Just another WordPress site

Tag: interesting

  • search terms that bring people here

    see, we have now added several thousand words to our site with these blogs, so, we show up more in search results, so, we are getting many many more hits…
    and, following the tradition of posting interesting keywords, here are some that i thought were odd or cool or whatever…

    let me get our regular keyword stuff out of the way first…

    for as long as we have had our collection online, we get lots of hits from people looking for dreamcast stuff, since our dreamcast page has a lot of stuff, a few rare items people would be looking for, full titles, and even catalog numbers… dreamcast-related searches are our biggest bringers of traffic…

    next, or maybe tied, would be all the searches for porn using google image search… you see, the directory of pics from when we saw a band called “Bozo Porno Circus”, every pic has “porno” in the filename…

    we also get a surpring number of hits for people looking for the “sounds from hell” wav file that is in our wav directory…

    recently, we have also been getting some hits from people searcing for movie titles, and a few for bands we have mentioned here and there on the site…

    and, with my recent posts on the subject, we are pulling in some mp3 blog-related searches…

    ok, now for the singularities…

    whisper dish
    mentioned in the post from when we went to alamogordo…

    jesse diaz pastor las vegas
    mentioned in my recent post about our wedding…

    virtual drugs
    yeah, made a post about that…

    clive barker signing pics forbidden planet
    whoa… huh?
    i assume those terms match to the “horror night” post, but, i have no clue what this guy was looking for…

    what is the k-pax alternate ending plot spoiler
    so, lemme’ think… probably the “list of movies we have seen” post and the “horror night” post appear on the same archive page and have all those terms between them…

    talking cat video
    whoa, now that is a weird one… i would have to poke around a bit to figure out where they landed…

    intitleindex.of mp3 chab
    this may be the oddest one… who would be looking for mp3’s and chabs simultaneously?
    though, both are in our media directory, i don’t know anyone else besides us who keeps voice chabs online…
    or is there a band called chab?
    (btw, for non-dc’ers, “Ch@b”, sometimes spelled “Chab” in casual use, is a japanese instant messager service, and is built in to japanese Dreamcast browsers… it is the only real IM choice for dreamcast browser users…)

    limpbizkit.mid
    i thought the midi craze was over… we have not added any to our collection in a long time, and only have this one for something like historical value, in that it is the first midi we ever in heard…

    amarillo yard signs
    argh! does this mean someone knows the story behind these??? or are they also searching for the answer?

    archived yahoo webcam feeds
    i don’t get this one, either… feeds are live, not archived, and what is a ‘yahoo webcam’?
    nor can i think off the top of my head where they might have landed on our site using these terms… though, now that i think about it, i bet most or all of those terms appear in the sidebar of every page of my blog here…

    dreameye homebrew
    well, THAT would be nice… but, i don’t think anyone is working on it…

    angelfire briefcase links page
    don’t get this one… what is an angelfire briefcase? i know yahoo briefcases, but, not angelfire… and are they searching for a page of links TO angelfire briefcases? i just don’t get it…
    anyway, the terms all probably appear on our sitemap…

    penn jillette pc computing
    good to know someone else reads them… (you can read tem, too, if you follow the “Penniphile” link on my sidebar…)

    so, nothing TOO terribly exciting, but, we are just gettin started here and many more words will be added as months roll by, which means man more interesting search terms…
    so, i will post about this again in the future…

  • virtual worlds, virtual drugs

    http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,63578,00.html
    damn fascinating…

    here are some excerpts…

    The world of massively multiplayer online games is often a dangerous place, what with constant threats from bloodthirsty monsters and murderous non-player characters. But now players have even more peril to contend with: addictive drugs that can incapacitate or kill their characters.

    The designers of Achaea, one of the biggest online text-based games, have recently introduced a virtual addictive drug — known as gleam — as part of a story line in which a crime ring has been attempting to infiltrate the game’s cities. And some players can’t take it fast enough.

    Achaea characters who take gleam get hooked quickly — suffering typical addiction symptoms: violent vomiting, shivering, irrational sobbing, begging for the drug and even overdoses resulting in death. Some of the game’s players are angry about gleam’s introduction into their world.

    and then, there are virtual performance-enhancing virtual drugs…

    In A Tale in the Desert, players discovered that by dosing their characters with a potion called Speed of the Serpent, they could gain extra waypoints, a valuable attribute allowing for instant travel across the game’s wide three-dimensional globe.

