fine whine

Challenged by RandyWalker and inspired by John Gruber's post about blocking the DiggBar, I whipped up a quick plugin to do just that for Habari.

After all, why should all the other blog engines have all the fun?

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The DiggBar is a new feature that adds lots of great features to pages and sites linked on Digg. And to do so, it shortens the URL (to one starting with http://digg.com/) and loads the target in a frame.

In a frame?! I thought we were done with frames half a decade ago.

There are myriad reasons why this is a bad thing, and not all of them involve Digg stealing revenue, and other sites have covered it better, but in short, it's a bad thing.

So, how can you avoid it framing your Habari site?

DiggBar Blocker

You can download* it here: Current Version.

Unzip that in your /user/plugins/ directory, and activate it in your admin plugins page.

By default, it will provide a brief message ("This site does not support use of the DiggBar.") and a link to the correct page with your URL on it. I also added an option to bypass the nice message, and just reload the target outside of the bar.

If you have questions, comments, suggestions, please leave them below or submit a ticket on the Habari-extras Trac.

* Or view the source here.

Yesterday, on a tip from Scott, I checked out the first-ever Twitter-based fiction writing contest. Twitter, for the uninitiated, is a combination micro-blogging application and social-networking tool all rolled into one, but the significance is that all updates (dubbed 'tweets') are 140 characters or less. Thus the 140-character (no more, no less) story contest.

I'd written my entry fairly early, but having mulled the idea over some more, I wrote, well, some more*:

I found a time machine that only makes things younger. Spent the afternoon making burgers into veal. And then, well...now I need to grow up.

She was scared. Zombies attacking, and only with a lot of help were the houses made safe. But now mommy said that the neighbors were hungry.

She ran. He ran, pulled a gun, and sprayed bullets at her. She dove into the canal, and he swam after her. Was this a chase, or a triathlon?

Found a lamp in the antique store. Rubbed it, and a genie appeared. I wished I could understand what he was saying. It was "You get 1 wish".

I need to learn how to ride a motorcycle. I'd take lessons or talk to another owner, except the nearest one looks mad I'm stealing his bike.

* Only one entry per person, though. So the rest of these are just for fun. Then again, so's my "official" entry also, since I'm not going to win.

So ever since I read about them on Neatorama, I wanted to make some random CD covers. From what I read, the recipe was simple:

1. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The first article title on the page is the name of the band.
2. www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 The last four words of the very last quote is the album title.
3. www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ The third picture, license permitting, is the album cover.
4. The finished product belongs in the CD cover meme pool.

I turned out a few in as many hours. I tried to stick to the rules, but couldn't bring myself to use the photos that were marked "© All rights reserved" when I knew there were ones licensed (via creativecommons) for derivative works, as this would likely be considered. Though I ended up reloading a few times more than I liked, I did come across enough to make these (and a few more that I'll eventually upload).

Making fake album covers is nothing new to me. Back when I was first learning Photoshop I'd made many a cover using stock photography for a fictional band called "Spontaneous Grape", going even as far as creating a fictional record label* to release them. But coming up with the titles was often the trouble, and moreover selecting photos that I thought would be interesting even more so. Without those aspects to worry about, I can crank these things out much faster.

Eventually I'll get them up on flickr, annotated and everything else. But I've got to take a break from making them first.

* The name of the label was Ludd Records, and it was rather a bit of a dumb in-joke. One of my many online identities was that of "Luddite Industries", which I thought to be a particularly sophisticated joke, in that the Luddites would not likely be operating a web site. Here's the logo, which I drew in AutoCad, knowing it better than Photoshop at the time.

Someday I'm going to make a black t-shirt with this on it in white.

So with the holidays lately I've had a few weekdays away from my desk*. As is often the case when this happens, I had some errands to run, and interesting stores in which to stop nearby. At one point I found myself wandering through a MicroCenter (though I bought nothing), and near the video game section I saw something I wish I could've caught on video (and posted to youtube). But I didn't have a good camera handy, and my phone's movie mode would've been rather a bit lacking. So it's time to dust off your imagination (take that, you click-happy tweens).

In front of me, there was a kid playing Guitar Hero. For those not in the know, Guitar Hero is a console video game that comes with a plastic guitar-like controller, and players push fret-like buttons while doing a motion similar to strumming, in time with popular rock and metal songs (or cover versions thereof). The kid appeared to have average skills, hitting the correct buttons at the right time. This was not the remarkable part, of course. Much more interesting than the player, was the kid standing next to him, fingers in the air, miming the same notes.

He was playing air Guitar Hero. There was, of course, a second guitar controller on the demo kiosk, but I think he was probably having more fun playing his fantasy version of the song than actually hitting the buttons. Or he was trying to be supportive of his buddy. Or perhaps he was doing a very convoluted form of mockery.

Anyway, I thought it was pretty funny. Guitar Hero, from my feeble attempts to play it, is already once removed from the actual experience of playing the guitar. This kid found a way to do it one better, I guess. And about 50 to 80 bucks cheaper, too.

