IRC

It isn't that women aren't technical enough to be on IRC, it's that men aren't wise enough to avoid it.

Advertising and mixed motives

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

- Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders and CEOs of Google, 1998. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

Kaboom!

Is that the quarter target way down there?

Christian fundamentalist after seeing 2girls1cup

"Ewww, they're both girls."

Kimikiss

I like Mao-neechan and all, but dude.. don't break up the blushing couple. That's like killing puppies.

18.8 bazillion dollars

Blizzard and Activision have merged to form BlizzardVision. It's difficult to see where they're going with this.

RIAA's coming to town

You better cop out.
You better not fight.
You better not sprout a legal fund site.
RIAA's coming to town.

They see you when you're seeding.
They know when you're a peer.
They know when you can't fight the suits
So they spread some doubt and fear.

You better cop out.
You better not fight.
You better not sprout a legal fund site.
RIAA's coming to town.

Towels

Using a towel requires getting it wet, but a towel doesn't work if it's wet. Therefore, towels are useless.

Website accessibility

Website accessibility isn't just about blind people. You also need to cater to people with limited mobility, keyboard-only interfaces, voice-only interfaces, allergies, small screens, pink fonts, learning disabilities, memory retention disabilities, bowel control disabilities, colorblindness, unusual eye refresh rates, obesity, and depression.

Observe the Stabbath

Every year, God kills more Christians than atheists.

IP

To prove that you stole the music, the RIAA uses something called an "Intellectual Property" (IP) address.

How the Internet works

You start the Internet by double-clicking on the Internet, which opens an Internet window with an Internet loaded (usually Google). You then type the Internet address into Google's Internet bar and hit Enter, which takes you to the next Internet. Sometimes an Internet will allow you to download a piece of the Internet. DON'T BE FOOLED! Downloading pieces of the Internet is illegal and you will typically have to pay $200,000 for each violation. Have a good Internet!

Substitute

Mister missed her, kissed her sister.

Fingernail hygiene

If you have a nail file, never let other people use it.

Because file sharing is against the law.

Neener neener

With all their might they clutch the cloak of darkness, that it might guard them from the claws of consequence and the teeth of justice. And behind this cloak of naught but a shadow, they mock the beast and claim they are well beyond its reach. And to the shock and horror of us all, the beast is fooled.

Innovation

What a unique innovative idea! Too bad nobody thought of this before.

Tongue twister and other kinky acts

How many woodchucks could Chuck wood if Chuck could wood woodchucks?

Spin

Gravitationally, I'm getting more and more attractive every month.

You can be content with content, but

AdSense makes the heart grow fonder.

Inquiry into the origin of carless travelers

Where is Pedestria?

Tenacity

If you fail at something, don't worry, it's just what makes you unique.

Let's do the twist

I am Lord Mobius. Come see my exotic dance.

Ordasity

Ordasity is a word. Google says so.

Heh-heh

Condi told me something funny the other day. She said-- this is what she told me: "We have a window of opportunity in Iran, so we should crack open the window and reinstate a draft." Heh-heh.

Confession

I know this may seem sudden to you, but it's something I've been feeling for a long time. It's been hard to find the confidence to tell you this, because I'm not sure how you'll respond, but please consider what I have to say. When I first saw you at the dance last year, I felt something I'd never felt before. It was like a warm glow inside me. The way your eyes seem to light up when you smile, it's almost as if I'm watching an angel playing in the clouds. And no matter what your answer may be, I want you to hear me and know how I feel about you: I want to bang your ass.

I think I need a better transition from the clouds part into the next sentence. What do you think?

Hell of a deal

I sold my soul to the devil, but it broke JUST after the warranty expired. He was so pissed.

Cue the catchy beeps and boops

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the FreeNode network proudly presents our spectacular blossoming gallery of style and content separation in thousands of unordered lists and proper hierarchically structured headings and divs... The FreeNode semantical parade!

The war on llama snatchers

I'm looking for a llama, kidnapped by Osama, no doubt going through trauma and calling for his mama.

I'll point you to his shack-a, but if you go attack-a, don't mess up and bring back a lousy old alpaca.

