Execute php code in WordPress posts
I stumbled upon a great WordPress plugin the other day. It’s called Exec-PHP 4.9 and it was created by a German person by the name of Sören. His name sounds like a character from Lord of the Rings, but he’s an actual person, not a character.
At least I think so.
The plugin allows you to place PHP code right into a WordPress post, page, or even a widget. This means that you can create an archive page or a tag cloud page without editing page templates. If you have spent time creating custom page templates to handle specific PHP code, you know how cumbersome this can be, especially when you change your theme and realize that your custom pages are now useless.
I only wish I had stumbled upon this plugin sooner.
I just ordered my iPad!
I just finished pre-ordering my WI-FI 16G iPad. Apple says it will be delivered to my door on April 3 which means I don’t have to make a road trip to my nearest Apple Store in the Montgomery Mall on exit one off the Washington beltway. At least I think that is my nearest Apple Store. If there’s one closer, I don’t know about it. The point is, I thought that if you pre-ordered an iPad, it meant that you could go to an Apple Store and pick it up on April 3. Having it delivered at my front door is a lot better.
Yesterday I read that Apple already has a “Comics & Graphic Novels” section planned for the Apple iTunes store. The iPad looks to be a killer device for reading funny books.
I’m really looking forward to owning one of these.
Apple iPad available in US on April 3
Apple has announced that the Wi-Fi model of the iPad will be available for purchase on Saturday, April 3. The base price for the 16GB version will be $499. Starting on March 12, customers may purchase an iPad and then pick it up on April 3 at an Apple store.
Make any URL look much more terrifing
Want to make a website’s address look a lot scarier before forwarding the link to a friend or co-worker? Go to ShadyURL and make it look a lot more foreboding that it truly is. For instance, the somewhat benign http://bentcorner.com having gone through the ShadyURL process becomes:
http://5z8.info/dogs-being-eaten_r4a7n_dogs-being-eaten
Now that is really funny.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 Compatibility View
If you use Internet Explorer 8 to access the web and have noticed that some websites just don’t look right, or that some features just don’t work, you need to know about something called Compatibility View. It essentially dumbs-down Internet Explorer 8 so that it can correctly display so-called older websites.
To enable Compatibility View for a website, follow the following easy steps:
- Open the website that is not displayed correctly in Internet Explorer 8.
Click the Compatibility View button located directly to the right side of the address bar. It’s supposed to look like a jagged edged, “broken” document. More specifically, it’s supposed to represent a broken website.- If you do not have one of these spiffy buttons, go to the Tools menu, and click Compatibility View.
That’s it. The website in question should now look and function correctly each and every time you visit it. That is, until you delete all your Internet cookies or reset your Internet settings.
Shortly after Internet Explorer 8 went live, a lot of people evidently couldn’t read this very blog. It was because IE8 had problems with the WordPress theme I was using at the time. If people who couldn’t read my blog would have activated Compatibility View, they wouldn’t have had any problems.
I mention this because I get an absurd amount of phone calls at work from people about this very issue.
I want one
Apple introduced the new iPad today and I officially want one.
This thing looks like it is going to be great.
To say that this gadget very well may change the way people prefer to surf the Internet or read digital media may not be overstating it. The good people at Robot Comics have already stated that they will be producing a reader app for the iPad that is capable of reading CBR/CBZ comic book scans. ComiXology has released a video showing what their iPad comic book reading app will look like.
Not only will this surely kill the Kindle, I think the iPad will be a killer way to read comic books.
The base price for a basic 16 GB iPad will be only $499. That seems like a bargain considering the fact that it’s been rumored for months that the iPad would cost at least a grand.
The only bad news is that the iPad wont be available for another two months. I’m counting the days.
Real, but damaged
I got home from work last night to find that the Mitchell & Ness 1984 Los Angeles Raiders Marcus Allen jersey I purchased on eBay had arrived in the mail. I was happy to see that it indeed looked like the real thing and not some cheap Korean knockoff. I then discovered after putting it on and looking at myself in the mirror, there was a rip on one of the sleeves.
I don’t know how it happened. I checked the box for cuts or any other damage, but I couldn’t find any. I don’t even know how something like this would happen. It looks like it might have been cut with a either a sharp knife or with a box cutter. Maybe it happened when Mitchell & Ness received a box full of jerseys from the factory. Perhaps this jersey was sitting at the top of the box and whoever opened the box nicked it with their box cutter. I really don’t know how something like this would happen.
I contacted the seller and he responded by saying that he didn’t know it was damaged. He told me that he doesn’t have any more this size and that I can return it for a refund. He also said that he would be willing to give my a partial refund if I wanted to go ahead and keep the jersey. Honestly, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if something like this could even be fixed.
I have the worst eBay luck.
Is it real?
I purchased a Mitchell & Ness 1984 Los Angeles Raiders Marcus Allen jersey on eBay yesterday afternoon and unlike many of the jerseys on eBay, I’m fairly confident this one is the real deal and not a cheap Korean knock-off. This one looks just like the one on the Mitchell & Ness website.
I’ve had really bad luck buying jerseys on eBay. The last few I bid on and won ended up to either be flawed or obvious fakes. I hope my luck is about to change.
Why eBay doesn’t do anything about the fakes on their site is a mystery to me. I’m really surprised that the NFL doesn’t do anything about the non-licensed, counterfeit jerseys on the popular auction site. It’s not like these fakes are hard to find.
Wish me luck!
This is why newspapers are losing money
The Associated Press ran a small piece about a fake Twitter account that was pretending to be the official Twitter account of the liberal blog, The Huffington Post. Whoever was running the account was posting insults directed towards conservatives. The account has been since been shut down by Twitter. Evidently some people actually thought the fake Twitter account was the real Twitter account.
