spamguy

Way back in high school, I took driver’s ed in a dumpy complex adjacent to Austin’s Burnet Road. That’s BURnet. One of my instructors, of uncertain wisdom, taste in clothes, and sexuality, frequently told me to turn onto BurNET. I wanted to slap his rat-tail for not knowing how to pronounce the street printed on his paycheque.

I discovered a more tactful way I could have taught him. The Texas Hill Country has a line for this very occasion: ‘It’s Burnet, durn it, can’t you learn it?’

Tags: Austin...language...school...Texas

Mere days after lauding my friend’s craaaaazy new blog idea, I’ve already learned it’s not so crazy new. Behold, Not Hired. It has a catchy title and custom GIFs and everything.

Fear not, wheel-reinventing friend: give it a Rule 34 spin or something and you’ll be back on top of your field.

Tags: blog...Rule 34...work

Overheard by the water cooler:

I had a wooden whistle, but it wooden whistle. Then I bought a steel whistle, but it steel wooden whistle. Then I bought a tin whistle…and now I tin whistle.

Is there a punchline somewhere? Is it a cruel prank, like a brain computer virus, intended to lock up victims’ brains as they pursue meaning that isn’t there? It doesn’t matter. By joke conclusion, my head had imploded in a rush of joke anticlimax.

Tags: humour...language

My friend (who shall remain nameless, lest her inferiors gang up on her) is following in the footsteps of blogs that examine human weaknesses. FMyLife logs f-ed lives. So does grouphug.us. There’s even a collection of the ‘mom mails’ that make us roll our eyes, Postcards From Yo Momma.

My friend contributes to the field with Worst Job Applications, which I can only hope is a tentative name that will become less self-descriptive and more artsy in coming revisions. As a job interviewer, she receives self-indulgent résumés and melodramatic cover letters that cry out for public shaming. WJA is her quick and easy vector towards that goal.

She is working off her own received content at the moment, but she welcomes contributions from other interviewers.

Tags: blog...language...work

When I say I don’t understand the inner workings of OS X’s UNIX, I mean it. The system has dependencies worthy of witch cauldrons.

(Killjoy explanation.)

Tags: animals...computers...Macs

There’s a blog for everything, Austin hamburger reviews included. His conclusions are mostly accurate. I felt my veins pulse a little as he trashed Burger House on Spicewood Springs, though. The burger is oh-so-gooey (as it should be!) and is spiced with a mystery concoction that complements, not dominates, the flavour. The fries were rather weak, but that side is something almost every good burger spot in town tends to botch.

As you can see, I take my burgers seriously. I keep meaning to post a Top 5 list.

Tags: Austin...blog...food

When .NET 2.0 makes things easy, it makes them brain-dead easy. But when it makes things hard, you wish you were working as a greeter at Wal-Mart. Take GridView editing. If you accept Microsoft’s TextBox method of editing GridView cells, you’re golden. Sometimes you need DropDownLists in place of TextBoxes, and that takes a teensy bit more work:

There’s a microscopic UI flaw in this approach: when the user clicks ‘Edit,’ the selected DropDownList item is the first (index 0), not the item that matches the cell’s text. Uniting the two is surprisingly harsh, since the text disappears before the DDL appears. After many unfruitful searches for an answer, one long blog post has a solution. A very dirty but awesomely easy solution. Use the DDL’s ValidationGroup field as short-term memory!

Tags: .NET...programming

Japanese Seizure Robots is a staple of those who have lived on the Internet a little too long. It’s a classic.

Sadly it slipped my mind for a few years. Upon return, I was horrified to see the spam crap they appended to it. I just want seizure robots, not a mail-order bride! Well, maybe we could strike a deal between the two.

Tags: internets...Japan

House flipping and Ponzi schemes can kiss my ass. There is only one way to get rich quick, as I discovered this afternoon.

1. Stop if you pass a CoinStar machine in your local supermarket, mall, or area of high traffic.
2. Peek in the tray, in the reject receptacle, and under the machine.
3. ???
4. Profit! Literally.

The Randalls I shop at must have a hypersensitive machine, because it rejected $3.31 in coins (3 quarters, 12 dimes, 18 nickels, 46 pennies), the vast majority of which seemed unobjectionable to my eye. The poor chump that used the machine must have been deaf to not notice the sound of almost 80 coins near his feet. Even if you don’t profit economically, sometimes you get a pleasant surprise in the form of exotic currency. Speaking of CoinStar, more life advice:

1. Rack up unwieldly amounts of loose change.
2. Approach a CoinStar machine.
3. Urinate in its tray.
4. Join a bank or credit union that offers free, fee-less change counting.
5. ???
6. Profit! Literally.

