See for a minute there I thought I was being handed a mobile template. Nice work. It's such a shock to see the site on a professional white background... :)
Who you callin' fat, bernockle?
MD friend of mine said that killing fat cells off is pretty much the only way to fix obesity. Over the last 4 years of working in an obesity research lab I'm inclined to agree with him... it's relatively easy to prevent but a pill-based cure after the fact isn't gonna happen. Even the tried-and-true methods (eat less, exercise more) don't work as they should in the severely obese, because being obese changes your physiology. Even if you lose weight, you're geared to regain it. Not that it can't happen, just that it's a hell of a lot harder than it looks on the surface.
Glad my old U station was on the list. Confused as to why The Current didn't make the cut, as it blows my old U station out of the water - and that college station was hands-down the best in the state and a regular contender in the "best college station EVAH" contests.
Anyway in the last X number of years (where X >=10) I have had exactly two stations programmed into my car radio, and those are both of them. Commercial radio blows.
That's hilarious.
On a related note, I spent two days last week trying to figure out why every web browser known to humanity EXCEPT internet explorer drew my website correctly, but IE simply refused to load the fonts.
What's worse, it worked better in IE6, 7 and 8 than it did in 9. I have IE-specific CSS files (thankfully drastically reduced in size as versions increase) showing that the browser has improved, but for the love of pete the damn thing is WORSE for font rendering now than ever. 6 and 7 load the fonts. 8 loads 'em, but will replace them with a default on page refresh (keeping the letter spacing from the original, which makes it look like hell). 9? Refuses to load them. At all. And from the web developer toolbar I know darn well the browser is seeing them and is downloading them.
What's worse, if I check the test version of my site, hosted on my own laptop, everything works. It only fails when served from my old U webspace. Seems like if the site uses HTTPS IE9 decides that fonts must be ignored or something. Damn do I hate that pile of crap browser. I hate it with a burning passion. And I am in no way a professional web guy. I can't imagine the sheer thousand-burning-suns intensity of the fury a pro must have at those (incompetent? uncaring? malicious?) coders over in Redmond.
It is because someone made it so. This is the Internets. We have a sworn duty to do things which make no sense and add nothing to the well-being of society.
Also sometimes we give away free software or leak documents or whatever in a vain attempt to make up for things like "keyboard cat".
I don't want to see the ark. I want to see the boat they sent to Australia to pick up a pair of wombats, platypi, kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, etc. to make sure they survived the global cataclysm, you know, the one that we don't physically have enough water to have ever actually had happen. THEN I'll believe these yahoos.
I know a guy who is firmly convinced the bible is true because dinosaur bones were found on top of mountains. The only explanation he has is that "the flood carried them there obviously, because everyone knows dinosaurs didn't climb mountains!"
Yes. That is literally what he said. His proof of god lies in the common-knowledge fact that dinosaurs don't climb mountains.
I honestly didn't know what to say to the guy so I settled for laughing hilarously and cracking another beer. (Just 'cause he's a nut doesn't mean I won't drink a beer with the guy.)
I blame Playboy.
It's this mentality that has turned young women into airbrushed Barbie dolls. I don't like the look. Unnaturally smooth skin, identical noses, lipstick that is lighter than their faces, so on and so on. If you don't know what I mean just go outside and look at a random 18- to 28-year-old. I am tired of the plastic women. I am tired of people who don't look like themselves, who would be unrecognizable without the base layer of Revlon spackle and Max Factor lashes or whatever the hell brand kids are using now, I don't even know. People have pores. Freckles. Lines. Blemishes. Bumpy noses. People get older and nobody looks 18 forever, sometimes not even when we are 18. My wife is beautiful. She has all of these things. The little crinkly lines around her eyes when she smiles - dear lord why would you botox those away? They add so much life and delight to her face, they make her who she is instead of some anonymous idealized plastic simulacrum of a woman-thing. She can smile at me with just her eyes, trying to keep a striaght face, and the tiny crinkles of her eye-smile give her away every time. Her freckles slowly and almost imperceptibly wax and wane with the annual changing of the day length (I swear to god it's true, our baby has a single freckle that completely disappeared last winter only to reappear with the spring sunshine, just like his Mom's freckles!). Her bumpy nose, the result of a childhood accident, just a wee little imperfection on the bridge of her nose but perfectly placed to hold her glasses from sliding off like mine do, how I envy that beautiful accident of hers! Moles and weird spots and wrinkles and veins that show like hidden blue milky lines just under her skin. Her scattered streak of gray hairs just off-center above her brow, still masked by her blonde hair but there if you are close enough to notice the thin streak that gives away her age despite her youthful face, her years of accumulated life experience (happiness and joy and stress and sorrow and all the rest) showing in those silver strands.