    Speed of the Serpent was poisonous, though, and required the ingestion of an antidote within 30 days, or the character would die. If a player took the potion a second time, the antidote was needed within 29 days; a third use meant 28 days and so on.

    Eventually, as players succumbed to their desire for the extra waypoints, the interval between potion and antidote was short enough that even the hard-core couldn’t keep up. According to Andy Tepper, the game’s lead designer, 18 players’ characters have died from addiction to Speed of the Serpent, more than from any other cause in the game’s history. Unlike in many multiplayer online games, where death means little, in A Tale in the Desert, a character’s death is final. It means starting over from the beginning, no small price for dabbling in a little performance-enhancing potion.

    meanwhile, elsewhere in the virtual multiverse…

    But even the larger games have elements some consider akin to addictive substances. For example, in Galaxies, smuggler-class players traffic in spices, spells that increase characters’ skills.

    In an article in RPG Expert called “Life of a Smuggler,” the author wrote that spices can offer terrific benefits, such as increased strength. Yet there are also side effects, like lowered strength and vomiting, that last as long as the high.

    Given the side effects, though, one might ask why the risk is worthwhile. [the eternal addict question, eh? -i_p] The author’s answer sounds just like it came from a real-world drug dealer.

    “OK, who will buy and use your spices? Almost everyone that tries them a few times gets hooked,” the article read. “Free samples are good for business!!”

  • My LJ Feeds Link

    i would just like to call attention to this link, since i get a daily kick out
    of it…
    over there on the menu on the left of this page, under “Links”, is a link that
    says “My LJ Feeds”…
    this is part of the “Friends Page” features on LiveJournal…

    for those not familiar with the concept of feeds, it is a way to gather
    content from a site, without going there… this blog of mine has an atom xml
    feed, so, you could get my posts in your favorite “feed aggregator” (along
    side feeds from other sites), rather than stopping by to see if i’ve posted
    anything new or signing up for the email notification…
    at livejournal, people set up xml/rss/etc. feeds for various sites, or use
    feeds already offered and you can add those feeds to your lj friends page for
    a public online aggregator… there are hundreds of choices, everything from
    daily comics like garfield and dilbert, to news, weather, movie reviews, all
    sorts of stuff…
    you just have to see it to appreciate the sheer coolness of it…
    since i have few lj friends, i fill it up with these feeds and then i get
    stuff from sites i would not otherwise go to everyday, in one convenient
    trip… so, you can see the stuff i am interested in and, if you share those
    interests, it can make for a good daily visit…

    here are the feeds i have on there currently…

    some post several items a day, some once a day, some once a week or once a
    month, some post rarely, which makes it even handier to have it appear on my
    feeds page… and some may be broken, so, i am still waiting for them to post
    something…

    firstly, i get posts at “syn_promo”, where people publicize cool feeds they
    have found or have made…

    astronomy photo of the day

    ask yahoo
    answering trivia and imponderables, using yahoo

    blog of death
    sort of a big, far-reaching obits page

    boingboing blog

    coming soon
    a movie news site

    dictionary.com’s word of the day

    engadget
    gadget news, reviews, etc.

    filmadd
    news of movies added to the Internet Archive

    filmtease
    an unusual movie trailer review site

    found magazine’s find of the week
    unusual objects people find

    aaron swartz’s googleblog
    a blog about google

    googleblog
    the official blog of google.com

    penniphile
    the writings of penn jillette, mostly new entries to “road penn”

    word spy
    dealing with new terms, slang, etc. as they enter the language

    quote of the day
    not as good as refdesk.com’s quotes of the day, but, they have more than one
    per day, so it sort of balances out

    snopesrecentadd
    one of my favorites, posting urban legends as they are added to snopes.com

    thinkgeek
    various merchandise of interest to those involved in modern technology

    and wordsmith’s word of the day

    oh, and almost forgot, i also get “ljnifty” where people post various fun
    things you can do with livejournal, such as adding feeds to your friends
    page…

    and i add cool new ones as i find them… and occasionally remove the ones
    that get annoying or boring…

    anyway, if that sounds interesting to you, as i said, the link is on the menu
    on the left side of this page… “My LJ Feeds”
    i stop by at least once a day and it is a pretty good collection at this
    point, after some tweaking…

    now if only i could get scifi.com’s “today in sci-fi history” on there, which
    is almost always interesting to sci-fi buffs… (there is a link to this, as
    well, over there on the left…)
    i would add the fark.com feed, but, it does not have comments links and the
    comments threads are at least half the fun of fark…

    btw, geez, it seems today is list day on my blog…
    admittedly, i am trying to come up with posts to make so i can knock that huge
    “april pics” post off the front page…

