You are currently browsing the Dan’s Horrendous Waste of Bandwidth weblog archives for November, 2005.
I confess, the horny geekboy in me is very excited about the upcoming Aeon Flux movie. I loved the Liquid Television shorts.
Here’s a cute little webcomic that gives the history of the Aeon Flux franchise, complete with spot-on editorialization.
CulturePulp 041: The Not-So-Secret History of ‘Aeon Flux’
Heh. Robot Chicken rules. Well… Ruled.
Brilliant piece of animation at the end of this bit, where the Napoleon Dynamite dance is recreated perfectly, using an action figure.
Napoleon Bonamite (Robot Chicken) - Google Video
It’s such a perfect moment, isn’t it? Annoyed by a reporter’s question (”You seemed a little off your game this morning. You seemed to hurry through your statement. There was a lack of enthusiasm. Was something bothering you?”), Bush called an abrupt end to the press conference and scurried for the door.
Unfortunately, the door was locked, preventing a clean exit. “I was trying to escape,” said the Leader of the Free World, “Obviously it didn’t work.”
Locked doors thwart Bush’s escape bid
Update: Just a little follow-up thought. Bush needs a “Bush is Stupid” meme right now like a (well, another, har har) hole in the head. Anybody else see shades of Dukakis in the Tank here? Anybody else hear echos of Howard Dean’s Scream?
I am the proud owner of a new Toshiba Satellite laptop. My not-that-old HP recently completed the terminal phase of a slow and intermittant death due to mainboard failure.
It’s all good–it’s small and carryable, got a widescreen and a DVD burner, it’s plenty fast, got enough RAM.
Only thing is, there’s this damn Notebook Maximizer program that sits on the desktop. No matter how many times I delete this damn thing, it appears on my desktop again at next reboot. Driving me nuts! Anybody ever seen a WinXP machine do this? Any thoughts about where I should look about this?
UPDATE: This post just came across my RSS reader and the image I meticulously inserted into it smacked me in the face. LOOK at that smug grin on that icon! Bastard’s laughing at me! “Send me to the trash will you? Ha, ha, ha! I laugh at your pitiful attempts to have an uncluttered desktop!”
UPDATE: Guess what! EXACTLY what I wanted to happen happened–somebody with an answer found this post on Google, and provided me the solution! Read the comments for deets. God Bless the Blogosphere and Thank You Becky!
Wow, now HERE’s an idea.
Getting cancelled is the best possible thing that could have happened to Arrested Development. (Or “put on hiatus” or “cut back episode order” - whatever. It’s cancelled.) No longer shackled by the whim of a fickle network, “AD” can take advantage of all the technologies now available for video delivery and make more money. The model is just waiting to happen: AD, a pioneer in its style of comedy, should pioneer this, too.
Lost Remote: Cancellation great for ‘Arrested Development’
For the last several months, keeping this blog spam-free seemed like a full-time gig. Every time I logged into the admin page, there were a dozen or thirty new spams about prescription drugs, gambling, credit reports, or methods of enhancing elements of one’s physical person. And those are the ones that made it through my keyword blacklists! Cleaning them up took detective work, and that takes time.
Enter the Wordpress plugin “Spam Karma 2“, or SK2. SK2 is a brilliant piece of software–I half expect it to become intelligent and evolve into SkyNet and start sending robots back in time to install itself on Wordpress blogs throughout the blogosphere. In the three or so days I’ve had it installed, it’s stopped every single spam comment and correctly let through every single valid comment. Okay, okay… The one single valid comment.
Even more shocking than 100% perfect performance so far is this: it claims to have caught over 800 spam comments. First of all, I’m shocked that there were that many coming here (though, I admit, I’m also a bit flattered). Second, I’m stunned that the simple keyword blacklist function in Wordpress was as effective as it was–cutting 800 in three days down to a dozen to thirty twice a week.
Third (and most importantly to anyone who reads this), I can now get rid of that obnoxious captcha on the comment form–the thing that forces you enter the scarmabled text from the generated image. SK2 will pop up a captcha for you to fill in if it has concerns about your being human, but it saves that for fallback purposes.
Captcha stands for “Completely Automated Process for Telling Computers and Humans Apart”, by the way. That’s the technical term for those scarmabled text “I’m actually a person” thingies. It’s a proper acronym, like Scuba, not an initialism like NASA or The FBI.
It’s official: television executives have no idea what’s good.
As of yesterday, Arrested Development is no more. It was the best thing that’s been on TV in a long, long time. And as with most good things on TV, it was yanked without really giving it a chance to find anything other than a cult following.
Which goes to show you: you’ll never go broke underestimating the taste of television executives. A perfect example is the sitcom Friends, which dragged along for 46 seasons, 38 of them post-shark-jump.
Fox puts abrupt stop to ‘Arrested Development’
This is a very big ad for Carleton Draft, an Aussie beer. Brilliant.
load.mov (video/quicktime Object)
This is a really excellent list of things to do when you’re bored.
Have a water drinking contest
(Amusement Potential: 5-10 minutes)
While the competition is fun, you probably won’t feel too good afterward. To give your event an old western theme, slam the cups upside down on the tables after you have emptied them.Stare at the back of someone’s head until they turn around
(Amusement Potential: 2-5 minutes)
This works on the “I have the feeling I’m being watched” principle. Conduct an experiment-does this really work?Have a “Who is less competitive” competition
wonder (Amusement Potential: 1-3 minutes)
Trying to win at this will make you lose. Trying to lose makes you win which makes you lose. Not trying at all makes you lose which makes you win which makes you lose.
Things to do when you’re bored - a bumper list of pointless timewasters
Here’s video excerpts from late lamented Monty Python alumn Graham Chapman’s 1989 funeral, including John Cleeses’ BRILLIANT euolgy.
Graham Chapman, co-author of the parrot sketch is no more. He has ceased to be. Bereft of life, he rests in peace…
Extremely clever thing! And I couldn’t possibly pick better music for it.
Turns out Jon Stewart only has one sweater.
Hey, I have clothes I wear over and over and over again. I don’t see Jon’s wife or mother giving him grief about it!
Jon Stewart Sweater Phemonemon
This came up at a party the other day. Seems a particular breed of goats has a rare combination of genetic mishaps that result in them seizing up and keeling over when startled or excited. There’s a festival for them and everything. Here’s a great video of them in action!
This may be the single best piece of evidence there is against Intelligent Design. Either that or God has a sense of humor.
For some morbid reason this is really satisfying. All sorts of wrecked and smashed up exotic cars, plus a gallery of strange wrecks like this one.
If you haven’t started reading Savage Chickens yet, start now. Each day Doug Savage draws a chicken cartoon on a post-it note and sticks it to his blog. Brilliant and strange–sort of in the Gary Larson mold, but with a smaller cast of critters. RSS feed here.