My number 2 (that’s number 2 as in secondary, not as in going number 2 although in this case that works too) monitor died this morning. Goodnight, sweet prince.

Comments

Comment by Tobin on 2004-05-05 07:49:59 +0000

My condolences.

Comment by Sarah on 2004-05-05 14:39:43 +0000

What a way to start Cinco de Mayo.

Comment by Carrie on 2004-05-05 19:33:12 +0000

Now you’re just a One Monitor Joe like the rest of us.

Comment by Carrie on 2004-05-05 23:49:26 +0000

May flights of angels wing thee to thy rest

Even though I already get site statistics, including referral information, over at SiteMeter I decided to install Refer from Textism just because it looked kind of interesting. As you can see here, it does just what it claims to do. Unfortunately, this also gave me my first encounter with referral log spamming, since random pr0n sites are popping up in that log. I’m fairly certain they don’t actually link to me. Once again this confirms the idea that spammers are out to ruin anything and everything they can get to. It’s weird though, since I’d never seen any of this under SiteMeter (and in fact, the junk referrals still don’t show up there). I figure either SiteMeter manages to filter out the junk somehow, or spammers specifically target sites with an installation of Refer.

Comments

Comment by Brett on 2004-05-05 09:18:30 +0000

It’s only recently that I have been getting porn spams on my statistics. I was wondering where they were coming from. I’m glad to know I’m not the only one

Comment by Neal on 2004-05-05 22:51:17 +0000

Perhaps the purveyors of porn posess a particular preoccupation with your periodic postings.

I can’t stop watching this. Or this. Or this. Why? Whyyyyyyyyyyyy? What’s wrong with me. I blame you, Khaaaaan!

Comments

Comment by Kimmee on 2004-05-04 11:42:21 +0000

i can’t even handle the Jean-Luc Picard one. why are French accents so funny?

Comment by Kimmee on 2004-05-04 12:07:16 +0000

http://jumptokahnclusions.ytmnd.com/

Comment by Neal on 2004-05-04 13:21:49 +0000

Normally I get annoyed when sites only work in IE, but after coming to work and firing up those sites I decided that IE users got the short end of the stick on that one.

Comment by Carrie on 2004-05-04 18:45:46 +0000

ROTFLMFAO!

I think I peed my pants.

Looks like that under its new ownership eMusic (see previously) has started to branch out. They’re starting a trial for a service that will put kiosks in rock clubs where you can pay to get mp3s of a show immediately afterwards. I’d heard previously of places where you could purchase a cd of the show, but this way you can just get the show on a keychain memory stick. That seems like a much better idea to me. Not only because I rip all my cds to mp3 right away anyway, but because without the need for recordable media it might be cheaper and more appealing to venues. I certainly hope it catches on. Live recordings usually don’t do too much for me (depending on the band) but to be able listen to the shows you’ve been to and hear specific parts you remember (“And here’s where that drunken idiot yelled ‘Freebird’ right during the quiet part of this song…”), well I think that’d be great.

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2004-05-02 19:25:02 +0000

The concert mp3 thing sounds great … it’s so … futuristic! 😉

Comment by G on 2004-05-03 18:35:50 +0000

I LOVE JOLAYNE!

Looking at the recent mass of identical nonsensical comments on my last post (which are soon to be deleted) it looks like I’ve become the target of MT comment spamming. I really thought I’d be too small time to get hit with comment spam, but I guess I underestimated the depths to which spammers sink. I guess they won’t stop until they manage to spray everything on the internet with a thick layer of crap. I guess I’ll see if it keeps up or not before I take action. My options seem limited to either requiring registering to be able to comment (to those of you that occasionally comment: would you mind this?) or getting the MT-Blacklist plugin set up.

Comments

Comment by Dan on 2004-04-29 00:53:06 +0000

Ahh. You’ve reached the rite of passage. I’ve only had two waves of spammers. Been lucky since then. MT3.0 is supposed to have some pretty nifty blacklisting options, whenever it comes out.

Comment by Carrie on 2004-04-29 03:01:47 +0000

I wouldn’t mind registering … if it helps keep spammers away, I’m all for it.

Comment by dave on 2004-04-29 16:30:08 +0000

Spammers have gotten me a couple times. Because of that, I wound up disabling commenting for most entries on my Movable Type site. Most of the people who comment on my stuff usually do so in LiveJournal, so it works out OK for them.

I’ve read that earlier versions of MT had worse, where it would use a mail sender script within MT to propagate spam; I’m very glad not to have been bitten by that one.

Even though I do 99.78% of my online gaming on the PC, I’m still pretty intrigued by Xbconnect, which was pointed out to me by a resourceful co-worker (one of the few people I know of at work that’s a gamer, which I find odd for a software company). Anyhow, Xbconnect is a program that tricks your Xbox into thinking it sees other Xboxes (Xboxen?) on a LAN when in fact they are on the inter-web. This lets you engage in Xbox Live style multiplayer action, sans yearly fees. When I heard about the program, I had really expected it to just be something simple where you had to know the IP addresses of the boxes you wanted to play with. Not so, it actually comes with a pretty good match making setup for finding people to play games against. Right now the only game I have to play online is Halo, but now that I can play online without signing up for Live, I’m thinking of picking up either Crimson Skies or Mech Assault now.