From the Associated Press article:
The feed included mostly unpublishable insults about political and media figures, including President Barack Obama.
Unpublishable? Really?
I don’t know what’s more pathetic: that this “news” article was published in the first place or that it described what was posted as unpublishable. I don’t even know what that term means. After all, it’s 2010, not 1910. How can something pertaining to the Internet not be publishable? This is why newspapers are loosing money. This is why millions of people don’t bother reading newspapers anymore. Newspapers refuse to keep up with the times, instead they pretend that we all live in some bygone era where certain words or phrases are not fit for human consumption.
That era is long gone.
The article doesn’t even state the facts. What was the name of the fake Twitter account? Is that too somehow unpublishable? A quick search of the Internet shows that the Twitter account was “@HuffPostNews”. The real Twitter account for The Huffington Post is “@huffingtonpost”. That information isn’t in the AP article, even though it’s germane to the story.
And what were some of the unpublishable insults?
- “Vote McCain 2012!!!!!”
- “Barack Obama is a stupid fucking socialist.”
- “We LOVE @SeanHannity!!!”
One would have to be mentally retarded to think this Twitter feed was in fact the real The Huffington Post Twitter feed. By refusing to show examples of said Twitter posts, it gives the false impression that anyone duped into believing this phony Twitter feed was legit was simply honestly fooled by a well executed fraud.
That is simply not the case.
Let’s see iPhone propagandist Luke Wilson spin this
AT&T has suddenly stopped selling iPhones to people living in New York City. If you go to the AT&T website and try to purchase the iPhone, upon entering a New York City zipcode you will be instructed to “Please shop for another phone.”
Supposedly this is because the high-speed data network in New York City is overburdened. I’m not sure why this would stop AT&T from selling more iPhones. I know from personal experience that they make people pay for the high-speed data network whether you can use it or not.
Assume nothing
It’s as though being laid off for nearly three months has made me forget everything I’ve ever known about technology. One of the things I learned a long time ago was to assume nothing. I wish I had remembered that little adage a couple of weeks ago when I made some minor changes to the theme my blog currently uses. I made the changes while using the Firefox web browser and I just assumed that everything looked right in other browsers.
How stupid of me.
It turns out that even though the changes I made to the css style sheet looked fine in Firefox, the changes looked anything but fine in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The changes caused my blog to not load correctly in Internet Explorer. When I finally got around to opening my blog with Internet Explorer, I discovered that the entire screen was dark brown, causing the text to be unreadable.
I didn’t know anything was wrong until I posted an email I received the other day from an angry reader that wanted to inform me that he was unsubscribing to my RSS feed because, well, he said he couldn’t read posts.
I didn’t know what this person was talking about, so I asked if anyone else knew. It wasn’t until I read the comments that I knew anything was wrong.
From now on when I make changes to my blog, I’ve going to take a look at the changes not only in Firefox, but Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari too.
It’s a good thing I’m starting work again on Monday. Any longer on unemployment and I would probably forget everything I’ve ever known about technology.
In a perfect world, all web browsers would share similar browser compatibility. Assume nothing.
I have no idea what this person is talking about
I recieved this email the other day and I didn’t know what to make of it. It reads:
From: [omitted]@aol.com
To:rick@bentcorner.com
Date: Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 2:42 PM
Subject: Bent CornerRick
I used to enjoy reading Bent Corner and since you changed it I went along and subscribed the articles to Yahoo and then I found I couldn’t read the comments, then I subscribed to the comments then I found I still couldn’t read the articles without subscribing to the email…so I just removed ALL OF IT.
Thanks but no thanks
I’m inferring from this that he is referring to the feed for this blog. I’ve had Feedburner doing the syndication since forever. I haven’t changed it. Anyone know what this person is talking about?
Why I am kicking Ubuntu to the curb
I have had it with Ubuntu Linux. I’m kicking the penguin to the curb. The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s proverbial back was this morning. I was writing a blog post on my HP Pavilion dv6000 notebook running Ubuntu 9.10 when everything locked up on me. I couldn’t save what I had written and I couldn’t even close Firefox.
That was it. This wasn’t the first time Ubuntu had locked up on me, but it will be my last.
I got on my desktop PC and went to the HP website. Armed with my laptop’s serial number and model number, I was able to easily order a restore disc for only $15 that will install Windows XP back on my laptop. When I first installed Ubuntu, I wiped the entire hard drive, including the partition that held the Windows XP restore image, and reformatted it for Linux. Because of this, I needed a restore disc.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a PC lockup on me as much as this laptop has with Ubuntu installed. I’m just tired of it.
I guess Luke Wilson has never been to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania
AT&T, in response to some Verizon ads that trash AT&T’s minuscule 3G coverage, have hired actor Luke Wilson to make commercials touting how great AT&T is. instead of actually improving their 3G coverage, they spend millions of dollars telling people that how great they are.
Isn’t that just fantastic?
I have an iPhone which means that I can only use AT&T as my provider. No matter what Luke Wilson says, I know that AT&T’s 3G coverage sucks. Without 3G, the iPhone is just a pretty iPod that you can talk to people on. When you find yourself in one of the many areas the AT&T doesn’t have 3G coverage, a lot of the apps that make the iPhone great are unusable.
When I worked in Pennsylvania, my iPhone’s 3G coverage died the minute I crossed from Maryland into Pennsylvania. Because of this fact, I had to listen to XM radio on the actual XM radio instead of the Sirius-XM iPhone app on my iPhone. This would not have been necessary if AT&T’s 3G coverage wasn’t such a big bucket of suck.
Microsoft wants to make Bing the official search engine of teabaggers and birthers everywhere
Microsoft is in talks with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation to de-index every News Corp owned entity from Google and allow Bing, the new search engine owned by Microsoft, to become the only search engine for News Corp properties. This would mean that if you wanted to search for something on Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, or the New York Post, you would have to go to Bing, not Google. The same would apply to 20th Century Fox, Fox, Fox Sports, FX Networks, and a host of other entertainment and sports networks.
