atom feed
comments(0)
link
oh sweet irony
when trying to get to the microsoft msdn reference the other day i was greated with this gem:
you know your operating system is too complicated to configure when your own engineers can't get it set up and keep it running correctly. of course ms is entiled to have issues with their site, but when they don't even have the error page configured correctly, that's just too humorous.
microsoftvideo of the net neutrality commercial
someone has posted a video of the commercial i mentioned a while back that is full of outright lies about net neutrality, and is paid for by internet providers. the bill recently died as the 109th Congress ended, so senator teddy stevens crazy bill that cuts against everything the internet stands for is no more. maybe destroying net neutrality would be good for the internet if it was a series of tubes, but since we all know it's a dump truck, preserving net neutrality is exceptionally important. find out how to help save the internet
technology designed to make your life easier, from lexus
watch as a lexus tries to park itself. this is seriously one of the funniest things i've ever seen. between the guys in the video and the fact that the car tries to park itself on top of the minivan in the next spot, it's just awesome.
flesch-kincaid rules
so i have added the display of flesch-kincaid raw score and grade level to the footer of each post. as i've said previously "i wish i know the algorithm, so i could spit it out on the fly in response to someone's sentence. it's not quite there, but it's close. man, only a 9th grade post. i better throw in some longer sentences and bigger words like antidisestablishmentarianism, that ought to blow my boy flesch away. well i guess 10th grade isn't so bad, i mean usually i just post pictures and swear extensively. btw, code shamelessly stolen from here
firefox 2.0 - take 2
some additional settings tweaks in about:config, found here:
make the tabs get smaller before the tab bar scrolling kicks in:
make the tabs get smaller before the tab bar scrolling kicks in:
browser.tabs.tabMinWidth = 75turn off prefetching:
network.prefetch-next = false
inkling maintenance screen
good to see that inkling markets doesn't take themselves too seriously...
btw, it's a cool wisdom of the crowds market site that you should definitely check out.
firefox 2.0
so i just downloaded firefox 2.0 even though it's not quite officially out yet. took a couple of changes to get it workable for me.
two changes in about:config:
additionally i had to add the following, found here, to my userChrome.css:
so far it seems to be using somewhat less memory, and having spell check and session history live in the browser instead of via add-ons is definitely nice
two changes in about:config:
browser.tabs.closeButtons = 3this makes the tab close button show up on the far right of the tab bar (where it belongs)
browser.urlbar.hideGoButton = truehides the stupid ugly go button next to the address bar that serves no useful purpose
additionally i had to add the following, found here, to my userChrome.css:
/* Disable Container box for "List all Tabs" Button */
.tabs-alltabs-stack {
display: none !important;
}
those changes got me back to the way firefox is supposed to look :)so far it seems to be using somewhat less memory, and having spell check and session history live in the browser instead of via add-ons is definitely nice
net neutrality commercial flat out lies
while watching penguins games on fox sports ny the past two nights, i have seen a net neutrality commercial that i'm actually surprised i haven't found any mention of on the internet. it starts out looking like an election style attack ad. it then goes on to talk about how net neutrality is a bunch of "googly" words that "you" don't understand. it then goes on to say that net neutrality will make "you" pay for what big companies are doing. i can't believe someone is ballsy enough to make and put this commercial on the air. the telcomm companies are already getting paid twice, on the in and on the out. they want companies like google to pay more to ensure a certain level of service. of course, google already has this level of service, so what they are really saying is "give us more money or we'll start intentionally degrading your service."
my best analogy for net neutrality is that currently the internet is like 95 in delaware. you pay to get in, and you pay to get out, and what happens in between is out of your control. what the telcomm companies want to do is make you pay to get in, pay to drive more than 5 miles/hour while in the state, and then pay to get out as well. what's scary is that there's no way google's going to run a counter ad, so this is all "normal" people are going to hear about this.
what's funny is that the telcomms think that google needs their customers more than their customers need google. all it would take to break the telcomm's will would be google putting an announcement up on their site whenever one of those companies' customers hit their site. "your internet provider is forcing your access to google to be slower and less reliable than it was last week. contact their customer support here: 555-555-5555" and the call center would explode. i know that the internet, left to it's own devices, will keep this from happening. my concern is people like senator stevens getting involved with the telcomm's telling him that google is clogging the tubes.
