Last week I got fed up with having to make car payments. Cars should be free! Then someone told me about this thing they have called the linux car . . .

The great thing about the linux car is that it’s free and it never gets flat tires. I’m all about saving money and I love free. While everyone else pays huge companies for their car, or taking the bus (which sucks!) I got a car without spending a dime.

The first bad news came when I tried to actually get in the car and drive; I received an error message on the dashboard that said, “No tires detected.”

WTF?

I knew I saw tires when I got into the car. So I got out and checked, and sure enough there were tires on the car. So I got back in and banged on the steering wheel a few times before deciding to check the manual.

After a few hours of poring over the manual I discovered that I had to tell the car about what kind of tires I had.

So, after some digging, I found the button to initiate tire declarations (for some reason it was called INI RUBBER-BASED ROAD INTERFACE LIB EZ). I pushed it and a little sign lit up saying, “If your Linux car is a 2006 model or better you may need to install a rubber-based road interface synchronizer before attempting to declare tire status to the vehicle.”

I went to the hardware store and bought one, but it was the wrong size so I had to go back again. The instructions were in German but I still managed to get in installed. I pushed the button and went on with my tire type declarations, after which the car finally decided to recognize my tires.

Great!- now where’s the gear-shift?

After hours of searching I gave up and called up a friend who’s a real car expert. He chuckled. “Dude, only idiots use gear-shifts. Linux drivers use gear modulating paddles located on the sides of the driverseat. Don’t you know anything about cars? Jeez.”

I made fun of him for being a virgin and then returned to my car. Indeed, the gear modulation paddles were conveniently hidden under the edges of my seat.

I decided to take the car for a spin, so I pulled out of my driveway and the car stalled. A message on the dashboard said, “Before initializing for road driving, please specify your exact model of Linux car.”

It then gave me a list of four hundred vehicle types, each with just a slight difference in model number. I was eventually obliged to take apart a substantial part of the engine in order to see the little model number on the side of the block. Satisfied, I inputted this number into the dashboard once I’d put the engine back together and started off on my first Sunday drive with my brand new Linux car.

After going to the supermarket, which my linux car did more faster and more securely than any car i’ve been in, I decided to drive to the football game. When I got within 3 miles of the stadium, the car started to shake, stalled out and said “Football games cannot be visited in this car.”

So I checked the manual and, sure enough, the linux car will not go within 3 miles of any baseball, football basketball or hockey game . . . but you can take it to a lawn dart tournament or to compatible bowling alleys. Sigh . . . well that sucks.

Finally, when I found out my car wasn’t compatible with my iPod I put the damn thing up on cinderblocks in my front yard and decided to just take the bus.

The bus sucks, true, but you know what? It’s a no-brainer.

I put the reddit button up cuz this is a reddit type of post. Problem is, I don’t think many of you use reddit yet. Give it a try if you haven’t – there’s some great stuff on there, it’s way faster than Digg, and you’ll see a different set of what’s popular on the web.

This little bit of geek humor is because of Pubcon/ light SEO news and a /. comment – hat tip to cheesburger brown. The comment was open source – right?

While trolling digg this morning, I noticed that Google made the front page because of a $30,000 donation to creative commons. Now, don’t get me wrong, if someone in the SEO community were to give $30k to Creative Commons or any charity – that might be link worthy: maybe even Digg worthy.

But why is it news that a company that made $800,000,000 in profits last quarter gave $30k to charity? What is Google putting in the freaking Koolaid to make this a news worthy event? If they weren’t there already, this surely signifies that Google has reached cult status and is now a religion rather than just a company.

“I’d like to start a religion. That’s where the money is!” L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology Cult Founder. 1947.

Compare that paltry donation to what Microsoft did in October. Microsoft had a giving campaign during last month, October, where it matched employee donations, and in one month they raised $63 million dollars. That’s what a one month campaign resulted in. 58% of the employees at MS contributed and MS added $1 for each $1 the employees gave.

Imagine how many people were helped by Microsoft’s Giving last month. Contrast that with how many people will be helped by Google’s Giving. We don’t even need to start on the personal giving of Gates this year – that would put things in an even sillier perspective (if that’s even possible!)

$63 Million dollars vs $30,000. The $30k makes the front page of Digg. The $63M – well at least it went to a good cause.

$63,000,000 / $30,000

So IF This story makes the front page of Digg, Google’s Marketing is 2100 times better than Microsoft’s.

Of course we don’t expect that to happen. For Digg, and much of the blogosphere, Google = God and Microsoft = “teh Bad”. Here’s the button – You can try, but I doubt it will make a bit of difference: