Yep, that’s right! I’m actually awake! Ready to go out the door in fact. Got to go right now, being picked up. Got up at 6:15 though!
Mon, 2005-01-24 (Jan 24)
Wed, 2005-01-19 (Jan 19)
Comment Spam-Be-Gone: Thank You Google!
“Google”:http://www.google.com/ has done it again: solved a major problem on the web. Fixed Comment Spam! It was a blindingly obvious fix, but only with the usual 20/20 hindsight :-) It will take a little while to make a difference in the number of comment attacks, until all blogs are updated to take advantage of it. The major services out there (including LiveJournal for some of my readers) have it or are implementing it right away, in cooperation with Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search. Robert “brought it to my attention”:http://robert.accettura.com/archives/2005/01/18/no-more-spam/ from his blog and I checked out (as you should) this Google post called “Preventing comment spam“:http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html on Google’s official blog. All the gory (not really) details.
Very elegant, but it does require the major search engines, the reason for the comment spam problem, to implement ignoring the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all links they index. Fortunately, that’s exactly what has happened, and why this is even news!
So, Google, thank you once times a “googol”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=googol&btnG=Google+Search!
Sun, 2005-01-16 (Jan 16)
LibraryLookup
Another awesome library-related web tool (the first I mentioned was “LibraryElf”:http://www.existdifferently.com/archives/2005/01/16/library-elf/) is the “bookmarklet(Google for term to define)”:http://www.google.com/search?q=bookmarklet creation tool over at “Jon Udell’s LibraryLookup”:http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/stories/2002/12/11/librarylookup.html page. If you live in Indianapolis, Indiana (or in the county of Marion in Indiana), you can use his customize tool to “build your own bookmarklet”:http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/stories/2002/12/11/librarylookupGenerator.html that lets you, when browsing Amazon.com or another similar web merchant, click this bookmarklet in your toolbar to open a search for that book at your local library! Easy way to save money buying a book that’s at your library!
This is very cool. If you go to the “Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library(IMCPL)”:http://www.imcpl.org/ you can just drag this link to your bookmarks/favorites/links bar, go to a page at Amazon (see “my LibraryElf post”:http://www.existdifferently.com/archives/2005/01/16/library-elf/ for some Amazon links), and click the bookmarklet to try it yourself! It seems that IMCPL returns the identical match in a list of search results, but it seems the exact ISBN match is the third item down, so click the third ISBN down in the results to see the actual book information.
Note that if you use his “custom bookmarklet generator”:http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/stories/2002/12/11/librarylookupGenerator.html (which I did to create the link above) the values for IMCPL are:
Base URL: http: //catalog.imcpl.org/
Library Name: [whatever you want to call the link]
Vendor: "iPac" is the one you must select
(note: remove the space between the “http” and the “catalog.imcpl.org” above, I had to add it to get it to show up correctly in this post)
I provide this information because it was very hard to figure out that “iPac” was the correct vendor type, since it doesn’t mention that specific vendor anywhere on IMCPL’s site. Try it, you’ll like it!
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Library Elf
In news important enough to deserve its own entry, I found a great new little resource over at “LibraryElf“:http://www.libraryelf.com/ that I found through a great little “post at 43 Folders“:http://www.43folders.com/2005/01/lazyweb_library.html. It gives you an RSS feed, and emails, with notifications of books due at the local public library here in town (they added ours, in one day, at my request!) and several others around the country. Granted, the local library already has reminder emails. But this site will not just email you, but text message your cell phone and provide a nice little RSS feed you can stick in your newsreader to let you know when what’s due, or overdue. With customizable reminder times (library’s limited to three days prior to due date), and the ability to notify you when holds are ready to be picked up as well!
For those with big families of book-checker-outers, or those with accounts at multiple libraries that ‘Elf supports, you can add multiple cards to one account and it will track all of them for you on the same system. Makes tracking all your stuff that much easier, even if they don’t let you place holds or auto-renew the books online through their system at the moment.
