It’s good to know that comment spammers from Turkey still have a sense of humor.
The post that was being spammed was a recap of the Janet Jackson breast dustup back in 2004 where I proudly proclaimed that breast censoring, save for dramatic purposes, would not happen at this blog. Yes, I will still do love them tits!
Having been someone who has lost his temper before on an internet show I winced when I saw the normally calm and friendly Leo Laporte get angry and shut down the Gillmor Gang show over a Palm Pre review copy misunderstanding with Mike Arrington. I think the point Arrington tried to make was a very good one and it’s too bad that the usually passive Laporte took it as a personal insult and shut the show down. I think if given a similar situation 99 more times, Laporte would not have reacted the same way. But that’s not to say Arrington or Laporte did anything wrong.
Sometimes you just have bad days. That’s what I came away from this thinking.
I wish the internet mob would be able to look at these types of events and chalk them up as humans being human rather than trying to stir something up and going crazy as some are (apparently Arrington received death threats in the comment area of his apology post). We are all far from perfect and I think if each one of us looked inside ourselves when incidents like these come up we’d be able to say: yup, I remember reacting poorly to something and wish I could have that moment back. I sure do.
I didn’t know what the keyboard cat was about and am normally not that fond of the LOLcatz animal humor but this video mashup cracked me up. Now go watch more keyboard cat at playhimoffkeyboardcat.com
Cooler heads prevail
Hopefully as the dust settles – and it seems by now Mike has already quickly apologized and Leo has accepted (in the comments area of same post) – the Gillmor Gang show should return and a serious discussion of the ethics of any company who might or might not be sending out gadget review units targeted primarily to those who will give a more positive review will be discussed and debated.
All keyboard cat kidding aside, that is a serious worthwhile discussion. What caused this spat is the primary reasons I stopped doing those paid ReviewMe reviews. The money was good and I didn’t feel obligated to give the products/services any particular positive slant. And I always started each review with disclosure for readers but at the end of the day something didn’t feel quite right. It left me feeling kind of dirty, so I stopped doing it. I wonder how many other tech pub writers have done the same?
Runpee.com serves mankind well by offering up a service that tells you when you can take that much needed bathroom break. Check out the logo which runs, pun intended, from white to yellow. Creative, I like.
To use the site, just click the movie you’re going to see and then the radio button. It will show scrambled spoiler text that can be unscrambled with what happens while you are gone runpeeing.
Hat tip to Lestat for sharing this one and helping to save bladders everywhere. Lestat, you must be off on a long bathroom break, as your blog was last updated in November 2008
Thanks Abraham for sharing how the HR department view differs from a programmer’s.
Got a good morning chuckle out of this one, particularly the negative programmer points for “topless in Facebook picture” and “Lists Visual Basic experience first.” What is that about perception being everything?
Curious thing happened yesterday. Client stopped in and mentioned that they’d stopped by twice and we weren’t in before realizing we had a new entrance door. I then started checking with other clients who stopped by and several admitted being confused at first by our new entrance door.
We changed our entrance door from wood to glass and while it looks much nicer and more professional, it confused some clients who were used to seeing a particular entrance type. Even though we added a more commercial open/closed sign and business hours and a sign next to the new door with our business name the new glass door itself was still causing confusion.
As simple as a door. Wood versus glass. It occurred to me that for years we’d had the same door and people were programmed for seeing a very specific entrance to our business. Like changing your hair from blonde to brunette.
To the right of our business is an apartment and they have a seldom-used secondary door that looks very similar to the door we used to have and some clients were trying that door which is almost always locked. Even though that door was a good 10 feet from our entrance door people were checking that door, seeing it was locked and driving away.
Yikes. So I talked to the neighbors and created a sign with a big, green arrow pointing to the left as the correct insurance door. Got their permission to put on their secondary door and am hoping this will do the trick in easing the confusion.
I never contemplated that a new door in the same business location would cause any confusion. How could I have done a better job explaining we had a new door? I came up with the following ideas:
make a blog post before the new door was installed letting clients know that our entrance door had changed.
call clients who regularly come in and let them know. It’s not like we have so many since we are rebooting our business this year that it would have taken a long time to make these courtesy calls.
email clients and let them know of the change. We are doing a better job than we had before collecting email addresses, so sending out a blast email just letting folks know could have been helpful
Truth of the matter is that I never even considered that changing an existing business door would do anything other than have clients say: “hey you have a nice, new door.” Live and learn, all right. I’ll be more careful in the future. Although in the 15 years we’ve been in business this is the first new door we’ve had installed, so who knows when or if ever we’ll have this scenario present itself again.
Speaking of green, our company logo color, happy St. Patrick’s Day to all those who celebrate. Don’t be drinking too much green beer tonight and stumbling in the wrong doors now..
One of my favorite parts of Saturday Night Live over the years has been the repeatable skits like the classic Mr. Bill, the Coneheads, Da Bears with Chris Farley (anything with Chris Farley), Eddie Murphy as Mr. Rogers and most recently MacGruber.
I’m not a big fan of any of the current SNL cast, but these MacGruber skits are a riot. Thanks to NBC and Hulu you can watch a bunch of them. Hilarious.net has collected all of them to date as well.
MacGruber is a spoof on the 80s show Macgyver, the guy who could get out of jams using normal household objects. I can’t get the MacGruber theme song out of my head.
