fractalnavel : humor?

attempted selficide

fractalnavel — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:00:27 GMT

so i'm reading around the 'net, innocently, i might add (since all such anecdotal events are required to have occurred innocently), and i run into the following:

...

"The way to stop this collective madness is, of course, to get a committee on that and get a decent standard together. No, wait . . . . you wanted sane.

[kills self]

"The last time we did that we got XML, and no, the pain has not ended. Indeed, I would echo your whole comment, but change “C” to “XML” and poise a knife over my wrist."

...

[dadhacker, 2009.11.17]

NOOoooooo!!! SELF!! he killed self!

i am so depressed.

and here self was, just a minute ago, getting another cup of coffee, and ...

wait a minute - there's self now. grinning as stupidly as usual. well, ok - laughing at me.

self says that everyone has a self - even self has a self. ad infinitum, apparently. more likely, ad nauseum. so i guess it's ok to "kill self", since there are back-up selfs all the way down.

kill self! kill self! kill self!

self just laughs at me. he's holding a knife now...

cameron / origins rebuttal (video): invite dawkins to write an...

fractalnavel — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:24:04 GMT

cameron / origins rebuttal (video): invite dawkins to write an introduction for the bible - i love it ;-)...(read more)

electronics? _what_ electronics?

fractalnavel — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 13:21:35 GMT

from: the depths of the dust bunny graveyard in the land of dysfunctional devices
to: perhaps not-so-interested parties
via: dial-up (woohoo! we're blazin' now!)
subject: update on internal landscaping; circle of life; and, wtf?

message follows.

not sure what's with roadrunner lately. for the last several months it seems every little rainstrom drops my cable modem connection. for years this was only a rare event. then yesterday evening, after some storms passed through, same thing. the poor little modem went through it's usual frantic gyrations to call home. except this time, after about an hour of trying, poof - all lights went to black. trying power cycling, only the ethernet indicator light comes on for a few seconds, then goes away. no power light. modem is hot, so is the power supply. i'm thinking, dead supply. well, ok, there's something to be said for consistency - now everything is useless in this place - tv, self, modem, washer, dryer, ... whatever it is better not be contagious. on second thought - too late.

self has been doing a little bit better, though. removed six thirty+ gallon trash cans of beer bottles over the last week. plus two little recycle bins full. sad that they won't take the contents of the trash cans for recycling too. it would take months to get rid of all the bottles in that puny little bin. it cowered in the corner when it saw the task that lay ahead, so the trash cans and i took pity on it. when will they make recycle bins for dedicated beer drinkers / bottle hoarders ? whaddya mean, "no demand" ?

found seven mini-kegs in the rubble. those are gone now too.

the newly freed dust bunnies have been attacking my toes. i mean, perhaps they are just trying to show their gratitude for their new found liberty, providing nice, soft, gritty instant felt slippers as they tend to do, but i find this unnecessary in the summer. i have had to walk outside fairly frequently to clean my feet. glad it had rained; no telling what the neighbors would have thought had they seen the fuzzy footprints on my driveway.

anyway, back to the dead modem - remember the dead modem ? well, i called support after laughing at their online live chat feature sputter incoherently as it tried to load over a dial-up connection. the nice young lady on the phone actually seemed to know what she was doing, and - biggest surprise, come to think of it - she was a local person. either that, or they've started giving excellent american regional accent & micro-geography lessons overseas. after giving me the location of their nearest store where i could trade in the broken modem for a working one, she mentions that she was there the other day, and that the store is between a maternity shop and a victoria's secret. i found this hilarious, and she didn't get why. not really something you explain to strangers over the phone. clearly a young'un, this one. she had called my modem "old" at four years (i still think it's five), and she had not seen this type often before. her youth was not shown so much by her lack of familiarity with somewhat aged equipment (heh), but by the lack of temporal context exhibited in her comments.

