New Facebook Vanity Urls

Perhaps they make a lot of sense for people without their own web presence, but it seems like it's easier just to point people to here if they want to contact me. I did make my own vanity url, though, just in case you want to see what I look like or who my friends are.

http://www.danlindquist.net/facebook

See? Just as good. Plus if facebook ever goes friendster on me, I can just point it somewhere else, like my profile on some other up and coming social network.

Back in business

The blog is back up and running cleanly again now on a new version of Chyrp. Hopefully using defensio instead of akismet will actually block the spam this time. Only time will tell.

Hooray for blogging again. Sorry to keep all my fans waiting. Now that I've cleaned everything up, these meta posts should go stop and more substantive posts will take their place in the future.

Facebook ads

I'm certainly not the first to post about this issue, but does anyone else feel like Facebook ads might be a little too targeted?

The latest one:

Are you done with Yahoo?

We are inventing the future of advertising, and it's social. Great people, comp, equity and SF office. Join us! LAMP or Hadoop plz.

It's just a little presumptuous. And "plz?" Seriously? I would never even consider working for a company that requested a specific skill set without bothering to spell out the word "please." You've got a full keyboard. Use it.

Weeds

When you don't post to a blog in awhile, your blog starts to get overrun by those spam comments, much like the weeds you'll see that grow at abandoned houses.

Well, spam, I've got two things to say to you. I'm back, and your days are numbered.

As an aside, does anyone know how to get kismet to work with chyrp? I thought I had it hooked up right but I'm very clearly wrong.

Update: I think there was some goofiness going on with the way the chyrp comments were reading the akismet response and running up into timeouts and the php execution limit. I reduced the timeout so comments should now post faster and less spammy.

Gladiators

As I glue myself to my TV each week in anticipation of my national broadcast debut as "Audience Member 327" on American Gladiators, I've come to the realization that American Gladiators is possibly the dumbest show on television today.

Today's episode was tied into the new Hulk movie coming out this weekend, which means they gave out those puffy hulk fists to people in the audience. Additionally, they had several of the gladiators use them as their blocking apparatuses in Gauntlet, and Titan was painted green and used Hulk-like grunting as a form of communication on Joust. Now, it's not like I treat American Gladiators as some kind of sacrosanct icon of American culture, but still, the egregious Hulk promotion was a little too much to handle.

I've also realized that despite all of the events and rigmarole they have the contestants go through before reaching the eliminator, any head start gained through points is typically eliminated by the time the contestants reach the cargo net, which is about 30 seconds into a 2 1/2 minute race. What's worse is that the Eliminator culminates in an obstacle known as the Travelator. The Travelator comprises what is essentially an inclined moving walkway with a rope hanging down from the top, the idea being to walk up the incline using the rope to offset the fact that the walkway is moving against you.

The problem is that by the time they reach the Travelator, the contestants are so exhausted that they almost unfailingly end up slipping back down on the first try and stop to catch their breath at the bottom. This gives the other contestant ample time to catch up to that point, which means that every episode of AG boils down to who is able to climb up a moving ramp more quickly. That's it. They might as well forget having gladiators at all because they sure don't affect the outcome at all.

And lastly, because this is a primetime TV show, the contestants always end up being chosen for the drama they end up creating. First, there was the guy with no leg versus the normal guy. Then, there was the deaf guy versus the family man (granted, the deaf guy was far and away the best contestant on the show so far, so my hat is off to him). Then they had seasoned veteran cop versus his mentee, young naive cop, where of course the veteran cop pulled off the upset. And this week, it was the former cheerleader versus the former football player in what was clearly hammed up to be some kind of nerd versus jock battle. And naturally, the former cheerleader won. As usual, it came down to the Travelator.

I guess it's all in the name of good tv, where good means appealing to the largest demographic, but whatever happened to the pureness of competition?

According to the end of episode promo though, next week is the week with the twins on it, which was one of the episodes partially recorded while I was in the audience. Make sure to tune in next week to get a glimpse of Hollywood's next big thing. You'll never see better fake cheering in your life.