Chuggnutt!

Month: October 2003

  • Local Loser

    Could’ve been worse, I suppose, if it weren’t so amusing.

    According to this article on Bend.com, Jodie Lynn Ackerman was released from jail last Wednesday (the 8th) due to overcrowding. By Saturday night (three days later), she “was booked back into the jail on charges of second-degree theft, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, first-degree criminal mischief and a probation violation.” Seems to me that if you suddenly got a “get out of jail free” card, shouldn’t you not do something stupid, like, oh, I don’t know, steal a car and some beer and evade the police?

    (This also showed up on UtterlyBoring.com.)

  • Navel Gazing

    I’ve been reviewing the web server logs for my site, and decided to self-indulge and post some interesting stats here online to bore you all. Read on if you’re interested.

    The 10 most popular pages, in order:

    1. Free Palm Reader eBooks
    2. Home page
    3. What’s Your Matrix Name?
    4. rss.xml (syndicated XML feed)
    5. HTML to Text Converter
    6. HTML to Text source
    7. Word Stemmer
    8. Stemmer source
    9. Geographic Codes
    10. Geographic Codes source

    Interestingly, none of those (except the home page) have anything to do with the actual blog. Plus, the ebooks page gets about 3 times as much traffic as all the rest.

    The top 5 most popular blog entries, in order:

    1. New Urban Legend
    2. What’s Your Matrix Name?
    3. Friendster
    4. What are all the colors of the rainbow?
    5. Palm Reader eBooks

    Odd queries people type into search engines to reach my site (exact phrase entered, my commentary in italics):

    • how to beat darth bandon (This puzzled me quite a lot, since Bandon is a town in Oregon, until I figured out “Darth Bandon” is a Sith character in one of the Star Wars video games)
    • hustler channel
    • what’s your name?
    • Richie Sambora wallpaper
    • old lady sex (Not what you think. They got here from this because of this blog entry)
    • portland english townhomes
    • what’s your samurai name
    • definition of “parts unknown” (seems pretty self-explanatory to me)
    • scrappy doo patterns
    • Most important things in a operating room
    • effects of too much television
    • batsuits from the movie are sale (???)
    • animation Misery Loves company… from a little worm (What in the hell…?)
    • You could pick up the old lady, because she is going to die (Out of context, this is awful but terribly, terriby funny to me… in context, it’s again this blog entry)
    • braille wallpaper border (yes, the blind CAN enjoy wallpaper)
    • napoleon comic strip (Hmmm… maybe I’ll do one)
    • survival tips sinking car (#1 tip: better type faster)
    • samurai homebrew bumper (Sounds like a badly translated anime series, or something along the lines of “All your base are belong to us”)

  • The Scottish Play

    I just uploaded the Palm Reader file for Macbeth to the ebooks page, and holy crap, I forgot how messed up that play is until I was converting it. Shakespeare must have been in a very, very dark mood when he was writing it. Enjoy.

  • Where’s George? In Bend, OR

    For the second time this year I got a dollar bill stamped with the “official” Where’s George stamp. The first was at the Portland Zoo back in July, the second yesterday here in town, from the Factory Outlets. For the uninitiated, Where’s George is a bill tracker, where users can enter the serial numbers from various denominations of money and their location, and the system will track those bills, and show you a report of where that bill has previously been (if another user had already entered it).

    It’s a neat concept, one of the first of this type I think (along with other sites like BookCrossing), that came out a few years back. All or most of the original stamped bills were released on the East Coast, I believe, so it’s interesting to see them finally circulating out west.

    Of course, it’s also easy to overlook the fact that this is a massive database tracking the existence and whereabouts of hundreds of millions of dollars across the country, which I’m sure gives paranoid conspiracy theorists nightmares… Myself, on the other hand, I’m a data junkie, and I would just love to get a peek at that database…

  • Arnold is Governor

    So the freak show in California is over and Arnold Schwarzenegger is the new governor.

    Lovely.

    Reminds me of an old California joke: California’s like a bowl of cereal; once you get rid of the fruits and nuts, all you have left are the flakes.

  • The Return of the King

    The trailer for The Return of the King is online. December 17th; just over two months.

  • Pirates of the Caribbean

    We (finally) went and saw “Pirates of the Caribbean” tonight. It was a lot of fun, I liked it. Johnny Depp was, frankly, amazing. Go see it, if it’s still in theaters where you’re at.

  • Broken email prognostication

    I’ve been reading a lot about how email is broken these days—articles here, here and here are examples—and interestingly, I came across the following passage in Cryptonomicon (published in 1999) that I thought was apropos:

    “I hate e-mail,” John says.

    Harvard Li stares him in the eye for a while. “What do you mean?”

    “The concept is good. The execution is poor. People don’t observe any security precautions. A message arrives claiming to be from Harvard Li, they believe it’s really from Harvard Li. But this message is just a pattern of magnetized spots on a spinning disk somewhere. Anyone could forge it.”

  • Article on blogging

    Interesting story on weblogs here. Good introductory overview on blogging, worth reading if you’re new to it and are curious, and even if you’re not.