Archive for August, 2007
Interesting posts, the OCHO!
August 31st, 2007 • interesting posts
Hopefully this one will get published on time and I don’t have any of those real life delays like…relaxation or something silly like that. Here’s the Ocho!
I know, I know, it’s CNN and it’s probably 95% utter garbage but it’s still worth a watch. Thanks for this, vjack!
I don’t hate Texas, I really don’t but I do have this growing mountain of reasons to never visit this backwards state. I’ll probably espouse on this one more in a separate post.
I know a lot of smart people in Australia and I have no idea how they can live in a country filled with such dolts. The government spent $84M AU on a web filter that was bypassed in less than an hour. Then they put a new one up that was bypassed just as quickly! WTF Australia, seriously. First the knobs at Telstra think they can control an entire country’s email by filtering out any useful ESP and now this. Do you guys still drive cars that are foot powered too?
Many of these are aesthetic changes made either by Greasemonkey or Stylish but some can be helpful such as Twittercal.
A giant communal spider web was found in Texas of all places. Chalk that up as another reason to never move there: insane spider webs.
I read this last night and could hardly contain my laughter. Why is it that so many fundamentalists and other uninvolved parents think their children know nothing of sexual acts or what curse words are? There’s more filth on FX’s Nip/Tuck than in the books quoted to be “lascivious”.
This is just beyond description.
Tangled Bank 87
August 31st, 2007 • blog, carnival
The new Tangled Bank blog carnival is up at Balancing Life. I have so much reading to do this weekend 
. Maybe Shisha or Funky Buddha have free wifi I can use while imbibing sweet coffees and aromatic shisha?
New Four Stone Hearth
August 29th, 2007 • anthropology, carnival
The new Four Stone Hearth is up at Hominin Dental Anthropology. Oh, this is going to make a sweet read at work tomorrow.
Does reporting spamvertising to hosts make a difference?
August 29th, 2007 • email, spam
I just read the following article about reporting spammers to their web hosts in order to deter their activities and how it’s more effective than anything else (via TechDirt). Since this is something I do every day, I have to strongly disagree with these people. Reporting spamvertising does stop it from occurring…from that particular web host, it doesn’t stop it in general. We gets tons of reports everyday about spamvertised sites and we take them down. I follow up on these sometimes and notice that the spammers just take their sites elsewhere and continue on, the cycle continues and nothing has changed. This is how these people make money and you’re not going to stop them from spamvertising (advertising a site solely through spam tactics) ever. While reporting is a good tactic, it’s not at all effective.
Our abuse email address at work receives spam, just like any other address, and many times it’s the same one over and over again from different addresses. Every few weeks, the URLs in the emails change but the email is still the same and their aim is the same. If people truly think that reporting spamvertising is really going to stop it, they need to stop reporting it altogether and find something more worthwhile to do such as develop filters that are capable enough of recognizing and filtering these emails out before they even reach a user. No matter what moves we make on the administrative side, spammers are always three steps ahead and their tools are so automated that there is very little they really have to do in order to continue making money.
Bodily stress
August 28th, 2007 • chatter
Now that I work at home, I’m beginning to remember why I dislike office desks so much and why good ones are so expensive — along with decent office chairs. My desk, for lack of a better word, sucks and my nice Ayreon knock-off chair is equally sucky. I can’t seem to get both of them to meet at a happy medium where no part of my body hurts after work. Today I woke up with a severe soreness in between my shoulder blades which I’m used to from sitting in another equally uncomfortable chair for hours on end. However, I remained quite sedentary on our new couch last night so I know this soreness isn’t caused by my squad of unergonomic chairs. Adjusting the arms somewhat relieves the pain in my shoulders but then something else ends up hurting and my desk doesn’t help that much. When I sit at my desk, trying to figure something out, I tend to lean heavily on my elbows and just last week I found two little divots in the desk from my elbows. So now I need to keep my elbows off my desk but then that leads me back to the problem with my chair…vicious circle.
Buying anything semi-ergonomic is currently out of the question simply because I’m not made of money. But if I were made of money, I’d be less worried about stress and more about catching fire.
