Both Facebook and Twitter are wedged this morning. How can I be expected to function when two of my connections to the outside world are hanging by a virtual thread? It can't be a coincidence that both are frelled, especially since from what I can see on Facebook I'm not the only one suffering. More on this story as it develops, assuming of course that I'm not the only one reading this. Which I may be.

...but he is a god. And this is just the latest evidence.

This is one of those "too much time on their hands" things that's more amazing the more you think about it. A guy named Román Cortés created a portrait of Homer Simpson using the artistic medium of CSS. Then another guy named Ned Batchelder created an animation, so you can watch Homer get rendered. And suddenly, an okay portrait of the Pillsbury D'Oh! Boy is shown to be the work of genius and dedication it really is! Although I have to ask why Ned reversed the accents in Román's name. Carelessness, I suppose.

(Thanks to John Gruber of Daring Fireball for making me aware of Ned's efforts on Román's behalf.)

Check out http://cubo.cc/ and see if you don't agree.

I speak not of Mos Eisley but of MySpace. Not my sentiment; it came up in a conversation about increasing the visibility of a nonprofessional project with which I'm involved. I suggested that MySpace might bring us more of an audience. I was told not only that we would never do something like that officially, but that (and I quote) "MySpace is a disgusting slum of the lowest of the Internet and those who aren't the lowest but know no better. It's way less classy that I think we are."

Which leaves me wondering: as a MySpacer myself does that make me scum, or just stupid? I await your verdict.

I mentioned in my previous post that I'm moderating my friend Barry's discussion forum. Seems like a simple thing, doesn't it? And it is, really; the Simple Machines Forum software is amazingly simple to install and to manage. And our growing membership is getting along well. So why do I feel like I've taken on a second full time job?

Yeah, running a forum is addictive. Right now I can read every post, although I know that won't last. And of course I hope it won't last; the bigger the community grows, the better for the forum and the better for Barry as a writer of successful books. So that means distributing the responsibility. More importantly, it means finding others who can be as slow to respond as I'm learning to be. The hard part of running a forum, as I'm beginning to realize, is accepting the idea that the best response is generally no response at all. And for someone as lazy as me, knowing that I'll want to act and shouldn't is ironic beyond belief.

It must be true; I read it on the Internet!

Late to the game as ever. In this case the game is MySpace, as overhyped a web venture as ever there was. So why am I suddenly investigating the dubious pleasures of yet another Rupert Murdoch property? Blame my friend Barry, who dragged me kicking and screaming to help him figure out how to connect with all those potential thriller readers. After all, if they insist on reading, why not something good?

So here I am. Or, to be more accurate, there I am. And as friendless as ever. Which is why the plaintive plea at the start of this post. If you're on MySpace, won't you make me your friend? Poor Barry's looking awful lonely as my one and only friend.

I stopped at the Mountain View farmer's market this morning, both to pick up some groceries and in hope of finding something to photograph to feed my stock habit. Among the more prosaic edibles I found some Asian dates, which I thought might make an interesting subject. Of course, one important aspect of shooting for stock is coming up with keywords a potential customer can use to locate the images, so I brought up Safari and typed "asian dates" into the Google search field. Oops! Finally found what I was looking for on page three, after a couple of dozen entries for rock groups performing in that part of the world and, well, the other kind of Asian dates. Which wasn't at all what I had in mind, not that there's anything wrong with that.

Thank you, Valleywag. Not for just being you, althought that's certainly reason enough. But for your foresight and wisdom in passing along news of Internet Status. Indeed, without Internet Status how would any of us know if there's an Internet on which to work, play and... well, that's it, really. Although there's something bothering me about this. Something about how, if the Internet really were down, how useful is a website that would tell me that it's down, assuming of course that there's an Internet to get me to the site. Or something like that. I'm clearly not seeing the big picture. Good blog, though.

I was out a couple of times today, looking for a microphone to use with my work laptop. We're doing a WebEx presentation tomorrow and I need to be able to record it. Anyway, I was listening to the Mac Geek Gab on the drive to my second electronics store. That's the podcast the Mac Observer guys put out. At the end of the podcast they mentioned a site called AmigoFish, which supposedly lets you rate podcasts and then recommends new ones. I say supposedly because my first attempt to visit got me the generic "Hi, we're the Apache server on a Red Hat Linux system" page. And my second attempt a little later claims to be somebody called Plesk:

This is the Plesk™ default page

If you see this page it means:

1) hosting for this domain is not configured
or
2) there's no such domain registered in Plesk.