Tags: money

This was mentioned on the previous blog, but it deserves a revisit.

Look Around You is a BBC series of short segments parodying 1980s science classroom films to which we’ve all been subjected at some point. The show’s attack is subtle and spot-on. So much so, in fact, that the pilot episode is actually too subtle. The first five minutes are conducted in such seriousness that it does not pass as satire. Beyond that it grows increasingly absurd to the point that, by the end, they’ve achieved maximum British humour per second. Succeeding episodes distinguish themselves much better.

Look Around You has earned a second mention here because Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim has picked up the series for United States broadcast. It airs midnight CST every Sunday night. (Monday morning?)

I could not be happier. It shows that US television is not as xenophobic as I have often claimed. In most cases, if a series concept proved successful in another country, it was adapted for American audiences rather than broadcasting the original. Many of 2008’s new shows were guilty of pretending to be original, made-in-America material. The Office set a precedent for this behaviour, and I insist the series was always worse off for it. Steve Carell is a brilliant man, but his character exudes only predictable ignorance. Ricky Gervais is an entirely different man, producing a slimy and naïve boss personality irreproducible in the United States.

Tags: England...school...science...television

The first time I heard Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain,’ I had a brain fart. This was bad, because it occured on Mopac at 70 mph. Luckily I survived, but the song’s refrain still caused a logic exception in my head every time I considered it:

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You’re so vain
I’ll bet you think this song is about you
Don’t you? Don’t you?

I even lost a little sleep thinking about it last night. The wording is odd, and combined with its vague context—Simon still refuses to say who her douchebag ex is—potentially disastrous. After a little analysis, I have reached the conclusion that Carly Simon has inhuman sluttish abilities. Work with me on this.

Until the song’s ‘you’ is defined, I am free to consider every person living in 1973 p capable of being the song’s target (set P). Naturally, I’m not saying she banged everyone on Earth in 1973.¹ To whittle down the size of P, apply the song logically to every potential p ∈ P. In other words, a Cinderella glass slipper-type scenario. What she is saying is ‘If your vanity is sufficiently large, you think this song is about you.’² Broken down even further, ‘For every p, if p’s vanity v > some arbitrary constant k, then p ∈ P.’

It doesn’t take a mathematician to see that P is a very large set. As in, untold millions of people. Carly Simon is confessing over oldies radio that she made out with entire cities, states, regions. She is either a) a boasting hussy or b) not a logician. I’ll be nice and assume the latter, in which case I’ll help her out.

Her goof is surprisingly petty and easily corrected: cause and effect are swapped. This is why I noted the song’s wording is disastrous. With a simple rearrangement of phrases, all is well. Um, until you try to sing it.

If you think this song is about you
You’re so vain
If you think this song is about you
You’re so vain
Do you? Do you?

Instead of saying every vain person in 1973 thinks they have a song dedicated to them, the lyrics simply claim that every person in 1973 who thinks the song is about them is vain. That’s a fair statement, even applied to any other song. What would you say to a person that boasted that Nine Inch Nails had him in mind when they did ‘Closer’?

1. Probably close. Mom? [↩]
2. I had to drop ‘probably,’ because that’s a matter of statistics: what percentage of vain people live in a self-obsessed fantasy world where Carly Simon wrote a song about them? [↩]

Tags: maths...music

Another year, another factor. 2009 is 7² * 41, which is pleasantly compact. Unlike 2008. Maybe compactness is proportional to a year’s quality?

At a friend’s party, I botched my operands and reported it as 7 * 2⁴¹, which would be the year 15.3 trillion, give or take a few hundred million years.

Tags: maths

I’ve named an Obnoxious Song of the Year since the mid-90s. It all started when some god-awful country song (now lost to history—it starts with the words ‘alarm clock’) tugged at my ears every few days for a month. Unfortunately I never wrote this list down until last year. What’s worse, the implosion of the old blog last year took 2007’s award with it to the grave. So, we start fresh now.

Surprise! It’s Katy Perry’s ‘I Kissed A Girl.’ This song does the homosexuality movement no favours while still teasing the heterosexual males watching the music video. With the mute on. Because really, who’s watching for the words?

As an alternative, I recommend ‘I Kissed A Squirrel’:

Tags: music

Only once every few months do I laugh at something hysterically surreal in 4chan. Meanwhile, it’s been much longer than that since I shared the source of those yuks. Let’s fix that, shall we?

Poor Big Bird’s expression says more than the dialogue. Well, obviously, but…you get the idea.

Tags: 4chan...cartoons...Germany