I know this is just one of those stupid examples where a company (eBay in this case) buys every keyword in Google Adwords that they can come up with, but it’s still kind of funny… 🙂
All posts by Shawn
How The MPAA Launched My Blog
Someone pointed out something kind of funny/ironic… Since the MPAA decided to sue me, they have actually made my blog a few times more popular than their own site (mpaa.org). If you look look at the Alexa graph below, the green line is the old URL for this blog, the blue line is the new URL (when I switched over to my own domain) and the red line is the MPAA’s website.
The orange arrow coincides with the day I first heard about the lawsuit (and posted about it).
The odd thing is it actually looks like their site is getting less traffic over time (not a good direction to go). Maybe they would like to buy some advertising space on my blog for their anti-piracy propaganda? 🙂 Hey, you never know… it could happen!
100,000 Mile Warranty
I got a letter in the mail today that Hummer has put a 100,000 mile warranty on all 2007 vehicles. That’s cool… especially considering it was 36,000 miles before. I just got a free 64,000 mile extension on my warranty. 🙂
I’ll Show You Tough…
Some guys from my gang of ninjas getting ready for a high profile mission we are about to embark on…
Teleportation Coming Closer To Reality
“It is one step further because for the first time it involves teleportation between light and matter, two different objects. One is the carrier of information and the other one is the storage medium,” Polzik explained in an interview on Wednesday.
The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They also teleported the information a distance of half a meter but believe it can be extended further.
“Teleportation between two single atoms had been done two years ago by two teams but this was done at a distance of a fraction of a millimeter,” Polzik, of the Danish National Research Foundation Center for Quantum Optics, explained.
“Our method allows teleportation to be taken over longer distances because it involves light as the carrier of entanglement,” he added.
Quantum entanglement involves entwining two or more particles without physical contact.
Hard Gay Infiltrates Yahoo Japan
Japanese people can be kind of funny when they want to be… 🙂
Padres Lose
WTF is going on here? The Chargers lost on Sunday, and now the Padres lost today to the Cardinals in the first post season game of the year for them.
Oh well, whatever… it was an awesome day in San Diego, and we had awesome seats for the game (4th row, next to 3rd base). 🙂
Steve McNair
I don’t think you can appreciate my hatred of Steve McNair right now. I’ll just leave it at that.
Padres In The Postseason
Padres clinched a postseason berth today with their win over the Arizona Diamondbacks.
Now if I can just get some postseason dugout seats somehow, we’ll be all set.. 🙂
Suspicious Looking Device
Someone has a little too much time on their hands I think. 🙂
The only function of the Suspicious Looking device is to appear as suspicious as possible, whether carried in hand or placed indiscrimately in public places.
The SLD contains LEDs, a LED array, a character display, an optical distance sensor, capacitive touch sensor, buzzer, and motors.
San Diego Chargers – Strength In Numbers
You know I have to repost great things I see about the Chargers, so… 🙂
THE FAVORITE
1. San Diego, 2-0
The funny thing about the Chargers: Every team has at least one serious flaw, but everyone wrote off the Bolts because of the “downgrade” at QB to Philip Rivers. You would have thought they were replacing Brees with Bruce Gradkowski’s illegitimate brother, Cliff. Rivers was the No. 4 pick in the 2004 draft, remember? The next seven picks were Sean Taylor, Kellen Winslow Jr., Roy Williams, D’Angelo Hall, Reggie Williams, Dunta Robinson, Ben Roethlisberger and Jonathan Vilma. He’s no stiff. I’d say it’s more probable that Rivers becomes a good QB right away over Indy suddenly figuring out how to stop the run, or the Bengals not getting killed by off-the-field stuff, or the Eagles making it to Miami without anyone who can run for a first down when they need one.
Of course, all of this is mitigated by two words: “Marty” and “Schottenheimer.” But you know what? We don’t have to worry about that for another four months. I think they’re the best team right now, and I think they throttle the Ravens in Baltimore on Sunday. And that’s why you rank the teams.
Linksys WRT54G Flashed With DD-WRT
I found some bugs in the web interface for a Linksys WRT54G router I bought to fix some 2Wire “issues”. One of the bugs just would give me a false error when trying to do something and keep the form from being submitted.
Anyway, the short version of this entry is that I found out that you can flash your Linksys with an entirely new firmware. Ultimately, I just wanted to fix the bug so I could do what the Linksys is supposed to do to begin with. But after installing it, it looks like you can do all sorts of other interesting things… like run crontab processes (since it’s Linux).
Anyway, if you have a Linksys WRT54G (they are pretty popular), and you are a dork, you may want to give it a go… but don’t blame me if you screw yours up (mine was fine).