You have ten seconds to get it

A slow guy with a knife is a risk, but a fast guy with a knife is a f*.

Retrovision

If we have 20/20 hindsight, why are people so bad at history?

DIS 29500

No

We landed on the moon!

The U.S. government has a lot of the public convinced that mankind has yet to set foot on the moon. I urge you all to not buy into their lies! As it turns out, NASA has a high-resolution video of astronauts landing on the moon. The video has made its way into the public via some lower-resolution recordings of the video playing on a TV set. They're a bit blurry, but believe me, they're real! And now, NASA claims that it doesn't have the video. Don't buy into the government conspiracy! Mankind has landed on the moon.

Blogger hates my genius

Blogger is using a trick to block the trick I was using to block Blogger's annoying banner.

So now I'm using a trickier trick to trick and block the trick blocker.

Rumor: Google's GPhone will turn lead into gold

I should first let you know that I don't work for Google, I don't personally know anyone who works for Google, nor has this rumor leaked from anyone even remotely connected to Google in any way. That said, I've been thinking about this, and it seems clear to me that if Google really wants to make a winning product that will beat the iPhone, they will make the GPhone turn lead into gold.

The demand for this feature isn't anything new. In fact, the concept of turning lead into gold has been around for at least a decade. But now that Google is in a position to sell their own cell phones, it just makes sense they would finally invest their resources into making this happen in a user-friendly interface.

An unverified source with no credibility recently claimed to discover that when he searched for "1 kg lead in gold" in some obscure unmentioned localized version of Google, he received a Google Calculator answer: "1 kilogram of lead = $80 billion in gold".

Sergey Brin stated in a recent interview, "Google is not in any way involved in turning lead into gold, nor will it ever be, nor is anyone else that I'm aware of." As our readers have pointed out, there are several ways this statement can be interpreted. It is possible that Google is planning to shift its entire core business into the lead-to-gold conversion market. Anonymous insiders at a company that may or may not be Google have told us that we're absolutely 100% correct and shouldn't even consider the possibility that half the rumors about the GPhone will end up as just that: rumors.

Competition in standards

<Microsoft> Competition in standards rules!

<Google> Competition in standards rules!

<developers> :(

Web developer

Graphic designer, web semantics engineer, layout architect, database engineer, web systems programmer, user interface programmer, accessibility consultant, quality assurance tester, marketer, and project manager.

Yet they pay you a single position's salary.

News

I don't like news. I like recent-but-old-enough-to-have-been-thoroughly-digesteds

Roswell

The whole Roswell thing is stupid. There was no UFO that crash-landed there. The flying object was identified. It was an alien spacecraft.

Ship travel

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But ships don't sail in straight lines when they cross the Pacific Ocean, they follow the curve of the earth. I suggest that we replace all cargo ships with submarines.

Fairies

"Hi, I'm a fairy."

"Um... aren't you a guy?"

"Yeah, I'm a male fairy. You got a problem with that?"

"I just never.."

"Where do you think fairies come from? Massive lesbian fairy orgies and magic pixie dust? You're in the wrong fantasy, bub."

Failed Linux desktop slogan

"It's Beryly functional!"

On belt size and food consumption

Thin people will ask for a minute meal, while fat people will ask for seconds. But a minute is 60 times the size of a second. Therefore, thin people can eat a lot more than fat people.

1120 fucking days

1120 fucking days.

Facts you didn't know or knew but didn't take seriously or knew and took seriously but had to listen to again in this post

Lemmings don't actually perform mass suicide off cliffs. Basically, the Walt Disney company decided that their documentary White Wilderness wasn't exciting enough, so they forced some lemmings off a cliff and videotaped it.

The world was not widely believed to be flat back in Columbus' time. It's a myth that originated from an 1828 fantasy by Washington Irving called The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus which was incorrectly repeated as fact and somehow became popular. The debate over Columbus' voyage was not over whether or not the Earth was round, but over the circumference of the Earth. Columbus made some calculations that were much smaller than the widely accepted circumference, and he based his voyage on that. It turned out that Columbus' calculations were very wrong. And by the way, Europeans already knew there was a large land mass to the West. They just hadn't really taken the time to accurately map it out before.