his analogy was a little off in the telcomm's eyes they probably thought it should have looked more like this:
my best analogy for net neutrality is that currently the internet is like 95 in delaware. you pay to get in, and you pay to get out, and what happens in between is out of your control. what the telcomm companies want to do is make you pay to get in, pay to drive more than 5 miles/hour while in the state, and then pay to get out as well. what's scary is that there's no way google's going to run a counter ad, so this is all "normal" people are going to hear about this.
what's funny is that the telcomms think that google needs their customers more than their customers need google. all it would take to break the telcomm's will would be google putting an announcement up on their site whenever one of those companies' customers hit their site. "your internet provider is forcing your access to google to be slower and less reliable than it was last week. contact their customer support here: 555-555-5555" and the call center would explode. i know that the internet, left to it's own devices, will keep this from happening. my concern is people like senator stevens getting involved with the telcomm's telling him that google is clogging the tubes.
the recording industry association of america or nambla
a hypothetical letter from the RIAA: "if you are a 13-year-old girl, do not expect that the bad publicity in the past has made us hesitant to sue little girls—it has only made us hate you even more."
while they have been screwing artists and consumers since 1952
the whole thing is an amusing read
why didn't i think of this...
crazy egg
i'm trying out crazy egg which tracks where people click on the site and displays it in a cool heat map or various other ways. if i find anything interesting from the 2 people that probably ever visit the site i'll post it up. dhh recently posted about crazy egg, and how it's built on ruby on rails, i don't remember where i first heard about it though.
digg gets some work done
even when you're on your way to owning the world, you still have to do server maintenance sometimes.
search engine friendly urls
i've reworked most of the links on the site so they use friendly urls rather than passing raw database IDs on the query string.
geraldo rivera you are a douchebag
maybe geraldo should spend more time with his head up his ass, and less time attacking the daily show and the colbert report. "they exist in a small little place where they count for nothing."- geraldo "douchebag" rivera. those two shows, which are one of few things worth watching on tv currently, and probably have a larger viewer ship than he ever has i'd just like to say i've hated geraldo since day one, clips of him getting punched, shot at, blown over by a hurricane etc. generally make me giggle like a school girl. it's too bad the sent him home from iraq after he gave out troop positions after being explicitly told not to. i think there was a few soldiers there who would have like to have thanked him for his quality, in-depth reporting. oh and the fact that he's on o'reilly, that tells you a lot about our little buddy geraldo. apparently he also attacked keith olbermann, who attacked back in a great clip on his show.
microsoft loves making me cry...
at work i was writing a data access layer for a project i'm leading and i discovered a fun little piece of craziness in vb.net. the data layer would successfully convert most anything i threw at it from the string that it started as to the dbtype that i specified for the parameter in the command object's parameter collection. however the trouble started when i tried to do something crazy, insert a value into a sql server uniqueidentifier column, and boom, it blows up throwing an exception saying it can't convert from string to guid. long story short after bashing my head against the wall trying to do the conversions to no avail, I finally start polking at the guid class in .net, which let me to the fact that guid has a constructor that takes a string. holy crap!!!! so it can convert strings to guids, but just not through any method that you would logically try. sure enough, convert my string to a guid and it all works. i hate you microsoft and i hope this is one of the 9 million little annoyances that's fixed in vb.net 2005
parents television council, i hope your children read the shit i'm writing
i encourage everyone to go to the ptc site and let rescue me's sponsor,s such as wendys, visa, toyota, and staples, know that you think the ptc are close-minded, home-schooled, sheltered morons via their handy form. here's what i sent:
I am writing today to express my concern about your recent sponsorship..... oh wait, no I'm not.
I'm writing to encourage you not to listen to an exceptionally annoying, exceptionally vocal, and exceptionally delusional minority of your customers, known as the Parents Television Council (PTC) and its members. You should not allow yourself to be fooled into the idea that any sane, normal, or educated member of your customer base believes any of the insanity that comes out of PTC representatives' mouths.
The PTC represents and incredibly small portion of the US population, yet according to the FCC's own statistics generates more than 99.9% of all complaints they receive in a given year. These PTC members believe that since they are too self-involved to control what their children watch on TV, the government should do it for them, and attempt to accomplish this by using their small membership to fraudulently create a massive volume of complaints. Yet no one forces them to have cable TV in their homes, to not use TV and cable box features to control what their children watch, or god forbid, supervise their own children and their TV viewing habits. Maybe if they weren't so busy sending millions of copies of emails and letters to people they'd have time to watch what their own children were viewing on TV.
