I’ve just gone through my archives and realized that all the times I’ve plugged Bobwhite have been strips wherein Cleo is humiliated. I think there is some identification going on. Cleo provides an outlet for derision aimed at College Brendan that, perhaps more healthily, does not involve fantasized face-punches.
Page 26 of 179
Told you I was lying
High-text, low-art comics like Narbonic and xkcd are fine for what they are, but the four panels of today’s Bobwhite are all anyone should need to understand exactly what a skillful artist can do with fifteen words, some posture and a few carefully rendered facial expressions. The second panel alone! Man!
We Return You Now to Masterpiece Chatlog
Holly and I were discussing the inevitable self-recrimination that comes of owning a computer with anything one has ever written on it.
| Brendan: | I am not sure if there is a way to mature that does not involve violent, sickened hatred toward all one’s own past incarnations, but–hang on, I think I just reinvented Buddhism. |
| Holly: | But Buddhism was invented by someone who didn’t have computer logs of half the things he’d ever said or written. |
| Brendan: | Well, he WAS a lot cleverer than you or me, Holly. |
| Holly: | And ha, yes, teachings “transmitted orally” for ages, says wikipedia, so maybe that is indeed the solution. |
| Holly: | I bet he invented the computer and then saw what self-recriminations and nausea it would scatter on the path to enlightenment and self-improvement, and hid it at the bottom of a pond or something. |
| Holly: | (This is the plot of the next Dan Brown novel.) |
It even stopped airing in spring of this year!
Wait. Hold on. Comedy Central has a pseudo-cinema verité show about a radio program? A radio program where one of the hosts is relatively grounded and knowledgeable and the other is the wacky, grating narcissist? And then there’s a new guest every week and things go poorly? And the jokes depend heavily on bleeped cuss words? And nobody’s ever heard of it?
WHAT THE FUCK.
Skip this one, Mom
In mid-writing session:
Brendan: It’s a pretty old joke structure, but as Tina Fey has pointed out, if you get to a certain gag density people don’t notice that kind of thing. Many of the jokes in Arrested Development are groaningly old, but nobody notices because they come so thick and fast.
Brendan: … This is the part where you make a joke about coming thick and fast.
Stephen: I WOULD TOTALLY COME THICK AND FAST WITH TINA FEY
Brendan: There you go.
Stephen: BOYOYOYNG
Searchblort
If you are a regular reader of this blog, or indeed any reader of this blog, it is extremely likely that you will have no idea what the following few sentences mean. Don’t worry about it. I’m just dumping this into Google because I’ve spent the last four hours clawing at my head trying to solve a problem that is, to the best of my searching ability, undocumented anywhere else.
If you are trying to use the Magento XML-RPC (or SOAP) API to import new product data and keep getting the following error:
SQLSTATE[23000]: Integrity constraint violation: 1452 Cannot add or update a child row: a foreign key constraint fails
Then it may help you to know that the catalog_product.create function takes an integer for its product attribute set ID, and that the key for the ‘Default’ set (as of Magento 1.3.2.4) is 4.
(If that doesn’t work and you recently upgraded, the most popular suggestion is to ensure that all your MySQL tables are InnoDB, but that wasn’t my problem.)
I saw Snüzz live in concert solo only once, last year, while I was living in North Carolina with Jon and Amanda. It was some kind of multi-band benefit thing, and the Brasfields, ardent fans of his, convinced me to go and take a cute girl from OKCupid.
The show (like the date) was a mixed success. It introduced me to Midtown Dickens, my favorite lo-fi act, but while Snüzz was great, he only played for about twenty minutes. Afterwards he sat next to us in the audience, and I mentioned that I was a friend of Jon’s; he smiled broadly and said hey, yeah, Jon and Amanda were awesome, he hoped to see them again sometime. Then I said I’d enjoyed the show but wished it had been longer. He opened his mouth, hesitated, then smiled (less broadly) and just said thanks.
Turns out he was probably forced to stop early by the symptoms of his then-undiagnosed lymphoma. I wish I’d known to say something more tactful. He’s holding the second of a couple benefit concerts himself now; the first was to raise funds for his medical bills, and this one for a group that helps buffer cancer victims against unforeseen costs.
It’s not like I have many non-Brasfield contacts in North Carolina, but hey, if you like good music you should go and toss some money in the hat. It’s this Sunday night at the Blind Tiger in Greensboro.
SO EXCITED
GUYS! GUYS I FINALLY GOT A DMCA TAKEDOWN NOTICE. I feel like I’m a grownup on the Internet. It only took seven years!
Hello,
We have received a formal DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notice
regarding allegedly infringing content hosted on your site. The specific
content in question is as follows:
The party making the complaint (Deborah Sykes, e-mail:
websheriff@websheriff.com), claims under penalty of perjury to be or
represent the copyright owner of this content. Pursuant to 17 U.S.C. §
512(c), we have removed access to the content in question.http://www.loc.gov/copyright/title17/92chap5.html#512
If you believe that these works belong to you and that the copyright
ownership claims of this party are false, you may file a DMCA
counter-notification in the form described by the DMCA, asking that the
content in question be reinstated. Unless we receive notice from the
complaining party that a lawsuit has been filed to restrain you from
posting the content, we will reinstate the content in question within
10-14 days after receiving your counter-notification (which will also be
forwarded on to the party making the complaint).In the meantime, we ask that you do not replace the content in question,
or in any other way distribute it in conjunction with our services.
