Get Well Soon, Glenn!

Skynet is here, now, and its name is Google

Join the Rebel Alliance...

The Worst Airport Ever

Your First Album Cover

Follow the instructions here to create your very first album cover.

For your convenience, here are his instructions, followed by my first album cover...

1 - Go to "wikipedia." Hit “random” or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to "Random quotations" or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album. (make sure you hit the new random quotations button at the bottom)

3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days

Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Use photoshop or similar to put it all together ( http://www.picnik.com/ works well, online ).

He's right, picnik does work well, or at least, it's easy...

The S.S. Foreclosure

If you are interested in what's happening in "The Foreclosure Capital of America" (Lee County, FL), this video is worth watching. It's even worth waiting for the 30-second commercial to end (if one appears).


It all rings true... especially today, two days after the Fed printed $1,000,000,000,000.00... real estate suddenly looks like a, well, real investment.

No, wait, they didn't actually print money, they loaned it to themselves. No, wait, they effectively dropped the interest rate by 1 full percentage point.

No... it's called a "balance sheet expansion", now I feel better.

Seriously, this video rings true because I have studied the Cape Coral real estate market for the past four years, up through the bubble and down through the bursting... and it doesn't contradict anything I have learned.

Except for the part about the current buyers being speculators just like before... bubble speculators didn't have cash, they didn't put ANY money down, today cash is king.

And yes, the guy running the boat tours is a clown, a hustler, that's not the point.

The $100,000 YouTube Challenge

Parsing xkcd Again

Taking counsel from the mouseover text:

div class e quals main
span i d e quals mar quee
blog! slash span slash div

A house with its own domain name!

How cool is THAT?

The House Bonita domain

HouseBonita.com

is registered and parked at

internic.ca

which forwards it to a page on a real website

http://www.ruralfinds.com/housebonita/index.html

and that page does a

<meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="0; url=http://www.vacationhit.com/Picturepages/HouseBonita.htm">

to the final destination

http://www.vacationhit.com/Picturepages/HouseBonita.htm

It sounds hard but it took longer to write about it here than to actually *do* it.

It's on my endless "to do" list to add cool content and links to that "page on the real website" instead of just doing the HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" bouncy bouncy thing.

But at least I've grabbed the domain before someone else.

It's "House Beautiful" indeed!

The Apple Wheel

Everything is just a few hundred clicks away...

The Games People Play

The various SYS-CON Media websites are among some of the most visually and aurally annoying on the web today.

That doesn't matter, they're easy to avoid...

Or are they?

Sybase has a portal called MySybase that shows a "Latest Blog Entries" widget on its home page:



There we see that Chris Pollach has posted an item PowerDesigner Viewer at 20:17 GMT on February 28.

So far so good, really fresh stuff, at least it was when the screen shot was made (the same day).

The only trouble is, that particular item was actually published two days earlier, on February 26:

---

What's happening here?

What's happening here is that a Sybase website is being spammed and scammed by one of SYS-CON's properties (Chris Pollach's blog), and that just ain't right.

Several other blogs, published by Sybase itself, have posted articles dating later than that, in particular Glenn Paulley's and Jason Hinsperger's.

But they don't show up in the MySybase "Latest Blog Entries" widget because SYS-CON keeps shovelling fake feeds Sybase's way every few hours.

Here's the latest (as of this writing):



I've heard two stories about this: first, that the practice is unintentional and will be fixed momentarily, and two, that it's been going on for a long time with no action taken.

We shall see... later tonight. A new fake "PowerDesigner Viewer" post is being created every 11 hours or so (the latest at March 2, 2009 08:47 AM EST) and is picked up by MySybase some time thereafter.

The obvious question is, why is Sybase accepting a feed from SYS-CON in the first place?

What's next, ads for SYS-CON's Adobe Flex Journal?

Parsing xkcd

Here's the text from today's xkcd:

DENSITY

SUP DAWG, I HERD U DIDN'T 
LIEK FORMING BABBY, BUT I 
ACCIDENTALLY IN YOUR BASE.

CONS: RUINED LIFE
PROS: SENTENCE SET THE NEW
      MEME DENSITY RECORD.

If only I had asked 4chan for ideas for what I should do to prevent this!

Ready to take a trip?

First, innoculate yourself with a heavy dose of dull and boring as only Wikipedia can deliver: MEME

OK, now it's safe to travel: SUP DAWG, I HERD

This is LIEK

Let's jump ahead: FORMING BABBY

Now this: I ACCIDENTALLY

And this: IN YOUR BASE

Tired of travelling? Want some home cooking? Want to hear English spoken? Here you go: With 'LOLcats' Internet Fad, Anyone Can Get In on the Joke.

Finally, from the xkcd mouseover text: 4chan

Conference Highlights

- credits