I’m thinking maybe if they allowed you to place holds on books you find in the library’s catalog (wait, I know the library lets you do this already through their site, let me finish!), but add them to an “interest queue” (see the second comment at that 43 Folders post above, which links to “Netflix for books or ‘interest queues'”:http://www.sauria.com/blog/computers/open_source/osaf/chandler/1129) that monitors when I return books and puts the next book or two on hold for me automatically. That would give the library more books on its shelves (so I don’t have to check out 30 books on a topic because I don’t want to forget to get them, then renew them up to the 15-times max unless someone else requests them). And me a more manageable stack of books to read at once, while letting me get to my “wish list.” But ‘Elf doesn’t place holds yet, so it’s a dream for the moment. Enough from, me go check it out!
Unrelated: “this is cool”:http://www.lazyweb.org/.
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I’m baaack…and funnier than ever!
Not that I’ve really gone anywhere. Or become funnier than ever (I just find and link to funny stuff, in case you hadn’t noticed). I’ve just been busy. And every time I get some time I could be posting, I pick up one of the five or so books I’m reading instead. Come on, it’s only been eight days. Plus work takes a lot of time. If anyone wants to donate a salary equal to that which I’m making now (preferrably more, and no, I won’t tell you what it is :-) I could switch to blogging full time. Any takers?
Didn’t think so. Just in case, the lines of communication are always open…
Anyway, I’ve been reading a lot of good books, which I need to at least link to soon, if not review. And of course there’s the usual day-to-day life happenings, but I tend to forget those after 24 hours anyway, so you may not get a combined update of time I spend not posting here. If you really want to know some personal details, all the other cousins on my Dad’s side of the family came from Illinois to our house today (there’s three of ’em besides my brother and me). The goal? Get a photo taken of the five of us together to give to our grandma (we call her Busha since she’s Polish and that’s how you say grandma in Polish…or at least that’s what I’ve been told my whole live, I don’t exactly speak Polish so I can’t vouch for authenticity) for her birthday this year. Goal accomplished, and my family got a new family photo while we were at it (the last one was from the early ’90s, so it did need a bit of updating!). Plus it was good to spend the day with them, we haven’t seen them in a long time. The five of us have ages that are, youngest-to-oldest, 15, 20, 21, 25, and 32. My brother and I are the youngest. Next are two girls that are the daughters of one of my Dad’s sisters, then the son of my Dad’s other sister. Not like you care terribly much, so I’ll stop the info there. And get on with the humor.
“ForeverGeek”:http://www.forevergeek.com/ (an excellent blog itself) has a great link to an article entitled, “Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?“:http://forevergeek.com/entertainment/is_your_son_a_computer_hacker.php that you must check out. They provide a quick quote from the article so I won’t give you preview…the full article they link to is “over here”:http://www.adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html and in case you can’t tell, it’s satire. Very, very funny satire, made more so by the pages of comments you can find at the bottom made by many, many people who actually think the article is serious and publish rebuttals, or just call the article stupid! But the reasons for that are explained in another “Adequacy.org”:http://www.adequacy.org article, “Writing Satire For A Technical Audience“:http://www.adequacy.org/public/stories/2002.1.28.213530.133.html. Heck, that one might actually be a lot funnier than the first one! Depends on who you are, I guess. If you enjoy those — and still have time left, as they aren’t short — try this one: “Internet Licenses: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?“:http://www.adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.12.28.55410.553.html
ovingMay onway otay otherway tuffsay, oogleGay ashay away ranslationtay “intoway igpay atinlay”:http://www.google.com/intl/xx-piglatin/! ockRay onway, oogleGay! Iway riedtray otay earchsay orfay ymay itesay onway itway, andway itway idn’tway indfay anythingway henway Iway usedway igpay atinlay otay erformpay ethay earchsay: “Ouryay earchsay – “existway ifferentlyday“:http://www.google.com/search?hl=xx-piglatin&q=existway+ifferentlyday&btnG=Google+Earchsay – idday otnay atchmay anyway ocumentsday.”
