At 10:00 AM today, Apple will be announcing the iPoo, a small device that will be fitted, at miniscule cost to local governments and zero cost to consumers, inside the rim of every toilet bowl on the planet.

What does it do, you ask? The iPoo will save us all in three ways:

1. Public Health

Sampling waste in the bowl, the device will monitor the health of the individual using the toilet. Personal health issues will be addressed through the release of nanite-administered medications, while the World Health Organization will be alerted to potential health risks to the community as a whole via wireless connection. This data is anonymized to protect the privacy of the individual.

2. Energy

Nanites constantly manufactured and released into the bowl will break down the waste in the sewage or septic system, converting it into clean-burning fuel, which will be collected from septic systems and waste treatment facilities. This fuel can reportedly be used as a direct replacement for natural gas, and converting systems from gasoline and diesel is intended to be inexpensive. Carbon emissions are expected to decline 30% worldwide.

3. Cleaning Power

When not administering essential medical treatments or breaking down human waste, the nanites controlled by the device will keep the bowl sparkling clean.

You saw it here first, folks. Apple's new creation is going to live up to the hype in ways people haven't even imagined.

Slate re-wiped
Friday, December 4, 2009 • 09:04 AM

I have just deleted all my historical entries. I don't really want to find a way to import them; if they were going to be online, I'd want to read them first and do some cleanup work, discarding stuff I didn't feel should still be online and making sure the formatting was consistent.

That makes the project a fairly large one, and instead of doing it, I've been using the fact that I haven't done it as an excuse not to write new entries. That's bad behavior, and I'm putting a stop to it.

Clean Slate, Scribbled Upon
Thursday, September 3, 2009 • 04:50 AM

After about two years of wanting to, and nearly eleven years to the day since I wrote my first online journal entry, I have finally switched over from Geeklog to WordPress. I've managed to pretty much duplicate my layout without any tables or image-based borders. It seems to work properly in both Safari and Firefox. I'm told it doesn't degrade well in IE6, but I don't really care; if you're still using IE6, then for the love of all that is good, please stop.

Old comments and user accounts are gone; I didn't feel like trying to separate out the hundred or so legitimate ones from the thousand or so spammer accounts set up on the Geeklog system. WordPress should be a bit more secure in that regard.

It is also entirely possible that some layout problems will materialize if a post generates a lot of comments. I haven't tested that. And of course other issues may come up as well. If I find them or you report them, I'll try to fix them as quickly as possible.

I'm going to try hard to migrate all my old entries into the new system. This will take a long time, and will be a great deal of work; about half the entries are in Geeklog, for which there seems to be no reliable converter available, and half are in nonfunctional PHP files that depend upon a Movable Type installation that I no longer have, so they need to be scavenged out of the midst of a bunch of my earliest, very ugliest PHP code. Nonetheless, I'm going to do my best to get it all in there.

I'll be starting from the beginning, so you can enjoy the ramblings of Bill circa 1998 if you're so inclined. Enjoy!