Month: July 2003

Chat with Google

Just add [email protected] to your MSN Messenger contact list, and you can chat to Google. From the site:

The idea behind Chat to Google is to add a chat interface to the knowledge contained in the Google search engine database. In theory, Google knows everything there is to know about any subject that has ever had something written about it on a website. That is a hell of a lot of knowledge. If you talk about something that the program doesn’t know about then it simply searches for it on the web using Google and replies in a knowledgable fashion.
The thinking is that Google’s page ranking system for yielding the most relevant results for a query make it a perfect filter for almost everything you could ask about. If you ask how Chat to Google feels, it will return a statement based on the most popular feelings in the internet right now. If everyone with a webpage said they were feeling ill, then Chat to Google would also claim to feel ill.

I’m waiting for the system to get online myself so I can try it out. It probably got pretty well pummeled by its mention on b3ta, but hopefully it won’t die.

July 17, 2003

Flesh or Food?

Yet another stupid quiz, but this one is tricky: Can you tell, in this pictures, which one is a bod part and which one is food?

July 17, 2003

Learn what you want to all in one place

From Kim Komando’s Daily Cool Site:

What if you wanted to know how to play poker, decorate your apartment,ace a job interview, write a business plan and become a sitcom writer
and could only surf to one site. Impossible? With Soyouwanna.com, you can find out how to do just about anything.

And Kim’s right. The site’s full of stuff, written in a fun, easy to understand way that’s pretty humorous, too.

July 17, 2003

The Actiontec 1520 DSL Modem should NEVER be used in a corporate environment

My DSL provider gets their bandwidth and uses the Qwest-distributed modems: The 1520 from Actiontec. This modem is fine and dandy for personal use, but please, for the love of God, don’t use this piece of crap in a business environment.

The modem is single-handedly responsible for blocking random Web requests, and randomly not accepting SSL requests to the secure server I have here in the office (and it first started a while ago, but I’ve only now been able to fully eliminate every other possible cause for the problem). If you use the modem’s firewall and routing features (which suck) things work fine, but if you try to run the traffic through a firewall (using Qwest’s way to authentice the PPPoA) it starts randomly dropping requests.

So the tech (who, told me that the corporation that owns their office has basically said “Fix this or you’re fired!”) brought out a different firewall that played a bit nicer with the modem, so that’s all plugged in, and we’re at least able to get secure stuff through (for now). The modem itself is still giving me trouble, so they’re trying to get a hold of the discontinued Cisco 678 modem for my use.

I think what annoyed me the most is that they gave me a modem, knowing that damn near every user forum out there says it’s crap. Even the various levels of techs I talked to didn’t even know how to use the thing, let alone how to fix it.

Regardless, it should HOPEFULLY be fixed by the end of the week, and our bill for the month doesn’t have to get paid, which is VERY nice. However, we’ve probably lost a few grand because of this crap.

</rant>

Update: The modem was still dropping packets, so I finally have a Cisco 678 in place of the Actiontec, and put my old firewall back up, and lo-and-behold, everything works fine. Go figure.

July 16, 2003

Random comments

One fun thing about leaving the comments open on old posts is that you’ll still get random comments on them long after you’ve posted them. For example:

Dateline to focus on Michael Jackson’s face.

I posted that link over 6 months ago, but all the comments on it have come recently. Quite a few Michael Jackson supporters (and I deleted the duplicates — the “bless” guy posted the same comment several times). Some quotes (with my thoughts):

“yaall know darn well yall need to leave michael alone he aint messin’ with yall im only 11 years old and i shouldnt feel this way and all yall thats talking about him yall know darn well yall aint perfect yall self so yall needs to stop and whoever feel me and believe they need to leave him alone email me back at [email protected] or [email protected]”
Somebody needs to take some happy pills.
“why worry yourselves abuot the legend is it out of jealousy you do this. i don’t know why you keep chasing one man and do all you can to destroy him”
Jealous? Of Michael Jackson? I wouldn’t take his place if I could.

And then there are the folks that think by replying to posts on my blog, they think they’re writing back to the celebrity that I’m lampooning.

Observe…

Free Porn, Britney Spears, KaZaa, Atkins Diet, and the Iraq War

“i way 12 stones and i want to become 7 stones and i want to be just as thin as you so can you tell me what your diet is and how you become so beautiful and i am a magger fan of yours you have great talent comepared to the others. Can you help me on your diet and what exersice you do. Please i am begging you. Luv Rebecca***”
You want to go from 168 pounds to 98 pounds!?!?! You are nuts.

And course, my favorite…

Wow, a whole town for less than Eminem’s House

“Hi eminem i am Steffany i am 11 years old im not sure if it will be you that gets this message but hi to any one that gets this message. I know eminem you probably won’t give a shit what i have to say because you have so many fans but still i love your music eminem it touches me in a way that nothing has touched me before. any way got to go please e-mail me on [email protected] later.”
I won’t even touch that one.

July 16, 2003

Why hire a sports journalist when you can buy on on eBay?

From Romenesko’s letter page:

Foxsports.com, which recently fired its entire writing staff, is using eBay to find a NASCAR columnist. (Yes, you too can pay to work for a Murdoch outfit.) “If this is a success — and why wouldn’t it be for heaven’s sake — I’m sure we can all imagine the ramifications,” writes Stu Schneider. “The fine folks at the Medills of the world can just pack up their stuff and learn to play the harmonica I guess.”

What’s amazing to me is they’re also looking for a British Open writer. Generally, you get paid to do this sort of stuff, you don’t have to bid for the privilege.

July 16, 2003

Tired of the same old Google results?

Try Bananaslug. From their site:

BananaSlug was designed to promote serendipitous surfing: finding the unexpected in the 3,083,324,652 web pages indexed by Google. Directed Google searches return pages most relevant to your search term, based on the pages’ popularity on the Web. You may never see some of the pages way down the list that are relevant or interesting, but off the beaten path.
So we give you a little boost. We “seed” your search with another word, chosen at random, and this accidental encounter results in pages you may have overlooked. What, if anything, do all the results have in common? You tell me! We show the seed word at the end of the page, along with the number of results, and how many seed words we needed to try before we got results (it doesn’t always happen the first time!).

An interesting concept that does give some interesting results, indeed.

July 15, 2003