At some point in time last summer, maybe early last fall, someone from Flickr sent me a message, asking to use one of my milkweed bug photos for a book. The name of the publisher was vaguely familiar, so I googled it, and they publish educational nonfiction books (not text books), primarily aimed toward kids K-12, especially “reluctant readers”, which they then sell to schools and libraries. The woman had told me they don’t pay much for a single photo (and this is a single book specifically about milkweed bugs, which are often used in science classes to teach kids about incomplete metamorphosis), but since I release my photos under CC anyway, it’s not like I actually care, and even though this is a for-profit use, it’s educational in nature, and I always say yes to those requests. Someone who wanted to use a photo of mine for an ad campaign to sell a product would be refused (I have had one used to advertise a nature centre, and that was fine with me), but I’m all for anything that fosters kids’ interest in nature, so I told her to go ahead and use it, and I didn’t care about any money. She thanked me, and said that if I wanted a copy of the book, she’d be happy to send one to me. My mother would get a kick out of that (and annoy her friends with it), so I said, “Sure–that would be lovely!” Then, I got busy and never got around to sending her my physical address, and by the time I remembered, I thought it would be too late, so I didn’t bother about it. Today, I got an email from the same woman; she said she has my copy ready if I still want it, but didn’t know where to send it. Awwww! How sweet of her! I hadn’t given it another thought since I decided it was too late to give her my address, but she not only didn’t forget, she took the time to ask again. I may think most people suck, but I guess there are still a few good ones. 🙂

“Rampage!” (featuring Road, Weather and Tornado “Rampages!” and yes, those are sarcastic quotes), Wreckreation Nation (I am not making that name up), Destroyed In Seconds and the whole slew of crap reality shows, the newest of which I believe is called Cougar, and features an “older woman”; the attentions of whom are sought my a number of young men (only one of whom can win!) Same shit as the rest of them, but a woman this time. Can’t wait for the new shows next fall; I won’t be in the least surprised to find that Ow! My Balls is among them. WTF is wrong with people? Used to be that if you wanted to see accidents or disasters, you trawled the soft white underbelly of the Internet at Ogrish or Rotten.com. If you wanted the gossip about who was fucking whom behind whose back, you…well, you could always go to church. Now, it seems like the worst of every aspect of life eventually ends up on TV. I think I’m both sad and disgusted. Mostly disgusted. Jesus.

I don’t think it’s any secret that I hate advertising. I block nearly all of them with AdBlock+ and NoScript (whitelisting few sites, temporarily allowing only scripts critical to viewing content I want), and if the occasional animated GIF slips through on some random site that I rarely visit, then I’ll just “quick-nuke” it with Remove This Object. If I’ll be back to the site, then I use a custom Adblock filter or Yarip to remove it for good. If it’s just a static banner and it’s not huge or on a site I visit often, I can ignore it. I was reading an article today about a site asking for votes from its users as to whether it should start using IntelliTXT ads, and I had no idea what that might be, so I went to the suggested page to find out, temporarily allowed scripts, and…nothing. Fired up Epiphany (deliberately does not have ads blocked in any way, just in case I need it that way for something), went to the page again, and…holy sweet fuck, Batman! Nice to know what I’m missing, and to whatever method I’m currently using that manages to block this shite, I love you. Keywords in the text are displayed in a different colour with a double underlined link (gosh, that’s not distracting!), and if you mouseover the text–not only click, just mouseover–it pops up a relevant (or questionably relevant) advertisement, and as I understand it, they stay until they’re manually closed. Some even have sound and video (!!!), and any will interrupt scrolling whilst they load. Oh HELL, no! WTF? Didn’t advertisers learn their lesson when browsers started coming with pop-up blockers that were turned on by default because even computer illiterates hated pop-ups? This is just…”pop-ups 2.0″ and visitors aren’t going to like IntelliTXT any more than they did pop-ups.

Interesting! I’d originally named the image “intellitxt-ad.png”, but WP wouldn’t let me put it in until I renamed it. I wonder whether that was because of “ad” or “intellitxt”, or both? Anyway, good on WP. 🙂

I didn’t see these AT&T ads because not only did I not live here in 1993, but I didn’t have cable, and indeed, my TV wasn’t plugged in for a couple of years (unplugged it to move it once, forgot to plug it back in and just never bothered after that because I didn’t care), but they’re pretty cool, and considering that was 16 years ago, also fairly accurate. Granted, I don’t have voice-activated keyless entry for my front door, but the technology does exist to make that possible, and I do have keyless entry for the car. There’s no such thing as a phone booth anymore, but Skype and a laptop work pretty much the same if you want to tuck the kids in but you can’t be there to do it in person. You don’t swipe a card to pay tolls with EZ-Pass (or similar services), but it’s essentially the same thing, and although the fax is pretty much dead technology, I could certainly write a note, save it as an image or a PDF and email it to someone so he or she could experience the joy that is “reading my handwriting”. We generally don’t read scans of books on huge screens, but that’s because we have it even better with digital copies that we can read on computers, ebook readers like Kindle, or even on our phones (props to Project Gutenberg for making available so many classics!) Anyway, much as I hate commercials, this montage is pretty accurate, considering that much of the tech they’re describing either didn’t exist at all or was in its infancy back then. It did take me a minute or so to realise that’s Tom Selleck doing the voiceover.

