Month: April 2007

There Are Bad Ideas, Then There Are B*A*D Ideas

karaoke-tunes.JPG

That’s a banner in a booth I saw at CTIA 2007. So the idea here is that you use their software client to sing along with Karaoke tune, then whenever your phone rings you get to hear yourself singing. I’m a vocalist myself, so I have a bit of a narcissistic streak when it comes to hearing what my own singing voice sounds like, but this is completely ridiculous. And sharing it with others? “Hey, here’s a ring tone for you – what it is? Why, it’s yours truly singing Bootylicious…no, wait, why are you walking away?”. Some business plans deserve to fail.

It’s Just One of Those Days

Upgrading WordPress is a Pain in the Ass: I just finished updating WordPress from 2.1.1 to 2.1.3, and for this particular version they strongly suggested that people delete most of the WordPress files and re-upload them from scratch. What a slow, frustrating process that was – I can’t believe that with all the users WordPress has, they wouldn’t have come up with a smoother, more automated process by now. I’m keeping my eye on Habari to see if it evolves into a smarter solution.

Someone Hacked My Church’s Web Site: What kind of a degenerate hacks a church Web site? Evidently a degenerate that lives in Turkey. He got in through a Joomla exploit and didn’t seem to do much damage other than putting up a “You’ve been hacked” front page display. Thanks to Jorj and Janak, who did the investigating, it seems that only that one account was compromised and everything else on the server is ok. Yet I still remain a big nervous because you just never know…

Buy a Fresh, Whole Rabbit from Amazon.com

I don’t know if this is an April Fool’s joke or what, but my sick and twisted sense of humour found the “buyer” reviews to be extremely amusing. Here are some of the more amusing ones (thanks to Todd for the heads up).

“A lot of my friends like to shop online, so I added this to my baby registry. My best friend received one at her shower and she loves it! So when I got TWO at my shower, it wasn’t the disaster other duplicate gifts can be! My little girl is now three months old and we are still getting a lot of use out of the Fresh Whole Rabbits.”

“Thought it would make a cute Easter gift, no one else thought so, kids are in counselling now. Apparently I’m the only one with a sense of humor in this family. At least it’s a hit with the dog, one extra star for that. I’m way too scared to even try to take it away from him, he loves it so much. ‘Heh, OK SirFluffles,’ I say to him, ‘it’s YOUR fresh whole rabbit.'”

“How many weekends have I spent, in the loincloth, knife clenched in my teeth, running through the fields trying to find a rabbit? (A bunch, trust me on this, a bunch.) All so I can have something to sacrifice on the altar once I get to the cave. Now, with this, home, fix a cocktail, go through the day’s mail, finish my drink and drive over to the cave, yank this carcass out of the box and offer this at the feet of my dark lord and master, boom, done. I’m happy, my dark lord and master is happy, everybody wins. What a time saver.”

Gears of War Quandry: Surely This Can’t Be Right?

I picked up Gears of War a couple of months ago, but have only recently started to start playing it more seriously. Some friends were over a few weeks ago and we played in co-op mode for a bit, and got to a certain checkpoint. Then this last Saturday I fired it up again to play with a buddy of mine who’s in Ontario. I wanted to start over a new game from scratch with him, but I also wanted to keep my previously saved game. The game wouldn’t let me do that – it said that if wanted to start a new campaign I would lose my previous campaign and checkpoints. That can’t be right – am I missing something? How do you play a solo game and also do online campaigning with your friends? Or what if you have more than one group of friends you want to play with?