For more information please contact .

I especially like that administrator email address. Looks like somebody's having to rebuild their site from scratch. And taking their time about it.

As you may have noticed, I've been using Google's AdSense to make a few pennies from visitors to my site. Although if you're reading this with an RSS newsreader, you won't have noticed; AdSense doesn't have an ad system for blogs yet, or at least not for blogs using weird software like Blosxom. So when Yahoo! announced that they were starting their own ad network, I decided to sign up. They didn't have a problem with my running ads on my RSS-fed postings. And who knows? Maybe somebody (or maybe lots and lots of somebodies) would click on those ads and make me fabulously wealthy!

Okay, maybe not. But I did try Yahoo! Publisher for a while. And gave up after a few weeks, when the only click to register was mine. Guess I'll wait until Google supports roll yer own blogging software. Which isn't the point of this post. That's about a piece on Boing Boing about a new policy at Yahoo! Publisher. It seems they now require you to keep ads from being viewed by them damn furriners. How you keep 'em out is your problem. But keep 'em out you must!

Which raises a few good questions. Like, how do I know for sure where a visitor is coming from, in this world of proxies and other magical technologies? Okay, that's really the only good question. But it's such a good one, it ought to count as several. And suddenly I'm feeling pretty good about abandoning Y!P. Better a visited blog with no revenue than one that only Murrkuns can see. Assuming of course I actually have readers from outside these United States. Or inside for that matter. Maybe I'm just talking to myself. Good thing I have that split personality to fall back on...

Okay, my high school did have computers, although you modren kids wouldn't recognize them as such. But that's not what I'm here to talk about. No, I want to alert you to the latest scourge on the Internet: popularity by promiscuity! The site is called Slut-o-Meter, and it calculates your promiscuity by asking Google about you with SafeSearch enabled and then disabled. The ratio of good vs. dirty results determines your score. Me, I'm 1.3% promiscuous. Which is better than I feared but less than I hoped.

(Spotted on Google Blogoscoped.)

I refer to her role as Maria, the not terribly successful nun in The Sound of Music. "When God closes a door," she was heard to say, "somewhere he opens a window." And so it is. Just recently I was lamenting the shocking lack of updates at Tiki Bar TV, the most wonderful video podcast that is most wonderful largely because of the drunk (or at least drunk-appearing) antics of Lala, hostess extraordinaire. And which hasn't had a new episode since 2005, which explains my lamentations. But just today I discovered a possible replacement in my heart. French Maid TV has well developed young things in costumes and with outrageous French accents, providing their technical expertise to an enthralled audience. True, there's only one episode out there yet. And true, that episode's six weeks old. But still, edification is where you find it. And how.

Update 02/02: Looks like I reacted.... well, uh... prematurely. No sooner did I complain about French Maid TV's lack of content, then a new episode arrived. This one covers the serious topic of CPR. Although with all the pillow fighting, one might get the impression they don't expect to be taken entirely seriously...

I was gonna save this one for Sweeps Week, but it needs to be shared. This may just be the greatest web site ever. Except for this one, of course.

Update 01/12: Much as I hate to admit being duped, it turns out the preceding is not real. No, not the Chuck Norris facts; those are as accurate as ever. But the content was stolen from the Random Chuck Norris Fact website. There's also a Vin Diesel version, which isn't as interesting. At least to me, since I've never seen any of his movies and don't expect to. (Yes, that means I've seen some Chuck Norris movies. But not since Code of Silence, which I thought was about Maxwell Smart.)

No, not like that! I've been playing with Frappr, a website that uses Google Maps to let members of affinity groups put pins in a world map to show they belong. My first couple of pins went into maps for Cinecast and Tips From The Top Floor, two favorite podcasts. Then I joined a map for Farscape fans. At which point I thought it might be amusing to create my own map. So if you've read this far, how about marking your location on my map? It doesn't cost anything, and only requires you to enter a name or pseudonym and a location. On the planet, preferably. Dunno what my subterranean readers will do.

