Check out the “Dead Thesis Society”:http://freewebhosting.hostdepartment.com/d/deadthesissociety/resources.html which runs a “Yahoo Groups email list”:http://groups.yahoo.com/group/deadthesissociety/ for peer support and also has an excellent “resource library”:http://freewebhosting.hostdepartment.com/d/deadthesissociety/resources.html (displacement activity?). I checked out some of the humour sections – “how to tell you are a grad student”:http://www.cs.umbc.edu/www/graduate/how-to-tell.html is quite good, and I always liked the earlier, funny Matt Groening but I didn’t realise (or forgot) that he “wrote about grad school”:http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~dmirman/gradschoolhell/schoolishell.html. This one – “Why God Never Got Tenure”:http://www.stanford.edu/~smarti/Fun/godtenure.html particularly tickled me.

Thanks to Marcelo Vieta for the link

I am not an online roleplaying game player myself but I know enough about how they work that this article – “The Automated Online Roleplayer”:http://www.gamespy.com/fargo/august03/autorpg/index.shtml made me laugh long and loud.

Published in The New Yorker February 16, 2004

(NB you can browse all the cartoons in the New Yorker’s current issue each week “here”:http://www.cartoonbank.com/prints_currentissue.asp)

A 23-year-old Oxford student with no knowledge of economics bluffed his way into a trip to China to teach a course on the subject at Beijing University to business leaders. He thought he was just going to be delivering a single lecture to school students so he figured he could get away with it. He was probably offered the work because he shares the same name as a New York University professor. See BBC News and “The Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/02/20/nchina20.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/02/20/ixhome.html (requires registration) for more complete details – they broke the story originally.

(Note for non-Brits – the textbook he used to produce his lectures – “An Introduction to Global Financial Markets”:http://www.palgrave-usa.com/Catalog/product.aspx?isbn=0312233477 – is aimed at advanced high school students).

Watch and laugh at “The Man Behind The Motion”:http://www.ryantown.com/manbehindthemotion/ from Ryan McFaul. An interest in computer gaming is not required…

The concept – man falls in love with virtual woman – is not that original any more – but Flicka – a 12 minute Dutch film from “AtomFilms”:http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/, is genuinely touching. It is one of the films currently showing through their new free “Hi-Def”:http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/af/spotlight/collections/hidef/ service which downloads films in the background so you can see them at close to full-screen resolution (why don’t more sites offer this instead of streaming?). Most of the films have been frankly pretty poor (you don’t get to choose what you are sent) but Flicka was for me a genuine discovery.

The way HiDef works the films are recycled every two weeks so if you want to see it, download now. (note: the download and movie playing software is PC-only).

Stupid callers to tech support. Though there are hundreds of sites out there about this subject I thought it was worth highlighting this recent collection of anecdotes from the crowd at “b3ta”:http://www.b3ta.com/ because they are predominantly British (many other sites are more American and more business/corporate in what they focus on).

The first page you get to is a selection of favourites from among the 12 (!) other pages of anecdotes. It’s hard to choose a single favourite from that page but this anecdote certainly tickled me:

We managed to sell some software recently, and the client/user insisted on instaling it himself. Despite my suggestions that his IT guy do the install, or better yet, I could do it for him, he was convinced in his own ability. Fine.
I called up the day after to check on how things went, but he seemed somehow less sure of himself than previously, and mumbled something about how you had to know the little tricks to get things working these days, before he hung up.
3-4 days later their IT bloke calls me asking if they can, “erm, have another copy of the software, please”. It turned out the user had put the pc on the floor so the CD drive was in a vertical position, and glued the CD into the drive tray to stop it falling out before the tray moved back inside the case.

… and even more surprisingly they aren’t charging for it! Deloitte Consulting has provided the Internet community Bullfighter – an add-on for Word 2000 & PowerPoint 2000 (or later) which gives you a rough idea of a document’s readability taking into account its Fleisch index and the number of annoying corporate buzzwords embedded in it.

When I first saw this ad in the Weekend Guardian I thought it had to be satirical but no, the ingenious marketers at Bright Life UK (they don’t have a website, oddly enough) have found a new way of unloading a boatload of hideous old typewriters. ‘Save £1000 on the cost of buying a computer’ (actually a quick Internet search finds some which would be £12 cheaper).

But best of all is the appeal to nostalgia – ‘Makes a fabulous gift for all those who remember the good old days’. I remember the days of typing high school essays on a manual typewriter like this and there was nothing fun about it at all. In fact, it was the hassle I experienced then that encouraged me to get an Apple ][ in the first place!

Corbis was one of the few sites that offered E-Cards (photographs) on a wide variety of subjects that you might actually not mind sending to people. Now it seems the only Corbis sites will be aimed at “business presenters”:http://bizpresenter.corbis.com/default.asp and “professional users”:http://pro.corbis.com/ (eg magazines). Oh well – back to “Hallmark”:http://www.hallmark.com/hmk/Website/pass_ecards.jsp?CONTENT_KEY=&CONTENT_TYPE=None&fromPage=%2fWebsite%2fISE%2ftp_section.jsp&nav=CARDS&lid=BPF1 which is just about bearable I guess – or for those with patience and a broadband connection the “Historic Tale Construction Kit”:http://www.adgame-wonderland.de/type/bayeux.php

Can anyone recommend free birthday and holiday-related ecard services that are actually tasteful?