Pride in what one does

Inspired presumably by the native Americans who used every part of the bison.

Sounds good to me

Walking by the tubes.,
originally uploaded by Gabba Gabba Hey!.

A great many people give former Alaska senator Ted Stevens flak for comparing the structure of the Internet to a series of tubes a few years back, and I will not attempt to defend the gentleman's conception of the subject in full. Yet in the resulting furor, I would just like to point out that if I had to choose just one metaphor between "a big truck" and "a series of tubes," the tubes would win decisively. For what is more tubelike than the high-speed Intenet backbone network, the submarine cables, the dedicated satellite links, and the urban microwave trunks that do the heavy work of piping the traffic about, routing around congestion and breakages, rarely caught up in traffic jams, as photons rarely are wont to tarry? And if somewhere the end of a tube is exposed to our feeble senses, raw effluent pouring out in a stomach-churning mix, what can a modern net user do but express his or her wonder at the fluidlike medium that geeks in the know even refer to as a torrent? For something more like the opposite, look at the Netflix distribution scheme which relies on honest to goodness mail trucks to get the content to the consumer.

Why blogs are being pushed out by microblogs

I put up a new post on my sadly neglected writing blog Frabjous Times and noticed this odd development on the Feedback area of my admin screen.

One post from last February had 2790 comments on it, all of it flagged as likely spam. It is not that Twitter and Friendfeed and the like are free from spam, as any active user of those will tell you. It is that the spammers have not yet figured out how to crank up their engines of war just yet to trash them utterly. I give them a couple more months before they come up with a way to make those services nearly unusable. And then maybe some people will end up going back to their blogs.

Browser sociology

I was impressed by the amount of periodicity in these two graphs of browser reach, both worldwide:

Source: StatCounter Global Stats

and for Europe:

Source: StatCounter Global Stats

I downloaded the worldwide numbers and cooked them up in a spreadsheet to find that the weekday 68%/26% split between Internet Explorer and Firefox distinctly shifted to something like 66%/27% on weekends. The numbers appear to be a tiny bit more enhanced for the European browser users.

My hypothesis is that the jiggle of a couple percentage points can be attributed to people who are required to use IE on their work computers going home to use Firefox on the weekends.

How geeky is that?

Another crop of falling-apart rants averted

fail,
originally uploaded by Sidereal.

• Social bookmarking site ma.gnolia had a catastrophic failure that claimed not only the production database, which would not be unusual, but also apparently all their backups. What, no offsite database dumps? Fortunately, I have been posting my bookmarks also to delicious for the most part, so nothing much lost.
• My laptop at home froze up, then refused to boot, even in Safe Mode. Off I went to my wife's computer to download and burn the latest Knoppix which allowed me to verify that the hard disk was still readable. I brought it in to work the next morning prepared to copy my data files off to an external drive, but somehow the Windows XP installation healed itself, so the retrieval operation changed to one of backup. Gee, and I was all set to install Ubuntu 8.10 on it.
• The new furnace has been working a bit over-well, causing the radiator in the downstairs bathroom to spit out a lot of brown water all over the floor through its vent. We consulted with the plumbing company and it seems as if it's likely not a problem with that expensive unit, but either a problem with the old vents or with some kind of crud in the pipes. So I'll take a shot at saving a couple of hundred bucks by replacing some air vents on my own and seeing what happens.
• The "auxiliary" (12V) battery in our Prius lost nearly all its charge today while we were at church, and was recovering only very slowly over the next half hour, so we called a service station to come and give us a jump start. The verdict is still out on this one, but it seems not to have re-manifested in a handful of starts since, so we'll hope for the best until we can get it in to the dealer's.

Now any one of these can turn back up again (except for the Magnolia one), so this is possibly only a full-blown rant deferred, not avoided. Watch this space.

You learn something every day from the Web

Wikipedia tells me that this non-whale downtime page is depicting the larva of a Geometer moth. Perhaps, based on its companion who is speaking, it is a Dwarf Cream Wave, which sounds delicious?