If you can't look at yourself or your spouse or your kids or your significant other and see the beauty that makes us human - if all you see are problems that need to be surgeried away or airbrushed or glossed over or eliminated or hidden - well, you can blame Playboy too, but really maybe we ought to blame ourselves for buying into this line of bullshit wholesale in the first place.
Someone here at work said that boycotting BP stations isn't going to help, because it just hurts the station owner.
I still say, fuck 'em. I'm not buying their damn gas. I'm not giving them one cent. Sucks to be a BP station owner and all, but christ. This is not a company I want to support, even tangentially.
It isn't their actions prior to the incident that bother me. It's their actions since, and their lack of action in areas that might have helped.
I block ads because the web looks like shit without an ad blocker. I do not block text ads, just banners and flash and that kind of junk.
I don't mind ads, per se. I do get pissed at ads that are so obnoxious that they detract from the site. It doesn't need to move, make noise, etc. and quite honestly the more annoying the ad the less likely I am to react favorably to the product. I don't get pissed at ads in a magazine, because they just sit there and I can skip them. Commercials on TV I can mute. The only option on a web site is to block them. Making the ad more annoying is not going to make me turn off my ad blocker, either.
Interstitial "wait 20 sec and view this before the movie plays" ads are OK, a bit annoying but reasonable. Even better are the 5-second "Brought to you by..." ads prior to a video.
Stuff that pops up and covers up the content? Horrible, unconscionable and enough to make me swear off the product for life.
Product placement ads might work for video sites, but as text they aren't great: Better to have Google-style text ads on a sidebar.
Blocking me from seeing your site because I want to block your ads? Screw you. There are millions of sites on the internet. Nothing makes me look at yours. Driving down visit numbers is not a good way to convince anyone that they should pay you for ad placement in the first place.
And this isn't even taking into account the cross-site scripting vulnerabilities that can crop up when a host site allows an advertiser to drop in content...
Wow. I remember my dad firing up Alaska Locksmith back in the day, on our old Apple ][, but never was really clear what it was for.
Now I know. I am apparently a second-generation software pirate. Crazy.
Richard Dawkins
People who have their significant other grab them under the table in order to shut them up whenever someone else at a dinner says something absolutely ridiculous and wrong.
Yeah, that's pretty much me right there.
So here's a radical idea: How about we just get a team of divers and have them place limestone pillars next to the existing wooden piles? It's something we can do TODAY, not years from now, and it's something that we know would be safe to implement, both from an economic and an ecological standpoint.
Or is that idea too Victorian?
Little bit of a snarky comment on that whole concept, by the way - "Victorian" is such a self-serving word there, given the speaker's nationality. I assume people were building structures using teams of workers and blueprints long, long before Victorian times. Like, for example, when they were building Venice, a city that had been around in some form or other for at least 1000 years before Queen Victoria took the throne.
The crap thing is, the more evil Google gets the more of their stuff I find myself using.
I mean, look at Yahoo - they FORCE that damn toolbar down your throat every chance they get, in every installer everywhere, and I hate them for it - but I pay them annually for Flickr.
And I despise Microsoft for their idiot business practices and shitty treatment of any platform not owned by them, their asinine pushes against open-source and refusal to admit that 99% of the problems on the internet could be solved if they had half a brain about security - but I paid the MS tax for years and still use their utter crap Office suite on my Mac.
And Apple. Committed to obsolescence, because they make no money on software, even their laptops are now giant iPods with nonremovable batteries. Zero support for non-Apple anything (software, peripherals, parts, etc.) Secretive to the point of scariness. But I own three Macs, three iPods and two iPhones.
Hell. All those tech companies are evil in some sense or other. Google is apparently the only one I don't give any money to.
See for a minute there I thought I was being handed a mobile template. Nice work. It's such a shock to see the site on a professional white background... :)
posted by caution live frogs 10 years ago
In "Obese Monkeys Lose Weight on Drug that Attacks Blood Supply of Fat Cells"
Who you callin' fat, bernockle? MD friend of mine said that killing fat cells off is pretty much the only way to fix obesity. Over the last 4 years of working in an obesity research lab I'm inclined to agree with him... it's relatively easy to prevent but a pill-based cure after the fact isn't gonna happen. Even the tried-and-true methods (eat less, exercise more) don't work as they should in the severely obese, because being obese changes your physiology. Even if you lose weight, you're geared to regain it. Not that it can't happen, just that it's a hell of a lot harder than it looks on the surface.
posted by caution live frogs 12 years ago
In "RadioCollective.org"
Glad my old U station was on the list. Confused as to why The Current didn't make the cut, as it blows my old U station out of the water - and that college station was hands-down the best in the state and a regular contender in the "best college station EVAH" contests. Anyway in the last X number of years (where X >=10) I have had exactly two stations programmed into my car radio, and those are both of them. Commercial radio blows.
posted by caution live frogs 13 years ago
In "This may be a valuable tool for that new CSS3 webstuff. Or not."
