It Amuses Me

I was using the Amarok "Album Cover Manager" tool to fill in the missing cover artwork in my music collection.

It has a "Fetch Missing Covers" button, which goes to Amazon and retrieves the artwork it needs. The lookup often makes mistakes, particularly because I tagged artists in a discouraged "Lastname, Firstname" form. Still, it's easier to fetch them all, then go back and manually fixup the ones it got wrong.

I ran it over several hundred albums. It made a lot of mistakes, but none quite so hilarious as the one to the right. The album cover you see is what it selected for London Calling by The Clash.

The KOOP radio station fire was written up in Interweb A-list zine BoingBoing. See it here.

I thought the fourth comment from isadrone was particularly funny.

Excuse me, I believe you have my playlist... Can I have my playlist back? He took my playlist and he never brought it back.

It's not okay because if they take my playlist then I'll set the building on fire...

I could set the building on fire.

It's a movie joke. And, yes, it's in very bad taste.

How quaint! I haven't seen a good Google bombing in a while.

The current target is "dangerous cult".

The following email just came across the Austin Rails User Group jobs mailing list:

Hello Austin,

My name is Kayla Pennington and I am a Technical Recruiter at Brooksource, an IT services company. I just left you a voicemail because I came across your resume online and I wanted to touch base with you regarding a permanent Ruby on Rails Programmer position I thought you would match up well with in the Nashville area.

I am not sure what your current work situation is but wanted to see if you would be interested in entertaining a position such as this. Here is a brief description.

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Recruiters like this are the reason why I stopped publishing my phone number in my online resume.

I edit the monthly newsletter of the Capital Area Central Texas Unix Society (CACTUS). For your dining and dancing pleasure, here is an excerpt from my column in the April newsletter.

Finally, starting with next month's newsletter, we will begin publishing in a "Best Viewed with Internet Explorer" format. We will place a "best viewed" badge on our web pages. Visitors who attempt to access the newsletter archives with a non-preferred browser will be directed to page that urges them to upgrade. We'll be ready to go just as soon as we get the final artwork, currently being developed by Mr. Lirpa Sloof.

Link: Blind Date, Leiderhosen, and Me.

A relationship involves compromise. For my girlfriend, it involves giving up any hope of ever using her fireplace, because the way is blocked with computers and equipment. For me, it involves living with a television in the house.

I hate the thing. I've spent many years successfully avoiding the one-eyed monster. Yet, I must admit, sometimes late at night, when the girlfriend has gone off to bed, I'll sneak out to the living room and see what's on the tube. Usually the choice is between a shop-at-home show and a dating game show--which makes me want to play solitaire or staple my head to the floor instead.

So, having discovered these dating shows, I think the linked article is hysterical, one of the two funniest things I've read in a while. The other funny thing being an article by Harlan Ellison I was reading just the other day, coincidentally enough, where he recounts his antics as a contestant on The Dating Game. (via mefi)

Link: scoirc.txt.

You may have heard that SCO (nee Caldera) and IBM are in a small legal kerfuffle over Linux. Unless you've been following closely, you probably find all the actions and accusations a tad bewildering.

Fortunately, some kind (unknown) person has put together a brief summary of the history. And to make it even easier to follow, it's presented in IRC-speak. LOL!

Here is an interesting articulation. It's an issue I've thought about a lot, myself. I'm glad to see that David has at least sketched out some of the obvious, superficial aspects of the situation. Good job! One of these days, I need to find time to blog my more encompassing approach.

Rachel posts an entry to her blog speculating that Linda Tripp is the most reviled woman in America. That's an interesting proposition, and I thought it deserved serious investigation. So, I gathered the research crew and we initiated a controlled, double-blind, statistical study. The massive undertaking exhausted our entire spring budget for laboratory rats, but it was a small sacrifice in the name of scientific advancement.

Here are the results obtained by our crack research staff:

"Hillary Clinton" reviled       491 Google hits
"Ann Coulter" reviled           225
"Linda Tripp" reviled           113
"Nancy Reagan" reviled           73
"Ethel Rosenberg" reviled        57
"Leona Helmsley" reviled         10

So while Linda Tripp does indeed exhibit a high degree of revulsion, it appears that Hillary Clinton is 369% more reviled.

So, congratulations to Sen. Clinton. America says, "You're our bitch!"

Link: OSU-Tulsa Bookstore.

I really can't complain about these lamers stealing the artwork from my website, because....uhhh....I stole it from somebody else. (And goodness knows where they stole it from.)

What frosts me is these thieves don't have the decency to host their stolen images on their own web server. Instead, they link to the copy on my server. This redirects my bandwidth and my server capacity to their users. It's like siphoning a cup of gasoline from your neighbor's car every morning before going to work.

This has been going on for months and months, and I finally got tired of it. So I performed a little Apache rewrite-fu, and now visitors from their web site are redirected to an alternate image.

How long do you think this will last? My hunch is low clue, long time.

April 6 update: They have updated their web page to stop pirating the graphic from my server.