* I almost wrote "...weekdays I wasn't working" there, but with something of a slowdown at work I don't know if I can count all the hours I was there as hours I really worked. I was there, and available for work, there just wasn't any to do at the moment. Hence the deathmatch tournaments of Nexuiz, and before that, Marathon Infinity (through the magic of AlephOne).

Despite having joined a fair number of the social networking sites*, I don't really do much on them other than upload a photo or two, identify some "favorite" music and movies, and connect with one or two people (often the same one or two on every site) and then I let my profile languish, logging in very occasionally to check the notifications that don't show up in my email.

The flavor of the month this month is Facebook (see my profile) and I must admit, it's a pretty clean, usable site that blows Myspace (see my profile) out of the water for ease of use, visual appearance, and third-party expandibility.

It's no wonder there has already been a mass migration from the latter to the former.

One of the applications Facebook supports comes from movie rating site Flixster which I had already joined some time ago, played with, and hadn't returned-the interface is slow, rating movies en masse is not simple, and not enough people used it at the time. I connected to a new Flixster account (see it here) and started rating movies again**.

Tired of that, I clicked over to the "never ending quiz" which had drawn Rebecca in, several months ago. It's worse than I remember. More than half of the questions concern Nicole Kidman and Moulin Rouge or Alan Rickman and the Harry Potter films, none of which I've yet seen. Other questions are poorly written, with no capitalization, poor grammar, and misspellings galore.

But what bothered me the most was the True/False questions. Without a single exception every one was always "true".

The questions, I should point out, are all user-submitted, and there are quite possibly millions of them. I'm basing that "every one" statement there on the thirty or so that I encountered so far.

So I started writing my own True/False questions, and (unsurprisingly), making them False. It's a much bigger challenge, fabricating believable movie trivia, than it is to merely copy an item from the Internet Movie Database's extensive trivia archive.

So far I've written eight of these questions (and seven other multiple choice questions) and I'm proud to say that the quiz-takers (who number more than a thousand as of today) have only been correct at most a third of the time. You can see the complete list of questions I've written here. I admit I bookmarked the link and have checked it a few times just to see how I'm doing, and the numbers amuse me.

One example? As of right now, only nineteen of 1,133 people guessed that I'd made this up: "While filming Man on the Moon, Jim Carrey performed weekly comedy shows in Los Angeles, in character, as Andy Kaufman."

As a kid I greatly enjoyed the game Balderdash, though I didn't get many chances to play it.

Anyway, to the quiz. As my questions began appearing for the other people (they're supposedly random) and I kept answering others, I began to see other new questions that were also false, though none (I say this humbly) as convincing as mine.

Now I can play the quiz and know that some of the True/False questions may actually require some thought after all. Frankly, though, I think I'm enjoying writing them more than answering the other ones.

* I'd link the complete list, but based on what I saw from upscoop and pipl, I can't even remember all of the ones I've joined. A halfway-comprehensive list can be found on my about page.

** I was a bit inconsistent - apparently I'm only 84% compatible with myself.

Welcome, Carnival of Breastfeeding readers. My wife put me up to this, but as long as she does the majority of waking up late at night, and changes more diapers overall, I'm generally willing to go along with what she tells me to do.

So our daughter is breastfed, basically exclusively, other than the applesauce*. That said, she's eaten in a variety of places, public and otherwise, and every time I've been ready for somebody to be outraged. And waiting.

Except that nobody is bothered by it, to my befuddlement. I aggregate a few "new dad" blogs, and they rarely fail to point out a new media blitz when some celebrity in NYC or L.A. pulls up or down her shirt and gives her kid some milk. The blog and/or youtube comments following those articles are very, very informative as to the great gulf between the folks who find 'feeding fantastic, and the ones who are disgusted by the very notion of its mention, let alone seeing any portion of an exposed breast. Likewise the stories of women thrown off airplanes for offending more prudish passengers or flight attendants.

But out in the real world, I can't seem to find anybody willing to vocally object, or to even sneer, or look away in disgust. Either I'm ignoring such people, or they just aren't out there, around here. A couple weekends ago shoppers passing through the hoity-toity upscale mall portion of Columbus's Easton shopping mecca might have glanced, in the front window of Claire's (an earring and cheap jewelry boutique, for those of the non-female persuasion), a distraught baby with two new holes in her head, getting some comfort food from her mom.

For the record, I'm still not convinced getting Natalya's ears pierced before she's old enough to pay for it was a good idea. I have no such reservations about her being breastfed, and again, am almost sad nobody else seems to object either.

Not that I'd throw down my gloves and get into a good scrap with the offended party, anyway, but I'd point out that my wife would give them a good talking-to.

As for this Carnival, here are some more links:

• Jessica's post
• breastfeeding.blog.motherwear.com
• breastfeeding123.com
• mamaknowsbreast.com
• thelactivist.blogspot.com
• breastfeedingmums.typepad.com
• crunchydomesticgoddess.com
• nursingyourkids.com

* I don't really count shoving spoonfuls of peaches and sweet potatoes into her mouth "feeding" as I think of it as, more or less, an early, pediatrician-approved form of torture. The mashed-up bananas, well, once she's started eating more than she ends up wearing, then I'll figure out what I think of those.