I encourage you not to listen to these ignorant, lazy, self-absorbed, idiots, who claim to speak for the American population at large. I hope you will continue to sponsor Rescue Me, and every other show on the PTC top ten worst list (available here: http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/reports/top10bestandworst/main.asp). As a 23 year old, college graduate, with a large amount of disposable income, I hope to continue to see your delightful adds during episodes of Rescue Me, Family Guy, and everything else the PTC hates. While you might lose one of the six idiots who believes what the PTC says, you'll certainly keep me as a continuing customer. I can also distinguish the difference between reality and TV, just like I can tell the difference between the real world and video games. When the PTC finally mature and develop a method of conversation besides whining, crying, and throwing temper tantrums, they can join the rest of us in reality.
The site then responded: Dear Matt Dragon,
Thank you for taking action on behalf of America's children and grandchildren. Your emails have been sent!
Well you're very welcome PTC, I look forward to meeting your socially disabled, sheltered, home schooled, afraid of the world, gun toting, psychopath children and grandchildren and enlightening them as to how increadibly screwed up their parents and grandparents were for believing in your cause.
I am writing today to express my concern about your recent sponsorship..... oh wait, no I'm not.
I'm writing to encourage you not to listen to an exceptionally annoying, exceptionally vocal, and exceptionally delusional minority of your customers, known as the Parents Television Council (PTC) and its members. You should not allow yourself to be fooled into the idea that any sane, normal, or educated member of your customer base believes any of the insanity that comes out of PTC representatives' mouths.
The PTC represents and incredibly small portion of the US population, yet according to the FCC's own statistics generates more than 99.9% of all complaints they receive in a given year. These PTC members believe that since they are too self-involved to control what their children watch on TV, the government should do it for them, and attempt to accomplish this by using their small membership to fraudulently create a massive volume of complaints. Yet no one forces them to have cable TV in their homes, to not use TV and cable box features to control what their children watch, or god forbid, supervise their own children and their TV viewing habits. Maybe if they weren't so busy sending millions of copies of emails and letters to people they'd have time to watch what their own children were viewing on TV.
I encourage you not to listen to these ignorant, lazy, self-absorbed, idiots, who claim to speak for the American population at large. I hope you will continue to sponsor Rescue Me, and every other show on the PTC top ten worst list (available here: http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/reports/top10bestandworst/main.asp). As a 23 year old, college graduate, with a large amount of disposable income, I hope to continue to see your delightful adds during episodes of Rescue Me, Family Guy, and everything else the PTC hates. While you might lose one of the six idiots who believes what the PTC says, you'll certainly keep me as a continuing customer. I can also distinguish the difference between reality and TV, just like I can tell the difference between the real world and video games. When the PTC finally mature and develop a method of conversation besides whining, crying, and throwing temper tantrums, they can join the rest of us in reality.
The site then responded: Dear Matt Dragon,
Thank you for taking action on behalf of America's children and grandchildren. Your emails have been sent!
Well you're very welcome PTC, I look forward to meeting your socially disabled, sheltered, home schooled, afraid of the world, gun toting, psychopath children and grandchildren and enlightening them as to how increadibly screwed up their parents and grandparents were for believing in your cause.
websites as graphs
jon stewart on senator stevens on the internets
this is the man who is in charge of regulating e-commerce, yes that's right he's the chair of the senate commerce committee.
it's official, the world is coming to an end
there's now a phone that supports "myspace mobile". i think they're advertising should read something like "you know how you could still read 1 or 2 words on the hideously colored, stupid icons bouncing all over the place, steaming pile of crap that is your friends myspace page? now think about displaying that page on a tiny little phone screen....yeah you're head just exploded didn't it...yeah." i wish myspace would just up and die already, it lowers the overall classiness of the internet, and for a technology where 70% of the traffic is porn that's hard to do.
oh france, everything about you is a joke
joe suggested going to google, searching for "french military victories" and pressing "i'm feeling lucky" and he was right, the result is quite humorous
technorati pings
i think i've added support to ping technorati when i update here. btw, curl makes it impossibly difficult to understand how to send non-field data on a post, which is kinda needed to send a xml-rpc request using curl. it seems buy using the postfields option and just not putting and field names, it might work? they should really document this better.
