most intimate people I know, ie. THE ONES WHO ARE ALREADY ON MY FRIENDS LIST.

that’ll slow that stuff down!

Hmm… will it… well yes, it will. For you. With less people complaining about how crappy Myspace is, maybe you can “slowly” build a simple preventative account creation feature into the website.

But wait, that would take too long, so I guess you need us to slow things down so you can take your time and re-invent the wheel.

As for everything else… I understand that a robot communicating with a bunch of ignorant Americans is probably not an easy task, but for Christs sake, clean up the pathetic attempt at “connecting” with your community.

I have never been more annoyed to read such poorly phrased crap. I am seething right now. Seething. Thank you Tom, you horrible P.R. device.

I was shown this disturbing article about a boy, and spiders… living in his ear. Think before you sleep, because you could be next.

ALBANY, Oregon (AP) — These guys were not exactly Snap, Crackle and Pop.

What began as a faint popping in a 9-year-old boy’s ear — “like Rice Krispies” — ended up as an earache, and the doctor’s diagnosis was that a pair of spiders made a home in the ear.

Wait a minute? What? Does that even make sense?

“They were walking on my eardrums,” Jesse Courtney said.

One of the spiders was still alive after the doctor flushed the fourth-grader’s left ear canal. His mother, Diane Courtney, said her son insisted he kept hearing a faint popping in his ear — “like Rice Krispies.”

Remember kids, you too can prevent ear spiders. Just sleep with a plastic bag over your head!

Dr. David Irvine said it looked like the boy had something in his ear when he examined him.

When he irrigated the ear, the first spider came out, dead. The other spider took a second dousing before it emerged, still alive. Both were about the size of a pencil eraser.

Jesse was given the spiders — now both dead — as a souvenir. He has taken them to school and his mother has taken them to work.

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/05/07/spiderboy.ap/index.html

For the past few months, my blog has been a disaster for users browsing with Internet Explorer. Well, the problem is finally fixed.

I decided to dig deep into the problem with my template, and fix the issues killing the sidebar some of you may now see to the right. The design is slightly different, and not as pretty, but it’s much more functional.

Since Internet Explorer still holds roughly 60% of the internet within its grasp, I felt inclined to make the changes.

However, I would not have done anything, had Sokha’s persistent, IE7-fan-boy nagging not bothered me. I know he loves IE, but that’s because he’s not a Firefox fan-boy such as myself. (I’m kidding Sokha, I love you.)

Here’s a conversation that occurred between us earlier this evening:

Me: Ok asshole, I fixed my blog, now it works with IE.
Sokha: Nice, thanks ian

And there you have it… proof that he’s a nagging jerk.

Ok, you got me. This was just a cheap way to plug his site, and give him credit for pushing me to fix my own site like I did to him earlier.

So, thank you Sokha, you rock.

For anyone else, let me know what you think of the new design. Is it too wide for your browser? Does it look like crap? Whatever your thoughts are, please let me know.

Have a fun day, and don’t forget to visit Sok4Akira.net