Shame that it’s AT&T, though, and the person who wrote this was dead-on accurate:

• Have you ever wanted to open your phone bill and find out your long-distance company has changed without your permission?
• Have you ever wanted a telephone billing plan so complicated even Stephen Hawking couldn’t explain it to you?
• Have you ever dreamed what it would be like to be billed for phone calls you’ve never made?
• Have you ever said to yourself, “I’m sorry the Bell System monopoly was broken up. It would be better if we had one monolithic phone company like we had in the 1980s?
• Have you ever wanted to be forced to deal with a second rate, overpriced communications provider in order to be able to use the most innovative and popular domestic communications device?
• Have you ever had your local phone company gobbled up by a multinational corporation who then jacks up your rates and offers inferior customer service?
• Have you ever had all your personal private Internet data archived by the government secretly and illegally?
• Have you ever had your phones tapped and recorded in violation of the Constitution?
• Have you ever had a company operate above the law and then get politicians to retroactively give immunity for their illegal, and unethical activities?

You will, and the company that will bring it to you is AT&T.

We haven’t had a phone company as such for several years, but at one time we did have AT&T (whatever incarnation it took back then), and I can personally attest to the fact that the bill was indecipherable, and that we did get billed for services we’d never used and calls we didn’t make, and that trying to get a live person for anything other than sales was an exercise in frustration (and ultimately, in futility, since I often gave up). Never mind the pain in the arse of having to choose a company to provide local service, then choose another to provide long-distance service. That’s part of the reason we switched to Charter Telephone almost the instant the service became available here. I wouldn’t have AT&T now were it not for in-network calls to P. (their company switched from Verizon to AT&T last year), the iPhone (well, “the iPhone…legally”) and the fact that when it comes to the big wireless companies, none of them is really good and they’ll all arse-rape you about the same (“Verizon math”, anyone?) and also that the only ones with decent service here are AT&T and Verizon (Sprint isn’t bad, but they’re often initially left out of cool new third-party apps because the bigger companies get supported first).

I had to “liberate” this clip from LiveLeak because it was just made of awesome. The soldiers are Canadian; in Brussels for a service to commemorate the D-day landings in 1944. The little boy is Belgian, and is dressed in a replica of a Canadian Highlanders uniform (don’t know which regiment). He’s waiting for them beside the road, and you can see at the beginning of the video that the li’l dude is practising his salute on a few people ahead of the soldiers. I don’t know the soldier who issued the “eyes right” command, or even know his name, but that man’s got some serious class. “Eyes right” (or left) is usually used during parades or in-pass reviews as a display of respect for visiting dignitaries or high-ranking officers. The soldier on the front right doesn’t do it because he’s not supposed to; he is the marker, so he keeps looking forward to make sure everyone else stays on course.

Damn the person who added the national anthem to this awesome little clip and made me get all choked up. 😛

Telenor said it saw “no legal basis” for the demand for ISPs to control or assess the content that users download.

“At the same time, Telenor does not condone pirating of material and illegal file sharing,” Telenor said in the statement.

“We comply with all relevant laws and regulations and can see no legal basis for any ISP to act in the interests of digital intellectual property rights holders by blocking individual websites,” Ragnar Kaarhus, head of Telenor Norway, said in the statement.

In February, a Danish court ordered Telenor’s Denmark-based ISP Tele2 to shut its customers’ access to Pirate Bay.

Lawyers for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the Norwegian videogram association Norsk Videogramforening and the Norwegian Film Distributors Association have demanded Telenor block access in Norway, Telenor said.

I was rather disappointed when Denmark caved, but glad Norway didn’t (or at least hasn’t yet). Sweden…well, we’re all watching! I don’t really care so much about the “practical aspects” of having access blocked–for every security measure imposed, there’s someone clever enough to find a way around it–but I do care about an Internet for adults that has the equivalent of a court-imposed Net Nanny. It’s very much a slippery slope argument. First, it’s the torrents and the CP, then it’s the hardcore porn, then it’s sites the government considers “subversive”, and eventually, we have the equivalent of cable TV–you see what they tell you to see. They’re already doing filtering trials with a few small ISPs in Australia, and if that works, and Australia gets away with it…

