General

Miscellaneous crazy links

Too busy today to put anything more than some crazy links into the blog.

• Ever wanted to foil your house?
• How to have fun in an elevator; no, not that.
• Microsoft tells us about l33t speak

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Really, who steals a garbage can?

Someone stole my garbage can. Seriously. I have two “fancier” garbage cans and both have wheels and lids that lock. But they’re not that great. They’re made of really thin plastic. And they only cost $15 each at HomeDepot. And yet, this morning when I went out to retrieve the one can that I had placed in the back lane for collection day on Friday, it was gone.

In any case, I hope that whomever “borrowed” my garbage can comes back in a future life as an in-land sea gull, forced to eat garbage at the city dump or something.
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iProduct

This “ad” for iProduct and this “ad” about Apple Haters cracked me up this afternoon. It wouldn’t be nearly as funny if they both weren’t fairly true.

Of course, to be fair, here’s a cutdown of Linux programmers of sorts. This too is rather funny given that it’s mostly true; welcome to the joys of using software written, as JWZ says, “…by 12 year olds.”
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It's just a movie

I ran across a blog site this morning about a guy waiting in line for 5 months to see the last of the Star Wars movies. I’m a pretty big fan of the original Trilogy but I honestly think that George Lucas should have left it at that. Nevertheless, anyone who waits in line for that long just to see a two hour film is out of control.
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adventure games might date me but...

I was pretty excited today to run across an article on Wired News about adventure games making a comeback of sorts.

I loved those adventure games; I started with King’s Quest at some point in the mid/late 80’s. I never got much further than King’s Quest III or IV so the pending release of King’s Quest IX doesn’t interest me all that much. For me, I like the way things were “in the old days.” That’s also why I only played the first couple Space Quests and Police Quests.

If you’re like me and long for the low, yet very creative, quality graphics, along with a humourous story line, you should check out Peasant’s Quest. It’s free and it’s Flash-based so everyone can play it. And it has the same great humour you’ll find on the rest of the Homestar Runner site.
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You can "commercial-ize" anything

I searched Google this morning for music-based blogs, and one of the ‘sponsored links’ (read: Google advertisements) was titled ”How To Blog For Cash.” Come on.
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Faith-Based Encyclopedia

When I read Robert McHenry’s article on the ”Faith-Based Encyclopedia”, my first reaction was that he was likely going to draw a lot of criticism from the Wiki-pedia community. And judging from his follow-up article, he did.

I am a huge supporter of the open source community. Let me say that again; I am a HUGE supporter of the open source community. I run Linux on my laptop. I use OpenOffice. I’ve used Firefox since it was called Phoenix. The list of software I use that is free or open-source or both is endless. And my company has a product built entirely around OSS products.

But the one problem with the system is that the community is too defensive, both of the system and of their individual products. Of course, the same is true of the “other side”; it’s easy to critisize open source projects for this and that, but in the end, in most cases they aren’t getting paid. But if the scales are tipped, they are tipped against the OSS community.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, criticism of OSS projects are seen immediately as an “attack” rather than an opportunity to look at how to make it better. And more often than not, part of that attack is to respond with “if you don’t like it, don’t use it” or “if you don’t like the way something works, fix it yourself”. I actually agree with everything that Robert says in his initial article, though I think he was a bit too harsh in places.

Robert’s follow-up article is also a bit harsh. I think that he could have summed up in two sentences: “I get it [OSS & Wikipedia]. All I was saying is that Wikipedia is a good source of information but has to fix some issues before it can be considered a quotable source like Britannica is.”

Of course, as with all things news and media related, “nice stuff” doesn’t sell; if Robert had written the article in a different way, it’s likely that no one would have paid attention anyway.
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Standard Disclaimer

Back in university I used to have a public directory (then a website) with a bunch of humour files that I had come across. Then I expanded that into a weekly mailout to friends. Then I graduated and all was pretty much forgotten.

Travel forward eight years or so, and do some massive find on my laptop, and what should reappear (indirectly) but my humour directory (when I switch machines I simply tar up my home directory and then dump it back out onto the new machine).

One of my favourite pieces from the collection was “Standard Disclaimer”. At the top of the file was a credit not as to where I “stole” the file… http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/~kbuxton. The magic of the Web is that stuff appears out of nowhere. The counter to that is that stuff is liable to disappear the day after. Or perhaps when said person graduates. Enter a Google search and I was able to find that kbuxton still exists. As does the standard disclaimer web page. Of course, I still have it in original text format on my laptop.
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Ctrl-H

For whatever reason (probably cause most of it’s true), Jamie Zawinski’s rants crack me up. I haven’t been to his site for probably six months now, so it was quite a treat given that there were a handful of “new” rants for me to read.

I started with his the unfrozen caveman hacker show rant, which in itself is funny. While most people might “get it”, it’s something completely different if you have actually seen it in action. And I have seen it; in first year at University of Calgary in 1993 the only “computers” you had access to were green screen dumb terminals from the mid-70s or something.

The best part about JWZ’s rants is that he links to his other rants, which led to his l33t hax0r rant, which also made me chuckle. I’d read it before but it was so long ago I’d totally forgotten. The image on the cartridge cracks me up.
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