Archive for the 'Rant' Category
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Ray Thinks This is Fun (part II)
July 18
So I just get back from a weekend at my mother-in-law’s and what do I find? THIRTY-NINE calls to my server in one day for one MP3 from one MySpace site. So you know what it got replaced with. :)
Ray Thinks This is Fun
May 6
So I get up the morning to check my email and RSS feeds before my trip to the doctor and I notice something funny in my logs.
Two links from a MySpace site directly to two of the MP3s I’ve posted on this site. Hmm, how odd. Surely someone didn’t hotlink an MP3 on me! How uncouth!
Go to the site and sure enough, there’s the hotlink (had to check the source to even find it, it wasn’t very good/clean code). Not just one hotlink, but two. Both as embed tags set to autoplay. Tsk tsk.
MySpace has in their Terms and Conditions that you can’t post copyrighted material. Well, well, well. Guess what these MP3s would be considered? So now he’s breaking the T&C of MySpace and stealing my bandwidth. This has to be stopped.
Now, I’m a nice guy. Really, I am. So I messaged him (thank god he posted that on his page. MySpace doesn’t give non-subscribers any information about its subscribers), telling him that he had until 5 P.M. my time to remove the embedded links from his site. After that time, I would be contacting MySpace with all the information I had about the matter.
Well, I’m going to be going out of town this evening and there’s a chance I won’t remember to check his site again at five. So I need to do something about it, don’t I? So, I did.
The files he was linking to don’t even exist any longer (files are removed after month, as is stated on the music page. Hotlinking is still hotlinking, though.
With the help of Ray, I reuploaded the missing files. Sort of. A quick conversion of an MP3 from Landover Baptist and a quick Google search gave me two fun little MP3s weighing in at 276kb total (one’s 00:00:03 and the other is 00:00:04 in length). Now, even if I don’t remember to report him, he has to deal with superChristians and Ahnold. Fun!
Update
Thanks to a suggestion from Jeff, the MP3s have been changed. I left the Landover Baptist one, but moved it to the second position. Jeff’s suggestion autoplays on pageload.
Update #2
Well, I finally got ahold of him on AIM where he refused to take them. He thought I was being rude apparently. Anyway, I reported him to MySpace, so we’ll see if they say/do anything. Either way, he has since taken down the embedded links. So, we win!
Shop at Home
February 4
Up late watching TV for no reason other than that I haven’t bothered to go to bed yet. Flip over to the Shop at Home channel that only comes in after midnight. The guy on it is trying to see a Toshiba notebook and I start to realize why so many people are confused about technology. He’s talking about an average notebook like it’s this amazing thing. 100gb hard drive. Ooh. Wow. ATI graphics card. OMG.
The best thing, though, is when he talks about the wireless Internet. First, he thinks people should be impressed that he can open up 54 Internet Explorer windows at once. Now, I’ll grant him that it’s impressive to be able to open that many IE windows without it crashing, but he was getting at how awesome it was to have that many windows open without it slowing down the computer. What I guess he doesn’t know or doesn’t care to think about is that once a page is loaded, it’s loaded. It’s process ends. No more stress, no more memory space, nothing. Just a loaded page.
The second was two blatant lies on his part. First is that he claimed it had 55Mbps internet. 55? No, sorry, it’ll have 54, like most other wireless routers and WiFi cards. And that, my dear salesman, is nothing out of the ordinary. His second lie was that this “55Mbps” speed WiFi card was FIVE TIMES FASTER than any other wireless card. Five times? What?
It’s no wonder people get so confused when it comes to technology, especially computers. Sometimes it takes a complete moron (who is now complaining about the letterbox bars on DVD movies. I’ve heard him say that they “scrunch up the picture” which is complete bupkiss) to point out the obvious.
Represent!
December 12
The other night, Elaine and I were at a local Chinese restaurant (the best Chinese food ever!) and we were waiting on our order to come. We usually just get it to go, and Friday was no exception.
