Um. If you’re having trouble downloading something from my site and decide to e-mail me, it would probably be a good idea to write something a bit more specific than “i cant download it”…

…and yes, someone sent an e-mail of which that was the entirety. Why else would I be ranting?

Via ThisIsBroken.com, here’s a really baaaa-d translation from French regarding Tolkien’s famous fantasy trilogy.

(And for those who are wondering how that mistranslation could possibly have been made, it helps to know that the French word for lambs is agneaux…)

[Edited to add: Also, tours can mean either “towers” and “turns”. Naturally, the translator made the wrong choice there as well.]

Spellbound, the National Spelling Bee documentary, will be coming to DVD on January 20 of next year according to amazon.com.

Mark your calendars, spelling bee geeks. And I mean that in the nicest possible way; of course, what would you expect since I fall into that category myself? 😉

Well, yesterday was my birthday. I’m now officially 21 years old. And somehow, I didn’t manage to find any time yesterday to write a blog entry about it.

Why? If you thought I was too busy getting drunk… BZZT! Wrong answer.

I was too busy playing Dance Dance Revolution on my new dance mat (eating cake in between rounds, naturally). My friends and I also went out last night to watch The Last Samurai, which we all thoroughly enjoyed, even if they did fudge a few details regarding Japanese traditions.

It wasn’t a very eventful birthday, to be sure, but I got a rather good amount of exercise on it…

And no, I don’t feel even remotely like I’m 21. I still feel like I’m, oh, about 16 or so. I swear, one of these days it will hit me that I’m actually this old, but I’m not sure when exactly that will be…

Admit it: we all say stupid things from time to time.

For instance, I was just talking to a friend about a final I just took, and I attempted to say that the test was shorter than I had expected it to be. Apparently my brain has been fried as a result of taking all these finals, because what I ended up saying was that “it was shorter than it was”.

::slaps head:: I’m not quite sure how that would exactly be possible…

In the tradition of the Deuce of Clubs’ Switcheroo, the Image Lifting Imposter Prank, and Heather Champ’s “queen of the known universe” image swap, I’ve thwarted yet another bandwidth thief.

Some guy on Geocities did a site on Internet advertising, and pulled images of ads from various sites. The thing is, however, that instead of mirroring the images in his own web space, he simply hotlinked directly to the original domains. One of those images that he had hotlinked just happened to be my own local mirror of a particularly annoying ad that I had seen; and naturally, the hits from this guy’s site were showing up quite a bit in my server logs.

So, without further ado, I decided to use the opportunity to get some free advertising for my own site. 😀

The result can be seen at: http://www.geocities.com/poscadvertising/

And if the designer of this site happens to discover his mistake, well, I’ve taken a screenshot of the site, both pre- and post-switcheroo, for posterity.

Let this be a warning to anyone who tries to link directly to images hosted on my domain…

It’s official: Britain’s Plain English Campaign has given its “Foot in Mouth” prize to U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. And I quote:

Rumsfeld, renowned for his uncompromising tough talking, received the prize for the most baffling comment by a public figure.

“Reports that say something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know,” Rumsfeld told a news briefing.

“We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Wow. I’ve got to admit, that makes my own incoherence sound strangely coherent…

[EDITED 28-Nov-2003 @ 1:05 PM: I posted an update earlier claiming that the site had been fixed, as it momentarily worked for me and several others as of midnight last night. Apparently this was only a temporary change; it seems that the site is now back to blocking all browsers but MSIE/Win! Thanks to several people for pointing this out.]

[EDITED 30-Nov-2003: It didn’t work in IE/Mac before, but apparently they’ve fixed that particular problem; the site also works with a Safari user-agent header. Still… are there any Mozilla or Netscape 6+ users at Cox’s support department?]

Accessing http://usercenter.cox.net/ in anything besides Internet Explorer for Windows, as of the time I wrote this post, produces the error shown in this screenshot, which states that the site is only accessible via Internet Explorer for Windows.

Now, my question: What were they THINKING? This is bad. REALLY bad.

I mean, come on. I can understand possibly limiting particular advanced support options so that they can only be accessed by evil security-hole-ridden browsers, but I literally can’t access ANY part of Cox’s support site; it keeps throwing an error in my face, even if I spoof an IE user-agent header.
(more…)

What do you get when you combine the basic idea of a Markov chainer with the contextual searching abilities of Google? Why, Google Talk, of course. (Thanks to Nyperold for the link…)

Here’s just a sample of the insanity that results from chaining such a large database of text:

“It was a Dark and stormy Night. The rain drenched not only my own thoughts and feelings from the heart. a Leader S Guide. to the Internet. and the World Wide Web Resources. for the study of The American Medical Association. All rights reserved…”

Edited to add: Even better, mentioning a particular anime convention causes us to get into a loop that goes on forever:

“Anime Weekend Atlanta By car from This site. is not a Geek/ ForumOC, Members: Threads: Posts: Last post: The latest version of the United States House of REPRESENTATIVES. Category: of One: s Own ORGANICS Guide to HTML? and CSS. by Example By Example, By Example, By Example, By Example, By Example, By Example, By Example, By Example, By Example…”

And one last bit of insanity, via a mention of that popular cartoon villain:

“Strong Bad Email Addresses. and phone Numbers. and addresses, Phone, Numbers and addresses, Exceptional circumstances EC) drought assistance, for the web, Yellow pages directory ON the internet. This Is London is the sky blue Sounds. like A Pirate Day! Sept. th Sept. th Sept. th Sept. th Sept. th Oct. th am Dr. Megavolt; and his OWN words. A M”

Hilarious stuff, at least for people as easily amused as myself. And it appears to give different results on each run, or at least so it seems, judging from the results I’ve seen on consecutive runs of the same phrase.

Since I don’t really have anything important to talk about in my life, and since I’m generally too busy to post anything all too introspective, I’ll instead just share an amusing bit of Engrish spotted on a local Chinese restaurant’s menu. This doesn’t appear to be just a careless typo, as it appears this way twice on the menu: