(14:13:47) Sarah: hahaha
(14:14:01) Sarah: ohhhh that so sad
(14:14:03) I: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chromatic_dragons
(14:14:06) Sarah: i got to the bottom of the paragraph
(14:14:07) I: oops wrong chat window
(14:14:11) I: that’s embarrassing

(14:14:38) Sarah: thats really embarrassing
(14:14:43) Sarah: i think im publishing that
(14:14:53) I: loling
(14:15:01) I: already sent that exchange to all my friends
(14:17:37) Sarah: and did they all have the same response. or were some like “oh sweet dude. thanks a ton”
(14:18:51) I: (14:14:17) Will: TWITA
(14:18:55) I: (twita = that’s what I’m talking about)
(14:19:01) I: (14:15:10) Will: it still doesn’t have the metallic dragons
(14:15:13) Will: FUCK THESE PEOPLE
(14:19:50) Sarah: hahahahaha

We’ve all been there before, I think.

Can you tell what’s wrong with this picture?

1. That man has King Leonidas’s head plastered on in a really shitty GIF way.
2. The title of the video implies there are other techno remixes of “This is Sparta!”.
3. It has over 17 million views.
4. I’m watching it, too.

In case didn’t cause you to hang your head in shame for being a part of this mess called the internet, try this one on for size.

Exhibit B:

What’s wrong here?

1. Over 19 million views.
2. Over 19 million views.
3. Will you look at these fucking peppers?
4. Over 10 million views.

The internet is dying, folks.

For the record, this particular YouTube excursion happened as a result of poring over the Internet Memes timeline over at Dipity. Requests were made to verify some of the claims laid out, and hence the “leeroy jenkins” in my search bar.

Hence also the flying spaghetti monster wallpaper. (For the record, the timeline credits the FSM as being born on January 14, 2005, while the website itself claims it all began in May 2005. It appears the domain name venganza.org was registered on November 24, 2004.)

And then I blogged about it. Sigh.

I’m not tired. I’m just not getting any work done.

Yeah. Yeah, that’s about right.

Via.

Because of this work before me, I holed myself up in my room and got promptly to procrastinating. Unfortunately, I was met squarely with this for my efforts.

How the hell am I supposed to blow off work when I can’t even read my feeds?

Christ, how I hate downtime.

Dearest One,

I bring you greetings in the name of our creator, it is in my search for a reliable and God fearing person and having gotten your contact through prayers and pains taking efforts via searching i made on the internet on my bed side.

Presently, I’m in a hospital here in Abidjan-Cote D’Ivoire where I have been undergoing therapy treatment for Oesophagi Cancer.

Though its a sad and long story but I will cut it short for your quick and easy understanding. I am Janet Fernandez (Mrs), widow to Late Mr. Edward A. Fernandez, former Defence attachee to Benin Embassy in Germany. My husband was murdered in 2005 by those who are envious of his position in the same office leaving me with our only son Desmond.

Before his death we were both born again christains and because of our new fond Love in Christ Jesus we both made a convenant with God to use his wealth for the down trodden,orphanages and the less privileged in the society. Having known my condition I decided to donate part of this money to an individual or better still a God fearing person who will utilize this wealth the way I am going to instruct herein. I want an individual that will adopt my only son, use part this wealth and provide succor to poor and indigent persons, orphanages, and widows and for the propagating peace.

I took this decision because I do not my child to suffere or continue to leave in this part of the world, moreover my late husband’s relatives are not inclined to helping poor persons and I do not want my husband’s hard earned wealth to be misused or spent in the manner in which my late husband did not specify. I do not want a situation where this wealth will be used in an ungodly manner which will be contrary to the convenant we made with God Almighty.

What is required of you is your honesty, trust and sincerity. Any delay in your reply will give me room in sourcing for another individual for this same purpose.

Please reply in case you are interested on this alternative email: janetfernandez39@gmail.com so that i will go into details and furnish you with all further informations.

May God Almighty bless you.
Janet Fernandez (Mrs)

I can’t figure it if by posting this here I’m going to get more spam comments, or what. But Akismet has snagged virtually every single one since I installed it, so no worries!

Man, how bad would I feel is this is a real person? Maybe I should write her just in case….

>

The 100% completion rate on The Future Of Ideas is a very nice touch.

This seems like a good time to mention that Knol is a stupid idea and I’m against it. But I’ll probably also write a billion articles on all subgenres of death metal and try to make a buck.

What spurred today’s rant is that this morning I popped open my Netvibes page—before eating breakfast, as ever—and there was a damn Google search box cluttering up my junk.

Maybe that doesn’t piss you off, but it does me. Why do I need Google in my Netvibes? I don’t, that’s why.

Mashable has some coverage up about it, but the comment thread doesn’t have nearly enough pissed off people in it for my tastes. I’m all about a cool site like Netvibes making a buck, but can someone please partner with someone other than Google?

For the record, Flock is sponsored by Yahoo. That’s a point in their favor, I guess.

Ever since I started twitting[1. I understand that most people use the verb "tweet" instead of "twit" when referring to using the service, but only the latter satisfies my penchant for abbreving words.], I’ve been torn about whether something is more appropriate for a blog post or a twit. Some hold that it is possible—and perhaps even commonplace—to twit too often, and things too inane. I most certainly do not fall into that category, although I cannot substantiate that with examples of inane twits, because the damn service is down.

