Unsought Input

Okay, not the death, but still a fierce battle between the forces of good and evil.

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Here is a cute little animation about an alien.  My addition to the study of UFOlogy, if you will, even though I didn’t make the video, only found it on youtube.

I found this tidbit of internet the other day and I just felt the need to share with everyone. This site looks nice and professional.  In fact they even dare to let their motto be “make an educated decision” while they write articles telling us about five “Weird Careers in the Unknown” which include careers in “Cryptozoology, Ufologist, Parapsychologist, Paranormal Investigator and Conlinguist (unfortunately neither Wikipedia nor Google knows what conlinguism is so I had to direct you to that site, Google suggested I had misspelled cunnilinguist). This site, a college career advice site, feels that it’s okay to tell people who are looking for a new career in these troubling times that becoming a cryptozoologist is an awesome and exciting new career choice. In fact, here is a paragraph from the introduction of this article to explain:

These career paths are not for the faint-hearted. Any of these will almost certainly mean danger, spooky experiences, scanty paychecks, and/or ridicule from the mainstream public. If you think you have what it takes to be the next Fox Mulder, check out the following careers.

Scanty paychecks and/or ridicule? Sign me up right now! And, seriously, the next F0x Mulder? Did no one tell this guy that Fox Mulder was an imaginary character on a Science Fiction TV program and never really existed? What kind of career path is this? How many Paranormal Investigators have to have second jobs to pay the rent? How many Conlinguists (which if you didn’t figure it out yet, these people’s jobs are to create, write and speak fake languages from fictional characters from movies, books and tv shows) need to work at McDonalds just to eat? I think it’s time to scrutinize each section of this guy’s article and then add one more “exciting and fictitious” career to his already lacking list. (more…)

This is a cute little animation about two gentlemen fighting for the hand of a fair(ly well endowed) maiden.  Don’t let me ruin it for you by telling you there is a little twist.  Please enjoy!

You know you want to just laugh or cry with these. For those of you who are internet ignorant of what cosplay is, basically people dress up as cartoon or video game characters (the key to this is that most of the characters who are cosplayed are animated) and walk around anime conventions or sometimes at Halloween as well. Basically one would expect to see this during Halloween but cosplayers take it one step further and dress like this for events and conventions all year long. It’s really a strange hobby and most people who do this spend a lot of time and effort to make their costumes better than anyone else as to always be “pwning n00bs”. I am planning to go undercover one of these days to a convention of supreme nerdlyness so I can get some insider pictures and also really cheap comics and candy. Here are some pictures I didn’t take.

I am sure most people will recognize this famous trio, Mario, his brother Luigi and Princess Peach. This one in my opinion is not so bad. This will be the highlight of our trip through cosplay and for that I apologize. (more…)

I recently stumbled on this site that tells you the average pay rates for jobs depending on where you live. Useful, right? Unfortunately for those who are taking the internet seriously, this site has been rendered useless. You might be asking your self how this is possible, the internet is infallible. I know, it’s a shock to us all. Let me just give you some average job salaries.

customer service in Ohio

$31,000

pizza delivery professional in Ohio

$33,000

pizza boy in Ohio

$86,000

First off, I don’t know anyone working at the local big box retail store that makes 31,000 a year. And second, let’s look the difference in title. Obviously that means a lot to your employers. I mean, if you are a pizza delivery professional you only make 33,000 a year but if you just shorten it to pizza boy you make more than twice that much. It must be sex appeal. You definitely sound sexier as a pizza boy.

Let’s keep going:

dracula in Ohio

$84,000

frankenstein in Ohio

$97,000 (more…)

Some quick links for you.

The Pinky Show. Cats talking politics. Cats making sense of politics. They are so cute it hurts.

Sugar cubes used to be the “in thing”. Now it’s honey cubes.

Geek Apparel. Check it out.

Monk caught being human, looking at porn.

Guy wins jackpot at casino, employee unplugs machine just in time to save company 5.5 mil

Peep research underway. 

Here are three episodes of David Blaine. Enjoy.

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Recently I received the worst job inquiry I have ever seen. I’ve had my resume floating around on job sites like Dice and Monster.com since the last time I was actively looking, more than three years ago, so I periodically get emails from keyword-searching recruiters. But nothing like this. This is a masterpiece:

HI, GREETINGS!!! WE ARE LOOKING FOR UI DEVELOPER SPECIALIST WITH BELOW SKILLS TITLE: UI DEVELOPER SPECIALIST Ø LOCATION: CULVER CITY, CA Ø TAX TERM: CON_CORP CON_IND CON_W2 Ø PAY RATE: ALL INCL Ø LENGTH: 12 MONTHS SKILLS: AJAX CSS PHOTOSHOP JSP HTML JOB DESCRIPTION: A MINIMUM OF 5 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE WORKING IN A TEAM ON A COMPLEX-PHASED NEW TECHNOLOGY MEDIUM SIZED WEB PROJECTS UNDERSTAND SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGY (PREFERABLY RUP) ABILITY/DESIRE TO UNDERSTAND BUSINESS PROBLEM THAT THE APPLICATION IS TRYING TO FIX/SOLVE RESPONSIBLE FOR DEVELOPING THE USER INTERFACE FOR A COMPLEX WEB APPLICATION WITH A LOT OF DATA ENTRY SCREENS, WORKFLOWS, VIEWS AND REPORTS EXPERIENCE USING TOOLS SUCH AS PHOTOSHOP OR ILLUSTRATOR TO PRESENT DESIGN COMPS, UI OPTIONS PARTICIPATED ON PROJECT WITH EXTENSIVE UI REVIEW PROCESSES AND CHANGES CAN PRESENT AND IDENTIFY USABILITY CHALLENGES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR IMPROVEMENT. CAN DESIGN PAGES WITH USABILITY IN MIND EXPERIENCE USING TECHNOLOGIES SUCH AS HTML, CSS, JAVASCRIPT AND XML EXPERIENCE WITH BLEEDING EDGE TECHNOLOGIES SUCH AS AJAX AND FLEX (ACTION SCRIPT) EXPERIENCE WORKING ON SITES THAT HAVE A JAVA BACK-END; WORKING KNOWLEDGE OF JSP EXPERIENCE WORKING ON PORTAL BASED SITES (NICE TO HAVE) EXPERIENCE ON PROJECTS WHERE SLICK UI**S AND HIGH PERFORMANCE PAGES ARE A KEY CAN UNDERSTAND AND EXPLAIN CROSS BROWSER CHALLENGES, PERFORMANCE CHALLENGES BASED ON UI DECISIONS ETC. MUST BE ABLE TO PROVIDE EXAMPLES DELIVERABLES WILL INCLUDE: LOW-TECH MOCKUPS USING PHOTOSHOP, ILLUSTRATOR, EXCEL OR VISIO HTML PROTOTYPES WITH FUNCTIONING JAVASCRIPT AND DATA INTERACTIONS FLEX APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT TO SUPPORT THE BACK-END DEVELOPMENT TEAM JSP DEVELOPMENT TO SUPPORT THE BACK-END DEVELOPMENT TEAM .PLEASE RESPONDS WITH YOUR UPDATED RESUME AND THE FOLLOWING DETAILS RATE EXPECTATIONS | IMMIGRATION | AVAILABILITY | CURRENT LOCATION| CONTACT NUMBER ——————————————————————————– WARM REGARDS, JOHN ADAMS | SIERRA INFOSYS | [ed: removed] PHONE: [ed: removed] (OR) [ed: removed] | [ed: removed] ——————————————————————————–
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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.

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.