Anywayway (oops, enough of that — but I was getting fluent at the typing while issuing forth the above paragraph from my fingers (not quite as fluent as I am at speaking it, however)), on to some comics: here are “two”:http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19990211 “UserFriendly“:http://userfriendly.org/ “comics”:http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19990815 that are rather funny, if you know what they mean. I supposed you’ll have to read them to find out if you do. If you don’t understand them, follow the directions in the first ;-)
If you’re ready to be done with the humor for a minute, here’s a link to two of the books I’m in middle of right now. They’re both by “Hugh Hewitt”:http://www.hughhewitt.com/pages/about_hugh.htm. One is “In, But Not Of : A Guide to Christian Ambition“:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0785263950/davidsworldva-20?dev-t=mason-wrapper%26camp=2025%26link_code=xm2 and the other is “The Embarrassed Believer“:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0849914191/davidsworldva-20?dev-t=mason-wrapper%26camp=2025%26link_code=xm2, both are excellent so far and after doing a quick Amazon search, I think I may try and grab his newest book, “Blog : Understanding the Information Reformation That’s Changing Your World“:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/078521187X/davidsworldva-20?dev-t=mason-wrapper%26camp=2025%26link_code=xm2, from the library. Maybe
I’m reading a few other books as well, but I don’t feel like taking the time to find them and put their info in right now, so you’ll have to wait. Go away now. Or read my other entries, if you haven’t. Or re-read them, I won’t stop you. Or get organized with the info over at the cool website called “43 Folders“:http://www.43folders.com/ (trust me, it’s cool).
Sat, 2005-01-08 (Jan 08)
ABBBB (or, A Bit of Badinage Before Bed)
I’m not tired yet, but I need to go to bed because I need to get up early, there’s things to do tomorrow! Oh well, at least I got to sleep all day today. Until I had to get up to go see the hilarious comedian we had at church tonight (“Joe Kessler”:http://www.northcentral.edu/admissions/staff/kessler.php in case you’re interested. You wouldn’t know he was a comedian from that link, but if you have Adobe Acrobat Reader you can “try this”:http://www.northcentral.edu/admissions/staff/documents/kessler_brochure.pdf).
Anyway, I figured I’d check out some funny stuff online because I already read all my usual blogs and news sites and wanted a bit more humor to finish out the day. And because it’s too late to watch the two-hour season premiere of Alias that I recorded Wednesday night without going to bed too late to get up early (as I found out two days this week that I had to work :-)
So…first thing I google is the phrase “you might be a librarian if” to see if I can find anything interesting along those lines. Only three results (librarians must be too busy cataloging to think up jokes about themselves (at least along the “redneck” joke style), or maybe no one thinks about them often enough to make up jokes about them. I know I didn’t pay much attention to them until I met someone becoming one, but I must say they are interesting people and my personality seems to have many places where it lines up with theirs :-)
So first I found “this”:http://www.agmb.de/medibib-l/1995/0189.html (Somebody reading this might particularly get a kick out of number nine…please keep in mind number five please! Of course that somebody might also have read this before.):
You might be a librarian if:
# You might be a librarian if it often appears that you have wrinkles in your nylons; especially if you don’t wear nylons — and you are a man.
# If you wear socks on the beach you may be a librarian.
# If the cans in your cupboard are arranged alphabetically by the name of the agribusiness responsible for their production, you are very likely a librarian.
# You may be a librarian if you need new glasses and are disappointed to find such a limited selection of horn rims.
# You may be a librarian if you do not think this is funny. You are probably a librarian if you think this is insulting. You are certainly a librarian if you do not see why this is insulting.
# If your Nash has less than 50,000 miles on it, that is one sign you may be a librarian.
# If you are the lowest paid faculty member at a university you are probably a librarian.
# The person assigned to record the minutes is usually a librarian. If two librarians are at a meeting, the other one will be asked to arrange for coffee and cookies. If three librarians are at the meeting, two of them
will be in a run-off election for the coffee-and-cookie job.
# If you go to Ohio on vacation, you may be a librarian.
# Librarians frequently have permanent soup stains on their pocket protectors.
# If you think that a night club is a stick you keep beside your bed to protect yourself from intruders, you may be a librarian.
# You might consider the possibility that you are a librarian if you have a dress you can not wear because the skirt is so short that your legs show above the tops of your tube socks.
# When Walmart puts a plaque of honor with your name on it on the door of their dressing room, you may wonder if you are a librarian.Copyright (C) 1995 by Millard Johnson
The material above may be freely used provided the following is attached: Librarians are as diverse in appearance, interests, and attitude as any other people. About their only common traits are that they all hold master’s degrees from accredited institutions of higher education and they have a sense of humor that allows them to laugh at the absurdities of the stereotype commonly associated with their profession.