That's hilarious. On a related note, I spent two days last week trying to figure out why every web browser known to humanity EXCEPT internet explorer drew my website correctly, but IE simply refused to load the fonts. What's worse, it worked better in IE6, 7 and 8 than it did in 9. I have IE-specific CSS files (thankfully drastically reduced in size as versions increase) showing that the browser has improved, but for the love of pete the damn thing is WORSE for font rendering now than ever. 6 and 7 load the fonts. 8 loads 'em, but will replace them with a default on page refresh (keeping the letter spacing from the original, which makes it look like hell). 9? Refuses to load them. At all. And from the web developer toolbar I know darn well the browser is seeing them and is downloading them. What's worse, if I check the test version of my site, hosted on my own laptop, everything works. It only fails when served from my old U webspace. Seems like if the site uses HTTPS IE9 decides that fonts must be ignored or something. Damn do I hate that pile of crap browser. I hate it with a burning passion. And I am in no way a professional web guy. I can't imagine the sheer thousand-burning-suns intensity of the fury a pro must have at those (incompetent? uncaring? malicious?) coders over in Redmond.
posted by caution live frogs 13 years ago
In "NZ - another quake"
Sorry to hear this! Another quake... hope this is the last one for a long time in NZ. Glad #1 and clan are OK.
posted by caution live frogs 13 years ago
In "Single Link Billy Joel You Tube Link"
It is because someone made it so. This is the Internets. We have a sworn duty to do things which make no sense and add nothing to the well-being of society. Also sometimes we give away free software or leak documents or whatever in a vain attempt to make up for things like "keyboard cat".
posted by caution live frogs 13 years ago
In "Scottish explorer goes missing on Mt. Ararat"
I don't want to see the ark. I want to see the boat they sent to Australia to pick up a pair of wombats, platypi, kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, etc. to make sure they survived the global cataclysm, you know, the one that we don't physically have enough water to have ever actually had happen. THEN I'll believe these yahoos. I know a guy who is firmly convinced the bible is true because dinosaur bones were found on top of mountains. The only explanation he has is that "the flood carried them there obviously, because everyone knows dinosaurs didn't climb mountains!" Yes. That is literally what he said. His proof of god lies in the common-knowledge fact that dinosaurs don't climb mountains. I honestly didn't know what to say to the guy so I settled for laughing hilarously and cracking another beer. (Just 'cause he's a nut doesn't mean I won't drink a beer with the guy.)
posted by caution live frogs 13 years ago
In "Perfect porn is perfect! (NSFW)"
I blame Playboy. It's this mentality that has turned young women into airbrushed Barbie dolls. I don't like the look. Unnaturally smooth skin, identical noses, lipstick that is lighter than their faces, so on and so on. If you don't know what I mean just go outside and look at a random 18- to 28-year-old. I am tired of the plastic women. I am tired of people who don't look like themselves, who would be unrecognizable without the base layer of Revlon spackle and Max Factor lashes or whatever the hell brand kids are using now, I don't even know. People have pores. Freckles. Lines. Blemishes. Bumpy noses. People get older and nobody looks 18 forever, sometimes not even when we are 18. My wife is beautiful. She has all of these things. The little crinkly lines around her eyes when she smiles - dear lord why would you botox those away? They add so much life and delight to her face, they make her who she is instead of some anonymous idealized plastic simulacrum of a woman-thing. She can smile at me with just her eyes, trying to keep a striaght face, and the tiny crinkles of her eye-smile give her away every time. Her freckles slowly and almost imperceptibly wax and wane with the annual changing of the day length (I swear to god it's true, our baby has a single freckle that completely disappeared last winter only to reappear with the spring sunshine, just like his Mom's freckles!). Her bumpy nose, the result of a childhood accident, just a wee little imperfection on the bridge of her nose but perfectly placed to hold her glasses from sliding off like mine do, how I envy that beautiful accident of hers! Moles and weird spots and wrinkles and veins that show like hidden blue milky lines just under her skin. Her scattered streak of gray hairs just off-center above her brow, still masked by her blonde hair but there if you are close enough to notice the thin streak that gives away her age despite her youthful face, her years of accumulated life experience (happiness and joy and stress and sorrow and all the rest) showing in those silver strands. If you can't look at yourself or your spouse or your kids or your significant other and see the beauty that makes us human - if all you see are problems that need to be surgeried away or airbrushed or glossed over or eliminated or hidden - well, you can blame Playboy too, but really maybe we ought to blame ourselves for buying into this line of bullshit wholesale in the first place.
posted by caution live frogs 13 years ago
In "Batman Branding"
islander - nice recovery. Now do "purple"! (It's my baby boy's favorite color, because so far it's the only color name he can say. Silly little guy.)
