“Should I take a class to lose my southern accent?” -Ben Folds

Apparently, it would be entirely unnecessary:

Once upon a time there was a TV show called Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place. The show never did that well ratings-wise, which lead them to develop the ongoing romantic interest between two of the three leads faster than a show otherwise might. They also determined that the title may be too complicated for modern audiences, so they dropped the pizza joint, leaving the show as Two Guys and a Girl. It wasn’t the greatest show, but it did leave me curious how things would turn out.

Meanwhile, at about that same time in the land of Napster, it was really difficult to download anything by the band “Live” because, well, any live song recorded by anyone would show up on the search results. You had to pretty much go song by song until Audio Galaxy came along.

Today, on BitTorrent, I discovered that trying to retrieve episodes of the old TV show Two Guys and a Girl makes for a naughty query indeed.

Eugene Volokh noticed a shirt that says </hate>, which presumably means “end hate”. Eugene points out that what it’s really saying is “end hate for now” and will probably resume later, since most </i> are on documents that resume italics later (or at least reserve the right to).

I bet the guy has a <hate> T-shirt in his closet that he was wearing three days before; he’s hated all the stuff between then and the </hate> shirt; and he’ll be wearing the <hate> shirt next time he’s got some hating to do. Plus he certainly wouldn’t just wear the shirt without having worn <hate> before, and on the same page — that would be syntactically non-compliant.

So the solution would then be a shirt that says </hate></html>… except that might just call for the end of mankind, which would kind of defeat the purpose.

I found this by way of Dustbury, who points out that <i> is, in fact, being retired (or at least depricated) in favor of <em> by the powers that be.

I’ve just updated the site’s bio page. I’d updated it about a month ago but for some reason I either didn’t save it or it reverted back to the old one. Please pretty much ignore that one. The current one is more accurate and more pertinent to the current direction of the site.

Also, there’s a Frequently Asked Questions page. That’s a bit dishonestly named since no one has really asked any questions. So in the name of accuracy in page titles, if you have any questions about me or the site, feel free to ask them.

As soon as the thought occured to me, I was pretty sure that some quiz must exist on the Internet.

The sorting hat says that I belong in Ravenclaw!

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Said Ravenclaw, "We’ll teach those whose intelligence is surest."

Ravenclaw students tend to be clever, witty, intelligent, and knowledgeable.
Notable residents include Cho Chang and Padma Patil (objects of Harry and Ron’s affections), and Luna Lovegood (daughter of The Quibbler magazine’s editor).

Take the most scientific Harry Potter
Quiz ever created.

Get Sorted Now!

I got 67 on Ravenclaw, 65 on Slytherin, 61 on Hufflepuff, and 48 on Gryffindor. After putting some thought into it I figured that I would get Ravenclaw or, if not Ravenclaw then Hufflepuff. The high score for Slytherin came as a bit of a surprise since the Sytherin House sounds like just about everything I hated about my upper middle class high school. A separate quiz said Hufflepuff.

“All you have to do is answer a pathetically easy question and you get a free XBox 360!” the ad told me.

The funny thing was when I put my mouse over the add, it didn’t matter which answer I clicked, or even if I clicked on the question itself… they all went to the same place, congratulating me for winning. Now, if I would just fill out this questionnaire and subscribe to 40 copies of Vibe magazine, I will be put in a raffle for my free XBox.

One of my giant pet peeves is with companies whose advertising is so blatantly dishonest that I wonder how those that do marketting for these companies can live with themselves. I really wonder how they do. At a dinner party, how do you tell people that you’re the guy that creates those obnoxious Flash ads on web pages that offer something for free that quite obviously isn’t or, more recently, promise to be able to download TV shows and whatnot free and legal when it’s neither.

Case and point: Put the name of a TV show, just about any TV show, into a Google search and GoogleAds will have at least one site offering downloads. Sometimes they say “free!” and sometimes they don’t, but in most cases you can’t download them. One day I was bored and it took 15 minutes of searching around the website to confirm that the show did not exist in their service — even though they were advertising specifically for that series. Of course, it’s all part of a little database they have going, but someone somewhere entered that show into the database knowing full well that it isn’t available.

“What do you do for a living, Mr. Jones?”

“I market a product that doesn’t exist in an effort to get people to come to a website that doesn’t really sell anything in particular but ads to other websites, that usually themselves don’t sell anything in particular.”