At the second Google page I found, a weirdly formatted page from the a newsletter at the University of Kentucky, repeated a few of the above but also had some interesting quotes. I like these four:
* “I believe you should live each day as if it is your last, which is why I don’t have any clean laundry because, come on, who wants to wash clothes on the last day of their life?”
–unknown
* “Alcoholism is sad, but drunks are funny.”
-Bill Maher
* Michael Guerra, a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, speaking of recent testing results that indicate that students have made little, if any, advances in reading and writing skills since the 1970’s said:
“This report suggests that mediocrity is still common in our schools and excellence is still rare.”
* “It sure would be nice if we got a day off for the president’s birthday, like they do for the queen. Of course, then we would have a lot of people voting for a candidate born on July 3 or December 26, just for the long weekends.”
-unknown
That third Google result returned a 404 Not Found error, but using Google’s Cache feature I was able to figure out that the site the link went to was a page of links, with the search phrase being a link to a website that had been moved “somewhere else”:http://www.lipsticklibrarian.com/. I didn’t spend enough time there to find any humor.
To be more than fair, I did google for “you might be a geek if“:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=%22you+might+be+a+geek+if%22&btnG=Search and “you might be a nerd if“:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=%22you+might+be+a+nerd+if%22&btnG=Search and found plenty of sites to waste quite a bit of time on:
geek:
* “You Might Be A Geek“:http://www.math.vt.edu/people/hoggard/you-might-be-a-geek.html (Six of these apply to me. This site also has a link to a hilarious “joke about biostatisticians and epidemiologists”:http://www.math.vt.edu/people/hoggard/texts/statisticians.)
* Hilarious Geek Culture Quiz (I got a 40 out of 72 on this, updating a few questions to make sense in my context. I esp. like numbers 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 (esp), 15, 31 (done), 32 (several), 37 (actually mine’s 24-hour time, not GMT), 39, 41, 42, 46 (yep), 50, 51 (yep!), 52, 60 (actually just after), and 62-67 (yep). I especially like number 7, “…and you *always* put the period outside the quotes, since you’re not quoting the end of the sentence…what the hell do english majors know, anyway.” Of course, this time I was quoting the end of the sentence, but I really can’t bring myself to quote ending punctuation that’s not part of the original quotation. That would be a false and ambiguous quotation! By the way, scroll down and read the comments after this one, they’re pretty darn funny as well!)
* “Another Geek If List”:http://www.katscratch.com/aMEWsments/mews23.html (I either identify with or resemble a lot of these remarks! It has it’s stupid ones, but the good ones far outweigh. I can’t pick a favorite, but I do like, “if you just don’t have the heart to throw away the 100-in-1 electronics kit you got for your ninth birthday”, since I don’t have the “heart” to throw out just about anything, but especially something that you can still do something with, whether that’s actually useful or not…also, the last quiz has this one, too, but a couple of times I’ve done this: “if, when you go into a computer store, you eavesdrop on a salesperson talking with customers and you butt in to correct him and spend the next twenty minutes answering the customers’ questions, while the salesperson stands by silently, nodding his head”. (See? This list doesn’t put periods at the end of it’s bullet-points, so I couldn’t quote it!) Also, I did this on the missions trip to Holland, which was the last time I flew: “if you find yourself at the airport on your vacation studying the baggage handling equipment”. Also, I’ve never been to an airshow, but for “if you are at an airshow and know how fast the skydivers are falling” I’d have to venture that the velocity would be equal to 9.8 m/sec^2^ times the number of seconds since falling, up to of course the person’s “terminal”:http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~broholm/l10/node5.html “velocity”:http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/termv.html which appears to be around 200mph for an average person. Of course the terminal velocity lowers quite a bit once a parachute comes into play, which is the whole reason those things work in the first place.) Actually there are so many good ones here I have to list a few more (keep in mind these mostly apply to me, but it’s not an exaustive list of those that apply to me!):
** if you can type 70 words a minute but can’t read your own handwriting
** if your favorite James Bond character is “Q”, the guy who makes the gadgets
** if you thought the real heroes of “Apollo 13” were the mission controllers
** if you think that when people around you yawn, its because they didn’t get enough sleep
** if you know what http:// stands for [HyperText Transfer Protocol…duh!]
** if you order pizza over the Internet and pay for it through your home banking software [“Pizza Hut”:http://www.pizzahut.com has a good online ordering system!]
