Unsought Input

If you had played Portals, one of the five games on the Half Life Orange Box available for Xbox 360, then you would know what I am talking about. Or you might have played it on an emulator, which is illegal and you will be found and flogged. But it’s a fun game that makes you think about the important things in life, like not following others commands blindly, whether to destroy your only friend and whether or not there is actually cake. While tooling around on the internet I found this cool site I wanted to share with all of you.

Check out ApertureScience. When you first go there it will look like an old computer with the black and green screen. Some of you may remember those back in the day. Anyway, there are several things you can do here. I don’t want to ruin the fun for anyone, especially those of us who remember how to use these green and black screens, so if are not getting anywhere, click here to be directed to a page that tells you how to do all the fun stuff on this page. I think the computer actually flicked me off while applying to work for Aperture Science. Well, either way, have fun.

And just because it’s the best thing, here is the portal ending song.

Ultimate Tag Warrior is a great Wordpress plugin that lets you add tagging to your blog and build your own folksonomy. You can use it to show related posts or a nifty tag cloud.

As of version 2.3, though, Worpdress has tagging built right in. That means that development on UTW has stopped, leaving us with a very nasty bug in the final version. After someone comments on a post (and the comment is approved), all the non-category tags are deleted.

This is a known bug in UTW 3.1415926. I’m not quite ready to take the plunge into Wordpress 2.3, digging up new plugins to add the features I want and changing our theme. So in the mean time, I found an ugly hack to stop our tags from vanshing into thin air.

1. Go to your ultimate-tag-warrior-core.php file.
2. Find the SaveTags function.
3. Comment out the code that removes tags that are no longer associated with the post.

The end of the SaveTags function should look like this:

// Remove any tags that are no longer associated with the post.
/*
if ($taglist == “”) {
// since “not in ()” doesn’t play nice.
$q = “delete from $tablepost2tag where post_id = $postID”;
} else {
// lop off the trailing space+comma
$taglist = substr($taglist, 0 ,-2);

$q = “delete from $tablepost2tag where post_id = $postID and tag_id not in ($taglist)”;
}
$wpdb->query($q);
*/
$this->ClearTagPostMeta($postID);
}

Please note that this is an ugly hack.  It makes it much more difficult to remove tags from a post when you want to.  I find that we get comments on posts way more often than we ever want to remove tags, so it’s a god tradeoff for the time being.

Got a better solution?  Post it in the comment below.

A few months back we wrote about the comedic possibilities of super heroes confronting real life.  In the last few years there has been a flood of super hero comics, movies, and TV shows and many of them place people with extraordinary abilities in ordinary situations.  Witness the blockbuster Spider-Man movies, or heroes like Hiro from Heroes.

But beyond the world of fiction, what kind of super powers can we find in real life?  Sure, it’s fun to come up with speculative pseudoscience explanations for Superman’s heat vision, but that’s not likely to produce any results.  Even non-powered heroes like Batman rely too much on poor comic book physics and unrealistic survivability to produce real-life counterparts.

We’ll find our real-life super powers in less obvious places.  In the 1980s Marvel had a character named Cypher, or more properly Doug Ramsey.   Doug wasn’t known by his super hero name because his power wasn’t flashy or very useful in battle - Doug was genetically gifted with the ability to understand languages.

This amazing ability to learn languages (along with numbers, dates, etc.) is something you can find in real life, often linked with disabling autism.  Often, but not always.  Watch the video to see the life of Daniel Tammet, the boy with the incredible brain.

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Here is my second amazing podcast this time talking about the Coreys.

And for those who want to play the DWallz podcast drinking game at home take a shot every time I say “of course”.

(Okay morons since everybody seems to be having such a hard time figuring out how to listen to the podcast let me explain, either lick on the link and play it in your browser with whatever program you have setup to play mp3 files OR right click and “Save Target As” to your desktop and then listen to the mp3 file with whatever program you like that plays mp3s. Was that clear enough for everybodyor do I need to make a powerpoint presentation?)

DWallz amazing podcast 10-20

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Magician Criss Angel will join Uri Geller on Phenomenon on NBC. The show is billed as American Idol for magicians and “mentalists,” but that’s not really interesting. Within the next few years there will be an American Idol-style show for every profession, hobby, and pursuit in the history of man.

What’s interesting is that Geller, who has for years gone on TV all over the world claiming to have psychic powers, is still able to get on TV at all. He’s been caught cheating and had his powers debunked so many times it’s not even funny anymore.

He was probably most famously exposed by James Randi (The Amazing Randi). Watch the video below for some entertaining history.

Yes, that’s right, Geller is so busted that he flaked out on Johnny Carson. In 1973. That’s more than 30 years of being busted.

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I started hearing it this morning, but I guess I should have expected it. With news of the Indians being one win away from the World Series, apparently Fox executives are worried about a “flyover” World Series between Cleveland and Colorado. Boo freaking hoo.

I’ll concede that the potential viewing audiences for a Red Sox-Cubs or a Yankees-Dodgers series could be more numerous than an Indians-Rockies series, just by dint of sheer population. And I could argue that the viewers that matter - the real baseball fans - will watch a World Series no matter who’s playing. Even if it were Florida and Toronto. The only benefit to a coastal series is that all the hangers-on - the girlfriends who wear pink Red Sox caps - might tune in. But if the ads are directed to a hardcore baseball fan, then what good do you think they’ll do for an audience of hangers-on?

