Month: April 2006

OMGWTFBBQ

2006-04-27, 1:59 pm
Categories: Announcements, Books, Status Updates, Work

It's a gorgeous fucking day. The high is 77 and there's a pleasant breeze. And in Phoenix in April, each gorgeous day could be the last one until fall: in a month, it'll be up over 100.

I was very disappointed that I ran late leaving the house this morning and had to drive instead of biking. But on the plus side, we had an employee barbecue at lunch.

Other than that, we're moving servers around. Lot of heavy lifting and interesting maneuvering. In-between that I'm setting up a mailserver.

Life is good.

Reading: Stranger in a Strange Land. Which, other than making me use the word "grok" more often than usual (though I've used it for years anyway), has somewhat lowered my esteem of Speaker for the Dead, which seems to crib all its best ideas from Heinlein. I guess I'm now down to liking only one thing Orson Scott Card's ever written.

Spam

2006-04-19, 4:21 pm
Categories: Announcements

I just deleted 2.8 fuckloads of spam referrals from my stats and banned the sites responsible.

In the off chance that I accidentally deleted a site I shouldn't have, let me know.

If you don't want your site to be banned, then never, ever directly link my stats page.

The Contest, Again/Still

2006-04-18, 7:03 pm
Categories: Announcements, Games

Looks like I made the winners' circle in the BioWare contest. #3 in the community votes.

Thanks to everyone who voted, and anybody who's found my site through the contest, welcome, and I hope you enjoy my ranting about MapQuest. (Incidentally, dexonline.com has not actually fixed its Mapquest system, and still routinely directs me to Kansas.)

Updated Features to put my mod at the top, and to add my current Pyoko avatar.

(...Ack, damn daylight savings time. We don't do that crap in Arizona. Am I really going to have to change my blog settings twice a year? Laaaaaaaame.)

(I sure hope nobody's got an RSS reader open right now. I've edited this entry about a half-dozen times in ten minutes. And I personally hate when people do that shit.)

No representation is made or warranty given as to their content, road conditions or route usability or expeditiousness.

2006-04-07, 11:33 am
Categories: Stream of Consciousness

Penny Arcade has already handily mocked online maps, but I'd just like to put in my two cents about how MapQuest fucking sucks.

What follows is an actual map I received when attempting to find a nearby Japanese restaurant.

Drive past your destination, go two and a half miles out of your way, and then come back.

Meanwhile, until recently, all my results on dexonline.com looked like the following:

Somewhere in Kansas

They seem to have fixed it now, but seeing as they're still using Mapquest, that just means an upgrade from pointing me to Kansas to telling me to drive a five-mile circle on the freeway for no reason.

While I'm on the subject, I hate sites with "online" in their names. Of course it's fucking online, it's a website. Why not just register dexdotcomwastaken.com and have done with it? I mean, maybe I'm not one to talk since my domain name has a hyphen in it, but seriously, what was wrong with qwestdex.com?

I also don't like sites with names that end in net.com. What the hell is that?

But I think we can all agree that the stupidest domain ever is news.com.com.

April Fool's Week

2006-04-05, 3:42 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness

I have uncovered one of the greatest threats facing America: the extension of April Fool's Day.

The Internet is a stupid, stupid place where people make bad jokes and lie about things. On April Fool's Day, this idiocy is concentrated, and even encouraged.

Which, by itself, isn't so bad -- stay the hell off Slashdot on April Fool's Day and you'll be much happier. (Actually, I think you could probably make a pretty good argument for staying off Slashdot entirely yielding the same result.) But 2006 showed us a dangerous precedent: this holiday is no longer confined to a single day.

From Sonic Cult's "leak" of a bogus Sonic Xtreme torrent on March 31st to Joystiq's news story on Uwe Boll's upcoming Starcraft project the evening of April 3rd, it is clear the stupidity is spreading.

Just look what's happened to Christmas. Stores start putting up goddamn Christmas decorations on Halloween now. Imagine that happening with April Fool's Day. This is a slippery slope, my friends. April Fool's Day has escaped its bonds.

The Internet is already flooded with lame hoaxes and dumbasses who think they're funny. Encouraging an increase in this asinine behavior is okay for one day a year...but any more than that is flirting with disaster.

The More You Know