Every Monday I like to post some music to start the week off on the right foot.
This week’s kickoff is from Silversun Pickups – Panic Switch (Live on MTV: Unplugged)
…and Lara Fabian – I Will Love Again (Hex Hector Remix)
News stories the mainstream media missed : 02/20/10
Here are some news stories from this week that I think the mainstream media completely missed out on. All links are from legitimate news sources and not the fringe / wacko sites.
* The jobs outlook still twitchier than a monkey in a washing machine full of bananas. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst everyone! [ECONOMIST]
* A Philadelphia school apparently has been using the laptops they provided to the kids to also spy on them while they were home! All this came out when a kid was popped for “”improper behavior in his home” and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence.”! OK, this won the official solid gold WTF! crown for the week! The district was OK with this? The Vice Principal on down authorized this big honkin’ invasion of privacy? Of putting a camera on a child’s private moments at home? Wow! To quote Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones) from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off “Les jeux sont faits. Translation: the game is up. Your ass is mine.” But I don’t think the hammer is going to fall on the kids! [BOING BOING] UPDATE: Ooooh yes. Here comes the FBI! Gonna’ need some popcorn for this one! [CNN]
* Google has received federal approval to buy and sell energy. They are going to be their own electric company! Dude. Picture this next video, but with the Google logo and Sergey Brin and Larry Page jammin’ with some of their friends… [IT WORLD]
* Dolphins can switch on and off diabetes as needed! Dammit Flipper, why didn’t you tell us about this earlier? [GUARDIAN.UK]
* How would you like working straight until 70 before social security clicks in? Or seeing some big tax increases and increasing co-pays and deductibles for Medicare? These are some of the tentative plans under Obama’s new deficit commission! Why isn’t the mainstream media talking about how horrible things are going to get if things don’t change soon? And since when do most people live past 70? Since a lot of people kick the bucket before then, so all that money won’t…. ooooooh. I see. [YAHOO]
* And speaking of how bad things are getting, something called “Peak Oil” is coming soon, with severe price increases by 2015. This doesn’t mean oil running out…. it means cheap and plentiful energy will be done with a big fork in it. About 1/2 of the world’s easily accessible oil will be tapped, and the remainder will be insanely more difficult to get out. If Oil was a restaurant, it’s going from a $ rating to a $$$$$ rating. This is going to be, very possibly, the end of cheap oil in our lifetime. You can argue everything in this last century was accomplished because we all had tons of cheap energy to burn (pun intended), so something new has got to be put in place soon. Any wonder there’s a sudden rush to develop and construct more nuclear power plants? [CSMONITOR]
* Dallas police are planning on going door to door in some neighborhoods, knocking on the door, and just having a chat with the resident right there! It sounds quite British of them! While they’re passing the time on your doorstep with their door open, if they happen to see anything behind the door or in the room in plain sight that happens to look or smell illegal, or if they hear anything illegal in the background, WHAMMO!! In come the SWAT teams! Seriously! That’s their plan! Man, where to begin? Profiling. Warrantless Searches. Authoritarian Intimidation. Disregarding on the 4th and 5th amendment. I guess the old investigation to lead to probable cause to lead to a judicial search warrant is just too hard! [DALLAS MORNING NEWS]
* Operation Iraqi Freedom is now Operation New Dawn. Great. So when does Operation GTFO start? That’s the one I’ve been waiting on this whole time! [ABC NEWS]
* What does your handshake say about you? I’d like to think mine says something like “Généralement, les gens qui savant peu parlent becoup, et les gens qui savant beaucoup parlent peu.” Oui oui je sais. Just a touch! [SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN]
* Colorado Springs, Colorado is turning off their street lights, not picking up trash in the city parks, mowing only monthly, and closing public restrooms. All this in an effort to save money. So they’re collecting all these property taxes and they have nothing left over after paying…. what exactly? I betcha’ there’s a few fat cats still porking out in the budget kitchen that can be flushed out. [NPR]
* “Scientists say that a meteorite that crashed into Earth 40 years ago contains millions of different carbon-containing, or organic, molecules.” Oooo! Get Michael Bay on the line! I got an idea! Coming soon… don’t trust anyone under 40! They’ve all got sleeper DNA cells that make them not human! Dun dun duuuuunnnnn! Wait… that would be me too!! Oh no!! [BBC.UK]
* Researchers discover how antidepressants actually work! What? You mean they had no idea all this time? To stael a bit from Eddie Izzard, did they just try a little bit of everything to find out what worked? Try this piece of zinc? No? How about uranium? Ooo definitely not that one. How about a frying pan upside the head? CLANG!! No? How about this prozac, then? Ah-hah!! [PHYSORG]
And to close out, that original bit from Eddie Izzard I just completely butchered in the article above. I must warn you, the man is an executive transvestite. Watch at your own peril!
Until next week… ciao!
Website Magazine’s big Google-goof in their February 2010 issue
So there I was speed reading through this month’s pile of magazines when I got to the computer stack. Near the bottom of this pile was WEBSITE magazine. I’ve always been kind of “meh” about them, but every so often they have something interesting, so I’ve been re-subscribing so far.