Trying to load the webpage, all I see is that damn whale graphic:

“There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.”

Kind of embarrassing that I had to Google for Moby Dick quotes, because I never read the book myself. I mean, had the folks at Twitter decided to use an albatross graphic or something, I’d be all over that. But so it goes.

I shall suffer through this madness by constantly refreshing When Twitter Is Down.

]]> http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/06/27/what-to-do-when-twitter-is-down/feed/ 5 http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/06/26/when-did-the-onion-get-all-homophobic/ http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/06/26/when-did-the-onion-get-all-homophobic/#comments Fri, 27 Jun 2008 01:58:37 +0000 Conor http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/?p=570 About a week ago, my The Onion RSS feed got all clogged up with gaybashing stuff—not that there’s anything wrong with that.

It still hasn’t cleared up yet, so I figured it’s Gay Awareness Week or something, but Googling for that hasn’t helped me very much. Can anybody explain this?

I mean, it’s raising my awareness alright.

Amazing, no?

It only bothers me because the articles are syndicated from years ago. If the writers at The Onion keep depriving me of relatively fresh sardonic content, I’m going to gather them up like bundles of sticks and burn them to death—not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Update:

There’s a banner big as life on the homepage that says “CELEBRATING GAY PRIDE.” Funny that because I only ingest media via RSS feeds, I never saw that. Ah, well. Still, I’d like to know why Googling for “gay week 2008″ doesn’t explain this cosmological event to me, and instead points me to:

Aspen Gay Ski Week

Another year, another great Aspen Gay Ski Week! We have hardly had a moment to miss all the fun times, great snow and friendships made during Ski Week 2008. …
www.gayskiweek.com/ – 13k – Cached – Similar pages

Best search engine my ass.

As of this writing, there are just under 2 million downloads recorded. Given that Download Day extends until 17:00 UTC on June 18, 2008, I think we’ve only seen the beginning of this. I’d bet on at least 3 million, possibly 4 million, too.

Let’s watch.

Download now.

Update:

OK, I guess I should have looked up some usage statistics before guessing about download numbers, because according to the counter Mozilla has running, they’re already over 7 million downloads. Goddamn!

Let’s hit 10 million, damn it!

But what keeps me coming back to this is the list of search engine terms leading to this blog. As if I didn’t know already, I write about weird stuff, and that brings weird people to this blog. Thank god they keep their mouth shut, too, because I wouldn’t want to talk to any one of these freaks. (Although, to be fair, it does look like we have a lot in common.)

I think it’s official: I have the greatest blog in existence.

Upon scoping out the package transition resolution list, this was the text I was met with:

Calculating the changes
Installing jockey-common as dep of jockey-gtk
Starting
Starting 2
Investigating restricted-manager-kde
Package restricted-manager-kde has broken dep on restricted-manager-core
Considering restricted-manager-core 1 as a solution to restricted-manager-kde -1
Removing restricted-manager-kde rather than change restricted-manager-core
Done

Do you want to start the upgrade?

81 packages are going to be removed. 197 new packages are going to be
installed. 1217 packages are going to be upgraded.

You have to download a total of 1090M. This download will take about
13 minutes with your connection.

Holy balls that’s fast. Over 10Mb/s, actually. Not quite as fast what I’ve seen before, but it is still damn impressive in my book.

Do I really have to go back to the States, where things are looking a little more grim?

There have certainly been times when I surfed without regard for my furry charges, and the results were morbid.

So, basically, be careful. Reading feeds kills.

Jesse was along for the trip, as I’d let him know that I’d found word of a 60€ router for sale somewhere downtown. It’s indeed fairly cheap for a router, especially in this city, it seems, but the real clincher was that it was Linksys and so therefore it was entirely open source. This is a very good thing.

Its being open source meant that I was able to take the thing home and flash the firmware on it with an open source alternative, enabling quite sophisticated functionality for a user-grade router. Specifically, I was able to plunk the thing down next to my window and tell it to act as a bridge between my computer and the signal broadcast from the university building 50 meters across the courtyard over which my balcony looks.

This stuff is really, really freaking badass. Check out this article for a brief rundown of neat stuff you can do with it.

So, in short, I have internet now. I’ve dropped once so far from the connection, but that’s in about an hour of use. I usually get disconnected around once every five to ten minutes, so things are looking awesome so far. And by tinkering with the position of the router, I should be able to find a spot with a decent signal. It’s made easy by the dynamically updating “signal strength” graph on the client bridge setup page in the router software. Thumbs up!

Well, isn’t that depressing?

I’m off to pick up some drinks before the cornerstore closes, then it’s off to German Melodic Death Metal land, with long streaming blonde hair galore, chesty double bass punch, DDR-inspired electronica fills, open-string solo riffs, and even some female vocals thrown in the mix, in case the music wasn’t accessible enough. Although good ol’ metalcore Neaera will be closing, I should think.

I vow that my brain has a sufficiently fast connection to enjoy the concert.

Time’s up in cafe! Posting.