** if your three year old son asks why the sky is blue and you try to explain atmospheric absorption theory [I don’t have a son but when I do, I will!]
** if you’ve already calculated how much you make per second ]actually I hadn’t but I just did…not going to post it here, but it’s between $0.003 and $0.005 :-]
** if the blinking 12:00 on someone’s VCR draws you in like a tractor beam to fix it
* “Star Trek Geek If…”:http://members.tripod.com/~learnb/recdeck/geeksign.htm (No I’m not at this level…mostly… :-)
nerd:
* “redneck ripoffs“:http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~garthman/humor.html (The link to “You might be a nerd if…” on this page is good, but also see the story thingy at the bottom. I didn’t even read the whole “nerd if” thingy so I can go to bed, much less the story, but it’s quite interesting (see the Disclaimer page) to see the style it’s written in.)
* “You Might Be A Nerd If…“:http://www.jokechallenge.com/lists/nerd.html
Okay as much as I’ve gone on, I almost could have watched that Alias I was putting off because it was too long. Grrr. Oh well going to bed now! BTW(By The Way), you might be a geek, nerd, and/or librarian if you write blog entries like this, or for that matter read (and mostly understand) them!
LOTRMQQ (or, LOTR Movie Quotes Quiz)
I should probably just add a Quiz category to my blog…but here’s another one: (more…)
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Fri, 2005-01-07 (Jan 07)
Brain Hurts Along with Eyes
Ouch. My brain hurts. So do my eyes. Can’t focus. Must. Sleep. Why? Clock. Look. [snoring…]
Grrr…I just read “librarygal’s”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/librarygal/ most “recent blog entry”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/librarygal/150845.html and of course she challenged me to another one of those detested quizzes that I told myself I’d just do one of and never tough again! This time:
They go into more detail:
12% scored higher,
1% scored the same, and
87% scored lower.What does this mean? Your nerdiness is:
High-Level Nerd. You are definitely MIT material, apply now!!!.
So MIT, that’s here in town, right? Since I’m planning on going to college locally…somewhere…
Oh and I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that librarygal’s post’s subject was, “another nerd quiz for david_itman”, but the last post was a geek post, not a nerd post. The distinction is “well defined”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=geek+vs+nerd&btnG=Search, if not ignored often. And maybe “not that well”:http://forum.defcon.org/archive/index.php/t-1069.html defined. Well-discussed, then. Or, opinionated. Or, I’m-tired-so-I’m-going-to-bed. -inated.
Update: If I had to pick I’d go with geek over nerd, personally, especially based on “this”:http://web.vee.net/stuff/geek-vs-nerd.html which is admittedly one of many opinions. Hard to tell if the above quiz was more for one or the other though. I’m going to have to say it meant geek and not nerd, though (probably since I scored so high or something…). Now really to bed (4:10 now).
Update again: Maybe I’ll switch back based on this article, “The Socio-Psychological Distinction of Nerds vs. Geeks”:http://www.earthsea.com/metrogamers/nerd-gee.htm. Blah. It’s 04:12:45 hundred hours as I click save on this now.
Wed, 2005-01-05 (Jan 05)
Geek Quiz
I really dislike online quizzes, but hey, some of them are good. Just following the example of “librarygal”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/librarygal/149223.html and “fearless4jesus”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/fearless4jesus/18768.html. So here’s this one:
| You are 41% geek | You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator.
|
Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com
I do have a question. Does it make me even more of a geek if I’m insulted that it didn’t give me a high enough score? Heck, I even went back and answered two questions differently and it only pushed me up to 43%…
Stupid Chain Letters
Well a friend of mine posted an “interesting post”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/fearless4jesus/18676.html about internet chain letters. And instead of taking up a huge comment on her blog, perhaps I should inform all of my readers of the extent of my genius (whatever extent being able to search Google gives me…apparently a lot considering how few people can do this… :-) Says she, in part:
“There are tons of e-mail hoaxes out there and they stay there because people don’t know how to recognize them, and they tug at the heart, or use core issues to move people. They don’t hurt anything I guess, but I am tired of them.
“I got an email today that I was pretty positive was made up. It said something about James Dobsin starting this e-mail petition to protect Christian broadcasting. My first thought was, how in the world could an e-mail petition really work? My second thought was, I’ve seen this before.