—

My former coworker Edgar was a halfwit. His mind never developed to the point that he could see through it when people could say they are offering an actual service, when in fact they are offering something that doesn’t exist, something that is free anyway, or something that isn’t legal. He signed on to a service that offered “unlimited free and legal music downloads” for $50. It was essentially a software program that latched itself on to Gnutella’s network with a note saying that he needed to find something that was free and track it down and download it himself. He paid $50 and when we explained it all to him he literally started crying.

“What do you do for a living, Mr. Jones?”

“I make dimwitted people cry by taking advantage of their naivete.”

—

As is frequently the case with new phone numbers, most calls I get on my cell phone are wrong numbers. Since my cell phone is in a different area code than that in which I live, I can usually see them coming. Today, though, I was expecting a phone call so I quickly, and excitedly, answered.

It seems there was this lady on the line that was very generous. You see, she wanted to give me stuff. All kinds of stuff. Free magazines, a free watch… and on and on. Just more and more stuff. Free!

It’s hard to be rude to a lady that’s giving you stuff. It’s hard to say that you don’t want free stuff. That, of course, is how they keep you on the line when they finally tell you that to get all this stuff, you need to buy this one teensy weensy little thing. And join this program. But you can cancel at any time! Any time at all! Just call and cancel and you get to keep all this free stuff.

There ought to be a law. Not banning them from their sales pitch, cause it wasn’t a bad idea and they got my number legitimately (note to self: have a word with my credit card company). But if they want money, they ought to be legally required to tell me so in the first minute of the conversation. That’s all I ask. Then I can save them all a bunch of time because no matter how good the deal is, I will not ever accept an offer from someone that I did not initially contact.

“What do you do for a living, Mr. Jones?”

“I give people stuff for free that they have to pay for.”

—

Way back when the Internet was younger, my then-girlfriend Julie spent an hour working her way through this website that promised to enter in to a $500 raffle. I was very blunt about how much she was just wasting her time and that there wasn’t a raffle or that her time would be better spent doing just about anything else.

A month or so later she got a check for $500 and I got the taste of fresh crow.

“What do you do for a living, Mr. Jones?”

“I give people stuff for free. Free as in without cost.”

That’s a job I wouldn’t mind so much having, though that actually might be harder to explain to people than actually being an internet marketing scumbag.

This post is a test. It is only a test. If this were an actual post, there would be content here of interest to somebody.

This post is a test. It is only a test. If this were an actual post, there would be content here of interest to somebody.

Via Logtar:

Four jobs I wish I had the capabilities of:

1. Police officer
2. Soldier
3. Musician
4. Graphic artist
Bonus: Superhero

Four names I wish I had other than my own:

1. Will/William/Truman (I chose these for my pseudonym largely because they are relevent to me for personal/family reasons, but also because I like them.)
2. Ray/Raymond (or Rayford, for the sake of being unique!)
3. Ted/Edward
4. Craig

Four of my favourite actresses:

1. Penelope Ann Miller
2. Sela Ward
3. Maura Tierney
4. Bonnie Hunt

Four songs I could listen to over and over again:

1. “Down on The River By the Sugar Plant” -M Doughty
2. “The Ballad of Barry Allen” -Jim’s Big Ego
3. “Spiraling Shape” -They Might Be Giants
4. “What a Good Boy” -Barenaked Ladies

Four TV shows I love to watch:

1. The Wire/The Shield (two different shows, but only run for 10-15 episodes instead of the traditional 20-30)
2. Frasier (always more like a theatrical play than a sitcom to me)
3. Boy Meets World (It’s purely a sitcom, but it’s about as good as I can imagine a family sitcom to be, even in reruns)
4. 24

Four places I would like to go to on vacation:

1. Turkey (where the Middle East meets Europe)
2. Eastern Europe
3. Australia (America’s long-lost cousin)
4. Israel

Four of my favourite cuisines:

1. Enchiladas
2. Fettacini Alfredo
3. Crawfish
4. King Ranch Cassarole

Four places I wish I was right now:

1. Back in Colosse
2. As a music show
3. Somewhere that’s not quite so hot
4. Right here

Hit Coffee has been hit with a flurry of comment spammers lately and unfortunately action must be taken. I’ve looked through the options for WordPress and found what I believed to be the least intrustive, most effective way to cut back on bot-comments. Hereforth, to post a comment you will have to answer a very easy math problem.