Plumbing Fixtures
I met with my interior designer today and I actually got *all* the plumbing fixtures picked out for the house. Faucets, shower stuff, toilets, sinks, bathtubs, etc.
There’s a lot of sinks… so it’s not as easy as it sounds. Just glad that’s over.
The $10,000 Space
If you are a programmer, have you ever had one of those bizarre situations where you know something is not working, but you aren’t getting an error or anything else that would make debugging easy?
A couple days ago I migrated a cluster of web servers to PHP 5.1.x (they were running PHP 4.4.x before). One of the things I run on them is a geo targeting mechanism, and in the case where my screw-up was, a function to block a subnet of IP addresses.
[code=php]echo sprintf(“%u”, ip2long(‘ 80.1.2.3’));[/code]
That little bit of code was my fuck up… PHP 4.4.x returns “1342243331” (as expected), but PHP 5.1.x would return “0“. PHP4 was more forgiving of the stray leading space before the IP address, while PHP5 was not. The end result was that every IP address before 81.1.2.3 was blocked, instead of blocking FROM that IP address to an end IP address (that was not very many IPs away).
Awesome… so what happened here? I ended up blocking about 40% of the potential traffic for awhile, which equated out to probably about $10,000 in lost revenue.
The lesson learned? Don’t fuck around with spaces, because they will cost you many hours of debugging/tracing as well as ~$10,000.
Chargers Up In Power Rankings
The San Diego Chargers didn’t play this week (they had a bye), yet they went from #7 to #5 in the NFL power rankings. Oddly enough, the team they play this weekend (the Ravens) did play this last weekend (and won), yet they went from a #6 to a #8 ranking. {shrug}
Random Email #29
Haha… this is a funny email I just got.
Hi,my name is Nkaylah and i want to see girls gone wild and i am 33 years old but they wont let me .I was born in 1973,please let me go on girls gone wild.
Nkaylah, who exactly won’t let you see girls that have gone wild? That’s an outrage!!!
Another MPAA Partner On The Pyramid Of Piracy
So back in June, I made a post that helps people understand the MPAA’s “Pyramid of Piracy”. As I pointed out last month, BitTorrent.com (the company, not the software), which is one of the MPAA’s partners is actually one of the biggest “facilitators” by their own definition.
Well now the MPAA has at least one other partner that is also on the Pyramid of Piracy… and this one is higher up in the pyramid. Guba.com is a Top Site on the pyramid.
//www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2019308,00.asp
It will be interesting to see how long before an MPAA partner is at the top of their pyramid as a “Supplier”. Oh wait, maybe the MPAA is saving that slot for itself. 😉
The Naughts
You know how people reference decades? Like, “I like 80’s music.” or “The 60’s was great.”, etc… I’ve been wondering how people are going to reference this decade in the future… “That’s so 0’s.”??
I think it’s going to be naughts. Although now I’m wondering what the next decade is going to be, the teens?
Never Forget Your Anniversary
This would be good for anyone that ever forgot their anniversary… 🙂
24 hours before your special day, the Hot Spot™ on the interior surface of your Remember Ring™ will warm to 120º F for approximately 10 seconds, and continue to warm up every hour, on the hour, all day long!
//www.alaskajewelry.com/remember-rings-never-forget-anniversary-p-2040.html
Little Indian Superstar
Ever since I became a full-fledged Indian, I’ve had a huge interest in my new culture. While doing some research on some Indian “things”, I came across this… does anyone else think this is weird?
(via Bobby)
Basement Construction Time Lapse
I threw together a time lapse of the basement being built. The end of it is today, when they took all the forms off the basement walls and we actually have freestanding concrete walls. Now for the waterproofing of the walls… 🙂
The movie runs through 4 hours per second. The resolution is a bit lame, but hey… can’t keep YouTube from down sampling it.
Random Email #28
It’s been awhile since I got a good one, but here’s one…
how do you change like your sleeves on your arms on your characters on mycoke?
What the hell are you talking about dude?
Oakland Raiders Find White Substance On Field
Old news now, but maybe someone didn’t catch it…
Associated Press (9/15/2006, 8:30 AM PST)
OAKLAND, (CA)–Oakland Raiders football practice was delayed nearly two hours today after a player reported finding an unknown white powdery substance on the practice field. Head coach Art Shell immediately suspended practice and called the police and federal investigators. After a complete analysis, FBI forensic experts determined that the white substance unknown to players was the GOAL LINE. Practice resumed after special agents decided the team was unlikely to encounter the substance again.
