Monthly Archives: December 2008

Dec 19 2008
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Rants

Burger King invents new way for customers to lose weight: eating each other

BK has never really had any challenge for the Outstanding Contributions to Obesity Awards. With its leading horse being the Whopper, its competitors are forced to find new ways to inject calories into their offerings just to keep up. Even the Big Mac is no match for the Whopper’s extremely efficient caloric compression skills.

Unfortunately for BK, they are behind McDonald’s in market share by a measly eight trillion restaurants. McDonald’s has also gotten some attention recently for introducing a “healthy” menu, for those concerned with nutrition (what, exactly, such people are doing in McDonalds is beyond me). Comparing the healthy options to the core menu is like choosing between a priest and a serial rapist. Either way, you lose money and get raped.

As a counter to McD’s nutritious rape menu, BK has introduced a new product which they feel will target the weight-loss freaks. The product is designed to help people lose weight, and furthermore, to help people around them lose weight too. By doing so, BK will be discarding its reputation as an evil corporation which fattens the masses, instead replacing it with a health-conscious salad-loving unicorn factory.

While I may be exaggerating BK’s intentions, I assure you their actual offering is just as ridiculous. You can now purchase a cologne that smells like Burger King meat. Before you click, be warned that the website’s designers were apparently given instructions to specifically design a “product destination site SLASH softcore porno film repository”. I have no freaking clue what class of imbecile would be convinced to buy one of these items.

Men wouldn’t buy this, because they already spend money on other colognes so they can hide the fact that they just ate BK five minutes ago. Women would consider buying this, then see the website’s display of the half-naked BK man and subsequently throw up / enter in a permanent self-induced coma. Children, however, are stupid. They could be convinced to buy this if they were offered it on the street. Or better yet, BK could finally have its own kids meal, with the toy being the cologne. Kids can spray themselves for fun, and since the perfume is composed entirely of actual BK burger contents, it will only be 60% more toxic than if they ingested a real cologne.

There’s only one problem: when the child goes home. His morbidly obese mother will smell the familiar Whopper scent, and with her eyes fixated on tonight’s Jerry Springer, her natural reflexes will take over, and she will eat her own child. Technically, this is still promoting nutritious meals, as eating her son is probably more healthy than eating a Whopper. Unless of course, her son had just ingested trace amounts of the BK cologne, in which case she will probably die within minutes.

Just for the record — I don’t hate BK. I love eating there, but I only eat the chicken sandwiches.

Oh, by the way, I’m off on a trip to India for 2 weeks or so. Haven’t been in over a decade, so it should be interesting. Happy holidays.

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Dec 13 2008
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Tech

A moment of silence for bash.org

I cannot recount how many hours I have spent perusing this great emporium of hilarious quotes. In case you’re not familiar with it, bash.org is a very simple site which allows user submitted snippets of chat logs (funny quotes in essence), and provides a simple digg-like promotion/demotion scheme (as far as i know, it’s actually older than digg, so i guess i should say digg provides a bash-like system).

If you’re not already convinced of its awesomeness simply due to my recommendation, you should check out its top 100 list. The 3rd ranked quote is my favorite — and indeed I do have plans to invent just such a device.

Now, bash.org has encountered many situations which threatened its ability to stay up, primarily consisting of hosting issues. Throughout its history, however, there has always been one issue with the site that simply drove me insane: abhorrently slow moderation of the submissions. I don’t know how many times I would visit the page only to find the same goddamn quotes show up there.

The bigger issue was that even the shitty quotes that were voted down would be left on the top of the page. In some cases, the worst kind of quote would stay up — these were quotes that were actually designed for bash submission. You could just tell when two or more IRC assclowns got together and staged some sequence of events which they assumed the world would find hilarious, since their moms always seemed to laugh at their jokes. A typical submission would go something like this:

*** LinuxNoob entered the room
<LinuxNoob>hey guys, i am new to linux
<LinuxNoob>how do i change my password
<ArkaneRaidenMaceMan>oh its easy
<LinuxNoob>ok tell me what to do
<ArkaneRaidenMaceMan>just open the terminal, and type rm -rf *
*** LinuxNoob left the room
<ArkaneRaidenMaceMan>HAHAHAHAHA IM AWESOME

Now, it’s nontrivial to determine whether or not such an event was real, or staged. If it was staged, both of these assclowns need to taste the wrath of my soon-to-be-invented device. If it was real, the guy giving the “advice” needs to consider the notion that maybe LinuxNoob realized he was not going to get any real help, and actually left the freaking room. In either case, at least 50% of the people involved in the situation are retarded enough to be electrocuted in Texas.

