Posts Tagged ‘interweb’

@minnesotian > Hey, how's everybody doing? Temp's dropping like a rock here.

@heapless_in_seattle > Here, too. No bright, fluffy snow, just slush slush slush.

@bostonbeaner > Snow's five feet deep. I'm kinda trapped at the moment.

@cabridges > Hi from Florida! Supposed to get cold this week here, not looking forward to it.

@heapless_in_seattle > How cold?

@cabridges > Down in the 40s, maybe 30s. You know what it's like, having to deal with that?

@bostonbeaner > Um…

@heapless_in_seattle > Um…

@minnesotian > Running out of food, really don't want to go out in that. It's snowing sideways.

@bostonbeaner > The dog was just out for 30 seconds tops, and all his whiskers broke off.

@minnesotian > Ow! Poor thing.

@bostonbeaner > He's huddled by the fireplace now. I think part of his brain may have frozen.

@heapless_in_seattle > Try holding his head in warm water, thaw it gently.

@heapless_in_seattle > With his nose and mouth OUT! boston? boston?

@bostonbeaner > He's OK, I think. He just keeps wandering in tight circles. We're supposed to get three more feet of snow tonight.

@cabridges > Just came back from walking my dogs around the park. Getting serious, I think, I'm going to have to consider putting on a long-sleeve shirt if this keeps up.

@bostonbeaner > Mom just came back inside, car wouldn't start. Looking around kitchen for food.

@minnesotian > Really getting cold, now. Wind is blowing and I think the carport just went over.

@heapless_in_seattle > hey guys? I can't see out of the windows anymore.

@minnesotian > So cold, so cold. Fingers burning. Mom breaking up computer desk for wood.

@bostonbeaner > No food. Thawing frozen tree branches we can reach from the upstairs window for the leaf sap.

@minnesotian > Boston? How attached are you to your dog? I mean, meat's meat, and if the dog is brain-damaged anyway…

@cabridges > This is agony. I actually had to dig out my hoodie and wear it this morning with my shorts. Back up in the 60s by lunch, though, so walking to the deli was no prob. Roast beast sub! NOM NOM NOM…

@heapless_in_seattle > Neighbors banding together for protection against lower east side gangs. I'm the 2-3am lookout for our apartment building. Killed a man yesterday, got 1/2 a Snickers bar.

@bostonbeaner > Cuddlebear will keep us alive for another week, with luck. Good dog. Good dog.

@minnesotian > Front door doorknob just broke in my hand. Entire house frame is frozen solid, starting to crack from the weight of the roof. May God have mercy on our souls.

@bostonbeaner > So sleepy. I'm warm when I sleep.

@cabridges > Just posted pics of our day at the beach. Little chilly to swim, but we did anyway. Can't wait for the warm weather to come back, you know? Guys? Guys?

I can't leave.

I'm stuck here, helplessly refreshing my browser over and over, waiting to see what… Hey, another Roomba! Do I need a Roomba? Nah, my house would kill the poor thing… Anyway, I'm hovering over my browser to see what comes up next. A Woot-Off is in progress, right now!

Woot.com is an odd little site that offers close-out bargains of a wide variety of items, a new one daily. You do not know how many they have for sale, only that once they sell out that's it. Prices often run at a fraction of ordinary retail, shipping is reasonable, and the product descriptions are always brutally honest and often hilarious.

Wait, it changed again! Is it… no, it's some kind of TV tuner game thing. Don't need one. Whew.

That's the normal site, anyway. Periodically a Woot-Off occurs, and the frenzy begins.

In a Woot-Off, items are thrown up there at breakneck speed and remain till they sell out, when they are replaced by the next item, and only during a Woot-Off can you see a progress bar letting you know (roughly) how many are left. This is what allows me to grab a hurried shower and, somehow, drive to work, moaning at every stoplight about the great deals I am surely missing.

Read the rest of this entry »

What do you do when your business model violates laws in your home country, and the laws of most every country around?

Start a new country, of course.