  • 30 Years of Penn & Teller

    verily, so says this tidbit on yahoo news via i forget who…

    heros of mine, they are…
    so, i thought of the link in our little orrl thing…

    the writings of Penn Jillette
    (yes, the big one of Penn & Teller)
    Philosopher Warrior Extraordinaire… from his articles for PC-Computing, dating back to 1990, his Excite articles of the late 90’s, plenty of various writings, articles, columns, on a wide variety of subjects, and his wonderful “Road Penn” journal, beginning in april, 2000 and continuing to this day… also has interviews, chat scripts, and more….
    jan30,03 – they lost their domain name, so, for now, this link goes to the wayback machine’s archive of the page…

    and it still does as their new site seems to no longer have their writings…
    (btw, the most recent link there on web archive is to a copy made AFTER a porn site got their domain name, so, go for second most recent or older…)

    one of my favorites, of course, is one he did in ’92, i believe, for pc computing, called “We’re All Going to Hell”…

    ok, i was wrong…
    his writings ARE on the new site…
    well, good…

  • 101 Ways to Save the Internet

    [moved from my LiveJournal, where there are also comments on this post that i have not moved to here…]

    101 Ways to Save the Internet [wired.com]

    Where’s a superhero when you need one? The Net, which once seemed so invincible, is under attack by the forces of evil. Viruses knock servers to their knees.. Spammers hijack our inboxes. Hackers and identity thieves menace our collective security and personal privacy.
    Desperate solutions range from abandoning email to requiring a license to log on. Halt, fools! The Internet’s problems stem from the same virtues that make it great: open architecture, the free flow of information, peer-to-peer cooperation, and a bias for linking strangers, not disconnecting them. Take those away and the Net might cease to infuriate us – but it will also cease to amaze us.

    Here’s a smarter approach: 101 proposals that harness the Net’s own superpowers to defeat its foes. Up, up, and away!

    a few examples…

    Build a .sex red-light district – Icann, the committee that assigns top-level Internet domains, refuses to create an adult zone that can easily be kept from kids’ eyes. Porn won’t disappear, so deal with it.

    from the “Microsoft To-Do” section of the list…

    Hey Steve, fire someone – Somebody’s not living up to the company’s tough talk on fixing bugs. Developers, developers, developers should be accountable, accountable, accountable.

    Give away a good spam filter

    Ship antivirus wizard – Why can’t the paper clip guy tell us something important, like “This message is infected with Sobig”?

    Take the blame – Software license agreements that absolve you of, oh, deleting three years’ worth of email are irresponsible. Bugs are negligence, and negligence should cost you, not us.

    from the “Google To-Do List”

    Crawl the Internet Archive

    Let us link to a page we hate without boosting its ranking

    from the “Your To-Do List” section…

    Switch your ISP – Some offer anti-spam and anti-virus tools and support. If your current provider won’t help you defend yourself, find another that will.

    Death to fax machines – Send us an attachment instead.
    Stop with the jokes – If we get the one about French military victories one more time, we’re going to come over and unplug you personally.

    people who continuously forward junk to me get treated like any other spammer…
    people, please, just repeat the mantra from the Earthlink Internet Hour radio show:

    I will not forward forwarded email
    I will not forward forwarded email
    I will not forward forwarded email

    Turn off your HTML email – It makes you vulnerable to viruses – and bugs us.

    Tell Kelly on Geocities to take down her Macarena tribute page It’s over, Kel.

    damn straight! i have written much on this subject in the past and i am sure i will write more in the future…

    Celebrate diversity – With nearly every computer on the planet running Windows, Outlook, and Explorer, it’s too easy for a single virus to spread everywhere.

    and, finally…

    Add a “Skip All Flash Intros” option to Macromedia players

    in the words of Sam Steele, “Flash is evil.”…

    ok, final thought, say it with me now…

    I will not forward forwarded email
    I will not forward forwarded email
    I will not forward forwarded email

    go and do likewise…