Dear Iran,
You suck at Photoshop. And possibly missile shooting.
First released photo of missile launch from Iran state media:
(more…)
Forgive my tardiness.
I’ve been promising a short write-up on RSS and its usefulness for a while. I actually did one for another blog about a month ago an instead of re-writing the whole thing I’ll just steal my own content:
The way we read/view/see the Internet is changing. As we move more and more of our information consumption time to the net (news, business, contacts, blogs, videos, music) we can find that we become overwhelmed and tired of chasing it all down.
I alone have accounts for multiple subscription sites including 30 or so blogs I read, digg, lifehacker, muxtape, vimeo, flickr, and the list goes on and on. Information overload to say the least. Please welcome, RSS.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is quickly becoming the way I, many others, and ultimately you should devour the net. It takes the work out of visiting your favorite sites to see their updates. No more do you have to keep a long list of Favorites or Bookmarks just to keep up with your daily content.
Easy to set up, and even easier to use, RSS Readers will go and find the stuff you want on the Internet and bring it to you when it becomes available.
(more…)
Dear Paste magazine,
I am writing this letter to inform you that our relationship is on the verge of coming to an end.
It’s not me, it’s you.
My courtship started late last year, November most likely. I found a link to your website and an offer from you to name my price for a subscription. I was excited for this new way into a subscription service. I felt like this could be an opportunity for other magazines to follow especially since most magazines make their money on ads rather than subscriptions.
2007 was a slow year for music. As I stumbled upon your offer and website, I felt that potentially you would be an open door for new music and other fine arts. Though small, there was a small excitement building in anticipation of your arrival in my mailbox soon. I hadn’t had a subscription to any magazines for a while and thought it would be a good change of pace, a little light reading for down times or restroom breaks. And best of all, I set my own price, $5. Yep, that’s right, a full year’s subscription for less than a Super-sized number three (plain Quarter Pounder, with cheese only) at McDonalds.
I know $5 dollars seems a little low. On one hand, I didn’t want you to feel cheap or cheated but on the other hand I wanted a deal. And since I had never had the opportunity to flip your pages, I really didn’t know how much you were worth. So I placed my $5 order and smiled when it was accepted.
Then I waited.
Christmas came and went and you chose not to arrive. I justified your absence to myself by thinking that I ordered late in the month and missed the December cycle since most magazines go out a month ahead of time.
(more…)
When political correctness backfires…
I don’t have any idea who the American Family Association is nor have I ever heard of their website OneNewsNow.com but by the looks of it, they are a very far right, Christian conservative group. In fact upon a current visit to their site, the lead story is a call from their founder about boycotting McDonald’s over their ‘refusal to be neutral in the cultural war over homosexuality.’ I am guessing this is a pretty common style of story for this site.
Side note for a moment: I appreciate good moral stances. But I also feel that there are some who take things a little too far. Keep following…
After a little reading today, I have learned that the OneNewsNow is a news aggregator of AP stories and other news sources. Great. Congrats. Another news site. Except for the fact that OneNewsNow has been caught on more than one occasion blocking stories and even modifying them in some instances.
One of the ways that they modify stories is to set up filters/rules to do search & replaces in the articles that come through. In some instances I can see where this could be a benefit; Editorial or op-ed pieces that might come through with inappropriate language or subject matter might be toned down for the OneNewsNow audience. I would be concerned on their part for some copyright issues but I don’t work for them nor read their material so it isn’t worth my time or effort to research it any more.
What is worth my time, was what came across my desk today.
In the AFA/OneNewsNow’s attempt to either keep it clean or politically correct, they got it wrong. Good thing is, wrong in this situation is funny-haha, not funny-gonna-end-up-in-court. Hopefully.
The Olympic trials are currently going on in several sports. Swimming, Bass Fishing, Bowling, Track & Field and many others. ONN (tired of typing here) seems to be covering the trials and the results pretty well. And of course filtering every story that comes through. Including replacing any location of the word GAY with the synonym HOMOSEXUAL.
I don’t guess there’s too much wrong with the aforementioned auto-replacement on articles… until Tim Gay, a United States Olympic hopeful, runs a 9.85 second time to win the 100 meter race. I think you get the idea…
In fact a quick search brought up several stories about Tim over the span of a couple days:
Even worse, this isn’t the first time it has happened to ONN. The NBA draft saw the Memphis Grizzlies picking early on a couple of weeks ago looking for a star player to play right along side their young stud, Rudy Gay.
At the time of this posting, ONN had resolved the issues above. Probably by hand. Maybe they should spend a little time looking into their methods or their algorithms, the current ones seem to have a few flaws. Either way, high comedy all around.
Nerd humor
The guys at Gizmodo posted a pretty humorous idea for you geeks out there. Instead of going with the standard naming on your WiFi router at home like Linksys or 2wire3401, set it to something that your neighbors will always see when they are looking for a connection. Plenty of suggestions abound (plenty of ideas are NSFW), but here are a few of my favs:
- ThosePeopleIn1583LookLikeTerrorists
- IReadYourMail
- IPoisonedYourDog
- GetYourOwnDSLCheapskate
And a couple of my own for good measure:
- YouReallyShouldn’tBeLookingAtThat
- IPouredSugarInYourPrius’Tank
- NiceAcidWashedJeans
- I’llShareMyInternetIfYou’llShareYourCable
- DoYouSwimInMyPoolWithoutMeKnowingToo?
There’s a good chance I will be starting a rotation of great WiFi names in the near future. Any suggestions?