it's like the civil war, but tastier
so flats sent me an email detailing the incredible political turmoil that is overrunning massachusetts with regard to whether or not marshmallow fluff can be served in public schools. it's brother vs. brother all over again as some want to ban the yummy substance, while others want to make the fluffnutter sandwich the official state sandwich. i agree with flats, when they find a way to incorporate it into the state flag it will be a truly wondrous day.
images courtesy of josh
nsa supper kitty
advice from the nsa on removing all hidden information from a word doc before releasing as pdf. i wonder why they got rid of clippy? is he inherently less secure? can they not give him a lie detector test because of his metallic nature?
is it only a matter of time before we get to: "it looks like you're trying to redact information. would you like some help?"
full pdf here
single funniest thing i've seen in a long time, possibly ever
stephen colbert absolutely rips apart shrub and his cronies at the 2006 white house correspondents dinner. in the first 2 minutes he asks someone to wake him up by shooting him in the face, and then asks the president if he's really not there, and then says cheney is "the one man who could have helped" and it just gets better from there. torrent or mirrors for those who need to see it, or a transcript for those who can read.
bling out your t-shirt collection
flash drive shows how full it is
new york times covers iraqi weapons prices
1. you can buy a hand grenade in iraq for less than it takes to fill your suv with gas in the us
2. ak-47s are so common in iraq they cost less than a glock handgun
3. the new york times is using weapons dealer interviews to quantify the fear that residents have in iraq, read the times tomorrow for an analysis of crack prices in a report on americans' happiness.
4. f*cking inflation always gets you
ohio proves it really is a red state at heart
maybe nintendo should add the ability to call the bomb squad to the upcoming mario releases ohio needs to get a sense of humor, particularly around april 1st.
things google just does right
this just hit me today, after using gmail every day for weeks with chat on.
this is the kind of user interface stuff that some people spend their whole life without understanding how perfect this is..
warning symbols by dell
so imagine you open up a box that contains a positively tiny dell x1 and find the teeny tiny laptop inside, contained in a white squishy rectangular bag that looks like this:
what would be your first thought as to what this means? here's a closeup:
now my thought was "it's a white soft rectangle, it means don't use this as a pillow." it's a guy with the rectangle behind his head and yawning, while moving his hand to cover his mouth with his hand. jason on the other hand immediately saw it as don't put this bag over your head and die. i think mine is funnier, though while his is a more common warning topic, it is an interesting new way to display that. the other fun tidbit of information about this warning label was that the image was at the very top toward the sealed end of the bag, which was about 24 inches long. so they put the warning about not killing yourself with the bag 24 inches away from the hole in which you'd put your head when trying to kill yourself. maybe that gives some credence to my pillow interpretation.
oh irony how i missed thee
miss deaf texas struck and killed by train, that is almost as ironic as our previously covered TULSA - Blake Champlin, a Tulsa lawyer and environmental activist, died Monday at his home when a tree supporting a hammock fell and crushed him. I admit it, i felt like a horrible person when i laughed while reading this.
striped raid....floppy drives
why get stuck with 1.4MB from your floppy drive when by running raid 1 across 13 floppy drives you can get 16MB? crazy collage kids.
make snow your bitch...
go get yourself a v8 snowblower, with it's 412 horsepower and weighing in at 912 pounds it'll certainly show the snow who's boss best line in the article: "And if, after a while, you feel you’ve outgrown the 400 horses, this particular engine is well catered for in the performance modification area ... and there’s always the fuel injection option too, if you feel you need to throw the snow out of the county..." Awesome. I think I will need to buy one of these at some point from these fine folks
internet identity tracking
my claimid.com page which allows you to pull together all of the disparate sites you have public accounts at, as well as anything else you have out on the internet.
the onion 4 bazillion, cheney 0, rice -1
the onion weighs in on cheney shooting a man in the face while simultaneously taking a shot a ms. rice
when life gives you lemons, make t-shirts
don't mess with texas, or we'll shoot you in the face that t-shirt can be yours for just $20 direct from texas, where the vice president shot a man, in the face.
cheney's got a gun
the daily show contributes the best spoof of an aerosmith title EVER.