Incidentally, with regard to the caption of this picture on that first Wikipedia page, I feel obliged to point out that Caterpillar Locomotion would be an excellent band name.

My evil side

I am doing my part to fill a great need for websites advising evil masterminds on how to be better villains by putting up my new website evilHow. It features a wiki, a blog, and user forums for anyone who wants to discuss such stimulating topics as How to destroy the planet. There are still a few kinks in the presentation, but still worth a look if I do say so myself.

Edit: That site is defunct, but still can be accessed via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine if you really want.

Damn near wore out that scroll wheel

Honorable mention is mine.

You will not get the point unless you are aware of this post on Daniel's blog.

Colorblindness, colorblindness, colorblindness!

The most popular page on this blog, by far, is one which people are attracted to because of the image of the random dot colorblindness test by Shinobu Ishihara. The two volume publication containing those illustrations, which was printed originally in the 1950s, is rather difficult to find at the major retailers (you know who they are), but those who are truly interested can buy used copies on the Web.

If only brand new will do, there is this place too.

Hope this helps you all.

More on the ever-popular subject of domain names

Yosemite Sam!,
originally uploaded by Dunechaser.

GolDurn.It , Dagnabb.It, and Consarn.It are still up for grabs, but regrettably Doggone.It has already been snapped up.

La plume de ma tante

I was looking at the recent pageload activity for this blog over at Statcounter's excellent service and stumbled upon this totally excellent re-rendering of part of my sidebar through Babelfish.

Thank you for that. I am thinking it might be nice to change the language used on the sidebar periodically, every other day, maybe.

No, I'm serious!

Joyce 40404

I haven't gotten into the Twitter phenomenon because I have not yet figured out why I should care to follow the rambling stream-of-consciousness of someone else, or why anybody would care to follow mine. Then I started to think of someone else has been accused of producing a chaotic flow of images and words - James Joyce - who created a masterpiece of self-absorption in his monumental book Ulysses. Fans of that work yearly commemorate the events depicted there with Bloomsday readings. In a way, blogs and static web content stand in relation to micro-blogs in the same way that traditional short stories and novels stood in relation to Modernist writing. What could be a better subject to take advantage of these ideas than Ulysses in an updated presentation using the wonder of Web 2.0?

Picture this: each of the major characters and a goodly number of the minor ones would be assigned Twitter accounts and those interested in the re-enactment would add them as friends. Early in the morning of June 16th the readers would receive the opening tweets from Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus in the Telemachus episode. Besides their dialogue, they could send out a few links to geotagged images or sound pieces on the Web to further ground the experience. Then they'd follow Stephen and, later, Leopold Bloom around Dublin through their obsessive little observations throughout the day and into the night. Gerty MacDowell would play the key role in Nausikaa (though perhaps not the late Paddy Dignam) and the anonymous narrator of the Cyclops episode too. And of course at the end, Molly Bloom would take charge in the Penelope chapter. Everything would be in real-time and first-person as it should be, and the transcript of the day's worth of transmissions would constitute a record of the event as well.

Those who are not playing parts in the story (the "readers") probably ought to refrain from stepping on the action by sending messages of their own or everything could fall apart. And of course there would be the risk of Twitter's servers possibly not being able to keep up with the heavy load, which would add to the excitement, I think.

If one could pull this off, perhaps the next challenge would be to adapt Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse to the Twitter format, taking the form of messages sent over ten years.

Thumbs up,
originally uploaded by Wexxie.

Some thoughts while sorting my sock drawer

1. A pair of socks I found in a sort of Paisley motif made me think that someone should produce clothing with actual protista shapes in the design. That way I could be styling at work with a pair of socks with an attractive Naegleria motif.


