For all of those of you who are younger than I am, you’re probably on Myspace, that huge social networking site which has a profile for almost everyone in the country under 30.

Now you can get Homeland Stupidity on Myspace.

It’s been three days since I have been able to post anything to Homeland Stupidity. Fortunately, this isn’t because I got shipped off to Guantanamo. There’s been plenty of news, though, so I wanted to explain what has been going on behind the scenes.

Homeland Stupidity was unavailable for several hours Thursday night due to an unexpected failure of our DNS provider.

Homeland Stupidity is undergoing a few changes, and for my regular readers, I thought it would be a good idea to let you know what you’re about to see.

Homeland Stupidity has been up and down, mostly down, over the last day or so. The reason for the outage is due to failed server hardware.

I’m performing system maintenance and this post is part of my testing. Feel free to ignore it.

A few days ago I posted about the untimely death of my laptop and its inevitable negative effect on this site, Homeland Stupidity, as well as the software I work on and publish here. The response was, well, underwhelming. So instead, now I have something for you.

Following closely on the heels of the House, a nearly empty Senate voted Thursday to agree to a one-month extension of the current Patriot Act, giving both houses more time to work out civil liberties concerns in the bill’s reauthorization.

A few thousand people stopped by today from Sploid, and I’m glad to see quite a few decided to stick around and subscribe. You all probably wouldn’t have noticed, but quite a few changes have been made around here recently, and I want to update both you and my regular readers on what’s new behind the scenes at Homeland Stupidity.

Hurricane Wilma, which two days ago was a tiny tropical depression in the Caribbean Sea, is now a Category 5 hurricane headed for Florida, and residents aren’t taking chances this time.

At 8 a.m. the hurricane packed intense 175 mph winds and central pressure of 882 mb, the lowest ever measured.

On Saturday morning, Tropical Depression Twenty formed on the Caribbean Sea east of the Yucatan Peninsula, moving slowly west-northwest. Forecasts call for it to become a tropical storm before it makes landfall, and to strengthen again in the Gulf of Mexico before threatening northeastern Mexico and southern Texas as a Category 1 hurricane.

If you’ve tried to send mail here or used the contact form in the last 24 hours or so, your message may have been lost. The trouble was traced to an improper PHP sendmail configuration which has since been fixed. Please resend your message if possible. Thank you.

Scientists have discovered a gene, which they’ve named the “hangover” gene, that controls alcohol tolerance and time to recover from exposure to alcohol.

Are you looking for that ever-elusive online application for a job at Target? If so, you need to read this.

“My name is Bassam, a one-man band, I came from sand, affiliated with the Taliban.” This rap got Bassam Khalaf fired from his TSA baggage screener post at Houston Intercontinental Airport.

Season 9 of Stargate SG-1 and Season 2 of Stargate Atlantis begin in the U.S. this Friday, July 9th, at 8:00pm Eastern/Pacific, 7:00pm Central.

On 8 May, while driving home to Chicago from a trip to Canada, a Chicago businessman was held at the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel border checkpoint by the Department of Homeland Security, where he says he was shackled to a chair for over three hours, repeatedly kicked while being searched, and isolated from his family for over [...]

The color-coded Homeland Stupidity Threat Advisory is used to communicate with the public at large through a threat-based, color-coded system so that protective measures can be implemented to reduce the likelihood or impact of homeland stupidity. Now you too can display the Homeland Stupidity Threat Advisory System on your web site.

Barbecue is easily one of my favorite things to eat. It’s apparently becoming popular in the UK now, as well. This weekend the BBC had a report (MP3) on barbecue in America.
BBC North America business correspondent Stephen Evans recently attended a barbecue festival in New York City, normally thousands of miles away from good barbecue, [...]

If you’ve been seeing strange images of pumpkins while reading my site or my RSS feeds, please contact me and report it. I have recently enabled hotlink protection for the images on my site, and if you are seeing a pumpkin, then you have somehow triggered the protection. I’ll investigate and take whatever actions are [...]

Clear Channel Communications, that corporate behemoth in control of almost every radio station on your FM dial here in the U.S., is trying some new marketing tactics. They’ve started up a fake pirate radio station (now shut down) in Akron, Ohio, according to Stay Free!
It’s official: even Clear Channel is sick of Clear Channel. The [...]

Researchers at Cornell University have designed and built the first self-replicating robots. Yes, that’s right, these little robots can build copies of themselves. I think someone has never watched Stargate SG-1, or they probably wouldn’t be doing this.
While robots that reproduce themselves is certainly a groundbreaking achievement, we need to consider carefully if this is [...]

Photo post.

Yet another strange one off the AP newswire: Weyco, Inc., a Michigan health-care company, refuses to permit its employees to smoke, even on their own time or at home, citing concerns about health care costs. Weyco fired four employees for refusing to submit to a drug test — to determine if they smoke cigarettes.

When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, my employer at the time didn’t take long to start outsourcing anything having to do with the Internet. Unfortunately, this included my department. Before, we were about to migrate to all new SPARC/Solaris servers and Cisco networking equipment which would have given us a rock solid platform on which to expand the dialup product from a regional to a national presence. Then management got involved.

It’s that time of…human history…again. Locusts have started to make their way into southern Israel from out of Egypt. It looks like the weather is going to keep most of them away, though. And this is definitely not one of my usual topics, but I had this sent to me and I just had to [...]

So after struggling for most of Friday night to get this thing installed, I have succeeded! I even managed to customize it a little bit. Guess this makes me a blogger. Say hi or something.
OK, so you all know me. What should I write about first? Pick a topic. “The hard part is not writing, [...]