continuing on through the piles just a bit, i managed to open some birthday & christmas cards & gifts from the last year or two. thank god there was nothing perishable that would have evolved into something alive. i had my trusty letter opener ready, though - just in case. oh - and thanks, everyone ;-)

speaking of life, something seems to have died in my garage, at least if one can go by smells on this sort of thing. damned if i can find it though, and that's the cleanest space here. well, whatever it is, it will eventually mummify and stop stinking. like last time...

at first i thought maybe jeep was, you know, having - issues - so i pulled out all the carpets and scrubbed those for the first time in years, then took him down to the power wash for a bit of attention: engine, interior, underbelly, everything. strange, though, how that mummified bat stuck to the middle of the radiator just won't come off, even under xxx psi of water pressure. (yeah, most vehicles get insects; jeep gets bats.)

but no, whatever the smell is still remained. i'm afraid to look too hard, though. a few weeks ago the neighbor was worried about her missing cat...

well, that's about it for now. still a lot to do. time to go pick up that new modem.

end of message.

feedhub spyware ? - NOT

fractalnavel — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:36:00 GMT

update:
all right, this was a big doh! moment. while puzzling over this particular item i had forgotten about my published browsing history feed, which normally i keep pretty constantly aware of. i was just not making the connection for some reason. so it's not so much that something here is calling feedhub, it's just feedhub having a reference to that history feed - which, through a feedhub - newsgator connection, i may have inadvertently created myself.

how did i discover this, you may ask ? well, it wasn't me - someone at feedhub is apparently suscribing to one or more blog search feeds for their product (i'm guessing), and my post showed up, and they promptly sent me an email explaining the above. i needed to have considered that someone (me, or anyone) could have been using feedhub with that feed.

so, out of fairness to feedhub, and the desire to spread humor even if it's ay my own expense, i have updated this post. so there.
caveat moron.

strangest thing. i've been running a new website this summer on google app engine, providing a niche webservice. it has been seeing significant usage, so i've been keeping a close eye on things in case the gae free quotas are approached.

at times when looking at one of the server log analyzer reports, i notice a particular user agent: "FeedHub MetaDataFetcher". only sporadic access by this, and very low volume, it shows up under unknowns. i haven't bothered to categorize it as bot access, or a user of the service yet, since i haven't been able to associate it with a particular account's behavior.

and then, strangely, i saw an address showing up on another report, one that only appears on a page that only i personally should have access to, on an https only page, and only when i'm logged in [only, for good measure]. and no, it wasn't me using it - it was the feedhub bot. what the hell ?

i had used the link once, five hours before, while testing, from my primary machine. so how did feedhub get hold of it ? that page can't be accessed by bots - externally. the clincher is that i found the feedhub bot accessing another similar link - one which i had only created manually & pasted in the browser address bar.

so something must be on my own system - and i don't mess with shady apps on this box. i try and be very careful about what i install, where i browse, and i always have (that damn resource sucking) anti-virus & firewall software running. ok, it's been a while since i've run specific anti-spyware software, but the completely up to date version of av that i'm running is supposed to take care of that too.

a brief search around the web reveals no mentions of this sort of feedhub behavior; it seems not to be associated with malware in any way. but i've never used their rss aggregating product. the only rss software i've used on this box is was newsgator, which i've long since stopped running, and windows live mail. and then there's that kludgey msfeedsync process that runs as part of ie8 & integrates with live mail.

but there's no particular reason this situation would necessarily be associated with an rss reader (although it seems most likely). checking browser add-ins - google toolbar is most notable, and a few bookmarklet scripts - nothing looks remotely suspicious.

something pretty clearly is calling back to feedhub when i access links to xml files, and then the feedhub bot goes & crawls them. i only noticed when the link in question happened to be on my own site. maybe i can catch this with some sort of netmon tool. kind of a bitch to do, and i'm only making assumptions about its behavior, which, if wrong, will mean i don't even know where to start looking.