But the real problem here is the bigotry of geography. I’m a meat-and-potatoes Ohioan, regardless of where I live. Any time I hear the term “flyover state,” it incenses me more than these East Coasters can understand. I’m proud of where I grew up, and I take particular pride in the success stories to come out of the Midwest. Such as this year’s Indians team. Nevertheless, East Coasters - particularly New Yorkers - feel compelled to treat the vast majority of this country like a third-world hellhole.

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Interesting links we found today:

• Bankrate Living Green Tips »

This is my inaugural podcast where I discuss the the shooting at Success Tech. Please don’t be too distracted by my sexy voice and miss my important message.

DWallz Awesome Podcast 10-16-07

So recently I wrote an article on how I felt that the British show IT Crowd is very good and does not need an American remake. If you click right there on that little blue link, you can read it, too, if your heart so desires. Basically it just became a comment festival to say that because I don’t think that a lot of people are “intelligent” (I will use this term loosely) enough to really enjoy this type of humor that I am a bad American. I am not saying that you have to be intelligent to understand humor. You can be dumb as a rock and still think things are funny. And different things are funny to different people. For example, my friends like to watch people take the Cinnamon Challenge all night. They think this is the funniest thing since the icanhascheezburger.com. I do not. I don’t really think it’s funny at all. And these people are pretty dumb. And you know, of course, that dumb people are funny. I mean, that is why Jackass got to make two movies that a lot of people went out to see and then bought, along with lots of TV shows and DVDs and merchandise.

But you know what? I do think intelligence has a lot to do with the type of humor you find funny. You have to be smarter to get certain subtle references to pop culture or semi-inside jokes taken from any culture: pop, web, society, ect. Because you can only get so far with fart jokes. Really. I am pretty sure that the basic fart jokes do wear down over time. Don’t get me wrong, a fart joke here and there is funny. Just not all the time. That is why intelligence in humor is what makes a certain movie or TV show or book or comedian or whatever more funny and memorable then another. Do you agree with me? I actually don’t care if you do or not. I mean, I am writing this article which means that it obviously bothers me a little that I had to go out of my way to explain this to some people, but that I wanted to make sure it was understood what I mean. So, maybe I do care. But just a little.

And, I am not saying I am really smart or that you are really dumb (if you felt that the title of my article on the IT Crowd was derogatory towards you, then maybe it was? If not, then hey, I’m not talking about you.). All I am saying is that there are a lot of dumb people out there who never get tired of fart and poop jokes, getting to see people kick other people in the nuts or fall off of buildings. But for the rest of us who want that kind of humor mixed in with more intelligent and snappy humor I feel we get punished with main stream entertainment. And I am very thankful when something funny comes out on TV or at the movies. But it’s like a rare mythological beast. You will see it and love it and want to own it but no one will believe you that it was there (or in this case worth watching). Americans are all jaded and bored. I am tired of the same old recycled TV being reprocessed and re-aired. So, sorry if I offended you people who like to watch the same show 20 different times (I am talking about anything here but you can insert The Real World if you want a specific example). Over a hundred different channels for people to watch and still nothing on TV worth watching.

Oh, and one last thing, it’s not just Americans. Every country has their fair share of dumb people. I’m sorry to just single out the good ole USofA. I know, it makes me anti-American. So does everything else despite but that is an article for another time.

A couple of weeks ago the esteemed Mr. Wallz mentioned that Radiohead was giving their next album away for free - sort of. The deal is that you can pay any amount you want for the MP3 version, from $0 on up. They are not going through iTunes or Amazon or anyone else and are selling direct from the album’s website.

I went, I bought, I listened. The verdict? Good album, incredibly terrible website. Seriously, the site looks and acts like something that crawled from the depths of 1998, escaping some doomed graphic artist’s college portfolio and wreaking havok on unsuspecting downloaders everywhere.

Here’s a screenshot of the registration screen. Too many fields, and too many required fields. Do they really need my mobile phone number?

Yes, the entire web site looks like that. It’s like someone asked their 4-year old to draw a rainbow in Microsoft Paint and then saved and re-saved it as a jpeg 100 times.

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Okay, I know I have been lazy and not writing my posts like a good girl but Shin Megami Tensai Persona 3 is the best game of my life. Ever. No better game. Well, at least I think so. Right now, so stuck on playing it nonstop that you just get quick posts of videos I found on the internet. And no dissing this guy, you can’t play the flute and you can’t beat box so you can’t make fun of him. I think he’s cool.

NOOOOOOOO!!!!!  Just watch if you haven’t seen this already.

Before we answer that question, take a look at the video below. This is Jon Stewart interviewing Chris Matthews about his new book, Life’s a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation, and Success:

This is very different from most interviews with authors touring news and talk shows in support of their new book. The most obvious difference is that Stewart has a strong opinion and actually takes Matthews to task for what in the book. Most interviews consist of fluffy questions like, “so what inspired you to write this book” followed by 60 seconds of uninterrupted marketing while the interviewer casts loving gazes the author’s way.The most shocking thing for me, though, is that Stewart has actually read Matthews’ book and come up with his own, very informed, opinion about it. It sounds disgusting, but I don’t think I’ve gotten this impressions from any “real news” shows in the past.Take a look at The Daily Show interview with Alan Greenspan:

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That’s right Radiohead are giving away their next album for free. Well not exactly Radiohead no longer are signed to a major record label and have decided to sell their new album online. You can choose to download it or purchase the more expensive boxed set. What makes the download different from other sites is that you can choose how much you want to pay for the album. So if you want to you can download the album for free.

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