- It’s the end of the world.
- Find the fastest DNS servers for your connection to see if OpenDNS, Google DNS, or UltraDNS or your ISPs DNS are the best for your location.
- Why I’d rather be punched in the testicles than call customer service.
- US Border Patrol gone wild (original story).
- If you could play one game for the rest of your life, what would it be?
- There’s going to be a waffle shortage.
- Learn To F–king Spell.
Category: Randomness
Reading Material
22 Below
It was only -13°F this morning at my house, but it was a balmy -22° at my co-worker’s house in Sunriver this morning. The SROA weather station had the low at its office at -19°F overnight (it’s gotten up to -5°F at my office — here comes the heat wave!). La Pine and Sunriver-area schools were cancelled and there were power outages in some areas. Thank goodness I don’t rely on electric heat in my home.
In other words, it’s frackin’ cold out. You whiners in Portland who are complaining about the cold up there (it’s currently 24°F up there), you got nothing on us.
There’s no sense in leaving the house if you don’t have to. This will help to keep you indoors today.
- There’s a Woot Off on the main woot, kids woot and wine woot for all your holiday shopping needs.
- Somebody with far too much time on their hands has achieved (nearly) everything in World of Warcraft.
- This would explain a lot about Tetris.
- Parenting is making me dumb.
- Only linking to this SFGate story because it mentions a friend of mine and his wife who I went to high school with.
- Banning cookies is a really bad idea.
- Political correctness has gone too far.
- Why Your IT Sucks.
- Comcast Acquires Majority of NBC Universal, launches Data Usage Meter in Portland (their cap of 250GB is still quite a bit higher than the 100GB BendBroadband offers).
- Millions of tax dollars are going to dead farmers.
- Twilight Fans get Punked.
Stay warm!
Pre-game Reading Material
OK, this has nothing to do with the upcoming game, but it will get some of these links off my desktop.
- Google introduces Public DNS, which is perfect if you don’t want/need the filterting/redirecting of OpenDNS.
- Speaking of Google, they’ve introduced asynchronous tracking with Google Analytics — which basically means faster load time for the Analytics code.
- The Geek Squad’s Real Agenda Exposed.
- Brilliant traffic light design idea.
- 10 Alternatives to Mininova.
- In the spirit of FMyLife comes i’msobadatsex (needless to say, NSFW language).
- Another Google Wave Use: Manhunt (I have Google wave, really haven’t had time to play with it much, but this did intrigue me a bit).
- Who is the most dominate athlete ever?
- Can we say crazy? Mothers Against Nickelodeon. I’m going to start a group someday: “Parents against jackass parents who plant their kids in front of the TV instead of properly interacting and raising their children and then complain when the TV has potentially offensive content.” I think the name needs work, though.
- Robin Williams talks about videos games.
OK, that should be enough for a while. Go Ducks!
Post-Thanksgiving Reading Material
Hope everybody had a good holiday. Back to work. There will be a quiz tomorrow…
- Kid’s drawings reenacted using professional photography.
- Just some more Twilight bashing: Bella and Edward are in an abusive relationship.
- If you want them to RTFM, make a better FM (from this old but good talk).
- Google China vs the Rest Of The World.
- Tomboy is a simple little note-taking application for Linux, Unix, and Windows. Now I just need to convince my other (better) half to use this and to quit sticking Post-It notes all over the desk.
- Rotate a site. Like this one.
- Perl and C programmers like to swear a lot.
- Video Professor is a scammer.
- TypePad Micro is a great new option for new bloggers.
- What kind of cereal are you going to have in the morning? Here’s a handy flowchart to help you decide.
- Converting an old Xbox into a cool new hackintosh.
- GeoIP Weather: Just load the page, it’ll give you the weather based on your current location.
Links For The Day
Some reading material for everybody:
- Deep Tracing of Internet Explorer.
- 8-Bit Awesomeness: Left 4 Dead For the NES.
- 20 Essential Firefox Tweaks.
- My Font Book is a great way to preview fonts installed on your computer.
- The History Of The Internet In A Nutshell.
- An online clock made entirely in scroll bars.
- Why women are sluts and men are legends (naughty language warning).
- I want to be like mommy when I grow up.