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2004-04-26 14:25:41 +0000

Ingenious. Stick it to the man!

Finally got around to seeing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with Jolayne tonight, and not a moment too soon as it was only playing at one theater in the area anymore. Excellent film, made me wish I’d taken some cognitive science classes while I was in school. I just find it interesting, to try and imagine how we store data and even more interesting how we index and retrieve it. I’m betting I’m just using a CMap or some other piece of MFC garbage. That would explain a lot. (See, that’s me for you. Not that I didn’t appreciate the love and loss components of the film, but ultimately it left me thinking about hacking the brain) Anyway, back to the film. It was pretty much what you’d expect from a film with a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry (and that’s not a bad thing at all). Quirky plot that often folds back in on itself, matched up with visuals that could have come from a Björk video. I thought the bit with Elijah Wood’s character was a little under-developed and never really resolved, but Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet were excellent. Watching their relationship play out in reverse and slowly slip away was fascinating due to all the different subtle (and not so subtle) methods the film used to portray the loss of memories. Also nice: a bit part by David Cross.

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2004-04-24 11:46:44 +0000

That was David Cross! I totally didn’t recognize him.

Great movie eh? 😀 Glad ya liked it!

Came across this page today for something called the ID Sniper, a modified sniper rifle that fires a GPS tracking chip into a target (without the target being aware of it) to allow tracking of the chip. Supposedly it feels like “a mosquito-bite lasting a fraction of a second.” The idea is to allow law enforcement agencies to keep track of suspicious people. Sounds like [a valuable tool in the “War on Terror” || a Big Brother control device] depending on your point of view. There’s one other thing though: it’s not real. It just seemed implausible to be able to hit someone with something as large as a GPS device at a high enough velocity to penetrate skin and still be unnoticeable. Their other product “JUJU the Citizen Eye” seems pretty obviously satirical. A quick Googling confirmed that it was indeed a hoax. The scary thing is though, that even though this one isn’t real, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if something like this were actually under development somewhere. It’s honestly not that far out.

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2004-04-22 07:26:58 +0000

Yiiikes.

Ok, so I was reading this article on MSNBC about the deaths of US contractors in Iraq and it got me thinking on a tangent. In the article there is a quote from Halliburton on the loss of its workers: “There is no road map for something like this and we are doing everything we can to assist the families as well as our employees to cope with this huge tragedy.” The use of the phrase “road map” was what really made me pause. “Road map” is one of those buzzwords that seems to have caught hold lately in corporate and government organizations. For example, the road map for the middle east peace process. Its even in common use at the company I work for. It’s no longer enough to have a plan, you have to have a “road map”. Words and phrases like these arise all the time in corporate cultures. The CEO says something in a big company meeting, and by the next day you can’t get through a single meeting or even break room conversation without hearing it 10 times. It just works its way into the company lexicon and everyone knows what it means. Often the language will make the jump from organization to organization and you end up with the widely recognized buzzwords, like “synergy” or the classic Dilbert example, “proactive”. What really bothers me though, is that the spokesperson for Halliburton couldn’t express a statement of sympathy without slipping into corp-speak. I don’t think they used it out of ill-intent or disrespect, in fact they probably weren’t even aware of that choice of language. But to me, the edge of inhumanity that it gives to the remark is unsettling. I may well be making a big deal out of nothing, but after being surrounded by the language of corporations I find myself being extra sensitive to it.

Comments

Comment by Tobin on 2004-04-20 21:47:25 +0000

Hear hear. I’m tired of the corporate talk too. If I hear my boss talk about having some “database opportunities” or “network opportunities”, I’m going to scream. (ok, no I’m not)

But why can’t we just say we have problems? It’s ok to have problems, or issues, or hurdles. Why do they have to be opportunities? It’s so stupid.

Comment by Carrie on 2004-04-22 07:33:21 +0000

“Road map” sounds less scary compared to “quagmire” or “imbroglio” when you’re talking about Iraq.

Just like “insurgent” is a much nicer word to use than the phrase “legitimately pissed off Iraqis who just want their country back”

There’s a cool article from Lawrence Lessig in this month’s Wired on the potential for intentionally destructive technologies to arise and more importantly, the circumstances that would influence a group to use them. One of the reasons: “Our present course of unilateral cowboyism will continue to produce generations of angry souls seeking revenge on us.” While I’m not sure how plausible I find doomsday scenarios in general, I have little doubt that with the way our nation conducts its self internationally and the increasing amount of tech available to various factions that feel marginalized, a catastrophic event of that nature seems almost inevitable.

Comments

Comment by Neal on 2004-04-20 08:45:18 +0000

Thanks for pointing that out – that was a good article. Larry Lessig is one of my heros.

Comment by Carrie on 2004-04-22 07:34:34 +0000

Unilateral Cowboyism … that’d be a great name for a band