(via Chris)
Camera That Makes You Look Skinny
This really is stupid IMO… if you are worried about your weight so much that you need to go out of your way to buy a camera that actually makes you look slimmer than you really are, maybe you should just go to the gym or something. Unless you are a model and that’s your livelihood, I don’t see the point of this…
//www.hp.com/united-states/consumer/digital_photography/tours/slimming/index_f.html
Chargers vs. Titans
Did anyone else catch the San Diego Chargers stomping the Tennessee Titans by 33 points? 🙂
I caught the game in Vegas with Chris, Jim and Sanaz right before I flew home. The Titans had zero passing yards in the first half and like 10 or so rushing yards. hah Funny. 🙂
All the teams in the Chargers division lost again this week (except for Kansas City, which played someone else in the division, so *someone* had to win.. heh)
So after 2 weeks of the 2006 season, let’s see where the Chargers are at (compared to all teams in the NFL)…
- #4 total offense
- #2 rushing game
- #2 total points scored per game
- #2 total defense
- #1 pass defense
- #5 rushing defense
- #2 points allowed per game
- #4 quarterback
- #5 AND #8 running back
Uhm, you can’t compete with that… 🙂
Google Gmail API
I was just thinking… Google needs to build an API for Gmail. Then we could do things like POP our email into an email client, and then run a script from within the email client that is able to go back to Gmail and tag stuff as spam, apply a label, etc.
That would be handy… can someone please make it so? 🙂
New Numa – The Return of Gary Brolsma
Good ol’ Gary Brolsma has a new numa numa video… 🙂 (you can find his original one over here)
First Woman With Bionic Arm
I can’t wait until you can just cut off your own arms and legs and get some of these things by choice. 🙂
Mitchell, who lives in Ellicott City, is the fourth person — and first woman — to receive a “bionic” arm, which allows her to control parts of the device by her thoughts alone. The device, designed by physicians and engineers at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, works by detecting the movements of a chest muscle that has been rewired to the stumps of nerves that once went to her now-missing limb.
//www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/13/AR2006091302271.html
(via Washington Post, via Engadget, via Bobby)
Ron Burgundy SportsCenter Audition
I know it’s a little old, but I didn’t see it until today, so now you get to see it too. 🙂
(via Bobby)
1.5 Million Pounds Of Concrete
There ended up being about 750 tons of concrete poured/sprayed today at the construction site for the basement walls and pool.
That’s a lot of concrete… So much that you could give yourself a hernia trying to lift the pool or basement…
Retroencabulator
I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a joke, or what… but this guy might as well been speaking Chinese and doing backflips. I think I may be able to put one in my new car (maybe)…
Concrete In Basement and Pool
Today we are getting concrete poured in the basement walls as well as concrete sprayed into the pool. I’m guessing it’s pretty much just going to be a zillion concrete trucks coming and going all day (it looks like they do 4 trucks at a time… 2 for basement and 2 for pool).
Chargers vs. Raiders
Uhm, did anyone happen to notice the San Diego Chargers completely dominating the Oakland Raiders last night on Monday Night Football by chance? 🙂
Check out some of these stats:
- Oakland Total Yards: 129
- Oakland Passing Yards: 42
- Times Oakland Sacked: 9 (3 just by Shawne Merriman)
Not a bad way to give your new quarterback some confidence. 🙂 In fact, Philip Rivers didn’t have to do much, but he ended up 8-11 with a touchdown and that gives him a 133.9 quarterback passing rating, which leads the NFL. Of course, it’s only 1 week, but the Chargers have the #1 defense in the NFL as of right now. 🙂
Linksys Fixes 2Wire Shortcomings
Did I tell you how much I hate the 2Wire router/gateway you have to use for fiber Internet connections? You can’t get into the admin (which is web based) remotely, you can’t use DDNS so when your IP address changes weekly, you have no idea what it changed to, the firewall assumes you are an idiot and can’t do basic stuff with it, etc…
So the IP address changed over the weekend, and the only way to get the new IP is to drive out there and look to see what it is. On the way out there, I had an idea… why not buy a Linksys WRT54G broadband router and just route all in-bound traffic to it. Then you can use it’s firewall and DDNS functions. So that’s what I did… and it works *so* much better… remote admin access and everything else. I even tried to get tricky and route traffic to the Linksys and then right back to the 2Wire to see if I could get to it’s web admin remotely, but no such luck… It ends up redirecting it to a different URL (I’m assuming based on the client not being on the local network)… whatever that part isn’t that important anyway now.
Motorola KRZR K1
I guess I missed it, but Motorola released a new phone (MOTOKRZR) a few months ago that looks pretty tight. Like a new and improved RAZR. The one thing it has that I’d love to have in my RAZR is support for the high-speed EDGE stuff for fast Internet. But it does seem to have some other handy stuff like a GPS, memory slot, etc.
Now if they could somehow fit a QWERTY keyboard on it, we would be all set…
//www.motorola.com/motoinfo/product/details.jsp?globalObjectId=160