And that's a good thing, at least in this case. Over at Google Blogoscoped, there a nice list of the Top 10 Website Euphemisms. Here's number one:

1. What the site says: Under Construction
   What the site means: Check back in a decade. Or later.

I'll let you read the others on the original site; I'm sure he needs the clicks. But I just want to point out that this very site uses not a single one of these euphemisms. I'm euphemism free! (Aside from an occasional use of a phrase like "I have to go to the euphemism", generally reserved for polite company. Which doesn't apply here, obviously.)

As if a website for dogs dressed as bees wasn't enough strangeness for one morning, here we have what used to be world's smallest website, which led to an even smaller contender for the title. Good grief! No, make that Good grief!

"Beedogs.com is the premier online repository for pictures of dogs in bee costumes."

What more is there to say?

I was ready to apologize for abusing Shakespeare with the title of this posting, until I discovered that I was boldly going where all too many have gone before. But no matter; fractured quotations aren't the subject of this diatribe.

Today I'd like to rant about the evil of bandwidth thieves, people who populate their websites, blogs and forum posts with images stolen from others. But it's not the image theft that I mind, bad as that is. It's the way many people simply insert links to those images, so the owner of the image not only has to suffer the theft, but has to pay for their goods to be stolen. Yeah, it's not as big a problem as spam. Or phishing for PayPal accounts. Or planting viruses or worms. But it's still wrong.

There's one consolation, however, and that's that the abused party has the power to take revenge. Because you see, it's not at all hard to replace the image being stolen with another image entirely, one that tells the world what you've done. I used to do that to thieves of my own priceless imagery; now I have things set up so the full resolution files are replaced automatically with their thumbnails. But revenge is so much more fun.

Witness the story of Paul Ford, one of whose images was used by Business 2.0 magazine without his consent for an article on Google's new Google Base service. You'd expect better from Business 2.0, but they went ahead and linked directly to an image on Mr. Ford's site for their story. And he decided to have a little fun with them. I'll let him tell the story, which is truly a cautionary tale for our time. And finish by reminding all those bandwidth thieves out there that the punishment could be so much worse than the crime. A word to the wise, as they say.

Okay, that's overstating it. A lot. But it feels like a big deal. Today one of the hit counters on my website went over half a million. Granted, it took just over ten years to get there, but there have been a whole lot of visitors to my travel pages since this site went live in August of 1995. Back then it was at reality.sgi.com, a server Silicon Graphics let us use for whatever we wanted, as long as it was noncommercial and didn't put the company in legal jeopardy. I got my own domain a little over two years later, having figured out that I wasn't going to be at SGI forever and that it could take a while for search engines to notice my new location. And of course I've added stuff to the site over the years, until it has become the lumbering behemoth you see today. Which gets a lot more visitors; at the current hit rate, I could hit a million visitors this time in 2008.

I'm thankful for a hobby that's kept me entertained for a decade. How about you?

I have a weakness for nerd humor, especially when it's tied to popular entertainment. (I was gonna say it's like Mad Magazine for grownups, but Mad Magazine is Mad Magazine for grownups.) But the best thing about Kill Bill's Browser, an effort to wean the masses off the disaster that is Internet Explorer onto something less, well, disaster-prone, is the list of 13 reasons to switch. My favorite is number 8; what's yours?

Oh, and if you click on the button below, Google says they'll give me a dollar. I'm guessing they can afford it.

Has the web gotten boring for you too? Remember the days when every trip to the browser offered at least the possibility of something wonderful, or at least wonderfully weird? You do? Me too! Gosh, what are the odds of that?

Okay, that was a pointless digression. Let's get to the meat of this post, which started with an entry on a stock photography forum. In the Off-Topic Discussion area, in case you were worried I was about to start singing the praises of my photo hobby yet again. Anyway, the entry mentioned a very funny piece about domain name choices gone wrong. Like The Experts Exchange, whose domain suggests they're experts, but in a rather specialized domain. (According to Snopes, they've since added a hyphen to their official domain.) Or an Italian battery maker called Powergen Italia that either didn't notice the pun in their domain name and didn't have an English speaker around to point it out.

That was fun. But it also led me to an article on company and domain naming that's a pretty thorough debunking of another article on the subject. That article (the debunking, not the original) was both educational and a lot more entertaining than finding puns in domain names. And to think that I wasn't looking for any of this when I started pulling at this thread.