2. Instead of video games where young people shoot people up or run them over or whatever, how about a nice sock drawer simulator where you have to pair up the matching patterns as efficiently as possible? There could be some socks with designs not found in real life, such as animated weaves, luminous thread, flaming toes, or whatever the graphic designer dreams up. I think this would be a fine way to inculcate important life skills to the next generation.


3. I ended up with some leftovers which lost their mates. Thus, "All we like socks have gone astray." (via)

According to All My Accusers, or A Tawdry Jaunt through the Multiverse: a rap sheet in ten criminal acts.

According to this search on Google, I may have been found guilty of the following:

1. Contempt of Court and sent to jail for refusing to evict the elderly
2. Three counts of assault and one count of assault with intent to commit sexual abuse
3. 7 counts and each involv[ing] one hundred 5 milligram Percocets
4. breaches of the Publicans Act on 16 August 1839, 27 September 1839, 11 December 1839, 11 February 1840 and 27 March 1840, and of murder and tried at Monmouth Summer Assizes on Wednesday, 18 August 1819
5. GBH (Gross Bodily Harm?) while staying at a North London hostel for the mentally ill.
6. not paying taxes on his Survivor winnings and earnings from a Radio show [I] was part of.
7. a misdemeanor assault charge in the spring
8. rape in April 1561, a crime that had probably motivated [my] flight to the continent the year before.
9. killing children [although there seems to be some doubt]
10. disorderly conduct and possession of drug paraphernalia.

I reflected on my past yesterday while sitting in traffic court, and have repented of all my misdeeds, vowing to make a fresh start.

Accio Cliff Notes

According to Statcounter, over the last several weeks there has been a shift in the nature of search terms used to land on items on my old blog . As you can see from the results from the last 100 searches as of today, over 80% of all search queries are one variation or another on Harry Potter Cliff Notes. Over 60% of my visitors are from the U.S. Yesterday, we tried to see the new film, but it was sold out at the one theater we tried to get into. I expect it will still be possible to go see it in a couple weeks anyhow.

I once was blocked, but now can save

The blogger/Google spam-prevention robots have withdrawn and it's back to blogging as usual. Or, I hope, better than usual.

The robots! ah they are cruel

Robot Attack!,
originally uploaded by Dan Coulter.

Day 2 of the lockout by Blogger's spam-prevention robots.

Fun with negative numbers

This is a screenshot of part of my browser today after I'd clicked on a message in Yahoo Mail. I am eagerly waiting to see whether when I get a new email, that will bump the total up to "0 unread."


More useful would be to have the Spam folder total reported as an imaginary number.

One holy, Catholic, and apostolic cellphone

Lest one think from the previous entry that I concentrate only on other cultures' religious artifacts, here's one from my very own. Catholic Mobile has the right idea, but they ought to consider a few other ideas in their marketing to tie in the two concepts on which they are based:

• Plans structured Novena-style., in which you get a reading every day for nine days (or one every First Friday in a row maybe).


• Forty Hours' Devotion, with litanies and readings sent out every hour over a weekend.


• Speaking of litanies, they could make them interactive, where they send out the antiphon, and the user would then send back the response. It could get kind of expensive if the phone is on a per-message charge rate structure though.

In my opinion,Universalis already has access to the Divine Office via mobile phone sewn up, however, so there is little sense in trying to compete there.

Two Towers,
originally uploaded by Princeps autem justus.

(Via Coudal Partners broken link.)

Google gives advice to the lovelorn

I'm envious about how this page at WikiHow gives much more useful advice about how to deal with infatuation than I did, but not very surprised.

What did surprise me, however, was the useful advice presented over in the sidebar courtesy of Google Ads:

That should do the trick: a drum crusher, to beat the man (or woman?) at their own game, thus leading to happiness! So sweet - it makes me want to buy this ultra-soft throwdown throw pillow.

On the closely related WikiHow page entitled How to Forget About Your Impossible Crush (which now redirects to the same link as above) there's this lovely sequence:

When given a choice, I should think it is always a good idea to go with the solution which has "Tertiary Impact" in its name.