other good news in the president's week:
one of those stories is dancing through little bushy's dreams while he sleeps... i'll leave you to decide which...
other good news in the president's week:
furthering bush's contribution to history, via google
why limit ourselves to miserable failure when we can add impeachable, president douchebag, impeachable douchebag, jerk, etc. also posting to del.icio.us
muslims campagining to represent all that is sane and normal....
it's an allah-damn comic get over yourselves. try reading penny arcade, and get a freaking life. do you think mohammed would have burned down a f*ing cave because some douchebag drew a cave painting he didn't like? btw, i'm quiet proud of "allah-damn," i may look to trademark it. also yes, yes, not all muslims blah blah blah, i don't care. in case you haven't noticed i'm as pc as trent lott at a strom thurman birthday party. go ahead, burn down my web site you douchebags. these seem to be the comics
why send flowers when you can send these?
now that's my kinda tax
shamelessly stolen from bruck's profile: tennessee has a "crack tax" under which drug dealers must pay taxes on their illegal drug sales. for paying their taxes they get stamp, and if they're arrested for selling drugs and don't have the stamp they get charged with dealing and with tax evasion. as far as i'm concerned this is great, and as long as all that money goes to treatment and enforcement i see nothing wrong with it. oh and btw, they took in $2 million last year.
al gore 1, george w. bush 0
who knew that al gore was good for something other than his consumption of o2 and exhalation of co2, oh irony how i love thee. in gore's mlk speech he drew parallels between the fbi's surveillance of mlk during the civil rights movement and bush's no warrant wiretaps against us citizens. now lets see how quickly the democrats run and hide from this potentially worthwhile critique of bush's policies.
i'd like to introduce you to ratcop (refs against the city of pittsburgh)
i know that hockey refs have been incredibly inconsistent when it's come to the tightening of the interference rules. but from all the hockey i've watched, and if you know me you know i watch a lot, there's been a uncountable number of calls that have gone against the penguins when they're leading or trailing by 1 or tied in the last 5 minutes of games that have cost them the game. now this isn't just hooking, interference etc. take tonights game, crosby and two of the canucks are pushing, shoving, slashing each other while armstrong gets a stick to the face for his troubles and who gets penalties? crosby and one of the canucks, not the other guy crosby was battling with and not the guy who high sticked armstrong. there's also been an incredible number of quick whistles during which the penguins would have scored had the ref not forgotten the rule for blowing a puck dead, and at least one occasion where not only did a late whistle cause a goal against the pens, but there was also goalie interference on fluery on the same play which went uncalled.
if i was one for conspiracy theories i would just say that the league is trying to make it easier to move the team by keeping them from being as competitive as they could be. maybe the nhl should issue statements like the nfl did, of course they only commented that one of their two horribly blown calls against the steelers was wrong.(btw joey porter's comment after the game: "I know they wanted Indy to win this game; the whole world loves Peyton Manning. But come on, man, don't take the game away from us like that.", its great that someone said it, i hope they fine him, i'd chip in) so why would the nhl not condemn the poor calls against the pens? hidden motives perhaps?
now the one thing i can't understand is how many of these calls go against crosby, who the league has to realize is the best thing that has happened to them since gretzky if not since some crazy canadian guy took a bent tree branch and ran out onto a frozen pond. unless the league is upset that he went to the pens who they were trying to drain the life out of so they could relocate them. sure crosby has a temper and some of the calls against him are justified, but 90% of the penalties he takes he takes are plays where an opposition player doesn't get called on a blatant penalty and crosby retaliates. say what you will about not retaliating, if the refs did there jobs there would be no retaliation needed.
just for the record i don't really believe most of the conspiracy stuff that i am saying, but it's hard to explain a lot of this away.
oh and btw, the family guy where optimus prime is jewish, freaking awesome.
demotivation needs to take it to the next level...
it's really too bad their os is so damn user friendly...
cause apple comes out with some seriously cool toys...
magnetic power plug connection, two fingers on the touchpad scrolls, backlit keyboards, linux on one of these bad boys would really fly.
i don't know what cnn was watching...
they say i have too much free time...
but i've got nothing on these guys. mario, luigi, and the princess rock out at what i can only assume is some sort of talent show. if they didn't win i hope all the judges were shot. this just goes to show you i actually have a healthy amount of free time in the grand scheme of things.