greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

  • Vacation Time Is Over

    I didn’t set out to spend a week avoiding my writing duties. Truly I didn’t. Time and events just ran away with me, and I wasn’t really in a headspace conducive to cranking out the kind of clever, witty, entertaining verbage that you’ve all come to expect from your favorite hue-impaired waterfowl.

    Of course, this means I have a lot of tidbits to share with you. Take the following, for instance. (Please.)

    Conversation with treeloverkath at 2006-02-02 09:58:10 on thelittlegreyduck (yahoo)
    (09:58:10) treeloverkath: Hey there, I was just on yahoo , i noticed your profile, anyways, you seem interesting. 😛
    (09:58:21) thelittlegreyduck: I have a profile on Yahoo?
    (09:58:26) treeloverkath: here use this link:www.pure-match.comvu/members/missy_kitty/
    (09:58:34) treeloverkath: oopps, I meant to write “.com”, hehe.. search for “missy_kitty”. anyways, my friend is here, i gotta run, tty soon.
    (09:58:38) thelittlegreyduck: *snort*
    (09:58:52) treeloverkath: do you wanna check out my profile and pictures..?
    (09:59:19) thelittlegreyduck: No, I want not to be spammed randomly.

    Social engineering spam at its finest. And by “finest” I mean “most annoying and yet rather sneaky.” Note the supposed typo, a trick I suspect is meant to get around certain IM spam blocking plugins by deliberately not matching the website address. Then, of course, I’m supposed to manually type in the “correct” address.

    As the kids like to say, “Puh-leeeze.”

    Life in meatspace comes with its own sources of amusement, such as the following tidbit of vitally useful information I heard on the bus the other day:

    Everything you could want to know on the Internet is on the Internet.

    You don’t say!

    I’ll leave you (for now) with a random thought that popped into my head the last time I was traveling northward: When you’re on the train, you only see the railroad crossings with their barriers lowered, but this is not their normal state. In what way is the journey you’re on affecting your perspective?

    (Yeah. Pretty damned deep for a Friday afternoon. I amaze me, sometimes.)

  • Quoth the webmaster, “Nevermore.”

    Post tagged:

    Today we mark the end of an era. That would be the “Monaural Jerk Era,” the peak of which saw five websites I manage (or have helped manage) running that particular content-management system. Ashalen left the platform long ago. I moved to WordPress at the beginning of the year, then I migrated Wendi’s site. I turned The Lab into a wiki from a blog, and now Lil’s blog has joined me in WordPress bliss. (Mari runs WordPress as well, but she converted from Movable Type instead; Kylanath remains a big fan of MT, which I don’t begrudge her one bit. Whatever makes you happy, hon’!)

    Getting “Note of the Day” truly blissful, however, took a fair number of hours and no few headaches. The only good-looking purple-schemed template I could find was a conversion to WordPress of a theme from an entirely different platform, and whoever did the conversion gave me some of the sloppiest website code I’ve ever seen. Glaring errors, screwed up line encodings and horrific indentation cost me at least an hour all on their own, nevermind the actual design challenges I faced in making the thing work the way I wanted it to.

    And then I loaded the site in Internet Explorer only to run smack-dab into the so-called “float drop” problem, the details of which I won’t bore you with, but I can tell you that I fixed it by editing one particular entry that included a bunch of fixed-width tables.

    Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get away from my computer for a while and put some food in me. Spending all afternoon coding (and fending off whiny salespeople) on an empty stomach is not my preferred mode of operation…

  • What’s In A (Company) Name, Anyway?

    It’s been the kind of workday in which it takes me until three hours later than usual to check my security logs. Among the constant attempts to hack into my Linux-based webservers, this line struck me as terribly amusing:

    unknown (ip-68-178-170-212.ip.secureserver.net): 1 Time(s)

    You know… maybe a business inclined to register the domain “secureserver.net” should also be inclined to keep a closer eye on, you know, the security of their servers. I’m just sayin’.

  • Spud’s PE Theories

    My son sent me the following in an email a few days ago, and I asked his permission to post it here for your entertainment. Enjoy, won’t you?

    I was bored in PE this morning, as usual, because they had us playing basketball. I hate basketball. It’s the worst sport. Then I thought, why? Why is it the worst school sport? I came up with a couple theories.

    Property of Popularity

    In middle school there are the popular kids and the unpopular kids. There are plenty of popular kids.

    There are also quite a few basketball hoops in our gym, and about as many tens of basketball players. Of course, this is common for any selection of schools. But anyway, I wondered one morning if there was a connection. What made students popular? What you looked like? What friends you had? How much profanity you can utter in a single sentence? These are merely subfactors.

    The true determining measure of popularity in my school is basketball skill. If a person plays basketball very well, or at least a lot, then that person is seen as a very athletic person who takes interest into a very popular thing.

    With this new theory, we can safely assume that

    Popularity = Basketball Skill(appearance + relationships + vocabulary)

    Basketball Is A Team Sport No Longer

    As the property above suggests, basketball has become a contest for individual popularity. The popular kids have to outplay the unpopular kids. Therefore, the unpopular kids, such as myself, never get the ball.

    A popular kid with the basketball will pass to another popular kid, but this merely adds to the relationships variable in the Theory of Popularity. And they will hardly add any other signs of cooperation at all. Teamwork is invalid. Seriously athletic kids in middle school are, with little variation, people who only care about their own popularity.

    Theory of Gym Relativity

    The unpopular kids probably find that the popular kids don’t notice them in a game. At all. A player could be WIDE open, and the popular player will go on without a clue. This may trigger thoughts like, “What am I, invisible?!”

    Maybe that’s the case, to a degree.

    If you aren’t in possession of anything important (like, for instance, a basketball), there’s no worth in making interaction. Especially if you are standing still. Then you are the closest thing to invisible.

    This even works in dodgeball. If you stand perfectly still next to a wall, and you don’t have a ball, popular kids won’t take notice of you. This is because, in relativity to them, you are worthless and therefore nonexistent. There aren’t many variables to this. I’ve tried it and it works.

    ~Spud

    Come to think on it, I don’t miss middle school. Not one bit…

  • Pruned: Helltown USA

    I quote from the entry titled Helltown USA at a blog named Pruned…

    Since the summer of 1962, a fire, fueled by rich anthracite coal deposits, has been burning beneath the mining town of Centralia, Pennsylvania.

    Nonstop.

    File this under, “Why have I not heard about something this incredibly freaky before now?” Check out the pictures. They’re both freakish and fascinating.

  • Musical Monday Madness

    I love my iRiver T30 portable player. It holds 512 megabytes’ worth of my favorite music, and does a reasonable job of randomly stringing songs together. (Mind you, I made a point of renaming the 60 files that I’ve loaded so far in such a way as to ungroup the songs by a particular artist. This helps a lot, I suspect.) This morning, however, it seems to have taken my current state of mind strongly into account. Sure, the morning commute started on a bright, perky note with Oranges and Lemons’ “Soramimi Cake” followed by The Space Brothers’ “I Still Love You,” but after that things took a turn for the moody.
    (more…)

Calendar

May 2026
S M T W T F S
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31  

My Links