On the last page, titled WEB COMMENTARY with Editor-in-Chief Peter Prestipino, is a one page article titled “A Day In the Life of a Google Junkie”. It’s a article that glorifies the daily pervasiveness of Google nowadays, but I noticed a really big goof in the article.
In the paragraph in the first column with the 5:30 AM indent, it ends with “…In fact, Gmail grew 43 percent in 2008 alone. Expect big growth in 2009 too.”
Wait. What?
This is the February 2010 issue. Even if this column was written last November or December in 2009 and used as a “plan B” column, the dates still don’t sync!
This “column” was originally written in 2008, since 2009 is referred to in the future tense.
Nice.
Either this was an old PR spam article from Google that they copied and pasted without attribution, or it was an article they copied and pasted from somewhere else without updating the dates. Either way, that’s enough for me not to take anything they print at face value. Especially since it came directly from the editor-in-chief’s page.
I bet if WEBSITE magazine actually catches this, they’re going to say it was just a typo and blame it on the copy editors.
Scratch one renewal!
You can see the page by clicking below…
UPDATE: Did a quick search on Google for “gmail grew 43 percent in” and found that Google’s Gmail services really did grow 43 percent in 2008. So it ain’t no typo!
Barbed Wire Burger King [PHOTOS]
I was in Brownsville not too long ago and was looking for a restaurant to grab a quick lunch at. When I pulled into a shopping center that had a Subway, I saw across the parking lot was a Burger King.
A Burger King with a prison-style barbed wire fence all the way around it.
Barbed Wire Burger King 1
Barbed Wire Burger King 2
Barbed Wire Burger King 3
Mind you, this was on main street in commerce central. HEBs, Whataburgers, Subways, Target…. lots of nice normal stores nearby!
Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I like my fast food restaurants not looking like they’re in the middle of a DMZ.
Fixed the post-to-twitter integration!
Finally fixed the post-to-twitter integration!
All I had to do was modify my .htaccess file to include…
Options All -Indexes
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php
Delete every twitter based plugin from wordpress
Then delete from my SQL database everything in the wp_options where option_name like ‘aktt%’
Then install the TwitMe plugin and Voila!
Actually it was Colonel Mustard in the Hall with a Revolver. I just made all that other stuff up.
Right! Back to it!
EA shutting down some online games
According to a news article on NEOWIN, EA games is planning on shutting down several online game servers in favor of focusing on newer games and services.
The list from Neowin has it as…
March 16, 2010 Online Service Shutdown
Def Jam for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
Godfather for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
Lord of the Rings: Conquest for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
Mercenaries 2: World in Flames for PC
Need for Speed: Carbon for PlayStation Portable
Need for Speed: ProStreet for PlayStation Portable
Simpsons for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
April 15, 2010 Online Service Shutdown
Burnout 3: Takedown for PlayStation 2
Army of Two for PlayStation 3 (Asia only)
Battlefield 2: Modern Combat for Xbox
Burnout 3: Takedown for Xbox
Madden NFL 09 for Xbox
Muppet News Flash!
We interrupt this blog for a very special news bulletin.
After decades of secrecy, today, the truth has finally been revealed.
Snuffleupagus’ first name is Aloysius.
In other breaking news, the Atlantic Ocean has been kidnapped!
Film at 11.
Small updates in progress…
Updating some backend stuff. Should be done in 10. If the website hiccups, a page reload should clear it up.
EDIT: Done!
Bypass a website with a reading quota
Have you ever been looking at a website and suddenly run into something like this?
Reading Quota 1
Some websites like to set up a quota so you can only view their webpages a certain number of times before you have to sign up for an account or have to pay them a fee.
Most of the time, there’s a real easy way around this.
Just look at the URL of the blocked page in the top of your web browser. In the example above it was….
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/9b8e66a6-1a3c-11df-b4ee-00144feab49a,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F9b8e66a6-1a3c-11df-b4ee-00144feab49a.html%3Fftcamp%3Drss%26nclick_check%3D1&_i_referer
Yuck. Looks pretty complex, right? Don’t worry. All we need to do it look for the word FALSE in the first part of that mess.
Once you find it, just change the word false to true.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/9b8e66a6-1a3c-11df-b4ee-00144feab49a,Authorised=true.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F9b8e66a6-1a3c-11df-b4ee-00144feab49a.html%3Fftcamp%3Drss%26nclick_check%3D1&_i_referer
Now press ENTER in your web browser!
Reading Quota 2
You can also just type the headline of the blocked article into GOOGLE and most of the time they’ll give you a direct link to the same article.
I wonder how much these companies spent on some cyber consulting group for this high tech security setup?
Monday Morning Music : 02/15/10
Every Monday I like to post some music to start the week off on the right foot.
A triple feature this week!
First: Rodrigo y Gabriela – Diablo Rojo
Second: The John Coltrane Quartet – Afro Blue
And finally, Wayne Shorter – Night Dreamer