If you’re going to sell items on eBay, and are going to copy reviews of said items from Amazon.com, make sure that you don’t copy the really bad reviews of your item. See exhibits A, B, and C. Of course, they were all Bruce Willis movies, and they’re probably hard to find a good review for. Link via NTK.
Month: November 2004
“Mommy Didn’t Buy Me A Computer…
…so I’m going to take her butt to court.”
An 11-year-old boy in central China took his mother to court for breaking a promise to buy him a computer if he did well at school, a news report said last Monday.
The woman told her son she would buy him a computer if he scored average marks of more than 94% for his school work, the Hong Kong edition of the China Daily reported.
However, she welshed on the deal when he achieved an average of 97%, telling him she could not afford to buy the computer, the newspaper said.
Updated: With Correct Link. Sorry, Rick!
Skeptic Quits Blogging
A local blogger who was there for our first meet up has stopped blogging. If you ever need a place to vent, let me know.
I Need A Bathroom Faucet
We’re remodeling our bathroom. Think my wife would get miffed if I got a drooling deer faucet?
Look at the Squirrel Fly
Simone lives on the Little Deschutes River down by LaPine, and has squirrels that get into her birdseed. I say she sets up one of these things on her back deck, and learn them little rodents good. Looks like it’s a manual release (you can see the guy pulling it behind the door), but it’s still quite affective. Thanks Doug for the video. If anybody has the source, let me know so I can cite it.
Microsoft Debuts Search Engine
Microsoft has finally debuted their long-awaited search engine and their already taking cheap shots at Google (with Microsoft still at #4).
Meanwhile, Google has 8-billion pages now in its index.
Link Dump
I’m well behind on my blog reading and have about 2000 unread entries in Feeddemon that I’ll get to at some point. Meanwhile, I have a pile of links in there that I’ve flagged in the past that I’ve been meaning to read, just haven’t had a chance to or they didn’t always merit an entire blog entry. So I don’t forget about them or lose them, they’re getting blogged here (and just watch the Trackbacks fly). So here you go (in no particular order)…
- A Good Discussion on Community/Wiki News
- Dane’s got a bunch of good ones: Distressed PhotoshopTutorial, and a a few good search engine optimization articles.
- Codenovice points to a bunch of great sites for blog templates as well as has the MT subcategory tags on file, and a bunch of other useful MT links.
- Contentious has a great deal of wonderful grab bags of links on e-learning, Media and Journalism, Net and Society, Wikis, Blogging, Webfeeds, Podcasting, Tools, and Writing and Editing. I only wish I had the time to dive through all those links.
- Based on an MT entry’s primary category, it can have a unique template.
- Mezzoblue always has a pile of great links especially in his dailies. Like Open Source is Like Sex, CSS Compatiblity Chart, and marking up data tables in CSS.
- In the future if I ever get around to create a site to aggregate all the Central Oregon Blogs I read, I might go this route
- If you want a good deal of RSS reading material, Nick has a pile of them, as well as a link on RSS Bandwidth saving techniques.
- An Interesting read on how WiFi is affecting Web site content.
- Scriptygoddess always has good stuff. Like this CMS comparison chart, using your MT Template in WordPress, another handy color tool, a gallery of FavIcons for inspiration, and a very cool Colorzilla extension for FireFox.
- A handy Google Cheat Sheet from the SEW Blog.
- I respect the Cub Scouts less and less every day thanks to SEB.
- Movalog Side Log comes up with the MT-DSBL plugin which is an open proxy comment filter for MT that should help combat spam even more. The main part of Movalog has some great links on customizing error messages in MT 3.12x, linking to a couple of very handy Mozilla sidepanels: EditCSS and Web Developer. He also has info on setting up scheduled posting, and skinning the administrative interface with dutchpink (a great admin interface that I might try here).
- Lastly, the 6A ProNet has a couple good article on creating a blogging business strategy.
OK, there’s a few less entries flagged in my RSS Reader. Now to actually read some of the unread ones…
Our Not-So-Free Press
To quote this column:
Protecting confidential sources has been a sacred ethical precept in publishing ever since John Twyn was arrested in 1663 for printing a book that offended the king. Twyn refused to reveal the name of the book’s author, so he was publicly castrated and disemboweled, and his limbs severed from his body. Each piece of his body was nailed to a London gate or bridge.
So, on the bright side, we have evidently progressed.
Though, as you’ll see reading that column, we haven’t progressed much. There are several cases where journalists are getting thrown in jail (or very close to it) for not revealing their confidential sources, and it’s starting to get messy.
Would I reveal a confidential source? If the story is worth it, no way. There are so many organizations out there (SPJ, for example) that would fight their butt off for you and make a spectacle out of the government that it’d be worth it to not give that information up. You’d also burn any sort of confidence you had with that source, killing off the possibility if getting information from them in the future. Most of the time, confidential sources are ones that don’t want to go on the record because of reasons out of their control — like they’d lose their job, for instance — and you don’t want to do that to a source.
Thanks Barney for the link.
Moron Cops For The Day
Usually I talk about idiot crooks here, but this time the cops are to blame. A man turned himself into police after seeing himself on TV news robbing a bank but was turned away by officers who told him to come back the next day. Full Story. Thanks Cheryl for the link.