posted by caution live frogs 13 years ago
There once was a man from East Orange ...? Well that's as far as I got, anyone else want to take a stab at it?
posted by caution live frogs 13 years ago
In "BP well deeper than permit allowed, lacked safety valve"
Someone here at work said that boycotting BP stations isn't going to help, because it just hurts the station owner. I still say, fuck 'em. I'm not buying their damn gas. I'm not giving them one cent. Sucks to be a BP station owner and all, but christ. This is not a company I want to support, even tangentially. It isn't their actions prior to the incident that bother me. It's their actions since, and their lack of action in areas that might have helped.
posted by caution live frogs 14 years ago
In "Draw yr own Monkey"
That is cool and all but isn't it easier just to take the drawing and do Live Trace --> Expand? That's what I do, anyway...
posted by caution live frogs 14 years ago
In "So anyway, this website I visit "
I block ads because the web looks like shit without an ad blocker. I do not block text ads, just banners and flash and that kind of junk. I don't mind ads, per se. I do get pissed at ads that are so obnoxious that they detract from the site. It doesn't need to move, make noise, etc. and quite honestly the more annoying the ad the less likely I am to react favorably to the product. I don't get pissed at ads in a magazine, because they just sit there and I can skip them. Commercials on TV I can mute. The only option on a web site is to block them. Making the ad more annoying is not going to make me turn off my ad blocker, either. Interstitial "wait 20 sec and view this before the movie plays" ads are OK, a bit annoying but reasonable. Even better are the 5-second "Brought to you by..." ads prior to a video. Stuff that pops up and covers up the content? Horrible, unconscionable and enough to make me swear off the product for life. Product placement ads might work for video sites, but as text they aren't great: Better to have Google-style text ads on a sidebar. Blocking me from seeing your site because I want to block your ads? Screw you. There are millions of sites on the internet. Nothing makes me look at yours. Driving down visit numbers is not a good way to convince anyone that they should pay you for ad placement in the first place. And this isn't even taking into account the cross-site scripting vulnerabilities that can crop up when a host site allows an advertiser to drop in content...
posted by caution live frogs 14 years ago
In "I don't know if this really counts as a link, but I've added a twist."
OK. First try, landed on the beach in Hawaii. So do I win a ticket to Maui or something? Please tell me I win a ticket.
posted by caution live frogs 14 years ago
In "The Oops Design Award"
I would have appreciated a little more context on some of these - just a simple photo doesn't help me make sense of most of them.
posted by caution live frogs 14 years ago
In "They Don’t Make Computer Manuals Like They Used To."
Wow. I remember my dad firing up Alaska Locksmith back in the day, on our old Apple ][, but never was really clear what it was for. Now I know. I am apparently a second-generation software pirate. Crazy.
posted by caution live frogs 14 years ago
In "Stereotypes of readers by author"
Richard Dawkins People who have their significant other grab them under the table in order to shut them up whenever someone else at a dinner says something absolutely ridiculous and wrong. Yeah, that's pretty much me right there.
posted by caution live frogs 14 years ago
In "A site dedicated to overweight cats. Check out the cat...in overalls!"
My baby is finally heavier than the cats. But I'm not dressing my cats in overalls.
posted by caution live frogs 14 years ago
In "Can reefs grow beneath Venice?"
So here's a radical idea: How about we just get a team of divers and have them place limestone pillars next to the existing wooden piles? It's something we can do TODAY, not years from now, and it's something that we know would be safe to implement, both from an economic and an ecological standpoint. Or is that idea too Victorian? Little bit of a snarky comment on that whole concept, by the way - "Victorian" is such a self-serving word there, given the speaker's nationality. I assume people were building structures using teams of workers and blueprints long, long before Victorian times. Like, for example, when they were building Venice, a city that had been around in some form or other for at least 1000 years before Queen Victoria took the throne.
posted by caution live frogs 14 years ago
In "All Google Searches Are Now Automatically 'Personalized'"
The crap thing is, the more evil Google gets the more of their stuff I find myself using. I mean, look at Yahoo - they FORCE that damn toolbar down your throat every chance they get, in every installer everywhere, and I hate them for it - but I pay them annually for Flickr. And I despise Microsoft for their idiot business practices and shitty treatment of any platform not owned by them, their asinine pushes against open-source and refusal to admit that 99% of the problems on the internet could be solved if they had half a brain about security - but I paid the MS tax for years and still use their utter crap Office suite on my Mac. And Apple. Committed to obsolescence, because they make no money on software, even their laptops are now giant iPods with nonremovable batteries. Zero support for non-Apple anything (software, peripherals, parts, etc.) Secretive to the point of scariness. But I own three Macs, three iPods and two iPhones. Hell. All those tech companies are evil in some sense or other. Google is apparently the only one I don't give any money to.
posted by caution live frogs 14 years ago
(limited to the most recent 20 comments)