November 19, 2007

100grrrrrrr

Sometime over the weekend, this blog had its 100,000th visitor. So whomever you were, thank you, and thank you all. If my logs are any sign, my 100,000th visitor came here after googling one of the following:

"ron oester"
"creation museum slideshow"
"starter jackets"
"celtics cheerleaders"

or

"ross mckeon"
"gta back to future 2015 police car location"
"furnace on china november"
"james dungy death homosexual"
"the soilders that looked after the napaleon on saint helena during the war is there name list"
"drunk girls pooping on the street"
"throwing distance catcher to 2nd base math" -- glad to be of help
"mission statement for ballreich's potato chips"

and if it was you who googled one of these, no thanks to you at all

"my parents are aliens"
"ass napkin ed"
"guys on guys porn sports"
"gothic girl holding hands with guy"
"corruption of lol"
"ohio hooter girls in pantyhose"

November 13, 2007

Stranger things have happened

Fark Headlines were a category on last night's Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions episode. I DVRed it, shot the HD feed to my MacBook, and uploaded it to YouTube.

Now I'm winning "Honors" for "most watched" and "most favorited."

Honors. For a video. That I recorded off TV.

My, how far Fark has come from the days we screwed around in people's backyards and basements doing vaguely illegal things.

November 07, 2007

Welcome home, Discovery

Space Shuttle Discovery is home after a 15-day mission considered one of the most challenging and heroic in NASA's history.

It's exciting to read the observations of individuals who were able to experience Commander Pam Melroy's ship return to Earth, either visually or sonically and sometimes not even knowing why.

That's the mystery, and that's what makes the space program so amazing. Contemplate for a while the magic of an essentially unpowered vessel being piloted from orbit across North America and landing perfectly in Florida.

We've become somewhat desensitized to the magic of space flight, even in the shadow of Challenger and Columbia. STS-120 completed some pretty amazing things: a stunning repair spacewalk, the installation of a new ISS module, and the return to Earth of a man who lived half a year in space.

No, we don't have permanent living modules on the moon. No, we haven't been to Mars. Yet to consider what we do with what we have, in the course of human history on this planet, it's pretty badass. And I'm still caught up in the mystery.

August 29, 2007

Meme progression

Aeonite and I were in serious conversations once about writing a book on memes. I think it's fascinating, but in many ways, what's more fascinating than the meme creations is how they promulgate themselves through the internets.

For example, take our friend the Miss Teen USA South Carolina (or whatever permutation of her name is proper). This dumb slag (her name is Lauren Upton, not that anybody will ever remember that) said some stupid things on television on August 24th, which is five days ago.

That was Friday night. On Saturday, Postgame Heroes posts the YouTube link. It blows up from there, appearing on Fark and Deadspin and other sites over the weekend. On Sunday night I start getting the "have you seen this???" emails. The radio morning show guys ran with it Monday afternoon, and then the sports talk radio guys (who are kind of slow) got to it Tuesday morning, and then Tuesday night I started getting the links on Facebook and Myspace (have you seen this???)

And now the older people I know are emailing the link to me today. It's now Wednesday, five days after the event. Have I seen this???? Yes, only about a million times now. But the way these things weave themselves around is fascinating to me. If there was something so purely made of fail like Miss Teen USA South Carolina and I didn't know about it for a week, I'd probably kill myself.

July 27, 2007

Lulz is a corruption of LOL

Today might be the greatest day in the history of the internets, even better than Chocolate Rain or TayRolling, because last night Fox 11 in Los Angeles spent five minutes investigating Anonymous.

(Click through to the post if you read via RSS/Bloglines, YouTube video embedded.)

Oh, that which could be said about the Internet menace that is Anonymous. This certainly has been quite a week for Anonymous, what with Chocolate Rain being on the front page of YouTube and the whole Fox News nonsense. In fact, it's been an interesting week for the continuing war between Fox and anonymous.

Just keep in mind two things:

Lulz is a corruption of LOL, and
INTERNET HATE MACHINE

July 23, 2007

Fox news web site breach exposes 1.5 million identities

The breach of Fox News' web site last night and the subsequent hacking of ZDNet has exposed at least 1.5 million people's identities according to sources. Military, government, and other individuals including those who had explicitly applied to opt-out of company emails have seen their personal information exposed to the world.

July 17, 2007

Hassles and frustration

We've been trying for several days now to migrate to the new server. Most of this is nerdage, but the problems result from the following:

1. The newest version of Debian (and Ubuntu) ship with Apache 2.2, which is not out-of-the-box compatible with FastCGI, which is pretty much a requirement for Movable Type (and Rails, which the rest of EW is going to be running). You can recompile Apache to make it work, but the fixes posted on the web all fail when I try them.

2. The next option is using Lighty, but I can't get it to work with FastCGI either. It just keeps failing and the web fixes don't seem to make it work either.

3. I tried using NginX with a Mongrel cluster, and that didn't work either.

My roommate's boyfriend is a server admin, but he only uses Windows (ha) so he's no help. I'm pretty frustrated as I've sunk many hours into this and can't get anything working. Linux is such an enormous pain in the ass it's amazing anyone even uses it; then again, EW has been running on Debian Drake for two years now and it's been pretty much flawless. We'll keep cracking, and maybe grab an image of Ubuntu Edgy or something that uses Apache 2.0.