We’d been in there for a few minutes, maybe 10 or so, and we’d been hearing loud noises outside. Kids running around and yelling, just making noise. Then we see a group of kids, all black with white bandanas on their heads, standing outside of the restaurant, talking. Oh well, no big deal. I certainly don’t begrudge anyone the rights to where what they want and stand where they want.
Anyway, a few of them come inside, still loud. They walk up to the counter to order. Now, think about how you order. If you’re an intelligent, polite person, you say something like “Hi. I’d like to get X.” and the waiter/waitress says “OK” and the order goes on from there. Right? Right. Not with these kids. The short one plunks his elbows down on the counter and, still loud, says “Gimme some chicken.”
It’s a Chinese restaurant! Everything is chicken! She looks at him and says “Chicken wings?” and he nods. She tells him they don’t have them any more and he gets a bit upset. “What? No chicken wings?” After she tells him that no, we don’t have chicken wings any more again, he and his friend start to fidget around.
“Well how much is the buffet?” he asks.
Now, let me explain this place’s buffet. You get all you want to eat off of the buffet area (like always), but you also get your drink and your choices off of a couple of huge dessert areas. Ice cream, cakes, cookies, fruit. All sorts of stuff. And it’s for a good price, too. $4.95 at lunch, $6.95 at dinner. For my money, it can’t be beat.
Apparently short gangstas don’t carry $7 with them.
“$6.95? Fuck. I only got $5. $7? Man. You must be outta yo’ fuckin’ mind.” And they walk out, the whole time talking about how “fucked up” it is that a buffet costs $7.
Now, the whole point of this isn’t to give some racist tirade. Or complain about how money-tight people are. I don’t care. I don’t see colors of skin, I don’t see quality of clothes. I try and accept every person to the same level and treat everyone the same way.
But when you come into a restaurant, cursing loudly and berating them for the prices they charge, you need to wake up.
I hear people bitch all the time about being treated differently. “We’re just misunderstood. Always trying to get a brother down.” Usually this comes after someone gets a cold shoulder ’cause they acted like an ass to someone else.
And, believe it or not, I’ve heard black people say that their tough-guy attitude and all the street slang and cursing is just “keeping it real” and a tie to their roots. The way I look at it, in this country at least, their roots were in slavery where they weren’t educated and they weren’t expected to have quality manners. I think you’ve got that one down. It’s time to move on, now.
It’s all very simple. No matter what nationality/race you are, if you want to be treated with respect and friendliness, you have to act that way. I’d be given a cold shoulder if I went in somewhere and started cussing and yelling about prices. Anyone would be.
Just grow up.
Bum Rush Explained
October 28
Alright, I know I’ve been very lax in explaning what Bum Rush was about. Part of that is that I wanted to get examples for you, but as I can’t seem to find any, I’ll just have to make due without.
As many of you know, we work for a newspaper company. It’s owned by a man and his wife, but she (I’ll call her She Boss) has said several times that she’s not a boss/the boss/our boss, and she’s repeatedly brought up the fact that she’s not a designer. She’s an accountant, actually.
Yet, on many, many occasions, she finds it necessary to come and tell us how such-and-such ad looks like two ads and needs to be redone this way, so that it’ll look so much better; or that this ad is the completely wrong color! Can’t we make it purple? Or yellow? Or maybe a nice pink? Just something that’ll make it appealing to men.
Please.
We’ve both graduated from college with degrees in design. We read all manner of design information (books, web sites, etc…). We practice our craft day-in and day-out. The last thing we need is an accountant telling us how to design.
Now, don’t read me wrong, here. I’m not saying that non-designers should never give design advice. By all means, if you’re paying me to make something for you and you don’t like the way I’ve taken it, correct me. Point me to the right path. But don’t tell me in a condecending, “I know design better than you ’cause I’ve taken a seminar on basic color theory” way.
Bum Rush
October 25
If you’re going to interfere in my work (or my wife’s), the end result needs to be better than what was there before. And if you aren’t a professional designer, don’t give me design advice or rework my designs. It’ll get you a swift kick to the throat, yo. (And by “my,” I mean “our”).