Please also be advised that copyright violation is strictly against our
Terms and Conditions, and such offenses risk resulting in immediate
disablement of your account should you not cooperate (not to mention the
legal risk to you if they are true).http://www.dreamhost.com/tos.html
We also ask that if you are indeed infringing upon the copyright
associated with these works that you delete them from your account
immediately, and let us know once this has been done. We also ask that
you delete any other infringing works not listed in this take down
notification, if they exist.If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
Glen,
— DreamHost Abuse/Security Team
Web Sheriff is, Google suggests, a DMCA gun-for-hire firm that Van Morrison has been employing for a couple months to hunt down those damn pirate MP3s on the Internet (along with, quite zealously, people saying mean things about him).
Now, my having posted that song seven years ago was unquestionably infringement, and I’d rather not see my hosting service get terminated, so I won’t be filing counternotice. Of course, the explicit purpose of posting it was to get a noncensored version out on filesharing networks, and I think that work is as done as it’s going to get.
So congratulations, Web Sheriff: you did it! You managed to Google “brown-eyed girl mp3,” send a stern email to the ISPs for all the results, and charge a pathetic, aging musician tens of thousands of dollars. Now no one will ever be able to illegally download his songs again.
I think I’m going to print this thing out and frame it.
Biting the wax tadpole
This piece of xenophobic garbage was the top Google News story under Sci/Tech as of a few minutes ago. It makes me so angry I want to blog.
Basically, ICANN–the governing body for domain name registration–finally got around to saying people could register domains with country codes in their own character sets. Country codes are the national domain endings, like .tv (yes, Tuvalu) and .kr, that until now have been abbreviated in Latin characters for absolutely no reason. Thanks to ICANN’s legendary corporate/Western bias, people in those countries have been forced to use kludgy keyboard settings to type in Latin characters when they want to go to a website. Is it any wonder search engines were desperate to do business in China? It’s easier to click through to your site via Google than it is to type its name into the damn address bar.
And so far, country endings are still the only part of domain names to which the change applies! You still have to type the rest of the domain with Latin characters. The rest of the domain scheme is coming, but only ICANN knows when.
So naturally it makes sense for David Coursey to start mongering fear. Oh, sorry, I meant “Tech Inciting.”
“Is this a change for the better? Perhaps, but is there any doubt that if another country had ‘invented’ the Internet–say the Russians–that we’d all have had to learn to type Cyrillic characters by now?”
Jesus Christ, what decade is it? C’mon, “journalist!” LET’S GO TO HISTORY SCHOOL. Setting aside your blazingly simple-minded assertion that “the U.S. invented the Internet,” if you’d bothered to go even Wikipedia-deep in your research, perhaps you’d remember–or learn–that the URI addressing scheme was invented by a British scientist working at a lab in Geneva. Unicode’s been around since 1992, two years before Berners-Lee’s RFC 1630 and RFC 1738 formally set out URL syntax. ICANN’s policies have restricted, not fostered, the Web’s growth into a truly worldwide entity.
“How many new domains will be needed to protect international brands?”
Oh, I take it back! I hadn’t considered the possible damage to brands!
“Will there be hidden domains that cannot be displayed on some computers or typed on many keyboards?”
HEY DIPSHIT! See the fifth sentence of this entry, because THERE ALREADY ARE.
“Will cybercriminals some how [sic] be able to take advantage of this change?”
This sentence is so stupid that it must have set some kind of Internet record.
“Practically, I am not looking forward to perhaps someday having to learn how to type potentially 100,000 non-Latin characters that ICANN has embraced. How many keys will keyboards need to have?”
Record broken!
Go ahead and read the article–it’s a cornucopia of minor idiocies in the same vein. This guy is, to all appearances, a professional blogger published by a real-world magazine (albeit one with a circulation smaller than some webcomics). In a world where major news organizations fight and win legal battles in defense of their right to knowingly lie, I suppose I should be expecting media of every vintage to continue stoking the terror of small minds to drive their dwindling profit engines.
This has been Brendan Makes Fun of Something on the Internet! I will now return to my usual activity of narrow-eyed hunting for the tilde key. And hey, David Coursey: Φάτε ένα εκατομμύριο πέη.
Suggestionbombing
I twitted this, but I think it deserves a fuller exploration. Is it possible to Googlebomb Google’s own search-box completion content via sheer volume of queries? Presumably the things you get are based on search popularity modulated by recentness, which is why typing in “blagojevich go” gives you “-vernor” first followed by “-lden.” That makes sense, but that means it’s also vulnerable to mobbing.
Say I run a company called Adkins AC, selling air conditioners. Getting my site to the top of the results for “air conditioner” is going to be extremely difficult, requiring either a lot of time and work, or a lot of money to SEO spammers whose efforts will eventually get me deranked anyway. I can buy an Adword, but in the summer that’s going to run through my budget pretty fast. Another vector of attack would be to just get a whole lot of people to search for “air conditioner adkins ac,” which is going to put me much closer to the top in the dropdown suggestions.
Now even if I make all my friends and business contacts do that, it’s not really going to affect Google’s giant sample pool. But if I pay a few thousand bucks to somebody who runs a botnet, I could have a million PCs searching for “air conditioner adkins ac” in a randomized, staggered pattern from February to April. By the time things start heating up in May, I’m the first suggestion result, and I’ve probably spent less money than a consistent Adword would cost.
Yes, this is all illegal, but much less detectably so than SEO or email spam. The botnet owners could probably make good money this way too, since you could take on hundreds of customers at a time, and the market for DDOSes-on-demand can’t really be growing that much. Now I’ve fixed the economy! Well, someone’s economy.
I know the Googlebomb wars are kind of a thing of the past, since Google’s gotten much better at deranking targeted efforts to mess with Pagerank, but suggestions are a whole different frontier–and like most frontiers, I’m guessing it’s not well policed.