Fortunately most people that send junk like this don’t have my email address :-) But I’m well aware of the problem, as I work with a lot of people who have no clue. There’s not really an excuse these days, as you can Google search just about anything to find out if there are reliable sources that will vouch for something. It’s time-consuming for me to email everyone I get one of these from (like I said not many, but it still takes time!) to inform them (without insulting them) about the fact that they’re passing on stupid unreliable stuff.
I did a quick Google search just now (how’s that for proof-of–genius-concept? :-) and found some really informative links on the subject:
* “CIAC(Computer Incident Advisory Capability) Hoaxbusters”:http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/
(this is a US government-run website…not that you can trust the government about everything, but I do agree with their stance on email hoaxes and chains :-) They tell you how to recognize a hoax and what to do with them.
* “How Chain Letters Really Work”:http://home.flash.net/~bob001/chainletter.htm
This is a great explanation of how those famous “send $5 to everyone on the list below and do a mailing” schemes make a lot of money in donations…but just for the originator! Enlightening if you’re not already aware.
* “The Paradox: Why I hate spam (and email chain letters and pyramid schemes and virus warnings and…)”:http://paradox.homeip.net/~janra/writing/spam.html
Good info…especially the parts about Bandwidth and Cost. It shows how it’s _not_ collectively harmless to send everyone in your address book the same thing and have everyone else repeat the same. It costs money on the Internet, along with commercial spam, and slows things down. By sending stuff like this, _you_ may be helping the internet get slower!
* “Chain Prayers”:http://www.truthminers.com/truth/chain_mail.htm
Quite interesting, and a site I hadn’t seen until now. Specifically debunking Christian Prayer Chain Letters, it give three example quotes from such letters and then provides a six-point analysis of why it’s garbage:
“Third: This is not a good witness. Sometimes God gives us one time opportunities to share with another person. Most of the time He gives us ongoing relationships THROUGH which we share the love and mercy of Christ by both our daily lives and our speech. Relationship building is important because then people can see God working within us, freeing us from sin. Messages like these can have the opposite effect on an unbeliever. It makes us seem foolish for believing that forwarding an email will prove our love for God.
I’ll let you read the other five reasons for yourself.
* “Chain Letters (and Anti-Chain Letters)”:http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/chain-letters.html
At first the information is similar to that provided by the above sites. However, there are some really good links down the page a bit, including a link to some “anti-chain letters” (“this one’s good”:http://www.perry.com/bizarre/antichn.html) and a very large section of “chain mail humor”. There’s some very funny stuff there, for example the ‘”Citation Chain Letter“:http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/citation-chain-letter.html’ (“Dear Fellow Scientist: This letter has been around the world at least seven times. It has been to many major conferences. Now it has come to you…“) and the “‘Why ask Why Chain Letter“:http://bears.ece.ucsb.edu/personnel/astornet/humor/humor7.html’, which asks such things as:
** “Have you ever imagined a world with no hypothetical situations?”
** “If a cow laughed, would milk come out her nose?”
** “Why do they put Braille dots on the keypad of the drive-up ATM?”
** “If you’re in a vehicle going the speed of light, what happens when you turn on the headlights?”
** “Why do they put Braille dots on the keypad of the drive-up ATM?”
** “Why do noses run and feet smell?”
** and, “Why is it that when you’re driving and looking for an address, you turn down the volume on the radio?”
Don’t worry, I didn’t repeat all of them :-) It’s especially nice since it says at the bottom that it originated in The Netherlands. I like stuff that mentions The Netherlands since it’s the only country I’ve ever been to outside the U.S. :-) There are even more good humor pages at that site, but you probably want to skip the one titled, “With sex all things are possible”. Yes, I realize many of you will read that one just becuase I said not to. If you don’t mind some explicit (but not pornographic) adult topics, it does have a bit of hilarity to be found, but probably isn’t worth the read anyway. Yet there are still those of you who will want to decide for themselves I bet. Curiosity killed the cat, but that saying hasn’t stopped anyone’s curiosity yet that I know of…you’ll have to find the link yourself at least. There’s one more hilarious piece I just read, called ‘”The Gullibility Virus Warning“:http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/gullibility-virus.html’. In part:
Internet users are urged to examine themselves for symptoms of the virus, which include the following:
The willingness to believe improbable stories without thinking. The urge to forward multiple copies of such stories to others. A lack of desire to take three minutes to check to see if a story is true.