June 28, 2007

Chris Benoit, Wikipedia, and sleuthing

Wow, it only took 90 minutes for this entire post to become irrelevant.

Read the confession from the coincidental death-predictor here.

Note the IP works out to... Stamford. Good job, Joe, you got another confession!

That night I found out that what I posted, ended up actually happening, a 1 in 10,000 chance of happening, or so I thought. I was beyond wrong for posting wrongful information, and I am sorry to everyone for this. I just want everyone to know it was stupid of me, and I will never do anything like this again. I just posted something that was at that time a piece of wrong unsourced information that is typical on wikipedia, as it is done all the time.

Tough luck, buster... or should I say, "Marc."

The media is once again letting you down in covering the Chris Benoit story.

I'm going to drop my usual narrative writing methods to lay out the facts of the past 24 hours or so for you.

1. Wikipedia administrators noticed an anomaly in the Chris Benoit article. Specifically, an anonymous user made the following edit (text from Wikinews):

On a paragraph about an earlier fight: "However, Chris Benoit was replaced… due to personal issues,…", the anonymous editor added " stemming from the death of his wife Nancy." The edit was reversed just under one hour later with the comment: "Need a reliable source. Saying that his wife died is a pretty big statement, you need to back it up with something."

This edit was made twelve hours before police found out about the deaths.

On Wednesday night, Wikinews starts investigating the story.

2. Fox News picks up the story from Wikinews and puts it on their own website as an "Exclusive." They report it on Fox News Channel as a "Fox News Exclusive" and subsequent articles on the discovery have cited Fox News. This is incorrect. Wikinews broke the story and deserves all citation hereforth.

3. The IP of the user who made the edit sources back to a Cablevision cable modem in Stamford, CT -- where the headquarters of the WWE is located.

4. A user at that IP has made a number of edits on Wikipedia, nearly all of them to wrestling-related articles and nearly all of them vandalism.

5. The one "constructive" edit was to the article on Chavo Guerrero, Jr., in which the user reverted a previous vandalism edit.

6. Chavo Guerrero, Jr. has been cited as one of the last people to receive communication from Benoit before he killed himself. The message was cryptic, essentially explaining how to get into the house to discover the bodies.

7. Chavo Guerrero's first call upon finding the dead body of his uncle Eddie Guerrero was to Chris Benoit.

8. One of the non-wrestling-related edits made by the anonymous user was to the page of Naugatuck, CT -- a city roughly an hour from Stamford.

9. The edit replaced the name of the Naugatuck Mayor and Deputy-Mayor with the names Marc Dagz and Visar Tasimi.

10. Marc Dagz and Visar Tasimi are students at the University of Connecticut and are on each others' friends lists on Facebook. Visar has a Myspace too.

11. It stands to reason, thus, that:

a) Someone with previous knowledge of Nancy Benoit's death is a friend of (or is) Dagz or Tasimi and edited the Chris Benoit Wikipedia entry.

b) Someone fitting that qualification chose to vandalize the Benoit entry at the very moment he was likely killing himself/his child.

I find the coincidences too great. I've already emailed Marc and Visar, and hopefully one or both will get back to me. Certainly the police can trace the IP back to the user who made the edit, and that news will come out within a few days. This is where we are with the investigation.

Jimbo Wales dropped into #wikinews on Freenode this afternoon to discuss his appearance on Greta Van Susteren's show later in the evening, then came back on afterward. He's a pretty cool guy, and even edited the entry for Drew Curtis' new Fark book after I mentioned he should read it. He also lives down the road, so he has that going for him. Oh, and being a multi-millionaire and all.

September 27, 2006

Yahoo! Mail is the new Hotmail

It amazes me when I read articles like this that show a significant number of people are still using Microsoft's Hotmail. I realize that in the late 90's everyone and their mom had a Hotmail account, but we all abandoned them around 2001 or so when the laughably bad spam filter meant using Hotmail was a time-consuming enterprise as you fought through the spam that had made its way through the sieve-like filter.

It's around that time we all switched to Yahoo! Mail, and a few years later, to the even better Gmail. Yet a lot of us still have Yahoo! Mail accounts, and a lot of our Internet faculties are still attached to them; message board registrations, PayPal accounts, et cetera. Yet Yahoo! Mail is slowly turning into Hotmail. In fact, I take that back. Yahoo! is ALREADY HOTMAIL. Check out my current Yahoo! inbox:

Not a lot of real mail in there. In fact, THERE IS NO REAL MAIL IN THERE. That's my Inbox, folks -- not my Bulk mail. That's all spam that made it around Yahoo!'s filter. Mind you, I can't really recall having spam leak through the Gmail filter on more than one or two occasions. Now, Yahoo! is ALL SPAM. I think I've just given up on trying to deal with it, and I guess I'll have to start the slow process of changing my email accounts -- though that's not always possible for things like PayPal, or at least it's a pain in the ass.

Yahoo! can fancy up their interface, but if the emails themselves are useless, what's the point?

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