Teen tries to cool Xbox with water
August 27th, 2007 • chatter, idiocy
I’ve heard of kids — and adults as well — doing some pretty dumb things in an effort to cool down hot electronics but this takes the cake: Teen immerses powered on Xbox in bowl of water. The poor kid is going to be ridiculed for at least a month about this and rightfully so. I guess he was so busy playing Gears of War or some other shooter to read the manual where it will plainly state that electronics and water do not mix. In fact, all electronics carry this warning…for this very reason. Maybe kids in North Carolina aren’t being taught to read any more? I know they were back in ‘98 when I was in school in Elkin, NC.
Interesting posts, part siete
August 25th, 2007 • interesting posts
While I didn’t find a lot of interesting news this week however, I did find tidbits that made me say “Finally!”
I know this is making kids happier, especially our neighbor. I don’t know why school districts are so hell bent on getting kids out of bed and to school at 8AM — or earlier — because of bus scheduling. I don’t know about you but the time my job starts isn’t dependent on when my transportation can get me there. Hopefully more schools come to their senses and realizes kids hate getting up at 6AM to trudge to school.
SciVee is being pitched as the “YouTube for Science”. Hey whatever works to get people to look at the site. It’s a site chock full of science videos by scientists and it’s all very nice to use. Each video is typically linked to a paper about the subject matter written by the video’s author/producer. Very nice.
I don’t know when I’ll need to use one of these but I know I will need to so perhaps I should order two.
This is an unofficial site that scrapes images/videos from reddit.com however, it’s not actually produced by the Reddit crew. When will the guys behind Reddit learn that the people that made Reddit popular and got it to where it is hate most of the inane images and video posted on the site? We’ve been asking for that garbage to be filtered off into a subreddit but I guess with all the new Conde Nast money, they’re less worried about listening to users. This unofficial site is a nice step in the right direction but by the wrong guy.
A crafty Japanese player has figured out how to turn ordinary Super Mario levels into intricate Rube Goldberg machines. Most of the videos are pretty good however, there are obvious spots where the player is actually using the controller although, these videos are purported to be 100% completed without user intervention.
Maki offers up more helpful tips for generating weekend traffic with little effort. I know that social networking works great, especially from StumbleUpon (submitting anything not Apple/I-hate-Microsoft/Linux-Ubuntu/Bush sucks/etc it’s pointless to submit to Digg).
Something finally surpassed the Nintendo DS in overall sales, that hasn’t happened since the DS was released a few years ago. It’s great to see the Wii passing everything since it was such an underdog system and the overhyped — as usual — Sony product has failed to sell much of anything.
Yay for network outages
August 25th, 2007 • chatter
Layeredtech, where my box is hosted, had some serious backbone issues last night so my site was practically unavailable for hours. Yay
*orders from caro*
Interesting posts 6
August 20th, 2007 • interesting posts
This was supposed to have been published yesterday but I spent the whole day unplugged and at a local hookah bar.
Using advanced radar imagery, archaeologists are discovering more of this sprawling, ancient city.
A recently unearthed ancient forest in a Hungarian coal mine will give climatologists and scientist a glimpse into the climate of ancient Eurasia and the Earth as a whole. As much as this is a look into the past, it’s a race against time since the protective sand and coal are now gone and the trees will quickly erode
Congress withdrew the US in a global math and science exam that is used to measure our educational progress against those of other countries. This should come as no surprise to anyone that keeps tabs on the nation’s sad state of education. Whatever happened to Bush’s master plan of No Child Left Behind? Seems our whole country was just left behind.
A judge ruled that Novell still owns the copyrights that SCO claims to be under its control in the UNIX source code. This was discussed about 2 years ago but I’m guessing this is the final judgment in the case that we all saw coming. Similarly to Microsoft, SCO is claiming that it owns certain IP (intellectual property) in the UNIX code base but has yet to ever produce evidence of such and clings to its false claims. Funny, people stated the same thing when they sued IBM…and lost.
I find it hard to believe that any state above the Mason-Dixon actually has a written law against blasphemy and in a state whose past is riddled with rebellion.
Very insightful and reasonably smart questions with poignantly smart answers
PowerTOP is an Intel-backed application that aims to lower power consumption on Linux-based computers in order to consume less energy and have a smaller carbon footprint. I remember needing something like this a little over a year ago when I was running ion3 and bare minimums on a Linux install on my laptop and the battery still only lasted an average of 3 hours. With applications that consume little memory and CPU cycles, you’d think that you would squeeze out more battery life but you’d be wrong!
That’s it for this last week!
BR561 as a new project and it …
August 18th, 2007 • tweets
BR561 as a new project and it definitely has interesting social bedfellows already.
