Chuggnutt!

Author: Jon

  • Elektro

    It’s kind of hard to imagine what Elektro, the Oldest U.S. Robot looks like until you actually see it. What’s crazy is that it was created sometime during the ’30s…

    Back in 1939, Elektro was able to walk, talk, raise and lower his arms, turn his head and move his mouth as he spoke. It used a 78-rpm record player to simulate conversation and had a vocabulary of more than 700 words. Thousands of people enjoyed Elektro at the New York World’s Fair in 1939.

    I don’t know, but it kind of reminds me of the robot from “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Weird.

  • Susan B. Anthony; or, People Are Dumb

    I’m not sure if people are stupid, ignorant, lacking in a proper education or some combination of those, but the following example should illustrate my point. At work today I was talking with a co-worker about education (her son is in second grade and learning history) and the name Susan B. Anthony came up. I asked, “You know who she was, right?”

    “Uh, someone famous—I know she was on a coin,” was the reply.

    Pretty bad. I’m always highly disappointed when I run into this type of thing at work… I should know better by now.

    What’s worse, though, is when I asked another (female) co-worker the same question:

    “I know she’s on a coin.”

    Ug.

  • Wanna be famous? Get fired for blogging

    Gee, it sure seems like the way to quickly get famous online these days is to get fired for blogging.

  • Cancelled!

    Well, I posted too soon. Tonight’s blogger get-together has been cancelled, too many people had something come up. Hopefully we can convene next week or something.

  • Bend Bloggers

    Unless plans changed when I wasn’t looking, the Bend/Central Oregon bloggers are getting together again tomorrow, Tuesday the 8th. It’s at the Cascade Lakes Brewery Lodge (upstairs!) on Bend’s westside, starting at 7pm. I don’t know yet if I’ll make it, but I know a bunch of the others will. Cheers!

  • php|tropics

    A bit over a year ago I blogged about the PHP Cruise. Well, this year there’s another PHP conference organized by the folks at php|architect, though it’s not a cruise this time: php|tropics!

    It’s in Cancun, Mexico, from May 11 through 15. Now, if I only had a few grand lying around and could convince work that it’s a business trip…

  • Central Oregon’s biggest baby?

    According to this article in the Bulletin, a woman in Prineville gave birth to a 14 pound, 1 ounce baby. Holy c-section, Batman! Still, as big as that is, it doesn’t quite beat the 16.7 pound baby born last month. And then for some bogglers check out these Guinness World Record entries for heaviest births.

  • Much Ado About nofollow

    Watching the various debate about Google’s nofollow initiative has been enlightening. Ostensibly, it was supposed to be a way to fight comment spam on weblogs, but predictably it took no time at all for people to figure out how to game the system. Also predictably, anti-nofollow support launched equally quickly.

    I won’t use it. At all. Why? Mostly because it’s such a non-issue (it won’t do a thing to comment spam), but a large part of the reasoning is that I won’t be held hostage to what I can write and link to by any one search engine or technology. Nor am I going to let the ranking alorithm of one search engine make me do its work for it, especially if PageRank is broken like some people believe.

    It’s a misnamed attribute, actually. Google says links with it “won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results,” but the “nofollow” label makes it appear that Google won’t actually follow the link itself. Not so. Google will follow the link, it just will not confer ranking.

    More bothersome is the fact that other search engines (Yahoo and MSN, notably) have signed on to this. Why bothersome? Well, because Google’s PageRank algorithm is supposed to be a Trade Secret, and theoretically other search engines’ technologies are Trade Secrets also, so who knows how the others will actually implement processing of this attribute? Will they choose to actually not follow such links, allowing sites to potentially drop out of their indices? There’s no guarantees. But if they’re all similar to PageRank, and PageRank is broken, then they may all be broken and this won’t fix things.

    Oh well. My various megalomaniacal rantings won’t change things in the world at large, so I’ll stick to what I can do on my own site. :)

  • Super Wal-Mart

    So there’s supposed to be a new Wal-Mart Supercenter coming to Bend. The Bend.com story is here. It’ll be located at the northwest corner of the intersection of Highway 97 and Cooley Road, and is supposed to be a gargantuan 200,000 square feet in size.

    I can’t say I’m thrilled. Why?

    • Bend and Central Oregon already has more than enough box stores, including two Wal-Marts.
    • Likewise, Bend already has plenty of grocery stores (for those who didn’t know, Wal-Mart Supercenters include groceries). Buying groceries from Wal-Mart seems way too sketchy to me.
    • It will make a bad traffic situation at the north end of town 1000 times worse.
    • It will always be crowded, making it too inconvenient for quick stops. Combined with traffic, this will make it far more trouble than it’s worth.
    • It will be ugly. Remember the hooplah that surrounded the building of the driving range at the north end of town?
    • That north end of 97 is already a stripmall, boxstore eyesore. I don’t even like going there (well, except for Food 4 Less, but even that’s not totally convenient).
    • It will drive smaller local companies out of business. This will happen.
    • While it will supposedly create 400 new jobs (according to what I heard on Z21 news), these will be barely minimum wage jobs (according to the Bend.com article). That can’t be good for people who need living wage jobs (especially in this area) or the local economy.

    Now, I used to go to the Wal-Mart at the south end of town. It did the job, but I don’t get down there anymore. It served its purpose. But I really see no reason for a Supercenter to be built. None at all.

  • Trackback spam

    Woke up this morning to find 116 notices of trackback spam littering my inbox. Out of the blue, and I notice that a whole bunch of other weblogs got hit today, too. It appears some spammer finally wrote a script to exploit trackback. Ah, well. It was easy enough to fix; do a quick mod to my add_trackback.php file, redirecting bad traffic, and a quick SQL query on the database to clear out the offending spam, less than 10 minutes. Gotta love having absolute control over my system.