My site has been plagued by odd characters in some of my old posts for a rather long time. The most common is the seemingly random appearance of  characters in the midst of some of my posts.
I know the basic cause: one of my WordPress / MySQL updates in ancient times (circa 2008) ended up producing a character set mismatch. I long ago fixed the cause, but all the existing bad characters persisted. Until today… I hope
According to the lead Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, Peter Hoekstra, the U.S. should launch an all out retaliation against North Korea for their role in the recent cyber attacks on American and South Korean internet targets. Unfortunately for the American people, Mr. Hoekstra is either an idiot, willfully ignorant, or intentionally twisting reality for his own political ends. The best experts in the industry agree that the attacks were launched by an attention-seeking amateur.
The cable content provider formerly known as the Sci Fi channel has renamed itself “SyFy”. Here is their reasoning for this rather bizarre change:
The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular. We spent a lot of time in the ’90s trying to distance the network from science fiction, which is largely why it’s called Sci Fi. It’s somewhat cooler and better than the name ‘Science Fiction.’ But even the name Sci Fi is limiting. … (Changing the name to Syfy) gives us a unique word and it gives us the opportunities to imbue it with the values and the perception that we want it to have.
So in one giant leap, the SyFy channel has both insulted their entire existing client base and devised a new name that sounds like a sexually transmitted disease. It also means nasty things in Polish, apparently.
I have talked here recently about my difficulty resisting the left over halloween candy. But for those who have no such concerns, and for whom money is no object, there is the world’s most expensive dessert.
Every year we buy more halloween candy than we give out. That’s great: I like the little snacks.
And every year I grab a handful (or two, or three…) of the stuff every time I sit down in front of the TV. So, there I am, feeling overweight and lazy, eating hundreds of totally empty calories. I feel this strange compulsion to eat the stuff as fast as possible, so it is gone and no longer a temptation. But wait a sec- whether I eat it in one week, or eat it in six months, I’m still ingesting the same calories.
I believe in the importance of copyright. I also firmly believe in “fair use”: that is, if I pay for the right to use your content, I have the right to use it for my own personal use on any platform I choose. Thus I am totally against abusive DRM systems that (for example) prevent me from watching a movie on my computer, and later watching it on my TV.
Someone has been submitting about five “Viagra!” news items to one of my websites every day now for about six months. Such news items are moderated, and never appear on the site since I delete them. That’s dumb.
I was reading one of my news feeds the other day and came across this gem about a woman who beat a dog breeder with a dead chihuahua. Apparently, the dog breeder sold the puppy when it was too young. The purchaser took the puppy to a vet who told her it needed to be returned to its mother, but the puppy died while in transit. The puppy’s purchaser then proceeded to assault the dog breeder using the dead chihuahua as a weapon.
I spent a few minutes the other day following a series of threads about a disagreement between a website designer and a “famous” blogger. In summary: a guy paid for someone to re-design their website. Some people criticized the design, and the guy who paid said “anything that’s wrong here is my fault”. Someone sent him a
of a different way the site could have been done, and he posted it saying “there are some good ideas here, I think we might use some”. Then the designer resigned, and some people went ballistic.