Over the weekend I hung my first interior door which at times was equally comical. Was able to bust up the tense moments by singing the MacGruber song.
I’m sure some might disagree but I think MacGruber is an SNL classic skit and worthy of tuning in each week to check out – or DVR through to see if there are new episodes. Or just wait for Hulu to have them. What do you like, if anything, about the current SNL?
How would you feel about someone coming to your house and littering on your porch under the guise of it being ‘temporary’ when you are the one who has to pick it up? Would that still be littering? Sure it would. These temporary blog posts for style detection are bogus. They might be temporary to the blog and blogger but some of them still show up in reader’s feeds like this:
Just say no! Like this provides any sort of reader value?
There are less intrusive and more intelligent ways to detect the style of a blog post if that’s the aim of the software/service. Yeah, I’m looking at your Windows Live Writer even though this post is being written using that system. I just say no whenever asked this question because I don’t want any readers to see this trash. And for the systems out there who think it’s cool to do a temporary blog post to detect blog ownership, that’s even more stupid. If you’re the blog owner you can put some sort of image or file on the server that isn’t in a blog post to show you own the blog. Heck you could sandwich in a verification code at the end of a legitimate post and that wouldn’t be temporary trash.
I purposefully blurred out the offending blog above because I don’t want this to be about the offending blogger, but the system which is stupid. There were actually two of these in my RSS reader this morning. Two bloggers who didn’t realize that there is no such thing as temporary in the RSS world.
Once you hit publish and it changes the RSS feed it is released and somebody could see it somewhere else. One of your readers, your mother, the pope, the President, a terrorist, anybody. Do you want everybody to see your temporary trash? As a reader and blogger I sure don’t. Just say no!
Oh, and got to love the 13 FeedFlares attached to the signature. Yeah, I’ll digg this, stumble it, add to mixx, share in Facebook, yadda, yadda. Argh.
Don’t know about you, but it’s getting harder to stay positive with the economy and bailouts and other negativity flowing, but hey, at least condom sales aren’t hurting:
According to data from the Nielsen Company, condom sales went up approximately five percent in 2008’s fourth quarter and around six percent this January, compared to last year. Just as millions of Americans resorted to nesting during the Great Depression, they are repeating the trend again in our current recession.
What empirical data can we draw from this? More people staying home and doing the horizontal bop instead of out spending money at the mall?
There are physiological factors, but, you know, sex slumps sort of beget sex slumps. Being sexy and having sex begets more sex. Sex is its own aphrodisiac. If you don’t use it, you can lose it. Testosterone levels — which men and woman have — start to diminish and your body and mind get habituated to not having sex.
Wish I had more to say on this topic but there are sometimes where quotes and links speak for themselves.
Just to tell you how out of touch I was with what is happening outside of working offline, I had to be reminded that this coming Sunday is the Super Bowl. Sacrilege! This morning, though, I’m cracking up over the PETA veggie sex ad (YouTube video) that didn’t make the cut. Thanks Mike Doe for the chuckles.
Asparagus, broccoli … sexy? LOL. They’ve got to be kidding. I’m not sure what’s more funny though, the use of odd-shaped vegetables (hey, what wrong with the old phallic standbys? Cucumbers, carrots, you know) as sexual innuendo OR the fact that YouTube flashes the Warning: Adult Content message before you can visit and watch said video on their site.
Seriously, trying to make an event where grown men violently knock the crap out of each other family wholesome fun is a bit twisted. I can see baseball being more wholesome but even that sport has bench clearing brawls and violent collisions at the plate.
Violence ok, sex not ok, is that it? Time to grow up, NFL. All of us got here because of the latter and most as a result of being squeezed through our mother’s you know what. Having witnessed this first hand several times I’d say it’s a beautifully violent event and men have the easy part by a long shot in the birthing process.
Of course having sex with vegetables isn’t going to lead to any baby carrots. I’m just thinking from a practicality sense of women having sex with a head of broccoli. That’s going to get very messy – in a non-sexual, turn-off way. Little crumply shards of broccoli everywhere, eww. The vision is not working for me. At all.
The PETA commercial as comedy is funny but them trying to shove home, pardon the pun, some poorly veiled message that meat is bad and unsexy while vegetables are good and sexy puts PETA even more fringe than I already thought they were.
Now ladies don’t forget the next time you are on the vegetable aisle that PETA is counting on you to get very horny when see that pristine head of cauliflower. Don’t let them down. And disappoint the NFL at will. Go Cards!
PETA might not be laughing but I am over this blogger who is writing angry, accusatory posts to “cute animals” like penguins, wombats, puffin hoaxes, goats (cute?) and enough other animals to make even Dr. Doolittle envious. Yes, even reindeers, sorry Santa.
All this fun is happening under a blog with the profane title to match the often profanity-laced postings. A less profane sample:
You know, Wombat, all I do is love you. But is that good enough for you? No, you have to look at wombats in magazines and ask, "Why can’t I look like that?" Well, I’m not here to boost your ego, I’m here to have a life with you. SO STOP FISHING FOR COMPLIMENTS, WOMBAT.
Doubtful that Wombat will be subscribing to this RSS feed, but I did. Having seen and read all kinds of different blogs, this one stuck out. This is a good example of what new blogs need to do to get noticed in the sea of blogs out there.
Bza, now go get your own domain and give Blogger the boot, I’m betting the FU Penguin dot com is available or some clever variation.
