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you’ve been sacked


Hey hey Tuesday night. Glad you could join me again today for another installment her at sounds familiar. I seem to be on a roll as far as the posting-regularity goes this month, so here’s hoping I didn’t just jinx it by saying as much. Should be a chuckle of a blog today, if I did my job right. So let’s get right down to it then, shall we?

OK, before I do this next bit, I’m going to ask, dear readers, that you either cast your memory back a couple days, or go quickly read this post from Thursday last week.

Done reading and/or refreshing your memory? OK, good.

Now, if you weren’t lying when you responded in the affirmative to that last sentence, you’ll remember that, when I was sharing the “hotlink prevention” story with Ben, he suggested that I take screen-captures of all my “victims.” Well, bored the other night, I started paging through my referrer logs and doing just that. Turns out, it was a great time looking at all the surprised people out there who’d previously been “borrowing” bandwidth from my site when their intended image got “sacked” with my new script. I had such a good time, in fact, that I wanted to share with you some the various places my new “hotlink stopper” image is showing up in cyberspace.

For your convenience, I’ve pixelized the NSFW image in the screencaps below, but you can always take a peek at the real-deal right here if you’ve forgotten the hilarity/horror of it all.

Let’s start off with a relatively low-impact MySpace profile picture. Looks like “mumu” might want to update his-or-her profile…

A lot of people seem to link my pictures in forums, here are some examples. (That last guy was attempting to link to a picture of a middle-finger-salute from my site. Funny enough, I think the same sentiment is conveyed even with the image-swap):

 

 

 

A tad more embarrassing, some people even used hotlinked images from my server for their forum avatars. Sorry Soda Popinski:

Looks like that hotlink-replacement image transcends the barriers of language as well! Here are some Spanish and what I think might be Finnish forums where I got the drop on unsuspecting hotlinkers. (I especially like the English reply in the Finnish thread, “Mmmmm.. sexy….” Anyone read Spanish?):

 

Switching gears, a lot of MP3-blogs hotlink to my Question Mark & The Mysterians album covers to accompany their posts about the band’s classic 1960s output. Funny, I didn’t realize genitals were featured this prominently on a rock album cover before Lennon did it:

 

Sadly, most of the threads that get “sacked” with the image-swap are long-dead, and thus aren’t impacted much by the hotlink-hijinks. I saved the funniest bunch of screencaps for last, however. These are the ones where the “sacked” thread is still “alive” enough that people notice the image-swap. I love the response in the below thread:

My absolute favorite of them all, though, has got to be this very-much-alive thread over at the “306 GTi-6 & RALLYE Owners Club” forums, where the poster is off-topic and asking anyone if they’ve ever had their back waxed (the original hotlink was referencing the picture of an extremely hairy back which accompanies this post). As a bonus for this one, you can click that link above you here to read the actual thread, complete with hilarious responses and one stymied poster who eventually asks this:

Oh man… good times. Thanks for the suggestion Ben. Funny thing is, I steal 99% of my blog-accompanying images myself, I just have the decency to actually host the pilfered images on my own server with my own bandwidth. C’mon you other unscrupulous web-types, get some scruples…

And, before I go I should acknowledge that I bet some of you came here today looking for my week-one Enzyte Challenge update. Well, it’s coming, it was just a bit of rough night and I had this entry pretty much canned and good to go – so I left the thing on auto. You’ll get your update soon enough, don’t fret.

Oh hey Pat’s got some pictures up from their New Year’s Eve party, check ’em out.

And, with that, I’m gonna cut this thing loose. Have a good night folks, and, to those of you with difficult days ahead – we’re here for you. Love you all and goodnight.

Posted on

snack-a-cheerios


Mondays mean I have to go back to work, so normally Mondays blow. This Monday, however, was quite pleasant. I got a ton of work done, hung out with friends at lunch, and came home to a big “Hi Daddy!” and hug from Keaton. I got home a little late (meeting ran long and I hung around talking to Ben a little bit), and we had leftovers for dinner (which I like, honestly, since I do dishes and leftovers mean less cleanup).