According to the Financial Times, News Corp isn’t the only media company approached by Microsoft to make Bing the exclusive search engine.
I cannot help but believe that this is a really stupid idea. Not just for News Corp, but for Microsoft too. A deal like this wouldn’t stop anyone from using Google to find News Corp related content. For instance, say Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck say something incredibly stupid on Fox News. If went to Google and performed a search of what they said, you might not find anything that directly links to Fox News, but you would still find a plethora of web content related to whatever Hannity or Beck said. Microsoft may pay News Corp money to de-link from Google, but that’s not going to stop bloggers and others from linking to News Corp entities.
These bloggers and others would simply move to the top of the Google search results.
A move like this would also hurt Bing’s credibility. I’m not sure being the official search engine of Fox News is anything to be proud of.
$1.5 million to teach people how to use Gmail?
The City of Los Angeles recently made news by announcing that they are turning to Google for their email needs. Instead of maintaining their own servers and staffing people to maintain the city’s massive email system, the people of Google will do it all for the. City employees will use web based Gmail instead of using a software based email system such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Mail.
Google is not doing it for free. The city will be paying out $7.2 million to make the transfer. Much of the cost is associated with making the new system more secure. A contract has been awarded to Computer Sciences Corp. to make the system air tight. In fact, if there is a breech in the security, Computer Sciences Corp. has to pay a fine.
Novell, is claiming that the cost to switch over to Google will cost the city an extra $1.5 million in hidden costs. The reason? To train city workers on how to use Gmail. It should be pointed out that Novel is sort of a competitor of Google. Novell was also vying to provide email services to the city of angels.
Google won, Novell lost.
The idea that city workers would need to be taught how to use Google’s wildly popular Gmail seems kind of silly to me. What office worker doesn’t know how to use Gmail? What’s next, will they need to be taught how to use eBay too?
I’m a a sharp-eyed blogger!
At least that is what Sara Dickerman over at Slate says:
The skull can serve as a piratelike threat, but historically it has also symbolized bravado in the face of death—a dual meaning that has made it popular among fighting units around the world. In the United States, special operations units have gravitated toward skull imagery in their insignia. During World War II, the death’s head, or totenkopf, was a hallmark of a number of Nazi SS uniforms—something that Wal-Mart unhappily discovered three years ago when a sharp-eyed blogger noticed that some of the retailer’s trendy skull shirts featured the distinctive grimace of the SS death’s head. Wal-Mart pulled the shirts and apologized, but it shows you that you have to be choosy about your skulls.
Of course Wal-Mart never really pulled the shirts unless that means that they simply continued selling the shirts till they were all gone. That’s what they did. The important thing is that they said they pulled the shirts from the shelves. To most people, that was enough. It didn’t matter that people were still finding the t-shirts on Wal-Mart shelves even 62 weeks after they said the shirts were removed.
The important thing is that I have been identified as a sharp-eyed blogger. Maybe I should add that to me resume.
I still hate comment moderation
I blogged once before about how much I hate it when bloggers ask readers to leave a comment and then after the reader takes the time to write a comment, the comment is withheld from being posted until the blogger gets a chance to first “approve” the comment.
It smacks of micromanaging and I hate it.
Early yesterday morning I tried to leave a comment over at Lifehacker. It was concerning a post about using cat litter to de-stink dirty, smelly shoes. Personally I thought it was a stupid piece of advice. If your shoes are smelling badly, I don’t think cat liter will fix the problem. If cat liter was really so magical, why do most cat boxes smell like cat urine and/or cat fices unless you clean them on a very regular basis? Smelly shoes are a sign that your feet have produced a ripe environment for bacteria to flourish.
Cat liter wont fix that problem.
Anyway, I tried to leave a quick comment, but after submitting my comment, I was told that my comment must fist be “approved”. If I had known that beforehand, I wouldn’t have bothered leaving a comment.
And that’s the thing that bothers me the most about blogs that resort to using comment moderation. They tend to keep the fact that someone must fist approve comments before they show up, a secret. The result is that if you read through the comments, you tend to think people are reacting in a way that very well might not be the way most people are reacting.
It’s dishonest.
NASA attacks the Moon
NASA sent a rocket into one of the craters on the Moon yesterday on the southern pole in the hopes that the rocket traveling nearly 6,ooo miles an hour would send up a massive plume of dust on impact so that a trailing probe could fly through the plume and analyze it for water.
The resulting plume of Moon dust was over 6 miles high.
Water (H2O) is important because it’s so expensive to take up to space. I once read that it cost $50,000 to take one gallon of water to space. Now I don’t know if that’s true, but I know that water is heavy, so in that regard, it does make sense. With water, oxygen can be extracted to make breathable air. Hydrogen can be extracted to make rocket fuel.
Water is important. It would be so much easy to send people to the Moon for extended periods of time if they could harvest water from the Moon’s dust.
Federal Trade Commission tells bloggers to stop acting like sleazeballs
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued revisions to guides that cover disclosure rules concerning endorsements, specifically endorsements coming from bloggers. The new guidelines state that if a blogger receives money in exchange for writing a review of a service or product, they must state this fact in the review.
From the FTC website:
The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service. Likewise, if a company refers in an advertisement to the findings of a research organization that conducted research sponsored by the company, the advertisement must disclose the connection between the advertiser and the research organization.
