Yo...

Not my usually 80's retro, but good stuff:

Happy new year y'all

Inspiring enticement to register

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Worst translator ever

I got bored so started looking at the last three people who followed me on twitter and one guy is just a page of SEO links and the top one was

RT @Rehan Marketing benefits given an online form with SEO services | The Best SEOhttp://bit.ly/UoIbp

And I clicked on it because I didn't understand it:

http://thebestseo.info/2009/06/30/marketing-benefits-given-an-online-form-with-seo-services/

It goes to a page of absolute gibberish that I assume was done by some software translator:

Therefore, with an enlarge in a volume, afterwards ask for great peculiarity has additionally taken place. Therefore, a SEO provider in a stream unfolding is compulsory to be vested with a multifaceted opinion which harbours a knack of being wakeful about opposite happenings all over a universe as well as how have been they able of conversion a website in conditions of a trade turn etc.

But, then I thought perhaps this guys is The Best SEO. I mean, I clicked on it...and perhaps all that gibberish confuses google or is so full of buzzwords that it gets great search results...

Quitting Facebook

So last night I quit Facebook. Does this mean I'm not cool? Am I destined to live in social networking obscurity? Perhaps...

But here is what won't happen:
1) People from my past coming out of the woodwork who want to catch up 20 years later
2) Questions like: "Are you the Steve who went to such and such a school?" Perhaps this would be less of a problem if I had a more unique name like "Bagel Zipperstein"
3) No more free virtual gift offers from the Hannukah store

I did find the deactivation process interesting. When you press the link they ask why you want to do such a dastardly thing. When I picked the "I don't think this is useful" it suggested I needed more friends and provided links to the friend-finder (or whatever it is called). Clearly I don't have enough friends to pummel me with "Bob is eating toast" messages so that I'm unaware of how much of my life is ticking by reading about Bob's enjoyment of toast.

It also showed pictures from my existing friend network saying how much they would miss me. While "Roger will miss you!" with a picture of him holding a fish ALMOST made me reconsider, I decided instead to just call him and have lunch from time to time rather than continue a more virtualized relationship.



I guess this will make me less cool to/than my teen cousins and nephews, but what can I say? I also don't like High School Musical (1|2|3).

So what say you? Crazy? Have I put a virtual bullet in my social networking social life? Used the entree fork for my salad?

Maybe I'm just a mean old man... now get off my lawn!

spotlight: mds, mdworker

The processes 'mds' and 'mdworker' frequently take over my macbook and make it sound like a jet engine about to take off. Clearly this is wasting a lot of battery power...



They are apparently related to spotlight, which I never, ever use. But there are some posts about how disabling spotlight altogether screws up OS X.

Anyone know anything about this?

Brush up on your Java exceptions

A coworker sent me this link
I think he is trying to tell me something...

You too can brush up on your Java exception handling!

Enjoy,
Steve

That's funny

Everything is better with Bacon...

Stupor Bowl?

Is all day coverage of the Super Bowl really required? I, for one, don't really care to know all the details of the lives of professional football players.

If I were going to rip off a website

I'd do something other than use the .org domain name of the .com site i was ripping off. But that is just me....

dotfiles.com
dotfiles.org

Xb: you should sue his ass.

Of course, you never got a mention in the RailsEnvy Podcast....

I could work for Apple

They make up words too....

Look under Video Quality Improvements here.

Note I tried to screen cap a context menu, but I couldn't figure out how.

Recently Read Books

Thirteen - Richard K Morgan

About 150 pages too long.  Not as well-crafted as his Tokeshi Kovacs novels, but still good escapist fun.  The US has split into a few countries around essentially blue states and red states.  It's not clear exactly what happened to Illinois?  The most interesting thing is that it's titled "Black Man" in the UK.

Moneyball - Michael Lewis

I'm on a bit of a Michael Lewis kick with Panic! (easily the best excerpt was this one) and all his recent financial writings.  If you love baseball, actually if you know anything about baseball, you'll dig this book.  It's fun to read it a few years on and recognize many of the names in the book.  Good enough to tempt me into becoming an A's fan.

Mac users don't know unix

In yet another example of how Mac users don't know Unix, I keep reading about how great SuperDuper is and how everyone should use it in addition to TimeMachine. Here it is:

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

It makes bootable backups of your HD. And if you pay $28, you can automatically schedule the backups to happen. And after the first backup, it only copies the changes.

Or, you could put this in your crontab:

0 5 * * * rsync -vaxE --delete --ignore-errors / /Volumes/BackupDrive/

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that does everything SuperDuper does as long as you setup BackupDrive to be bootable when you format/partition it.