- Make Your Own Steampunk Goggles.
- Infinitey Defined.
- Google Adds Turn-by-Turn Navigation to Android 2.0.
- Killing the beast — an indepth look into why malware writers are evil people who know a lot about software that can’t be killed.
Link Dump
Get these links off my desktop, will ya?
- What does Google know about you?
- Share your e-mail address safely from spambots.
- Great Invoice design and practices.
- Perl has a “do” function, but apparently there’s also a don’t.
- A (and seems to be the final word) on what you can do with your Windows 7 upgrade media.
- Citizen Journalists Can’t Handle The Truth.
- Don’t understand xkcd? Then have it explained to you.
- TinEye reverse image search. I’m using this to find sources for some random images I’m finding on a file server here, making sure we’re authorized to use them.
- XP Quick Fix Plus is a simple little tool to just get some quick and dirty tweaks done in XP.
- How much should that car repair cost?
- Create your own Facebook quotes.
- What are the odds?
Links For The Day
Another busy evening (have rehearsal tonight right after work until late and am already tired after today), but have a bunch of stuff to share…
- Developing Games for Android.
- A really cool multi-app installer which will be great when setting up new computers.
- Why do we have an IMG element?
- The “Less Than Free” business model.
- Unfortunately, victim in fatal car accident was not Glenn Beck.
- Twitter Lists How-to.
- Old buddy of mine started up Central Oregon Athlete, covering local sports.
- ABC Numbers are out, and The Bulletin bucked circulation decline trends by actually posting a very small gain in circulation. They did last year as well. I’m sure you can all come up with reasons as to why they managed this, so knock yourself out below.
Links For The Day (And Technology Sucks)
I’ve dealing with an accounting “upgrade” that has caused me nothing but trouble and more work the last 48 hours (and a hardware upgrade on a client PC that needed more RAM because Quickbooks said so). Since the first of the month was the beginning of our fiscal year, the software needed to be in place ASAP (it didn’t help that Costco cancelled my original order and caused a three week delay in getting it). It’s finally working after working out some quirks with the new version of Quickbooks and Windows Server 2003 (see my link above for the gory details), and I now have my backup system of Karen’s Replicator (backing up to multiple hard drives and date-based directories around the network) and Ahsay OBM in place (after rebuilding our offsite backup server after a motherboard failure — another time killer), so I can finally sleep a little bit better.
So instead of something witty or resembling humor on here, here are some links I’ve had sitting around for the last couple days that I’ve wanted to share:
- The Map That Change The World.
- 15 Guides That Teach You Useful Stuff.
- Man Sues Axe Body Spray Because Women Didn’t Throw Themselves at Him.
- Best Bike Ever: A cargo bike built in Portland that holds two kegs, has a bar, holds pizzas, and has a built-in sound system. Sweet.
- Movie Narrative Charts is a brilliant way to see character interactions in some movies.
- A pile of useful Windows 7 guides.
- Spammers are evil, and now are using delayed DNS to scam people.
- Be careful with that forklift.
- Google Groups is Dead.
Random Links For The Day
Some random reading material for the day…
- Prop Hunt for Team Fortress 2, probably the best video game mod ever.
- Detecting the Social Sites your Web Site Visitors Use, thanks to a CSS information leak.
- craigslist “Missed Connections” area in artistic form.
- A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope: Reconsidering Star Wars IV in the light of I-III.
- Forget Skype: Tiny Chat is far simpler.
- An engineers guide to bandwidth.
- What’s the funniest thing you’ve ever said during sex? (warning, some NSFW language).
- How to track Google Keyword rankings in Google Analytics.
- Al Franken draws a map of the USA.
I’ve Said It Once, and I’ll Say It Again…
…I do not control the entire Internet. Contrary to the popular belief of some of the folks I deal with on a daily basis (but don’t actually work for), if the Web site you’re trying to visit is down, and you haven’t tried visiting other Web sites, don’t blame me until you actually try some other Web sites. If you can’t get to any sites, then you can bug me. If I can get online, so can you. If I say the Web’s working fine, don’t sit there and waste more of my time (and my boss’ money) telling me it’s not.
</rant>
(Yes, I know I’ve made a similar rant before, but it doesn’t hurt to reiterate it.)