The real draw of the site, at least for me, was the notion that it was always receiving an ever-growing number of submissions, and thus there was a potential store of millions of funny quotes. I was personally under the impression that the reason for slow moderation was high submission volume. With this in mind, I decided that I must take it upon myself to save bash.

I clicked on the “Moderator Application” link, ready to offer my invaluable services for the greater good of humanity. My submission was apparently pre-screened by a super intelligent Cyberdyne-like machine which deemed my time too valuable to be wasted on such things, and rejected my application instantly (a.k.a. the page is down). Either way, my surprise reached its apex when I looked at the bottom right of the bash.org home page.

In innocent 10-point font, it read: “20531 quotes approved; 139 quotes pending”. One hundred and thirty nine? That’s it? Suddenly, it hit me. There is no submission volume overload. There is no Cyberdyne system which intelligently moderates hundreds of submissions per second. The harsh reality must be faced: bash.org is dead. People just aren’t submitting quotes anymore. I guess all the ArkaneRaidenMaceMen have found a new place to compose “hilarious” scenes for the world/their moms to enjoy.

RIP, dear bash. You will be missed.

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Dec 06 2008
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Rants, Tech

Microsoft lists web sites broken by IE8, beats Google at indexing the internet.

EDIT: This article has been featured on uncov.com!

Don’t get me wrong. The primary goal of the revived IE team has been to achieve standards compliance, and I respect that. The problem is, it’s almost 2009. The damage is already done. It’s worth taking a minute, however, to stop and reflect on the effect IE has had on the interwebs.

Conventionally, the sole purpose of a browser is to show you content. A browser should never play any part (directly or indirectly) in changing the content. This rule is as fundamental as it is simple. Unfortunately, like the UN, the browser police will only go as far as writing down the rules in large bold font, in hopes that someone else will actually enforce them.

Rewind to 1996. Imagine you’re in a classroom. The lesson is basic mathematics, and the teacher is writing up simple formulas. All the kids can see the board clearly, except for this one kid in the front, named Imon Ecstasy (for no reason in particular, I will refer to him by his initials, IE). IE has glasses with the magnifying power of the Hubble, and swaps hygiene tips with dead cats. He also happens to be the principal’s only son. Furthermore, his father has enrolled him in every single class in the entire school.

IE raises his hand, and points out to the teacher that he cannot see shit. The teacher is left no choice but to make amends for him, and starts writing on the board in a way that IE can see clearly. So, instead of seeing 2’s and 4’s on the board, all the other kids now see drawings of giant turds. But hey, IE can see the numbers just fine, and that’s all that really matters.

Fast forward to 2009. IE has had laser eye surgery, and his vision now matches that of his peers. Unfortunately, every single teacher in the school has forgotten how to write real numbers on the board (let alone complex ones), and all of the school’s textbooks have been replaced with collections of turd diagrams.

Now armed with normal vision, IE can’t see shit on the board (more accurately, the only thing he can see is giant drawings of shit). He then starts crying to all the teachers, demanding that they change the way they write on the board. Again.

At this point, the other kids have had just about enough, and some of them start shooting spitballs at IE. Recalling how he dealt with the situation before, IE proceeds to give them his lunch money.

All in all, the notion of a fully standards compliant IE is appealing, despite the initial cost of making half the world’s websites look like ass. It should be noted, however, that the same promises were made with IE7, which ended up with a net increase of jack shit percent in overall standards compliance.

To make things worse, every time IE’s popularity rating drops, the obese bully of the class grins to himself as he convinces one more douchebag to join his pokemon treehouse club.

Clearly, we need to increase spending on education.

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