so: how long has this been going on, and why, and how can i stop it ? and what else might be happening that i don't know about ?

damned unknown unknowns.

done there, been that

fractalnavel — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 20:16:02 GMT

follow-up on the last post, re cleaning - from craig: non-sequitur comic from 2006.07.31 - 2006.08.12

merry geek christmas

fractalnavel — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:02:00 GMT

there sure aren't a lot of references on the web to geek christmas outside of the "joke" realm.

so sad.

i picture it more as a pumpkin in a santa hat. guess i should make my own, huh ?

of course, the "official" movie was made years ago.

but other than that, there's only a few weak mentions out there. someone buying gifts, ok - and someone who put a little thought into it.

maybe it's time to push this thing a bit. what the hell - the merchants damn near do it anyway, almost overlapping the two holidays. poor turkeys get squished in the middle.

go there, do that...

fractalnavel — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:08:37 GMT

searching through the google site, i ran across:

Source: http://www.google.com/virgle/

i confess, they had me there for a split second. don't miss the videos !

also, a reminder: tomorrow is geek christmas - go out and spend spend spend !

this is not a life saving device

fractalnavel — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:23:03 GMT

loved this, on a beach ball:

situational huh-where?-ness

fractalnavel — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:18:01 GMT

[break in silence here]

so, i'm doing my usual morning work thing - leave the house, get coffee, drive through the park to the customer's place of business, park jeep out back under the overhang, walk around front to the door.

*hey, what's that sound ? sounds like a plane... dang, can't find it, looking up & around everywhere ... well, almost everywhere ... still walking ... hey, what are the facilities guys doing out by the parking lot ... oh, laying cement ...

*mursh!!*

what th... ?!

...looking down...

shit.

and there's three guys out front who just stood there and watched me do that. probably the same phenomena as "deer in the headlights".

yeah, there was a section of fresh concrete - and i mean fresh - & deep - that they hadn't quite gotten to marking with tape or cones or whatever, and there goes me, eyes in the sky and not one for the earth. in the "pride goes before the..." category, yep, i had just been mentally patting myself on the back for paying unusually good attention to my surroundings. sure.

this was my fault, not self's. [gee, thanks for the generosity, dude - one time in a hundred.]

and i had an audience. the worst kind. the guys who go everywhere, talk to everyone.

so i wait. when will i get the first comment - or silent smirk ?

worst part is, i set my coffee down, and it fell over, half emptying the travel mug.

isn't there some sort of an award for this kind of boneheadedness ?

"the Homer^TM", perhaps ?

today is...

fractalnavel — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:02:50 GMT

pi day !

craig:: Sent: 2008.03.14 10:40:08 Eastern Daylight Time
Subj: happy pi day! 3/14

http://www.piday.org/
me:: first reaction: thank you sir, and same to you.

second reaction (after seeing where that link goes): oh no - they've commercialized it ! next thing you know, they're going to dumb it down for the masses.

on the other hand, should have thought of this myself. except i'm not of that mindset. easy enough to do, using those free produce & fullfill on demand shops.

see http://coolwhois.com/d/piday.org/20080314085304. i can't get a decent response from the host domain name it returns.

ah, but ok, they've been around for a while, that takes a little bit of the edge off: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.piday.org/. wayback has been slow lately...

this is also interesting: http://trace.die.net/search/?source=bm&q=http%3A//ord.dreamhost.com. from there, get alexa info, and some interesting whois: http://whois.domaintools.com/piday.org (too bad a lot of these details are only available for a price - sometimes steep).

looks like the site has had regular changes over the years, so at least the guy is somewhat committed to this.

and what about the guy himself ? http://cbri.umn.edu/~kunau/?p=89 (they must know each other through choir) (interesting, that wordpress site looks almost identical to scott w.'s graffiticms site - see http://evil.che.lu/2007/4/6/skittlish-0-4-release-and-sightseeing (which is also worth browsing around on)), and mostly, his site: http://www.hellerich.net/ - he's a young'un, gradgitated in '05. means he put up the piday.org site when he was 18 or so - !

