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What happens when you click on this link and then mouse over the guy's picture? Something like what's shown below:
In fact, there's a whole company full of people with pages like this. Here's their staff directory. Oh, and don't forget winky.
Just thought I'd take a few moments to review three products that have helped me get through the cold cold Pittsburgh winter.
Rain-x Windshield schmutz happens, especially in winter. The question is, what are you going to do about it? Earlier this month, an article on Cool Tools revealed that there's windshield washer fluid with Rain-X in it available. At Target, I bought a bottle of a knock-off product (I think was called something like Rain removerX) for $1.99, and it works great. This washer fluid makes dirt and water fly off the windshield rather than sticking. Now I don't have to try to see through the layer of dark grey slurry that's all over the rest of my car.
Eucerin creme I can't tell you whether it's the dry weather or a curse placed on me by one of my many enemies, but my hands look like a mummy's these days. However, nothing works better than Eucerin for fighting off the effects for a bit. Don't get the lotion (which isn't anything special), get the creme. You might wonder why you're paying twice as much for something with the consistency of paste, but after you try it, you'll know.
Bombay Sapphire Gin If you're going to self-medicate through the depths of the mid-winter SAD, you might as well medicate in style. And what's better-tasting than Bombay Sapphire? Well, Grey Goose Vodka, actually, but until I'm out of grad school, I'll be sticking with the (marginally) cheaper Sapphire.
To the six people in Pittsburgh who shovel the sidewalk in front of their houses: Thank you! To everyone else: feh.
The deadline for submitting a paper to Sigcomm, the premiere computer networking conference, is coming up in a couple weeks. Working on research for Sigcomm is a lot like having a bad cold: I don't have much fun, I stay in a lot, and I feel vaguely disoriented. Which reminds me that I once tried to create a mixed drink called a "bad cold." It was not a success.
Sigh. Well, the comment spam has been arriving at the rate of 30 or so per day. Thanks to MT-Blacklist, the spam gets sent to my inbox instead of being put up on the blog. Is that an improvement? Possibly, but it's certainly damn annoying to me. This morning I installed Conversation Killer, which disables comments on old blog entries. That should help enormously.
Links are the coin of the realm on the Internet today, since they drive search engines and the search engines drive traffic. It's no wonder people try to add links wherever they can. Today, the spammers are so inept that we can do basic pattern matching to filter them out. Within a year or two, I'm sure the spammers will base their fake blog posts on text from the blog itself (or a google search on terms from the blog post), making it nearly impossible to automatically identify the spam. This is why comment spam is much harder to fight than email spam.
What are we to do? People talk about using captchas and the like to automatically tell real people from fake people. I'm not a big believer. We could only allow authorized users to comment, but that would take away a good amount of the fun of blogging. No, I think the best solution is what usenet did. Remember usenet? It was all the rage in the 90's, and then it became one huge spam-and-troll party. The solution? Most people gave up on usenet and moved to the web and blogs. Because spammers lag behind the early adopters by a good 2-3 years, changing systems works better than anything else. So, blogs are about to be over. What's next?
We learn important lessons from TV. The A Team taught me that blowing up the bad guys is an important conflict resolution strategy. The Incredible Hulk taught me that hiding my emotions is a key part of adulthood. Is it any wonder that now I can only watch kids shows, preferably in a different language? Thus, I give you my latest fav, Domo-kun (here and here too). What can I say about Domo? He's square and brown (sort of a subterranean Spongebob) and sweaty.
It seems like the New York Times is doing interstitial ads more often these days. If you want to avoid the flash-based monstrosity of the ad without watching it all the way through, just hit reload and you'll get the article right away.
Movable Type has announced a document all about fighting spam on blogs. They're chasing their customers away, and it's just dumb.
They're writing a whole long guide about installing this plugin and that plugin and whatever. Don't tell me to go install a plugin, ship your damn software in the recommended configuration. MT has lost touch with how real people use their software. That's made more clear every time I have to go clear out comment spam. MT's crap comment interface makes removing the comment and then banning the IP a multi-step process. Does anyone at MT admin their own blog?
But anyway, MT has learned at least one lesson: they've turned off trackbacks on their announcements blog. So no more embarassing trackbacks from dissatisfied customers like me. Way to go, MT! Why solve the problem when you can hide it?