The Pirates Bay, one of the top bit torrent sites where you can find links to download music, movies, TV shows, software, and more, is getting a little tired of being hounded by the Swedish government for their perfectly harmless habit of facilitating worldwide copyright infringement and has decided to go it alone by buying Sealand, a former British naval platform in the North Sea that was declared a "micronation" during some legal disputes in the 70's. Sealand is now for sale, and The Pirate Bay is sizing it up and measuring for drapes.

Interested in becoming a citizen of the first "information must be free" nation? Head to their Web site and donate. Keep in mind, however, that where companies can be sued, countries can be bombed. Just sayin'.

It is now a federal crime to annoy someone over the Internet. Anonymously, I mean. I'm still in the clear.

Packaged in with the Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act signed last week, the law states that anyone who uses the Internet 'without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten" will be fined or tossed in the pokey for a couple of years, or both. Goodbye, LiveJournal. We hardly knew ye.

The intention was to reduce cyberstalking, but the law is worded vaguely enough to use against the Web's most reviled inhabitants: shady, skulking people whose sworn duty is to annoy others. People whose only goal is to disrupt and infuriate, who pride themselves on ruining any chances of civilized discourse. I'm talking, of course, about radio talk show hosts.

And trolls. Trolls — named after the fairy tale, billy-goat gobbling monsters because of their arrogant and aggressive behavior, plus the smell — flood online forums with abusive and intentionally offensive, inflammatory comments in an attempt to hijack whatever discussion is going on. Logging in under an obviously fake name like "BadBoi" or "Stephanopoulos," they craft their words carefully to anger the online community into closing ranks and attacking back until the entire forum has been reduced to a screaming match in flames and the trolls, chuckling to themselves, move on.

They revel in their trollness. They delight in disruption. But legislation is not the answer. We'd have to lock up MySpace and the bottom of the articles at AintItCoolNews would be a lonely, barren place indeed. No, what you need to do is to deny the troll his goal: an angry you.

The most common attitude is to treat the troll like a disobedient child, which, depending on your parenting techniques, could mean ignoring him, yelling at him or chaining him to the forum's radiator. Ignoring is effective, if you can manage it. Like politicians and puppies, trolls live for attention and the worst thing that can happen to a troll is to never be noticed. ("I said, #@%&$ing Harry Potter bites! Hello? Anyone?") Without attention they will fade away, and somewhere a mother will enter her son's dank bedroom to find a pile of dust on his keyboard.

Of course an ignored troll may become frustrated and ramp up his attacks with more abuse until he gets a response ("#@%&$ing Harry Potter really bites!"). Sadly, this response is so rarely the half-ton meteorite strike from above that the other forum members are secretly hoping for.

You can try ignoring with intent. When the troll attacks, go a different direction entirely.

You: "Did you guys see Goblet of Fire?"

Troll: "#@%$ing Harry Potter bites!"

You: "Hey, who likes pie? Mmm!"

However, this can have side effects such as all of your threads getting derailed and you gaining forty pounds.

Do not counterattack, no matter what the provocation. It's pointless, and exactly what he's hoping for. You're not going to hurt his feelings or cause him to change his ways any more than throwing steaks at a wolf will cause him to leave you alone (unless maybe it was a really big steak, and frozen, and you fired it out of some sort of cannon. . . but I digress).

You can report the troll to the forum moderator (and should) but don't expect miracles. Even if he's banned he'll be back with a new name before the page reloads.

Instead, try engaging him. Treat the troll like a beloved relative with Tourette's Syndrome, someone with valuable insights who can't help screaming obscenities with every statement. Respond to the useful information in the troll's post and ignore the rest.

Troll: "#@%&$ing Harry Potter bites!"

You: "Yeah, I didn't think the last movie was as good, either. Did you think it's because too much was left out, or because the director didn't have a feel for it?"

Troll: "Um. #@%&$ing Harry Potter bites! Hard! Honest!"

You: "You might be right, it could have been Daniel Radcliff. He seemed a little wooden. I wonder if that was intentional."

Troll: "No, I think it was the way #@%&$ing Newell directed him, so as to point out the hidden #@%&$ing layers of teenage angst and fear of #@%&$ing abandonment that were barely restrained by Harry's civilized #@%&$ing veneer."