So what does this mean? It means that if a blogger writes about how much they enjoy website hosting from Go Daddy, but fail to mention that they are receiving a payment from Go Daddy in exchange for the positive word-of-mouth endorsement, they are in violation of the law. In fact, even if they are only receiving free website hosting from Go Daddy and they fail to mention this fact, they are in violation of the law. The FTC guidelines state that bloggers must disclose any “material connection” they have with the product that a normal, regular consumer would not have. That means that if you are reviewing a book on your blog and you received a copy of the book free-of-charge from the publisher, you need to disclose this fact.
I think this is a good thing. Then again, I’m biased. I blog as a hobby. I don’t run advertisements here. If I say I like something and recommend it to others, it’s because that’s what I really think. If I talk about how much I enjoyed a book or a movie, it’s because I went out on my own and procured the book or the movie like anybody else. When I state that I love Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, it’s because I truly love it. It’s not because I’ve been paid by Dunkin’ Donuts or because they’ve plied me with free coffee.
Every opinion I espouse here on this blog is mine and mine alone.
Apple fights Australian grocery store over vaguely similar looking logo
Evidently there’s a chain of Australian grocery stores named Woolworths that chose a logo that the powers that be at Apple believe looks just like their logo. You know, that logo that looks like an Apple.
Apple is attempting to block Woolworths from registering the logo with the Australian agency that is in charge of such things.
Personally, I’m not seeing that much of a similarity. Woolworths claims the logo represents the letter “W” shaped like an apple. Not the kind of Apple that makes overpriced computers and fancy cellphones, but the kind that grow on trees and are used to make delicious pies.
If anything, the Woolworths logo looks like something an Islamic terrorist would wear on his headband.
Tweetalarm is like Google Alert, only with Twitter
If you’re anything like me, you probably have more than a few keywords plugged in over at Google Alerts to find out if and when these keywords pop up on the World Wide Internet Web. With the popularity of Twitter, I’ve often wished there was something similar to Google Alerts for Twitter.
Now there is.
Tweetalarm is a free service that emails you imediately if and when certain keywords are tweeted. Check it out if this is the kind of thing that interests you.
The Music Balloon
I saw this speaker for the iPod (or any other audio device that has a 3.5mm jack) over at Unplugged and was immediately impressed with it’s awesomeness. Like most cool gadgets, it originates from Japan.
It comes in colors other than pink if that’s not your thing. Instead of using a battery, it comes with a USB cable to charge it for use. Looking at the specs, I don’t see the frequency spectrum that it encompasses, but something tells me that it falls short of 20Hz – 20,000Hz.
If you want one for yourself, it will run you ¥3,990 ($44.59).
The $148 space camera
Two M.I.T. students, Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh, constructed a special camera rig using nothing more than a weather balloon, a Styrofoam cooler, a basic Canon A470 point and shoot camera, a GPS-enabled prepaid cell phone so that they could track the setup when it came back to Earth, and some instant hand warmers to keep the camera and the cell phone from freezing.
Their result is this stunning photo that shows the curvature of the Earth.
My hope is that they can take this photo and present it to The View co-host Sherri Shepherd who said on a recent episode of The View that she did not know if the Earth was flat or not. I believe that if Shepherd had access to this photo that clearly shows the Earth curving, she would finally have enough information to formulate an educated opinion as to whether the Earth is flat or not.
If that were to be the case, then I say the $148 was well spent.
Adding a login to the header in WordPress
If you’ve been reading this blog for any period of time, I don’t have to tell you that I change the theme here quite often. One of the reasons I have a blog is because I like to toy around with it and play around with the code. In fact, it’s probably the main reason I have a blog.
Something I like in any theme I use is having a login located in the header. The problem is, not every theme has this useful feature. As problems go, it’s not really a major one in that it’s very easy to insert the needed code into any theme header. All you have to do is open the “header.php” file in the WordPress theme editor and insert the following code where you would like the handy login to appear:
<?php wp_meta(); ?>
<?php wp_register(); ?>
<li><?php wp_loginout(); ?></li>
It’s as easy as that. I generally insert it in the same span that contains the links to Home and any pages I have published.
My Samsung Blu-ray player wont play Blu-ray movies
I was watching Watchmen on Blu-ray last night when the picture froze. If you’ve seen the move, it was the scene where Silk Spectre and Nite Owl take a stroll down a dark alley and they end up going Old Testament on a bunch of street thugs who were up to no good.
I tried taking the disc out and cleaning it. I had just bought it so I didn’t know how it got dirty, but that was all I had in my digital disc troubleshooting bag of tricks. After cleaning off the nonexistent gunk from the disc, I tried to watch it again, but now my Blu-ray player wouldn’t read the Blu-ray disc at all.
I tried it again today, but the result was the same. I then tried playing another Blu-ray disc. The player wouldn’t read that disc either. I tried a regular old DVD disc and it read that disc without any difficulties.
My Samsung BD-P1500 will play DVD discs, but not Blu-ray discs. I’ve probably only watched five, maybe six Blu-ray discs on it and it now wont work.
I went to the Samsung website to see what I could now do. After entering in all of the applicable information, it informed me that though the machine was still under warranty for parts, it was no longer under warranty for labor. The warranty for parts is 12 months, while the warranty for labor is a mere 3 months. I was then advised to call Samsung to arrange a repair.
How lame is that? It would probably cost me more to have the unit repaired than it would to just buy a new player. I paid $200 for this one last Black Friday. I haven’t priced them lately, but I doubt Blu-ray players have gone up in price since then.
Not that I will ever buy anything made by Samsung ever again.
My blog posts are dishonest?
I had a few people leave comments on yesterday’s post about World Soccer Daily going off the air that I felt the need to delete. To say that deleting comments here is a rare occurrence is a huge understatement.
I don’t employ comment moderation and I generally allow people to say what they want in the comment section, as long as they are the ones actually saying it. What I don’t appreciate is when someone simply pastes the words of someone else from another blog or website into my comment section.
I usually delete these comments as spam.
