And she scores - Link fixed
You got to watch this short video (Linked Fixed!!). I watched it four times. It looks like the chick damn near had the back of her scalped scalped.
Overall, I’d call it damn impressive.
(H/T: Curmudgeonly)
March 31, 2006
Google sucks
[Editor’s note: To limit the hateful comments and the hate mail, the victim’s name has been elided from this post.]
I was Googling to see if there has been any new information on [a certain] murder case I wrote about involving the young pregnant woman who was shot in the head while riding a motorcycle last Sunday. So I start with the simplest search using the victim’s name. On that search, my friend Trench over at News of Doom is #1.
After clicking through several pages of results, I notice first that only a couple of the entries on the first page had anything to do with story. But then I notice that my site is not included in the fist five pages. That is not a good sign for my PageRank. So I do a little more checking. I do a search for ‘[Victim’s name] shot’, no quotes.
Pretty much the same results. Trench is at the top, then ABC news, then the random combinations of the victims first name and last name begin. Hmm. I’ll try the “[victim’s name] shot”, using the quotes to limit results to only the victim. Only five listings and my site is not among them. Now I’m pissed.
I click on the Google message at the bottom saying some similar sites were left out but by clicking you can see the omitted results. There I am at number three. I was culled by Google. Rastards.
And, by the way, there has been no recent coverage of the investigation into this tragic case, if there even is an investigation.
March 28, 2006
Spider Solitaire
Spider Solitaire that comes with Windows is flawed. I make this statement after about a thousand games over more than a year. There are clearly recognizable patterns over time where there should be none. My guess is the random number generator is of poor quality.
I ask you, how many times have you been burned by being dealt all the aces within two deals? And no twos?
I’ve tried to explain the card clumping away with nonscientific reasoning. I reasoned after some thought that it was that the mind recognizes more vividly when all the aces are dealt close together. So when the aces kill you again, as often as random percentages would allow, it’s more noticeable than if you had all the threes on the table and no fours to play them on.
So I decided to test that theory. The vivid recall theory, as I like to call it, is true, actually. But once you are aware of it and take the effects into consideration on your future calculation, what happens is that you notice the card clumping happens with pretty much the other cards too. Most noticeably the Kings. You’ll have a Queen to Ace lined up on a full stack of cards and the King comes up in spades killing almost every stack on the table.
I also noticed that in addition to the card-clumping, there is always one card missing. One card that you really need. And many times that missing card is the card needed to play the clumped card on.
Obviously, if I really gave a rat’s ass I would just keep track of the losing hands, of which there are plenty (it’s not like Freecell where if you are careful you can play at a 98% win rate over thousands of games. Every game is winnable–if you play your cards right) and then tally up the actual percentages of times pile-killing card clumping occurs. A scientific experiment, Brainiac style.
But I don’t care that much. Maybe I’ll write in to Brainiac and get them to do the test. All I need to know is that my win rate on Spider Solitaire is 41%, my high score is 1185, and no matter what my average is about 1150. I have been trying different strategies and techniques–methods of guessing I suppose you’d call it–for over a year and those numbers wont budge.
Therefore, or ergo, from a nonempirical standpoint, I conclude that Spider is pretty much non-random. Either that or I really suck at the game.
March 27, 2006
Lake drained like tub, fact or urban legend?
From a site called Damn Interesting, Lake Peigneur: The Swirling Vortex of Doom
Despite the enormous destruction of property, no human life was lost in this disaster, nor were there any serious injuries. Within two days, what had previously been an eleven-foot-deep freshwater body was replaced with a 1,300-foot-deep saltwater lake. The lake’s biology was changed drastically, and it became home to many species of plants and fish which had not been there previously.
I don’t know if this is a true story or not, but it sure is damn interesting.
March 24, 2006
D’Oh!
This is some funny stuff. A clip of real-life Simpson’s opening. Ha Ha HA!
