Never could the category title be more apropos. Where to start?

I put this SQL file with all the ISO 3166 country codes on my other web site. It sounds dumb, but it gets a couple hundred downloads a week. Someone obviously finds it useful. And in fact, I sometimes get emails thanking me for putting it on the web. I get maybe 5 emails a month, and it's nice to read them. It makes it feel worthwhile, like I've helped someone in some small way.

Anyway, I got an email tonight from this guy Ted. He said thanks, and he also said that "by way of compensation" I might enjoy this web site if I was "a thinking sort of man" in need of a mental break. And I am. And I do. It was a clever 'thank you' to get -- easily one of the best so far.

So I kept hitting reload for a while and then it occurred to me that I could use these images at home. I already have a pretty decent collection of random images just from what people send me attached to email. These would make perfect additions to my collection. I wrote a small script to grab them all and store them on my internal web server. Then I wrote a little PHP code for the server's main page that grabbed a random image and displayed it along with the page.

This was nice and all, but something was missing. The images needed captions. Random captions for random images. So I added a little code to print the output of the fortune program, right below the image. I wound up reloading that like a dumbfounded idiot for about 15 minutes.

It's absolutely amazing how some of the captions fit the image exactly. I'm serious. About 75% of them apply to the image somehow. It's eerie. Spooky, even. It's also often hilarious, at least in a Zippy sort of way.

It's cool when ideas come from all over and form a spontaneous completeness. Now my home page has a little moment of zen.