This morning I received an email from one of the people who left comments yesterday that I had to delete. In his message to me, he encouraged me to post his email. I’ve decided to do that as well as reply to it.
Horace Steenblatter wrote:
From: Horace Steenblatter (hsteenblatter@yahoo.co.uk)
To: rick@bentcorner.com
Date: Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 7:19 AM
Subject: Your blog posts are dishonestYou are not deleting “something negative someone on another blog wrote concerning Steven Cohen.” You have repeatedly deleted comments that I’ve left under my own name which consisted of nothing but Cohen’s own words and Chelsea FC’s response to Cohen’s words. If you were actually concerned with disseminating factual information, you would let Cohen’s words speak for themselves rather than posting dishonest information which only contain a partial account of his words. How in the world is a post about Steven Cohen’s words “not the place” for Steven Cohen’s words?
Horace, your comments were not the only ones I felt the need to delete yesterday. Not that what you were actually leaving comments. You were simply pasting statements from other blogs and websites dedicated to getting Steven Cohen “fired” from his own radio show because he shared an opinion.
That’s what radio talk show hosts do in this country. They share opinions. Nobody says that you have to agree with it. Nobody says that you have to listen to it. Nobody says you have to like it.
I’ve posted the actual quote that got Steven Cohen in trouble with Liverpool supporters. You or anyone else re-posting it in the comment section is at best, unnecessarily redundant. It’s also not even important. Cohen only voiced his opinion about an historical event. People shouldn’t be shut down or threatened with physical harm because of their opinion.
At least not in the United States of America.
Furthermore, the comment section of my blog is not for you or anyone else to treat as their own personal blog. If you want to re-post content from other blogs or other websites, get your own blog and do it there.
Do not do it here.
I get email
Occasionally people read something I’ve written and feel moved to email me about. Here’s an email someone just sent me:
from: Michael Elmore (elmoremj@googlemail.com)
to: rick@bentcorner.com
date: Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 9:15 PM
subject: Steve “Scum” CohenWhy do you have so many posts defending Steve Cohen, what he said was clearly out of order and yet you continue to try and justify his statements. You are just as much a scum bag as him and without being blasphemes I have to say you need to find new friends other than the wretched Cohen who spouts evil from his putrid mouth!!!
For the record, I haven’t written a blog post “defending” Steven Cohen since May 2. I’ve since blogged about the controversy, but not to defend Cohen. In fact, my last blog post mentioning Cohen was to criticize him for asking listeners for monetary donations.
And for that I get called a scum bag? Michael Elmore has a point. If you are going to spout evil, you really should do it from a putrid mouth.
I once heard the origin of the term “scum bag.” It was pretty disgusting.
Give that mommy blogger some clunky foam rubber shoes or else
George G. Smith, Social Media Specialist for Crocs, the company that makes those funny looking foam rubber shoes that some people like to wear, recently attended BlogHer ‘09, a blogging conference for woman bloggers, and he was threatened by a mommy blogger with negative coverage on her blog unless he gave her some free shoes.
From Smith’s blog, No Sense of Timing:
“Are you the Crocs guy?” she asks, timidly.
I look up and smile. After all, it’s nice to be recognize and it’s a sign that I’m doing my job right.
“Yes, I am.”
We continue with small talk. She says her name but, while I probably caught it at the time, it slipped out of my memory as the events of the next couple moments transpired. She asked how I was doing at BlogHer. If I was having fun. How it felt to be one of the only men there – all those typical questions that were being asked of me. Then her demeanor changed completely. She mentioned how she didn’t get any shoes at the SocialLuxe lounge. I apologized, saying that we provided what we could but it’s hard because we didn’t know everyone’s shoe size. She nodded but I could tell that wasn’t the answer she wanted to hear. Then she says something that I couldn’t believe.
“Ya know, if you don’t give me shoes – I could totally write something bad about you on my blog.”
“Excuse me?” I asked – hoping she would laugh or give me some indication that she was just joking around. Nope…
“It’s just a pair of shoes. It’s a lot easier to give them to me than deal with the negative press I could make.”
I envy Smith. I have a list of things I want to do or experience before I die. One of the things on my list is to be threatened by a mommy blogger. If I was Smith, I could now cross that off my list.
It’s a shame that Smith doesn’t name the mommy blogger that threatened him, but he didn’t know who she was, which I’m guessing is one of the many reasons his response to her was to laugh and to tell what she could do with her threats.
Because I condone and encourage future cowards
I just got an email from someone complaining about something I blogged about two years ago . It reads:
from: Samuel Saunders
to: rick@bentcorner.com
date: Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 7:35 PM
subject: Your Photo of ChoI was doing some research on my Alma Mater, Virginia Tech and found your photo of Cho – it is quite offensive both to me and to hundreds of thousands of people. Have you ever thought that by posting this photo you are condoning his act and ultimately encouraging future cowards that may be considering such a heinous crime? There can be no justification for leaving a photo of such a wicked individual on your site. The fact that you leave it there says a lot about you and your site.
Sincerely,
Samuel F. Saunders
For the record, the reason I posted the photo of Cho was not to condone or encourage people like him, but to bring attention to the fact that NBC News plastered their logo on his photo.
This is the second complaint I’ve received this month concerning the Virginia Tech massacre. The first one can be read here.
What’s up with these people? Don’t they have anything better to do?
The most obnoxious request I have ever recieved
I got an email last night that ranks right up there with some of the strangest that I’ve received. And that says a lot.
Here it is:
From: Amanda Heckman
To: rick@bentcorner.com
Subject: Google Image Search
Date: Thu, 2 Jul 2009 23:11:29 -0500Please remove the Virginia Tech tag from your article on Cho. His image is one of the first that pop up when someone wants to find an image for Virginia Tech. It could be as simple as changing the tag to “Virginia Tech Tragedy.” I don’t want people to think of what he did every time they want to look up Virginia Tech.