The typical supermarket banana, called the Cavendish banana, doesn't appear in nature. It was genetically engineered to be better suited for consumption than wild bananas. Wild bananas are blotchy green and brown when ripe, they're hard to open, they're filled with huge seeds, and they don't taste that good. Cavendish bananas were designed to be, among other things, seedless. Unfortunately, this means they don't have any genetic mutations that survive longer than a single "generation" and so there's no genetic diversity (they're all basically clones of each other). What this means is that a single virus can easily wipe out all members of the species and none will be immune. This actually happened in the 1950s when the main kind of banana was the Gros Michel which got wiped out by Panama disease. The Cavendish was developed as the replacement, although it wasn't quite the same in terms of size and flavor. A new variant of Panama disease has appeared in recent years, wiping out crops of Cavendish bananas, and scientists are working to develop a new replacement.

The cartoon series Captain Planet has some rather dark roots. In 1931, American playwright David Belasco, who had recently begun suffering mental illness, was found suffocated by his own pillow. In his latest journal entry, which was mostly nonsensical rambling, there was the sentence, "Through all of your being, I'm the captain of this planet." This was adapted into Captain Planet's catch phrase, "By your powers combined, I am Captain Planet!" Ted Turner also roughly translated the fact that Belasco was known for his naturalism (the ability to capture the essence of daily life) into "environmental awareness". Furthermore, he decided to give Captain Planet a blue face as sort of a sick jab at the way Belasco died.

Ostriches aren't able to chew their food, so instead they swallow small stones that roll around in their stomachs and help digest the food.

One of the above actually isn't true.

Global Warming

Contributing factors to global warming:

• Carbon emissions from vehicles.
• Cow farts.
• Disco (disco is dead, but the damage has been done).
• Greenhouses.
• Katie Price Jordan.
• Declining global pirate population (software pirates don't count unless they're dressed in full pirate garb and using wifi on genuine pirate ships).
• Walking to the grocery store.
• Steorn's free energy creation machine (See a demo).
• God's infinite and unfocused rage against people using their body parts for pleasure instead of their original core purpose (I'm talking about you, gum chewers; swallow or spit it out!)
• Firefox.
• The invisible Dyson sphere around our solar system, whose existence NASA has conspired to cover up.
• Terrorists.
• You. (See: Terrorists)
• The increasing amount of buildings and paved roads which retain more heat than dirt and plants. Hey, who knows?
• The melting polar caps. I always see ice melting when it gets hot, so the melting probably causes the heat.
• Al Gore's plane trips.
• Bears.

Google, as explained by emoticons

^_^ ^_^ ^_^ >_> ^_^ ^_^

King of web standards

If I were the king of web standaaaaaaards
Not queen, not duke, not prince

My magic hat of web standaaaaaaards
Would be fluffy, not hard, not tense

I'd write everything in XHTML
With a /> and a /> and text/html

As I'd post my spiel, all the readers would kneel
And the critics rave, and the Web is save!
And BusinessWeek would siiiiing
If I, if I were kiiiiiing!

Each author would show respect to me
The browsers all connect to me
With an extra slash, I would earn my cash
From every underling!
If I, if I were kiiiiiing!
Just kiiiiiing!

This song is dedicated to Jeffrey Zeldman, protector of the internets and omniscient XHTML knower-everything-abouter.

Good thing XHTML is properly parsed with an XML parser or this perfectly normal XML construct would totally screw up the sidebar.

Clutches of the sea

Once upon a moonlit voyage at the crest of a golden wave, a tale that began three score before descended to a salty grave.

Buck pushed him.

Essay on standards bodies

My professor asked me to write a 10,000-character essay on international standards bodies. Here was my submission:

T9998e

Resurrection

I've died and come back as a blog post. My life is meaningless.

Web standards for life

Someone asked me how we can take the lessons we've learned in the field of web standards and apply them to the physical world around us. I decided to investigate. Here are some of my findings:

Separation of content and presentation

I strapped my good-looking friend with a small speaker that carried my voice from the other room, and I told him to stand there and let me do all the talking through the mic. Among the female demographic we were attempting to appeal to, our traffic bounce rate jumped to an all-time high.