Since it’s a slang word, there really isn’t an “official” definition of a guido. Generally, though, they’re young men from New Jersey or New York who either have or claim to have an Italian background, and behave in a manner that they believe is suave, sophisticated and quintessentially “Italian”. The problem is that their version of “Italian” and a real Italian are practically nothing alike. These boys frost and spike their hair, turn themselves impossible shades of orange with spray-on tans, wear “wannabe” clothes from mall stores and too much cologne, drive BMWs owned by daddy (with the techno music cranked up loud), work out at the gym to look healthy, then turn around and drink like fish when they go clubbing to chase women (sometimes even their female counterparts, “guidettes”) every time they get a chance. Their MySpace pages are full of “party photos” and heavily decorated with the colours of the Italian flag. They’re generally…douches with daddy’s money, bad hair, orange skin, heavy (and deliberately so) Jersey or Noo Yawk accents, and photos of them are often seen on Hot Chicks With Douchebags. Guidos are much like wiggers, I suppose, except they’re trying (and failing) to be Italian, not African-American.

I’d thought this was exclusively an American phenomenon, but I was wrong. These boys are apparently from somewhere around Stockholm, which I guess makes them…wait for it…Swedos! 😛 I can only hope they’re not claiming Italian heritige; while the US Northeast did draw many Italian immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th century, and there does remain a Little Italy in New York to this day, to the best of my knowledge, Stockholm was not a popular destination for Italians seeking a new life a hundred or so years ago. Chances are pretty good that these boys could claim Viking ancestors, but The Family…no. They do have the same remarkable shade of orange skin, though!

I often wonder what these kids are going to think when they grow up. Sure, we all did stupid stuff at their age–I used to take my fashion cues from hair metal bands, facrissake–but when we did it, the evidence was confined to a few embarrassing prints in a photo album. These kids’ “idiot evidence” is all over the Internet, and at least hundreds of thousands of people (like me, for instance) have saved copies. When they outgrow being wiggers, guidos, “party girls” and all the stupid things that go with being their age, those photos will still exist somewhere, just waiting to come back and bite them in the arse. From the perspective of one who remembers well being that age, I’m enormously grateful that nearly no photos of me back then remain (few ever existed in the first place), but these kids won’t have the luxury of being able to forget. Interesting.

I don’t mind mobile Safari much; I’d like a button to stop a page loading (like if I’ve fat-fingered a link and end up loading slow-ass Flickr or something), and I don’t like not being able to delete/re-order *all* of the bookmarks and folders, but overall, it’s okay. What I don’t like is that when it starts, it reloads the last page I was on when I closed it (and it’s often some huge thing with a bunch of graphics that takes ages on Edge), and doesn’t let me set a default page to display on start. I have Google as my default search engine, but I hate that stupid little little field on the right of the address bar. It’s one of the first things I take off when I install FF. I almost never type in a URL; just give me Google, I’ll type something like what I want and make their servers take me where I want to go. I did not, however, figure out until just now (hours after I should have been asleep) that all I had to do was add teh Goog to the home screen, then take the Safari icon off the dock-thing and put the Google one on. Duh! Now, I get my browser the way it’s been since…oh, I think 1999, maybe even ’98. I still don’t love Safari, but with ads blocked and Google when I start it, I’m happy enough to go to sleep now. 🙂

This is part of a screencap taken from some local news site. An unfortunate side effect of computer technology is that now any dumbass can tap out a bunch of words on a keyboard, run it through spellcheck and think it’s good. An editor–a real, live professional editor–would have picked up on the word “propel” in this article because…it’s wrong. Propel does mean “to move forward”, but generally in a physical sense. Your friend might give you a push to propel you forward when you’re too shy to go talk to that good looking guy over by the bar. A speedboat’s motor propels it. There’s a reason the spinning thing on the front of a light plane is called a “prop”…it’s short for propeller. Stretched to its limit, I suppose that propel could be used in the sense it is here, but the word the writer actually meant was not propel; it was compel. That means to force, coerce or necessitate…figurative movement, not literal. An alcoholic who stops at a bar for lunch might be compelled (by his addiction) to order a drink as well. I was compelled to enter into a two-year contract with AT&T in order to get my iPhone (or at least to get it for less than $700). Anyone stupid enough to tattoo the sclera of his or her eye is obviously compelled to do so by a very special brand of crazy.

Is everyone in Finland slightly loony? I found this on a Finnish site along with some animation about fungus that featured singing cartoon worms on an alien planet, and the music for this one (I believe the genre is called “symphonic metal”) is Nightwish, “Ghost Love Score.” I am not entirely sure in which sense they’re using “score”. Nightwish is also Finnish. I know that Finns are noted for being a little strange (certainly applies to the few I’ve met online)…does the climate up there do something to people?

EDIT: Grrrr…no matter how many times I tell it not to autoplay, it refuses to accept that option. Can’t put it in the Flash player because it’s Shockwave. Fuck Shockwave…I’ll make it a link! 😀