Sincerely, Mandy
I write a blog post about the Virgina Tech massacre and I tag it with the words “Virgina Tech”. That’s what you are supposed to do when you write a blog post. You are supposed to tag what you’ve written with any applicable keywords. It allows search engines to find what you’ve written. It’s considered good search engine optimization (SEO).
When I first read this early this morning, I thought it was a goof. After having my coffee and reading it a second time, I came to the conclusion that it’s actually legit. This person, Amanda Heckman, evidently thinks that she is within her rights to ask me to edit something I’ve written because she doesn’t like how it’s showing up in search engine results. It’s not even about her, nor is she representing Virginia Tech in any type of official capacity. She sent the above email from an American Online account.
How obnoxious is that?
I have joined the iPhone revolution
Sheri and I stopped by our local neighborhood AT&T store and purchased iPhones. Instead of getting the fancy brand new 3G S iPhones, we purchased the regular old 3G iPhones. Even if we wanted the newest model, AT&T were all sold out. I heard them telling someone else that they only initially received 18 of the newest models and they sold out the first day. They didn’t think they would get any more for at least a month.
I didn’t see how the newer 3G S iPhones were that much of an improvement. Essentially the biggest difference was that it was capable of shooting video. I couldn’t care less about that.
I picked up a white 16 gig model and Sheri chose a black 8 gig model.
I’ve got to admit that I’m even more impressed with the iPhone than I thought I was going to be. Having constant access to the World Wide Internet Web is a life changer. While sitting on the sofa yesterday at my mother-in-law’s house, I was able to read my email and delete a spam comment here on my blog.
Speaking of my blog, I installed a special WordPress theme made specifically for iPhones or other smartphones, Carrington Mobile 1.0.2. Visitors reading this from a computer see the regular theme, visitors from an iPhone see a different theme all together that’s much easier to read on a tiny screen.
So far my favorite App is the Sirius XM App. It allows me to listen to Sirius XM directly from my iPhone either over the 3G network or any WiFi network. This is huge. This means that I can listen to Sirius XM anywhere I go. Oddly enough, just about everything that I listen to on Sirius XM is available on the iPhone except Howard Stern. His show is strangely absent from the lineup. What’s weird about this is he’s been speaking about a Sirius XM iPhone app for months. One finally comes out and his show is not on it? That’s weird. I guess he wants more money.
Evidently $500 million isn’t enough.
Opie and Anthony and Ron and Fez are on it, so it’s not that big of a deal. The thing that gets me is that I pay extra to for a Best of Sirius package that allows me to listen to Howard Stern (and the NFL). I also pay extra to be able to listen to Sirius XM over the Internet. I can listen to Howard Stern over the Internet on a computer, but not from my iPhone.
That’s really weird.
What happened to Air France 447?
I’m still trying to wrap my brain around what happened to Air France 447. The Airbus A330-200 departed Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for Paris, France on 31 May at 7:03 p.m with 228 souls aboard. Brazilian air traffic control lost radar contact at approximately 10:48 p.m.
The aircrew didn’t radio in that they had any problems.
Though the aircrew failed to send out a proper radio distress, the aircraft did. It sent out an automated message that indicated that the aircraft had lost cabin pressure and that there was an electrical failure.
The Brazilian Air Force has located a 3-mile area 375 miles off the Brazilian coast that they say is wreckage from Flight 447.
So what happened?
Every time something like this happens, I put myself in the place of the poor people aboard the plane. The thought of being stuck in a plane as it plummets to the ground, powerless to do anything, scares the crap out of me. I really hope they find what caused this.
More RAM fixes everything
What do you know, if you replace your laptop’s 512MB of memory with 2GB of memory, Ubuntu is much faster. Go figure.
I noticed a decline in performance shortly after upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04. I didn’t even realize my HP Pavillion dv6000 only had 512MB of RAM installed. I would have increased it a long time ago. I was able to get two (2) sticks of 1GB SoDIMM PC530 memory at Best Buy for only $34.99 each. I purchased them yesterday online and picked them up at the Hagerstown Best Buy on my way home from work today.
It couldn’t have been easier. Seriously, Best Buy has their stuff together when it comes to buying something online and then picking it up at the store.
Did Last.fm hand over user information to the RIAA?
I’ll be honest and admit that I never really understood what was so great about Last.fm. It’s a music community website based out of the UK that allows users to track their listening habits. Users can then share their musical listening habits with others on social networks or on blogs. I remember installing a WordPress plugin that displayed the recent albums that I’ve listened to on my iPod or in iTunes.
I quickly realized that I was rightfully embarrassed by my own musical tastes and promptly deleted the plugin. I don’t need the whole world knowing just how fond I am of 80’s new wave music.
It now appears that Last.fm wasn’t only making this information available to it’s users, but to the The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) as well.
From TechCrunch:
Last.fm didn’t hand user data over to the RIAA. According to our source, it was their parent company, CBS, that did it. That corresponds to what our original source said in conversations we had after our initial post and before CBS lawyers became involved. But we didn’t want to update until we had an independent source for that information, too.
I didn’t even know that CBS owned Last.fm. I’m sure that if I ever bothered to read the Last.fm user agreement, that tidbit of information was embedded deep in the fine print.
If this is truly, it’s truly a scummy thing to do on the part of CBS. Not that this would be the first scummy things they ever did.
Problems with Ubuntu 9.04
Ever since “upgrading” to Ubuntu 9.04, my notebook computer has been acting slow. Firefox will lock up and the screen will turn gray.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think someone came in when I wasn’t home and reinstalled Windows XP on it. Things just seemed a lot quicker when I was running the prior version of Ubuntu.