CSS Naked Day

I thought my traffic levels were low enough that it wouldn't be too big a deal, but the overwhelming negative response I received indicated that perhaps I should think twice before impairing the user experience in this way. It also appears to be illegal.

Semantic markup

The following is spoken in U.S. English. I, David Hammond — a male born October 3, 1986; who can be found in Chico, California, United States; who works at the CCC Technology Center at Butte College, Oroville, California, United States — attempted from July 28, 2007, at 1:23 PM PST through July 28, 2007, at 3:47 PM PST to verbally communicate with Phil Sharon — a male born 1976 — Carly White — a female born 1982 — Justin Roseland — a male born 1989 — and Mario Woodruff — a male born 1984 — while using the most verbose descriptive sentences I, David Hammond (see above), could provide to the respective recipients (among Phil Sharon [see above], Carly White [see above], Justin Roseland [see above], and Mario Woodruff [see above]). Significant data loss occurred for an unaccounted reason, and traffic quickly fell.

Progressive enhancement

“Hi, I'm David. I'm content with just talking with you and getting to know you. However, if you would agree to make out with me, let's go ahead and do that. If you'll have sex with me as well, I'll take my pants off now. If you're fine with a one-time fling, I can bypass any further conversation and get right on you.”

Unfortunately, I forgot to consider graceful degradation in the event that she refused my most basic option and dumped her drink on me instead.

Twitter

In my room, amazed at how innovative Twitter is.

Clarification

No, virgin olive oil does not bleed when you pop it open.

World Affairs

Every once in a while my readers ask for my opinion on world affairs. I for one am against them. Having sex with other planets is wrong. We should instead focus on what we do best: screwing our own planet.

What is RSS?

RSS is a kind of Internet that you can register for free. You use Google Reader to manage your Internets so you can surf them all up lightning-fast.

AT&T owns the Internets, so you have to buy their service before you can start using Google Reader.

Registering RSS is easy. First, you will need to upgrade to Internet 7.0 from Microsoft. Then when you go to your favorite home pages, click on the orange square you see at the top. That probably registers the Internet with Google Reader (I'm not sure because I'm still using Internet 5.5).

Lucky Star

As the series goes on, Lucky Star is including more and more references to Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. By the end of the series, it will be Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and it will be a seamless transition to season 2.

Anonymous

I didn't realize posting pictures of Konata Izumi to an online message board was an act of terrorism until Fox News told me so.

↑ This is terrorism.

Hay Fox News, lurk moar.

Blanket statements

Quilts suck.

Don't sell your friends short

Goodbyes are always sad. In economics, we learn to always bye low. So when we say "goodbye", our spirits are low. That's why when I part with someone, I always say "good sell!"

Call for a cardiopulmonary recess

"Mister Heart, this is the police. You're under cardiac arrest!"

"*Pant pant* I'm beat."

"You've been charged with two accounts of defibrillation. How do you bleed?"

"Huh? I'm not in court yet."

"Dammit, you ruined it!" (Walks away)

Stand-up folklore

Ever hear of the comic who cried "but seriously"?

Diversity of logic

Hy isn't a choice; it's something you're born with.

That's why we have a hygene.

Unsuccessful cover-ups

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows has been leaked onto BitTorrent, and no amount of scary e-mails from Scholastic to blog owners can rewrite that history. Welcome to the Internet.

Points of view

Looking at girls through the bathroom window is a crime.

Looking at your reflection in the bathroom window is not.

If angels had beaks

Birds of a feather are mostly naked.

Losr

My startup Web 2.0 company dives into an innovative new social networking paradigm in which users define the content model, leveraging wisdom of crowds. It's basically an empty MediaWiki install with AdSense. Acquisition bidding will begin at $60 million.

Book pirates

The Book Publishing Association of America (BPAA) is finally going after book pirating groups. Known in pirating circles as "libraries", these institutions specialize in distributing copyrighted materials to large numbers of pirates who read the books without paying for them. "These libraries are running rampant," said the director of the BPAA. "It's time we went after these networks of thieves and help protect the profits of our authors."