spamguy

Hey Girl, I’m Sad

spamguy — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:37:00 +0000

How’s your day going? That’s great, but did you get in your daily Aaron Carter karaoke today? Let’s fix that:

It’s like Backstreet Boys with a novelty Chipmunks-style speedup. Thanks, Lillie.

LOOK AT THE FROSTING

spamguy — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:20:09 +0000

NPR’s Radiolab is brilliant, but often nightmare-inducing. The audio editing is creative but excessive. As you listen you tend to wonder if someone slipped a hit of LSD in your coffee. Quirky production techniques seem to follow host Robert Krulwich around. Brave New World, a late 1990s miniseries on ABC, was an audio-visual feast, and probably the most fun I had with TV. What They Might Be Giants does for song, Krulwich does for science. Heck, they’re even best buds.

This week’s Radiolab, featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, was too much. I was in my car and halfway through the segment, I experienced a waking nightmare involving two miserly, satanic voices arguing over cake. Was it a soul-crushing hallucination, or just something from the radio? Does it matter? I’m dead inside now.

Back to the Future

spamguy — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:21:21 +0000

Whoa! Generic blog alert!

The backend of this blog had become buggy and strange after two years of WordPress updates. Today I did a clean reinstall, and everything should be back to normal. Except, apparently, the interface. This is probably a call to do what I should have done long ago: sculpt the blog into something beyond what it is now. Visit spamguy.org and you will be met with a surprise. Or rather, a non-surprise: there’s nothing there. I will never be happy until real content on that domain—not the blog—represents me.

Happy 2 • 3 • 5 • 67

spamguy — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:02:39 +0000

Another year, another factorisation. This time, it’s 2 • 3 • 5 • 67. This year is the first in a long time in which all the factors are rather small.

Can’t wait until next year, though: 2011 is a prime number, the first since 2003.

Austin Looks Like A Green Bunny

spamguy — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:24:18 +0000

I’m dabbling with the idea of owning property. But this ain’t Detroit, where you can plop a dollar on a bank teller’s desk and call yourself a homeowner. (Mostly exaggerating.) This is Austin, where money is not used to buy property, just larger, sturdier cardboard boxes. Not only are property values exceedingly high, so are appreciation rates.

(Source)

10 to 20%! If a given area isn’t already too expensive for me to buy, it will be in 15 minutes.

The upside is it’s the only variable that makes property ownership even half sensible. The New York Times has an excellent widget to help visualise the rent vs. buy argument. Their default appreciation rate, 1%, makes any economic venture in Austin an instant failure. Jack it up to 20%, and the grey (rent) integrated area is engulfed by the tan (buy). With such polarised win or lose outcomes, is it any surprise we have so many homeless people and millionaires living in the same space?

I'm Feeling Unlucky

spamguy — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:38:35 +0000

At some point in my Internet travels, Firefox 3 stopped acting the way browsers have worked for 15 years. Normally if I punch cnn into the Address Bar, I get (surprise) cnn.com. These days, I’m getting a Google search for the keyword cnn instead, which is enormously unhelpful. It’s not obvious, but Firefox is performing a Google search in both cases. The difference is giving me the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ result versus the whole damn results page. After some research, I realise that I’m living in Bizarro World: no one but me has this problem, but everyone wants to have it intentionally as a feature.

In a bit of convoluted problem solving, I reverse engineered a solution to a problem I didn’t have to get a solution to a problem I did. By outlining the new steps here, hopefully I’ll save someone out there some trouble.

Type about:config into Firefox’s Address Bar. The application will try to coax you away; don’t let it. Continue on.
Find the parameter named keyword.URL in the list.
There’s no telling what the parameter’s value will be in specific cases, but chances are it’s set up to send you to a results page instead of ‘I’m Feeling Lucky.’ To fix that, double-click on the value of keyword.URL and paste in http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q= . It’s ugly, but it works.
Surf just like it’s Netscape 4.

Burn It, Burnet

spamguy — Thu, 07 May 2009 23:10:20 +0000

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?’

Your Blog Has Been Denied

spamguy — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:35:44 +0000

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.

I Tin Whistle

spamguy — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:27:15 +0000

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.

Objective: To Obtain A Summer Internship

spamguy — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 23:39:45 +0000

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.