I think the problem is connected to Flash. I’ve been playing a lot of Bejeweled Blitz lately (that’s an understatement) on Facebook and it uses Flash. Maybe I should go a day or two without playing Bejeweled Blitz or watching videos and see if the problem goes away.
A whole day without Bejeweled Blitz? I might get withdrawals.
Hubble is fixed
Astronauts finished repairs and upgrades today to the Hubble telesope. NASA says that with these repairs and upgrades, the telescope is “better than new”. They then go on to say that this will enable the telescope to go on for another five to 10 years taking pictures of space.
If it’s as good as new, why will it only last for another five to 10 years?
The Hubble is now 19-years old. If it’s now as good as new, that means it should be able to go on taking pretty pictures of space for the next 19-years.
Local student suspended for posting a video to the Internet from home
An honor student from Musselman Middle School was suspended from school because she posted a 41 second video taken with her camera phone of a fight between to students from her school. As far as fights go, it’s not much of one.
The “fight” supposedly took place next to the Inwood, West Virgina school’s football field.
The girl posted the video to YouTube not from a school computer on school grounds, but from her home using her own computer. So why then was she suspended from school? According to her principal, James J. Holland, posting the video created more problems than the actual fight. He also didn’t like the fact that the video was put to music.
Uh huh. Posting a video is worse than a punch in the face? I don’t believe that. I’ve been punched in the face. I’ve been videoed. Getting punched in the face is far worse than appearing in a video that gets posted to the world wide Internet web.
You can’t even tell who the two kids fighting in the video are.
It could have been worse. The principle boasted in a voice mail message to the girl’s parents that he could have automatically suspended her for 10 days if he had ruled that posting the 41 second video was “cyber bullying.” I’m sure whoever came up with the rule against “cyber bulling” is glad that an idiot like principal Holland can misuse the rule as he sees fit.
I’m not sure what they teach at Musselman Middle School, but I’m guessing that the Bill of Rights, specifically the First Amendment is not covered very much.
What happens to your blog when you are dead?
Francis Wood, the Maryland woman who’s husband murdered her and their three children before killing himself had a blog. She maintained the blogspot blog What am I supposed to do now, where she blogged about personal issues including the stress her husband was under with his new job and the fact that she was taking an anti-depressant.
It’s kind of creepy to read.
She recently blogged about one of her children having emergency appendix surgery. It’s somewhat unsettling to read when you realize this young boy who needed surgery only a month ago is now dead, brutally murdered by his own father. Before shooting him with a .25 caliber handgun, he reportedly cut him repeatedly with a knife.
Reading her blog made me think of something I had never thought about before: what happens to your blog when you die?
Since Francis Wood had her blog over on Google’s free blogging service Blogspot, I imagine her blog will be around for quite awhile. Since there are no fees to pay to keep it online, it very well may be floating about the World Wide Internet Web for years to come.
Since I have my blog on AQHost, a paid hosting site, I imagine it would only be around for a month or two after I kick the proverbial bucket and can no longer make the monthly payment. Then again, I pay my monthly hosting fee with an automatic credit card payment. Maybe it would continue taking up Internet space, at least until my card was canceled.
And what happens to your Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook page when you are now longer sucking oxygen? I’m not so sure that I like the idea of my Facebook or Twitter page living longer than me. Maybe there should be some kind of deadman’s switch that requires you to log-on once a week. If you don’t, you will be presumed dead. I don’t want to die and have my fake friends on Twitter and Facebook leaving fake messages about my demise.
Making the entire header a clickable link
You will notice that when you run your mouse anywhere over my blog’s header that it is one big clickable link. Clicking anywhere on the header that does not have it’s own link takes to directly back to the main page.
It’s an easy hack to accomplish. All you have to do is open the WordPress header.php file in any text editor or the default WordPress editor and insert the following line where you would like this clickable aspect to begin:
<div onclick="location.href='http://bentcorner.com/';" style="cursor: pointer;">
It’s imperative the you also insert a </div><!--end clickable area--> where you want this clickable area to stop being clickable. Otherwise, not only will the rest of your blog be one huge clickable link back to the main page, the remaining formatting will be off.
It’s always a good idea to make a back-up of header.php before you start messing with it. Of course, you will also want to change ’bentcorner.com’ to the url of your own blog, that is unless you want your blog’s header area to be a clickable link to my blog. That would just be crazy.
Troubleshooting a WordPress slowdown
I noticed this morning that my blog was talking an overly excessive amount of time to load. The page would begin to freeze as soon as the first post’s title would appear on the screen. Even when I would try to load just a single post, the load time would exceed over 20 seconds.
It’s been my experience that most slowdowns in WordPress can be attributed to a plugin. To find out if a problem is coming from a plugin, go to the WordPress Manage Plugins page and temporarily bulk deactivate all plugins, then try reloading your blog. If it now loads quickly, you know the slowdown is coming from a plugin.
How then do you find out which plugin is causing the slowdown?
Go back to the WordPress Manage Plugins page and bulk activate half of your installed plugins, leaving the other half deactivated. Try reloading your blog. If it is loading slow again, you know the guilty plugin was in the group of plugins you just activated. If instead your blog is still loading quickly, you know it’s in the group of plugins that are still deactivated.
When I tried this, my blog was still loading quickly. I went to the deactivated plugins and activated them one by one, reloading my blog in a another browser window. It wasn’t until I reactivated the Related Websites plugin that I experienced a slow down. I went back and deactivated it and resumed reactivating the remaining plugins, hitting the refresh button in another other browser window each and every time.
When I verified that none of the other plugins was causing my blog to load slowly, I once again reactivated Related Websites. Once again, it slowed everything down.
This confirmed that it was the Related Websites plugin that was causing the slow down. Once I knew this, I was able to uninstall it permanently.