Tonight Keaton and I called Grammy and Grandpa together, we do that sometimes. Keaton likes to use the phone, and can actually hold something of a conversation (well, a two-year-old talks to an adult kinda conversation). Tonight, it went a little like this:

Grandpa: Hello?

Keaton (at Dad’s prompting whispers): Hi Grandpa! I love you Grandpa!

Grandpa: Why, hi Keaton! I love you too! Want to talk to your Grammy? (Ahh… the classic dad-answered-the-phone handoff, “Hey there!… let me get your mom.”)

Grammy: Hello?

Keaton (more whispers from dad): Hi Grammy! I love you Grammy!

Grammy: Hi Keaton! I love you too! What are you doing?

Keaton: Snack-a-Cheerios!

Grammy: Oh, you had some Cheerios?

Keaton: Yeah.

Grammy: We’re they good?

Keaton: OK.

Keaton: Me hold-a baby Colton!

Grammy: Yeah! Did you see baby Colton?

Keaton. OK.

Awkward silence….

Dad: Keaton, can you tell Grammy what you did today?

Keaton: Today.

Dad: What did you do today?

Keaton: Slide-a-Krittal.

Dad: Oh, that means “Slide with Crystal,” mom. That’s the person at the gym’s childcare.

Grammy: Oh, you went to the gym?

Keaton: OK.

Grammy: Did you have fun?

Keaton: Had-a-Cheerios!

…

And on and on and on it went like that. But, Grammy never seemed to tire of the conversation.

Well then, I am going to paste in something I wrote a while ago… maybe it’s interesting, let’s see:

Did you guys know that, no matter how you cut it, there is a certain element of the earnable respect a person can have which is entirely age-based? Well, I’m telling you that there is, whether you knew it or not. Now, people may tell you that this is false, but they are either misinformed or lying. If you’re a young whippersnapper, no matter how much of a superstar you are at what you do, and regardless of the number of millions you make, you’ll be still deprived at least some percentage of the respect you could garner (from those older than you) because of your age.

Furthermore, I bet I can roughly quantify that percent-deprived by looking at the median age of your peers (those who do the same tasks as you in your chosen profession) and subtracting your age from that. For instance, if you’re a thirty-two year old middle manager at your dead-end warehouse job, and the average middle-manager at the warehouse company is actually thirty-nine years old, you’ll be deprived of about 20% of the respect you could earn were you seven years older.

Now I know there’ll be a lot of fast-trackers and young up-and-comers out there who’d completely disagree, and maybe even argue that they are, in fact, more respected than some of their elders. And I’m not saying that can’t be possible or doesn’t happen (because, in point-cases, I’m certain it does), I’m just saying that, in a general sense, they’d be wrong. Sure, if there’s a deadweight fifty year old who’s coasting along as your peer, you may indeed be more respected in comparison. But, in general, those who are older than you will still have it in the back of their heads that they’ve “been around” and you’re “fresh off the tit.”

Seriously, you’re gonna have to work around this. It’s just a simple fact that you trust people who are your age or older because your brain tells you they’ve had at least as much, or more, experience than you yourself have. Think about it, we inherently think of those younger than us as less-experienced than we are (and, because physics says that time flows forward, we’re probably right in doing so). Young people are expected to “earn and learn” their way to the top. Just look to the longstanding, pre-medieval, concept of apprenticeship, or the way lawyers and accounts log hours to win partner.

Anyway, I’m actually not criticizing the concept – it’s common sense. I’m just saying, if you’re planning on being number-one top-cheese in your chosen field by thirty-one, you may be surprised. You might even make it to CEO by that age, but you’d better bet some of the musty members of the board are looking down their noses at your unwrinkled brow and perky breasts. Hey, I’m OK with it… just gotta do the time (or get insanely rich, cash out young, and run for the hills).

Hmmm… I dunno if that was an entertaining read or not…

Hey, Keaton made Megan’s photoblog: check it out.