I found it over at YouTube. Sites like this are the doom of television as we know it. Like I said in the previous post about the hilarious Outrageous and Contagious Viral Videos show I saw on Bravo, TV will soon be about brining viewers the best of the Web, which I think will be hugely successful if they can only figure out a better way to deliver advertising. Commercial interruptions suck.
March 21, 2006
Witticism
There are only 10 types of people in the world;
those who understand binary and those who don’t.
March 19, 2006
The Internet will change everything
You heard it here a two years ago and several times since. It has been slow in coming but check out this article about a rock band making it big without backing from a big record company.
What makes Arctic Monkeys remarkable is that they are an indie band on an independent label, and that they achieved their sudden success almost entirely through grassroots promotion on the web.
The foursome got together in 2002. They started playing shows around Sheffield and passing out free CDs at gigs. They encouraged their fans to trade the tunes online and to post them to websites and P2P networks. Yes, they encouraged file trading. Eventually, more and more people found them on MySpace or on their website via word-of-mouth, and their reach started to widen. Fans started booking them in venues farther and farther away from their hometown. Wherever they played, everyone in the crowd knew the words to the songs. This is all before they even signed to a record label.
Curiously, after achieving phenomenal success on their own, they contracted with a record company. A better deal, I think, would have been cut with Wal-Mart. Heh, a distribution deal with Wal-Mart is better than a deal with one of the powerful RIAA members. The kicker is that all it cost Wal-Mart to provide the service is some disk space and a few minutes of a webmaster’s time. Maybe $150 bucks.
I wouldn’t surprise me at all to see Wal-Mart open low-cost, state-of-the-art recording facilitiesLocated in regions like Austin, Memphis, L.A., New York–wherever this is a robust music scene–for use by artists with whom they have distribution deals.
The main reason the RIAA are so vicious in protecting their copyrights is because they know that in the very near future that music is all they will have the rights to sell. They are not worried about the future because they rightly figure they are not in it. The musicians will finally wake up and small the java realizing that the web is the only place they need to be. Then they will realize that they don’t need a big record company with expensive production equipment and media contacts to do it. They just need a good web strategy and a good web development team.
My previous articles on the demise of the big recording companies and RIAA :
(I saw this article over a t Digg, a cool tech news aggregator)
March 13, 2006
Back in service
I was gone all day today and will be gone all day for the foreseeable future as well. The reason I mention this is because it represents a major change in the way my day has been scheduled for the past couple of years that I have been trying to eke out a living from TheGarage. Such a reallocation of my time will therefore cause a change in my writing habits as well. I will continue to write here and continue my efforts to develop some of the other sites I have recently tried to get off the ground, but I certainly wont be putting as much time and energy into blogging as I simply wont have as much of either resource available.
The other reason I mention that I was gone today is because my Internet connection appears to have went down just after noon and I don’t want folk out there thinking I am a slacker. Normally I know within a half hour that my site is down because someone will bitch about not being able to get on the internet.
Sometimes the connection just drops for no apparent reason on my end. Turning the DSL router off for about thirty seconds usually fixes the problem, as it just did.
Sorry about any inconvenience.
March 12, 2006
FWD: You gotta see this
I am sitting here on Sunday morning sipping a cup of joe, surfing through the channels, and on Bravo I find a television show called Outrageous and Contageous Viral Videos that has a narrator running the audience through clips that you can find at any number of sites on the internet. Here are a few of the viral video clips featured:
- Cheney’s Got a Gun
- John Ashcroft singing
- Buzz Aldrich punching a guy
- Brittney’s baby riding in the lap gaffe
- Cartoon of Bill O’Riley talking dirty on the phone
- Howard Dean’s infamous Yeearrgh!!!
- A big fat guy got a running start and hurled himself into snack machine, vertical belly-flop style, smashing the front glass to smithereens.
- The Trunk Monkey vehicle security system, for when just getting your car back isn’t enough
- And finally, The Mercury Mistress
Bet you’ve seen some of ‘em. As a matter of fact, I bet that half of everyone with broadband has seen at least one of the clips featured. But I bet very few people with dial-up connections has seen any of them at all. Curiously, I don’t recall any high-speed internet commercials during the show.