The Pirate Bay
A Swedish court on Friday found Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde, the three men that founded the popular bit torrent site The Pirate Bay guilty of aiding in copyright infringement by linking to songs, films, TV shows, audio books, comic books, video games and other similar material. Carl Lundstrom, the man that provided financing for The Pirate Bay, was also convicted.
Each man was sentenced to a year in prison. They were also ordered to pay $3.6 million in damages to Warner Brothers, Columbia, Twentieth Century Fox, Sony BMG and EMI.
The defendants have maintained that they were innocent because they never actually hosted any of the copyrighted material on their servers. They only directed people where to go to get the material in question.
As of now, The Pirate Bay is still up and running. The last I read, most of their servers are no longer still even in Sweden.
Custom Query String 2.9
I wanted to limit the number of posts that appear on the front page to four posts, but wouldn’t limit the number of posts that appear on the archive pages to only four posts. Since only the titles are displayed on the archive pages, I wanted those to show 100 posts. The normal default WordPress does not allow you to do this. If you want only four posts to show on the front page, you will only show four posts on every other page too.
I found a plugin that allows me to do this, Custom Query String 2.9. It does exactly what good plugins do: it works exactly like it’s supposed to.
Google PageRank
I read that Google is doing an update to the number it assigns to websites for it’s PageRank link analysis algorithm. There are websites you can go to where you enter in a website’s URL and it will spit out a Google PageRank number.
The number ranges from 0 to 10 with 10 being the best.
I checked this website and it’s currently sitting at 5. The problem is, I don’t know what it used to be. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever checked it out before. I tried looking for a tool that would tell me what it used to be, but I couldn’t find anything. If anyone knows how to figure out past Google PageRank ratings, please let me know.
60 Minutes tries to scare people about the Conficker worm
Lesley Stahl did a piece last night on 60 Minutes about the Conficker virus and it was obvious from watching the segment that nobody involved in producing it knows the slightest thing about computers or Internet security.
It was actually embarrassing to watch.
At no time in the segment was it ever mentioned that the Conficker virus only affects computers using a Microsoft operating system. It doesn’t effect computers using Linux. It doesn’t effect Macs. It only affects computers running Windows.
Even than, if you are keeping up to date with security updates from Microsoft, you don’t have anything to worry about. If you are using a anti-virus such as AVG Free, you have nothing to worry about.
Tough economic times means people might be going back to dial-up Internet service
Evidently the economic crisis we find ourselves in is so bad that people might soon be ditching their pricey broadband Internet and downgrading back to dial-up. From the Chicago Tribune:
While it’s unlikely Americans will ditch broadband for dial-up en masse, there are likely to be some people who find the $20 to $50 monthly fees for DSL or cable modem broadband service to be too high, when dial-up providers such as NetZero are offering new $9.95 service plans.
I remember when I got rid of old fashioned dial-up and hooked up with Antietam Cable broadband, not only did I get blazing fast Internet, I was actually saving money. How was broadband Internet cheaper? Dial-up was costing me $25, plus, I was paying for a second phone line so that I could talk on the phone and receive phone calls while being on the Internets. That second phone line was costing me at least an extra $20. Once I switched to the more expensive $40 monthly broadband, I was able to cancel the second phone line.
Things are obviously different now in that dial-up is evidently cheaper. The article says that you can get NetZero dial-up for less than ten bucks.
The problem I have with this theory is that even in this current economic crisis, unless you’ve recently lost your job, you probably have just as much money as you had a year ago. If you have lost your job, you probably are in need of a good Internet connection than ever before. How are you supposed to find a new job if you cannot search for a job on the Internet? Also, if money is so tight, why do you still have a land-line telephone? If you really wanted to save money, I can think of no better place to start than to ditch the land line telephone and start using your cellphone exclusively.
A sundial for the XXI century
A guy takes a laser from a level, a RC servo, a micro controller, and a big chunk of white wall and creates a high-tech laser powered sundial. He also posted the instructions so that anyone can make one.
I’m tempted to make one myself. We’ve got lots and lots of big white walls in the new apartment. I’ve got a couple laser levels. I’ve also got oodles and oodles of electronics know-how. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems I’m destined to make one of these.
Animation on Blu-ray: is there a difference?
When the Watchmen motion comic was released on March 3rd, I found myself wondering which version I should purchase. Should I buy the high-definition Blu-ray version or the regular DVD version? Would I really see a difference between to the two formats?
I went ahead and picked up the Blu-ray version.
I’ll be perfectly honest and admit that I sometimes can’t tell a difference in quality between Blu-ray and regular DVD. Not that I’ve watched the same movie in each format side-by-side. That would be a fun experiment to stage, if it were at all possible.
When I moved from VHS to DVD, I noticed a huge difference in quality. When I moved from cassette tape to CD, I noticed a huge difference. When I moved from regular definition TV to high definition TV, I noticed a huge difference. When I moved from DVD to Blu-ray, I didn’t really see much of a difference.
I can only imagine that an animated movie with a limited spectrum of colors will have even a less pronounced difference in quality than a live-action motion picture.
I noticed recently at Suncoast that the Japanese anime classic Akira is now available in the high-def, Blu-ray format. Would I notice the difference between it and the DVD version I already own?
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Some people should really learn how Facebook works
Her comment to me was both insulting and extremely hateful.
I know this because when she posted the comment, an email was automatically sent to me by Facebook showing me her comment as well as a link to the comment on Facebook. When I clicked the link, it only showed the original comment thread. Her hateful reply to me was missing.
I can only guess that she regretted leaving the comment and deleted it from Facebook. The problem with that is, I still read the comment in the email.
People really ought to learn how Facebook, or for that matter, the Internet works. If you insult someone and call them names, deleting the comment doesn’t really do anything.