Love you guys and your unwrinkled brows and perky breasts. Goodnight.

Posted on

youthwise


Sunday, Sharaun’s out shopping and Keaton’s asleep. So far, naptime sans pacifier has proven more difficult than bedtime – Keaton not seeming to mind its absence at all at night, yet having a hard time missing it during her afternoon naps. Yesterday I couldn’t get her to go down at all, and eventually brought her back out into the living room having caught nary a wink. Today, however, I decided to get serious, and, when she was once again playing and talking to herself instead of napping, went in and rocked her for about fifteen minutes in the glider. Once her deep, ragged breathing convinced me she’d fallen asleep on my shoulder, I transferred her to the crib, where I’m happy to say she’s still slumbering peacefully. On the whole, I’d say operation pacifiers-be-gone is moving along quite well.

This weekend, I decided it was high time I worked a bit on all the more obscure BitTorrent downloads that’ve been piling up in my downloads directory, un-listened to and unloved. In line with my laziness, I often leave the “hardest” downloads for last. For my downloading habits, the “hardest” albums are the rare live stuff I love to collect, but hate to sit down and figure out the details on so I can properly organize it, tag it, and merge it into my general collection. It may sound easy, but tracking down the details of that live Jefferson Starship jam I grabbed one day because it looked interesting when the only thing I have to go on is a folder in my “unprocessed” directory called “starship73_SBD_matrix1” is sometimes hard to do. But, I persevered, and Saturday I used Keaton’s naptime to process I whopping ~15GB of rare live FLAC audio. In fact, I’ve snipped in the resulting anally-organized list is below for your perusal, because I know you value this stuff as much as I do, right?

I’m gonna do a general interest bit for nerds now, you can turn your head if you’d like to remain cool.

When I was a kid, I read with gusto a book called Big Secrets by William Poundstone. I’ve written about the book before here on sounds familiar, in the context of my youthwise obsession with backwards audio. The book, was filled with all sorts of cool stuff. One of the coolest, in fact, was the section on mysterious shortwave radio “number stations.” I think (dad, correct me if I’m wrong) that my pop used to mess around with shortwave, and I kind of remember this being partly why I was interested in that particular chapter.

Anyway, numbers stations are an “unexplained” global radio phenomenon, in which a string of random numbers and/or letters is broadcast on a given radio frequency with no explanation, the general consensus being that they are coded communiques intended for participants international espionage community. Some stations have been broadcasting these cryptic strings of numbers since back around the time of World War I. Enticed by the mystery, amateur hammers have, on occasion, turned armchair secret-agents and attempted to triangulate signals and hunt down the broadcast locations. Reading it all back then, I was fascinated. It was like some real-life Hardy Boys thing to me… and I dreamed about getting a radio, studying the signals, and breaking the code…

Anyway, if you’re interested in this type of “cloak and dagger” type stuff, Wikipedia has a great article on numbers stations here, and you can read about the “outing” of one of my favorites from Poundstone’s book, the “Russian Woodpecker,” right here (also via the great Wikipedia). For further reading, this page keeps a list of actively transmitting numbers stations (with sound samples), and even has some cool video of radio-nuts tracking down the transmitting antennas.

I’m sorry if that was boring, but I enjoyed writing it, so you, dear reader, can suck it.

Before I go, a tip of my babymakin’ hat to friends Erik and Kristi for the birth of their strapping young buck, Colton. Way to go guys, he and Keaton can be best friends until they’re around fourteen, then they’re forbidden from seeing each other until they’re twenty-three.

Goodnight.

Posted on

struggles


Hi internet.

Can I get a collective sigh for the long-awaited arrival of Friday? Good; good job internet. Without jinxing it, I wanted to mention that tonight is the fourth night Keaton’s gone to bed “big girl style.” For you barren folks, that means she goes to sleep without the aide of a pacifier. This is an awesome milestone for us. At this point, she’s going down for both naps and bedtime without much protest. In fact, Sharaun actually packed up and mailed her pacifiers to her sister (who’s about to pop herself), and let Keaton help pack them. When I put her down the other night, she said, “Paci mail to baby Hobson.” Yup, the pacifiers were mailed to baby Hobson. Goodbye pacifiers.