They teased the video clip of the week over at Bravo.com. Gotta spread the traffic around. Pretty smart application of media convergence. Soon the blurring lines between the wired net and the broadcast net will not exist at all.
Outrageous and Contageous Viral Videos would have been way better than surfing for the clips if it weren’t for all the same stupid commercials that viewers are constantly bombarded with on television. But the show was still pretty good relative to everything else on the dial because I didn’t have to look at a lot of bad clips to find the few really good ones. It doesn’t take a lot of time to download just a few clips, but it does take a lot of time to download a dozen or two, most of which are not worth the effort.
The people programming the television channels don’t “get it” and therefore bombard their customer’s with repetitive, asinine commercial interruptions. Maybe the majority of people aren’t bothered by the interruptions but I will rarely endure them, preferring to watch my entertainment uninterrupted.
The networks are in desperate need of a better way to present advertisement. Until they figure that out, the network’s will continue to bleed customers and television bandwidth will be all about delivering the best of the internet to their remaining customers who do not yet have access to high-speed internet.
March 7, 2006
Social Anthropology
From the mailbag, a comparative analysis:
How To Shower Like a Woman:
Take off clothing and place it in sectioned landry hamper according to lights and darks.
Walk to bathroom wear! ing long dressing gown
If you see husband along the way, cover up any exposed areas.
Look at your womanly physique in the mirror - make mental note to do more sit-ups/leg-lifts, etc.
Get in the shower. Use face cloth, arm cloth, leg cloth, long loofah, wide loofah and pumice stone.
Wash your hair once with cucumber and sage shampoo with 43 added vitamins.
Wash your hair again to make sure it’s clean.
Condition your hair with grapefruit mint conditioner enhanced with real passion fruit.
Wash your face with crushed apricot facial scrub for 10 minutes until red.
Wash entire rest of body with ginger nut and jaffa cake body wash.
Rinse conditioner off hair.
Shave armpits and legs.
Turn off shower.
Squeegee off all wet surfaces in shower.
Spray mold spots with Tilex.
Get out of shower and stand on bathmat.
Dry with towel the size of a small country.
Wrap hair in super absorbent towel.
Return to bedroom wearing long dressing gown and towel on head.
If you see husband along the way, cover up any exposed areas.
How To Shower Like a Man:
Take off clothes while sitting on the edge of the bed and leave them in a pile.
Walk naked to the bathroom.
March 5, 2006
From the mailbag…
A tongue-twister accident:
A guy with a black eye boards his plane bound for Pittsburgh and sits down in his seat.
He notices immediately that the guy next to him has a black eye, too. He says to him, “Hey this is a coincidence, we both have black eyes; mind if I ask how you got yours?”
The other guy says, “Well, it just happened. It was a tongue twister accident. See, I was at the ticket counter and this clerk with the most massive breasts in the world was there. So, instead of saying, I’d like two tickets to Pittsburgh,’ I accidentally said, ‘I’d like two pickets to Tittsburgh.’ So she socked me a good one.”
The first guy replied, “Wow! This is unbelievable. Mine was a tongue twister too. I was at the breakfast table and I wanted to say to my wife, ‘Please pour me a bowl of Frosties, honey.’ But I accidentally said, “Thanks for ruining my life you evil, self-centered, big-assed, bitch.”
March 1, 2006
Spam realignment
It has been several weeks now since getting any major referral spam. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’ve deleted a single blatant Texas-hold-em referral in two weeks. It’s weird actually. Not that I am complaining.
Not to worry, I just trashed about half a dozen. I had no illusions that the spammers were gone for good. But, still, I like to see the spam patterns change every now and then so I’ll have some bit of comfort knowing that someone is dishing it back to the spammers. Nothing like a full dose of the FBI to fuckin ruin your day.
I hope somebody’s on it. The same technology used to pump out spam can be used to clog the entire Internet, literally bringing the WWW down.
If spam can be stopped then it should be. If spam can not be stopped, there may be a security problem.
The Russians seem to be on to something with their anti-spam measures.