Irrelevant Friday #2 (!)

I missed out on IF last week, probably as a result of cosmic wind or brain farts -- or maybe I am just rebellious enough to forgo an outlet for irrelevance that I created. But, hey, I found my way back to vanilla-living this week, so let's begin.

First, in "WTF?!" news, I found a Goodreads account of a man named (apparently) Will Colbert. A 73 year-old man who has been on the site since 2007, he has not found the time to add many books to his profile, yet he has 1,260 friends, most of them attractive young women. Though certain to raise an eyebrow or two already, this story gets weirder

On this man's profile page it shows that he made a thread on a Goodreads group called "We miss Hannah." The group's description says, "Hannah was killed today at 9 a.m." but leaves it at that. The group has only one discussion, the one created by Will, which features many of the group's 29 members writing around like headless chickens. The thread has no clear answers to the riddle of the group name and description, and I, Internet user that I am, am inclined to call the whole thing a hoax. A very odd kind of hoax, yes, but accepting the situation as true only adds a few points to the odd-o-meter.

In technology news, the first alpha release of Haiku OS came out on September 14th. Though I only recently learned about this project, it has sent several shock-waves and thrills through my brain (and hair). Based on the proprietary BeOS, which went defunct in 2001, Haiku has been in development ever since. Just imagine the dedication -- and distinct lack of more interesting things to do -- required to work on a completely free project for eight years, to reach the very first test release. I could never do it, but it least now it seems to be paying off for the developers and the world at large. Haiku incorporates many new features unheard of from the three conventional operating systems. And while it will be many years before the average Joe -- even an average Linux Joe like myself -- can fully enjoy these improvements, it's nice to see something radically new in the open-source world.