All day yesterday guys, I was struggling with myself to make a choice. I’ve written before about how I tend to worry most over the little things (I know I have, but it’s getting harder and harder to find entries in this mass of writing), and this is a good example. And, since it’s foremost on my mind, I’m going to gestate and give birth to this decision right here, laid bare, in front of the blog. Here we go.

The setup: I’ve been invited to a “pub crawl” with a group of upstanding fellows. These fellows, while not the normal crew I run with, are all birds of a feather and of like age with me. For those unaware with today’s modern street-vernacular, a “pub crawl” is a walking outing centered around moving from bar to bar whilst having one drink or so at each. The idea being that you get to check out a bunch of new bars, hang out with friends, and drink alcohol.

The problem: I can’t tell if I want to go or not. Deep inside me, I bet it would be an awesome time and I think I’d have a blast with the guys. In some other way, though, I feel like this is not my bag. There are a couple factors at play here, but I can summarize it plainly by saying that 1) I’m typically not the guy at the bar, and 2) I’m not sure, but I think I kinda feel “too old” to be crawling pubs. Now, I know both of these things are rubbish, but they are indeed the psychological blocks I’m dealing with. Let’s take them one by one.

First, it’d be fairly accurate to call me a “homebody,” at least as a generalization. If it comes down to the choice between “going out” and getting some drinks or staying home and drinking some beer with friends – I’ll usually choose the latter (by the way, neither my homebodiness, nor my propensity to go out, is tied to alcohol consumption, I’m just framing this in the context of a “pub crawl.”) Some part of this is built into my Scrooge-logic, where I realize that socializing at home with friends is cheaper than socializing at the local overpriced watering hole. Some of it is just my nature.

Second, a “pub crawl” makes me feel old. In fact, most bars make me feel old these days. Unless they’re the dank, cavernous, dreary kind, they’re usually glitzy-trendy hotspots filled to the brim with fancy-smelling youngsters all looking to shack up for the night. Me and glitzy-trendy just don’t work, I just feel awkward and out of place. In fact, the whole concept of a “pub crawl” seems to shout “wasted college kid” to my subconscious. And, while that may have been OK when I was actually in college, thinking about it now makes me feel a bit like the fat, old, balding guy who’s just posturing.

Anyway… there it is. Still not sure what I’m going to do.

Goodnight.

Posted on

shepherd’s pie


Hey internet. How was your Wednesday? Mine was OK. I went to work, where things were, surprisingly, busy today. It was a nice change, as the slowness I’ve been working through lately had my apathy at record highs of late. I think I needed a little kick to get me ambulatory again. I also learned that Radiohead is definitely coming to the city for their In Rainbows tour. Wild horses couldn’t keep me away. It’ll be my third time seeing them… I’m so excited.

I hadn’t really planned on writing tonight. In fact, I was going to take the night off because 1) I had nothing to write about and wasn’t feeling guilty about it, and 2) I felt like not writing. But… then… as I often to, I became bored just sitting on the couch listening to music (Sharaun was out and about so I had the place to myself). I tried reading some from a book a buddy lent me, but I’m having the hardest time getting into it. So, to the internet I turned. And, after my standard ~20 page surfing cycle, I ended up back here in the old familiar WordPress post window… stringing words together for no reason at all. So, I decided I’ll just post a bunch of random, un-connected stuff I’ve been saving up for a while… sort of like a shephard’s pie of a blog. Here goes.