T. C. is an example of someone recently infected. He told one reporter, “I read on the Net that the major ingredient in almost all shampoos makes your hair fall out, so I’ve stopped using shampoo.” When told about the Gullibility Virus, T. C. said he would stop reading email, so that he would not become infected.
Of course, forward that one to your friends at your own risk. It’s not my fault if it makes you friendless!
I won’t even discuss virus hoaxes here, I need to get to bed and they deserve a post twice this size of their own (whether I’ll ever write the post…who knows?). Basically, check “Google”:http://www.google.com and your favorite reputable antivirus vendor’s website before passing on any virus warning you receive in email.
Sat, 2005-01-01 (Jan 01)
Blog Website Tweaked
Well, instead of writing a post about how great the New Year’s Eve parties I went to were (they were great), since 2:30 am (when I got home) I’ve been hacking away at this website, getting some plugins added, upgraded, and some manual tweaks set up. I won’t bore you with too many details, but indulge me for a minute as I’m rather proud and it was fun.
First thing I did was add a couple of behind-the-scenes plugins, and I also upgraded the “Post Teaser”:http://turnipspatch.com/projects/post-teaser/ plugin that I enabled the other day, from version 1 to version 2, and I tweaked some settings. Then I wrote some added functionality that I’ll probably submit back to the author! Basically the (wow that was some cat screech I just heard outside the window!) new version fixes some bugs and stuff, and is more efficient.
The settings I changed had to do with how the “number of words, approx. reading time, link to post” text read, and also how many words (approximately) to have each post show before cutting it off and sending it to the post page to finish. I think I ended up setting it at 400 words, which seems to show a lot of posts in their entirety and the others it gives a nice, long preview of. Keep in mind that 400 words is a “suggestion” and not a cutoff point, it actually auto-cuts off after a full paragraph, never in mid-sentence, it just chooses the paragraph closest to leaving 400 words in the main preview.
Then I saw that some posts had a “more” link already manually hard-coded (such as the “‘isn’t it time someone saved you?'”:http://www.existdifferently.com/archives/2004/12/25/isnt-it-time-someone-saved-you/ post, but you can’t tell what I mean except by viewing it in the “December Archives”:http://www.existdifferently.com/archives/2004/12/, 4th post down), and it was kind’ve weird to have it say “okay that’s the whole post with x words” right below where it said “click for more”! So I grabbed the “PHP”:http://www.php.org/ source code for that plugin, figured out how it worked (I’ve never worked with the “WordPress(WordPress Blog Software)”:http://www.wordpress.org/ “Plugin(WordPress Plugins Information Wiki)”:http://wiki.wordpress.org/?pagename=Plugin%2FAPI “API(Application Programming Interface)”:http://wiki.wordpress.org/?pagename=Plugin%2FAPI before), and modified it to show a third possibility where a post already has a “more” link manually added by the author. In that case it just shows a summary of the “intro word count and reading time” with a link to the more page and a reminder that there’s more to read. It was a simple little hack, but I really like it considering that I don’t know much PHP (“Perl(Practical Extraction and Report Language)”:http://www.perl.org/ is my language all the way. Go Perl!) and I wasn’t familiar with the plugin or the API previously.
Then, I happened upon a little hack that I set up so that when you view a post on it’s own page, it has “next post”, “home”, and “last post” links, complete with titles, showing up at the top. I wanted to do that originally, because before he switched to WordPress I saw “Robert”:http://robert.accettura.com/ doing it (I think MoveableType does it automatically). But I couldn’t figure out how, and now I did. And I like it, so it’s staying. Try it out.
Then my challenge was to set up a “Live Preview”:http://www.chrisjdavis.org/index.php/2004/03/15/live-preview-for-comments/ plugin I’d seen the other day that let commenters actually see a preview of the post as they were typing it, keystroke-by-keystroke. I saw this in action on the plugin’s demo site, and it rocks! Go ahead and try it out on a post…I did find a small bug in that if you use the “blockquote” HTML tag, Internet Explorer stops showing the preview at that point. Stupid IE. But “Firefox”:http://www.getfirefox.com/ does just fine with it and looks great. Everything else seems to work in IE all right though.