Rob Malda, AKA Commander Taco at Slashdot, has an interesting piece there about being forced to change his identity in the online game World of Warcraft. It seems one of the dungeonmasters (online admins) decided that CmdrTaco was a violation of the rules, since it includes a title. Rob talks a bit about having no recourse in the opaque bureaucracy of the game, but then considers why it matters to him: that our online identities matter. And they matter far beyond the personal inconvenience of having to reestablish a connection with people who know you in a particular context.

What brought this home to me was a reminder of a threat a couple of years back to this very domain. It seems the powers that be were considering changing the rules regarding domain names, specifically those in .ORG. They were discussing limiting .ORG to actual nonprofit organizations. And they weren't planning any grandfathering of existing domains, which would have meant losing almost ten years of connections and good will for people like me.

Fortunately, the proposal didn't go anywhere. But it made me conscious of how much of a house of cards an online reputation is. Rob talks about a heavy game player who abandoned the game when his or her identity was taken away. Would I be willing to start back at square one and recreate my reputation and my audience if new rules said I couldn't be disordered any more? Would you? Could we?

A few blogs are quoting from the list of the 100 oldest .COM domains. I take pride in the fact that Symbolics, Inc., my employer at the time, got the very first domain name back in March of 1985. Before that we had to use names like SCRC-STONY-BROOK.ARPA (SCRC was the Symbolics Cambridge Research Center) and manually route all our email and such through servers at MIT. I was based in Chatsworth, California, which was connected to Canbridge, Mass. by a leased line. Which meant that if I needed to share some data with folks at JPL in Pasadena (really La Canada Flintridge, but Pasadena sounds so much classier), it had to go from Chatsworth to Cambridge, across the road to MIT and then via the ARPANET all the way back to California. When it worked, that is. Which wasn't all that often.

Typeface, that is. A posting to the forums at iStockphoto asked for help in identifying a typeface. It seems the customer had provided their logo for use in a design but no help in making a higher resolution version. One of the replies suggested a website called WhatTheFont?!, which takes an image with a font and tries to match it against samples in their database. It's face recognition software for type-type faces, as opposed to people-type faces. Which I think is pretty cool.

Short version: check this out.

Long version: A few days ago I received an email from a company called RawSugar. They're based around here (here = Silicon Valley) and were looking for influential bloggers whose brains they could pick regarding a new web-based tagging system they're developing. Being one of a select group of Santa Clara County Bloggers (self-selected, it's true; but still...) got me their attention. And a scan of this very blog (this very what blog?) and the surrounding website convinced them that I had the kind of broad and deep industry background they were looking for. Which put me in some pretty good company: people like Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls and David Weinberger, who already wrote about his encounter with them. Anyway, I spent an interesting hour with some of the RawSugar gang, getting a demo and talking about how I as a blogger and blogreader might benefit from their system.

That was yesterday. Today I sat down with RawSugar to see where it took me. Scanning down a list of Just Added Pages, many of which relate to the disaster in New Orleans, I came across a blog with the rather provocative title of Libelous Claims About Large Corporations. And whatever I expected to see when I clicked through, I wasn't ready for what I found. Nor, I suspect, will you be.

No, it's not a drug reaction; I was and am too much the rational engineer for that kind of problem. No, the trigger for this burst of nostalgia for my college days comes courtesy of iTunes 4.9 and the nerdy folks behind Michael and Evo's Dragon Page, a show that starts out being about science fiction but meanders around to fictional and nonfictional subjects of interest to the cognoscenti. It reminds me of way too many nights in somebody's dorm room having passionate debates of no moment whatsoever. Only with better sound effects. Or maybe of our blogger Meetups, only without the coffee. Come to think of it, I haven't really changed that much at all.

While checking my web access logs tonight, I noticed some bad accesses from a site called Study On Net. The problem is that they linked to a Java Q&A page I wrote back in the dark ages of the web. Which wouldn't be a problem, except that for some reason they decided my HTML page is actually an Active Server Page. Which it isn't. And it never was. And which I'd be happy to tell them. Except for the small problem that there is no contact information on their website. Or if there is, I certainly couldn't find it.

I wonder how many other people's URLs they got wrong...

I guess we have George Lucas, Burger King and Macromedia to thank (yeah, my mind is boggling over that last phrase) for the entertaining and Flash-based Twenty Questions With Darth Vader. Darth is one for two with me; he figured out opals but got all confuzzled about kiwifruit.

No Natalie Portman in this one, I'm afraid. But I'd still rate it higher than Sith.