I had planned to write a blog about something I recently did, but I ended up chatting with Ben about it yesterday morning via IM, and the chat sums it up nicely and is a good break from my normal dry paragraph-style narrative. So, here’s there story, in the no-caps shorthand that is IM-speak:

Dave:
dude… i have to tell you what i did the other night.
so, i notice in my logs that a ton of my bandwidth is people hotlinking my blog-accompanying images and using them for forum avatars, myspace profile avatars, etc. so, i set out to eff the bandwidth-stealing hotlinkers.
the internet taught me how to put a mod-rewrite .htaccess that’ll swap any hotlinked image out for one of my choosing.
so…
now, when anyone hotlinks my blog-accompanying images, they get instead a picture of some dude’s nuts with a beach in the background. it’s outstanding

Ben:
HAHAHAH

Dave:
this pic is priceless

Ben:
OMG… that is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.

Dave:
here’s the actual image (warning, don’t open with people around). i should write about it… right?

Ben:
Yeah, you totally should. Hilarious.

Dave:
is that img classic, or what? pat was at my place while i was doing this… and we were giddy

Ben:
Outstanding.

Dave:
we actually went to a couple pages from my logs where people had been stealing and looked at their new nutsack avatars for a laugh.

Ben:
hahahahaha. Ohhh.. it’s sooo good.

Dave:
hehe, i thought so too

Ben:
you should screencap those

Dave:
steal my bandwidth, will ya? oh yeah i totally should.

Ben:
fantastic

Dave:
balls in profile w/the ocean behind.

Ben:
So excellent.

Well, that was fun.

Want to see something neat? Take a look at the I-got-a-new-iPod Christmas traffic spike my entry “new iPod & I want my old tunes!” Kinda neat to see the internet turning to my tiny blog in their time of holiday need… I wonder if anyone actually managed to get help from the entry?

ipod_post_stats550.jpg

Oh, what? That wasn’t neat at all? Oh my, I’m sorry. I’ll do better next time. But, next time is gonna have to be tomorrow or something, because I’m outta here tonight. Sorry I left you with such a stanky post. Better luck next time.

Goodnight and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.

Posted on

of snakes and snaking


Good evening blog-readin’ crew. Let’s just get right into it today…

Today on the way home from work, Sharaun called me to say that “something was stinky” in the guest bathroom. “OK,” I thought… as she walked in there, live on the phone, to investigate. “Oh no!,” she exclaimed, striking fear into my heart. I demanded anxiously, “What?!, What is it?” “There’s all sorts of food and gross stuff filling the bathtub in here! It looks like the kale from dinner last night that I put down the garbage disposal.” “OK,” I said… “I’ll look at it when I get there…”

Being that I have relatively little experience with plumbing, I called a couple buddies in that last mile home to pass the situation by them. Both consulted that I had a clogged pipe somewhere, to which I replied, “Well duh,” and asked how I could figure out a little more. Anthony suggested I watch the sewer cleanout outside the house, while running water in various locations in the house, to see if I could get an idea where the blockage was. Doing this, I decided that the blockage was between the kitchen sink and guest bathroom, to which I replied, in soliloquy, “Well duh.”

So, I motored up to Home Depot to rent one of those electric drain-snakes. I brought it home and tried snaking from the kitchen sink back towards the bathroom first, which didn’t work. I then went into the bathroom, braving the stench of the bathtub full of festering mangled foodstuffs, removed the overflow/cleanout cover, and snaked down that drain. After sinking twenty or so feet into the pipe, giving the thing a good whirl every few feet to break loose any clogs, the stagnant bathtub gurgled and sputtered, and the nasty water slowly began draining. After verifying the drain was clear, I cleaned up the gross bathtub with some Comet and called it a successful do-it-myself home repair job.

Nothing makes a man feel like a man like successfully solving some household problem. Now I’m all testosteroned and ready to punch bulls and chew nails. Oh, and, speaking of feeling “male” and being all “testosteroned,” yesterday marked the first day of my “Enzyte Challenge.” As such, I want to explain a little more about how I intend this to work.