but "official" site for pi day ? gimme a break. surprised there's nothing _on_ that site _about_ the site; i wouldn't have done all of the above ;-)

btw, relevant to a recent discussion of ours and to your employer / customer: http://cbri.umn.edu/~kunau/?p=143 (linked paper: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/02/data-visualization-modern-approaches/). worth checking out other stuff from that guy's site and his outbound links, etc. he's in the bioinformatics field. also check out his department: http://cbri.umn.edu.

anyway, thanks for triggering that tour, interesting stuff out there.

i think that's what you might call a disproportionate response ;-)

there must have been a reason i chose aol...

fractalnavel — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:40:24 GMT

... i just can't think of it. the latest:

Dear AOL Communicator User,

Thank you for using AOL Mail products. We wanted to inform you that we will discontinue support and availability of AOL Communicator as of March 31, 2008.

Meeting your online needs by providing you with first class mail products is our number one goal. As such, we have several options available. In place of Communicator you can continue to receive and send your mail through any of the following:

Through any browser access our webmail suite at http://dc.aol.com/cgi-bin25/DM/y/jwsD0MiPDm0MhG0FXJ0Eu (or via your mobile device at http://dc.aol.com/cgi-bin25/DM/y/jwsD0MiPDm0MhG0PiD0EH )
Try the newest version of our software, AOL Desktop. Download it at http://dc.aol.com/cgi-bin25/DM/y/jwsD0MiPDm0MhG0PHc0EF. AOL Desktop retains many familiar features of Communicator: integrated AIM and multiple email accounts. In addition, the AOL Desktop integrated experience includes a customizable toolbar and tabbed web-browsing.
Manage your mail by using any program that supports IMAP or POP3, such as Microsoft® Outlook ( Outlook instructions) or Mozilla® Thunderbird (Thunderbird instructions).
Enjoy the flexibility to read and send your mail via other third-party mail clients that you choose. Find out how.

Also, if you have mail stored on your local folders on Communicator you can move them to your unlimited “Saved on AOL” folder. That way you can have access to this mail anywhere anytime.

Thank you for using AOL Mail.

Sincerely,
The AOL Mail Team

a good deal of that package's features quit working years ago - without any notice ever. but the mail client was actually pretty respectable. and now this, only 28 days notice. what a team, thank you for your support.

yeah, i think i mentioned earlier i was going to seriously consider moving to outlook, and now it looks like my mind is made up for me. the real bitch has to do with all the rules i have to transfer (50+), the ones that sort out all the various subscriptions into folders. and i have to set up the folders themselves first.

as for the other aol mail packages - all online ? i don't think so. and the others don't handle non-aol mail, nor even a combined view of all my aol accounts.

it's funny too that not too long ago, aol was adamant about keeping their email systems closed - not even pop access. then that eventually got opened up - after i had already committed to communicator. bottom line is that it was a good idea and a good suite of software that never caught on.

it seems to be an unstated process that aol is divesting itself of all properties. i mean, their service was made largely free a year or two back, and they are encouraging people to really close down the old client. unfortunately, i started using their bill management service years ago, and that's associated with the paid part of aol. i will need to move that as well, it seems.

so what's "safe" in terms of software longevity ? only microsoft ? i've seen open source stuff have the rug pulled out from under stuff in the past. i start to wonder if certain capabilities need to be treated as utilities, in terms of government oversight and the like. for example, what would happen if gas or electric or phone companies decided to start going their separate ways instead of adhering to standards ? in computing, standards only address a very few things, usually restricted to comunications pipelines. there is a long ways to go.

i know someone is going to be thinking this, so i may as well say it: no, microsoft is not anti-standard. hell, they de facto define them. maybe it's time for the software religion laggards to get finally with it.

*gasp* - did i just suggest government regulation of software, etc. ? hmmm - pandora's box, there. but ok - do you like that roof that stays where it's been put (kansas farmhouses & trailer parks excluded) ? so regulations aren't all bad. not sure how to work out these issues, but it's not just going to "happen".

on thing ya gotta love: in that email, they included the following language translation options:

U.S.A

Canada (English)

Español de Latinoamérica (EE.UU.)

Français

Deutsch

日本語

 Português (Brasil)

Mexicano

English (United Kingdom)

one would hope a sense of humor was involved, but unfortunately, they were almost certainly serious. oh sorry - for you british types, that's "humour". and for the canadians - "soorry".

update:

in case anyone is morbidly curious, here's some early info on the aol communicator suite, and some additional stuff on its end. it was realy enjoyable to use when it was fully supported (which was quite some time ago), and i can imagine what new tech updates would have brought if it had caught on. still, can't find any info on exactly what this discontinuation means for a desktop application. i imagine i could still use it for pop & imap access, and since aol has been exposing those protocols for a while now, i would guess i could just hook up the aol accounts that way. the remaining issue will be the current aol address book synchronization, which will probably disappear.

i'm just not fond of outlook and its options for this stuff. not to mention that i only have office xp, and it's been flaky lately. *sigh* - i'm overdue for a complete tech overhaul anyway. hard to justify buying toys, though, when employment isn't steady.

existential uncertainty

fractalnavel — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 05:16:03 GMT

*ring*

"hello ?"

"this is your landlord, just wanted to make sure that you're all right."

"um, sure..."

"you see, the neighbor across the street hasn't seen you in a while, and your mailbox is packed, so he gave me a call."

"well, that's nice, neighbors looking out for each other."

"why don't you put in an appearance and go get your mail, that will reassure the guy."

"yeak, ok, gotcha."

*click*

that's a highly paraphrased version of a telephone encounter recently. kinda answers some questions brought up in recent discussions with family members about what would happen if i just dropped dead or something. by the way, i don't think i've talked to any neighbors in years, and i'm certain i haven't talked to anyone across the street.

thing is, that "full mailbox" alert normally wouldn't have worked. used to be that the mailman would take all the mail back to the post office for safe keeping when it accumulated like that. not sure why that didn't happen this time. it's a pain in the ass when it does, but it's the right thing to do. of course, i've got whoever it is trained to realize that i only grab the mail out of the box after random lengthy periods. it's a type of behavioral reinforcement schedule.

but ok, sure, i admit, i've been just working on my website or watching tv or reading or playing games for the last six weeks or so, and i haven't really cared about schedules. been getting to sleep between four & six a.m., more or less, and getting up six to ten hours later. and growing a beard. also been primarily living on delivered food, with a weekly stop at the local pub being my only outing. so i bet it does look awfully deserted around here. especially with the snow covered trackless driveway (until the other day), which conceals the drifts of undisturbed pine needles and cones.

oh yeah - i waited until after dark to get my mail. i'm such a stinker ;-)

no kidding, they really, actually said this:

fractalnavel — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 00:18:00 GMT

"... Continued research into procrastination should not be delayed, especially because its prevalence appears to be growing. ..."

The Nature of Procrastination: A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review of Quintessential Self-Regulatory Failure

tech notes: can you believe these morons ?

fractalnavel — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 02:50:41 GMT

so i go to the AWStats project home page - here's what i see:

now what kind of bullshit is that ?! i felt like ripping out their sorry-assed software just for spite. not to mention that all of their "points" are nonsense.

they must have been watching too many of those mac vs. pc commercials. or maybe they're fsj wannabes.

man, could you imagine if someone did that with ie ?! that would be so cool - at the microsoft site ;-) but only for bozos who do shit like this.

wow - i must be - uh -

fractalnavel — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 06:51:47 GMT

shut up, self...