It doesn't usually happen this fast, obviously. It can often take up to ten exchanges before you get into advanced cinematic analysis, and some trolls never get past their extrapolation of the high concept narrative, but at least they're not abusing anyone anymore.

Above all stay calm, stay cheerful, develop a thick skin, and don't expect the federal government to handle it for you.

And, if all else fails, tell the troll that an even fatter billy goat is coming along after you. Works every time.

Welcome to a new experiment in humor columning: the wikicolumn. This revolutionary approach to communal wackiness is based on the [trendy] [rumor-mongering] free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which allows its articles to be edited by anyone in the world with results that are often very educational indeed, if not necessarily on the original topic.

Wikipedia was founded in [2002] [1969] [the age of the dinosaurs] 2001 by [Bill Gates] [Jayson Blair] Jimmy Wales, who wanted to produce a vibrant, ever-growing encyclopedia that could expand and autocorrect itself by allowing anyone reading an article to [make changes] [replace it with pig latin] edit as they see fit. This, he [hypotheseized] [hypotheseed] [hypothosoosed] guessed would result in accurate and relevant articles because Jimmy Wales didn't understand people very well. Wikipedia is named after the Hawaiian word "wiki," which means literally "ha ha, wait 'til someone reads this."

There are several advantages to this format, notably the speed at which new events are updated — celebrity deaths are often posted here before the television news finds out and sometimes even before the first souvenir hospital chart shows up at eBay — and the breadth of the coverage. Experts both professional and amateur have contributed to Wikipedia, and if you know something about something your words can also become part of the permanent record of mankind's accumulated knowledge, at least until some jerk comes along and deletes it all.

While useful, Wikipedia entries are not generally considered [fun to dance to] authoritative due to the lack of peer review or [facts] [usefulness] [accuracy] provenance. But, like political spokespeople, they are still an invaluable source of information as long as you don't rely on them at all.

The wiki philosophy has not lent itself well to news-gathering or opinion, however. The Los Angeles Times recently attempted to launch wikitorials by allowing readers to make changes to their newspaper's opinion page. This ground-breaking experiment in journalism lasted about 20 minutes or approximately the length of time it took an editor to read the first readers' comments, finish throwing up, and scream into a phone.

Last week Wikipedia made the news again after a prankster changed the entry for former Robert Kennedy aide John Seigenthaler to read that Seigenthaler was [dating Pamela Anderson] [eating a large mince pie] [dating Pamela Anderson] implicated in the JFK assassination. This revision went unnoticed for months and was only corrected after Seigenthaler happened to google the words "mince pie" and "pamela anderson" for reasons known only to himself.

So. We have a process that is inaccurate, subject to change by consensus, and potentially libelous. In short, perfect for a humor column, and so I'm changing my format.

Now the lack of adequate research which has, in all modesty, become the signature of my column will be corrected immediately. For example, in a column about MP3s I made the following statement: "Heck, let me download music in the grocery store during long lines when I'm going crazy because I can't identify which song is being butchered by Muzak." Soon afterwards I heard from Sumter Cox, Director of Corporate Communications at Muzak, Inc, who let me know that Muzak hasn't re-recorded music for over 25 years. Had I been wikified, that little gaffe could have been cleared up instantly to cover the shocking fact that I haven't stepped into an elevator in three decades. Fear of lighted buttons. You understand.

In fact, I won't even have to produce a finished column anymore. I can just type in the subject (e.g. iPods, Rob Schneider, Harry Potter predictions, etc) and you guys can funny it up to your hearts' content. Did I miss a pun? Was there a butt joke I inexplicably omitted? Stick it in there! Check this out:

Why did the [pig] [Libertarian] [collective consciousness] chicken cross the [avenue] [teamsters] road?

[To achieve enlightenment] [To save big on his auto insurance] [To replace an economy based on manual labor with one dominated by industry and machine manufacture] To get to the other side!

Ha! Hilarious! And it only took the combined effort of 137 contributors and three weeks of bickering. A new age of comedy is dawning.

Meanwhile I can use the extra time to do something more worthwhile, like making Wikipedia corrections. That place is a mess.