Progress will be judged on a visual basis, using a graphic along the lines of the image below. The first Dave is the baseline Dave, and his X and Y proportions are tied, via some magical and secret percentage-math, to my real-life measured “data.” Growth/change is measured in two dimensions, and mapped (via those known-only-to-me factors) to the X/Y dimensions on the images. In other words, any subsequent Daves will have grown in the X/Y dimensions by any actual “growth” experienced by me. Here, just have a look at what I’m talking about…

I know the image above isn’t quite aligned, I just roughed it in to show what you’ll be seeing. I’m fairly confident, though, that I’ll never have to make a “grown” Dave overlay… as I expect the net results of the experiment to be precisely null. Anyway, let’s have fun with it.

And, for anyone wondering, the first day on Enzyte did have some notable moments. A few hours after taking the pill, I experienced a heated sensation in my face and limbs, and a mild red flush and “tightness” in my cheeks. The one “side effect” the pill lists is “transient flushing and a feeling of warmth,” both from the niacin contained, so I’m fairly certain that my experience was pill-caused. Finally, late last night I experienced this same warm feeling, but this time centralized in my nether-regions. Interesting… but without any hard data I’m not making any claims (pun half-intended).

Goodnight.

Posted on

chicken soup for me


A Monday evening greeting to you, blog readers. Hope things are well on the other end of the internet. Me, I’m sitting on the couch after watching the BCS championship with friends. Sharaun and I have assumed our standard post-repast evening roles: her watching TV, me half-watching TV with the laptop in my lap. We should really shake it up a bit, maybe play Twister or something… y’know… go wild. Today, I’ll regale you with some cutesy tales of Keaton and I. In fact, let’s go ahead and do that right now…

This past Saturday, I decided to clean out our much-neglected garage. I do this on something of a “cycle.” Knowingly letting things pile up on the workbench and around the cars, stacking boxes on the ground haphazardly, and ignoring the tufts of mown and dried grass that start to amass in the corners. Then, every few months going in and doing one big “sort, purge, store” operation. I’m actually OK with letting the garage go like this, it is the garage, after all, so I don’t mind if I can’t eat off the floor.

Anyway, I was in there Saturday rocking out to the iPod plugged the 1970s receiver, courtesy Goodwill, working away while it rained outside. At some point, I had to go back inside. Upon returning to the garage, Keaton ended up following me out. Since I had pulled both cars into the driveway so I could maneuver the ladder around and stuff things up in the rafters, she had the whole room to run around in. She brought her little stroller out, and began walking in circles in the middle of the garage while I worked. Soon, she began dancing to the music, and I just couldn’t help myself: I abandoned my garage work and joined the rainy-day garage dance-party with my daughter. We danced circles around that garage for a good fifteen minutes, and it was positively one of the best times I’ve had in my entire life – hands down.

And, if that weren’t enough heart-meltiness… here’s another one for you.

This morning, while leaving for work, Sharaun had Keaton in the bathroom sitting on her little potty. She was stark naked since she had just woken up and Sharaun took off her overnight diaper and pajamas. As I walked down the hall towards the garage, I stopped at the bathroom to tell Sharaun goodbye and give her a kiss. Since Keaton was occupied, I told her I loved her too and would see her later. She said, “Bye-bye Daddy!” and I headed off.

A few more steps down the hall I hear, “Kiss!,” and turn around to see the cutest buck-naked almost-two-year-old girl in the world bounding towards me with her arms out. My cheeks neared a complete loss of structural integrity from the sheer breadth of the smile on my face, and I squatted in a catcher’s position to received first a wide-armed hug, and second a nice juicy kiss smack on the lips. As far as I’m concerned, it was the best start to a day that anyone could ever ask for.

Oh, before I go – I wanted to let you know that my Enzyte arrived in the mail today (for background on the Enzyte thing, read here). That means that tomorrow will be my first day “on the pill.” I’ll try my best to make tomorrow be the day I debut my progress-tracking methodology and baseline status – so we can all get involved in the experiment from day one. Because, I know, you are just as interested in this as I am… right?

OK beautiful people… until the next blog, much love and safe-keeping. Goodnight.