This Is What I Was Born To Do

I have a fantastic lot of projects to do right now, which is why updates are a little spotty. It's okay, though, because most of it is code, and code is what I was Born To Do.

My employer wants a social networking site, which is hilarious, because social networking doesn't really fit our business model and because everybody and their grandmother wants their own social networking site.

My other employer (Fancy) wants video uploads, so that people can upload their steamy hot pornography to a server, so that other people who want pornography of the steamy hot variety can watch them. Having seen the site this is supposed to be similar to, I'm pretty disgusted, because every person who uploads themselves naked to the site looks like a gorilla. It's enough to make you want to burn your eyeballs out, with a gun that shoots fire.

Finally, I have to fix plunk's computer, which is crappy and slow and runs windows, barely. In the meantime, I have EIGHT. GIGS. of her pornophotography sitting on my computer. In a shared public folder. I hope there's something incriminating in there. I really do.

Look At My Hedgehog

Holy smokes.

Look at my hedgehog.

It has pimp ass goggles.

It has a parachute and radar and rockets all the fuck up in there.

Don't fucking mess with my hedgehog.

It will kick your ass.

MSN Spam Has Fucking Peaked

I'm kind of an equal opportunity chatter. That is, I don't care who you are, what language you speak, or whether you're the stalker child molester that ruined my summer vacations forever back in the innocent year of 1985. I'll talk to anybody, about anything, and as long as you don't mind hearing me reminesce about my twisted sexual proclivities involving ancient unspeakable programming languages and the recently deceased, we'll be best friends forever.

Then I reactivated my MSN account.

I have to warn you guys: I log my chats. I log my chats because I say things, twisted things, that I would like to read again, later, when I'm pretending that I'm popular and witty. But for the past month, all I've been getting is requests to go look at some psycho bicurious chick's webcam. From different accounts. That aren't real. In that laborious epic The World According To MSN Fucking Messenger, the entire population of the United States consists of me and several million horny twenty-three year old bicurious virtual maidens, all of whom spend their evenings flashing their supple goods for the benefit of the internet.

According to MSN, Google and Wal-Mart mean nothing. With all those webcams out there, it's obvious that Logitech is the richest company in the entire universe. Forget running your useless SETI @ Home screensaver and beaming sequences of primes out into that beautiful dark; when the aliens want to let us into their interstellar utopian society, they'll do it by transmitting us the access key to live, subspace video feeds showing versatile galactic nymphets stripped of everything but their glory.

Hey, Want To Bleed From Your Eye Sockets?

http://movieconvert.sourceforge.net/

It's PHYSICALLY painful.

I Fucking Love This Award

Created by OnePlusYou

The Future Is Tomorrow

Geez, the freaking internet.

I remember when I was a kid, and they were showing the MOUSE on Saturday morning television as the newest, most revolutionary invention yet. The mouse. And now, all of a sudden, I can make loans through Prosper; I can get a more or less accurate account of anything in the world via Wikipedia or the Urban Dictionary; I can see more naked women then I thought could possibly exist.

So, obviously, I'm bored like ninety percent of the time.

When I'm not writing code or doing simple administration work, I'm surfing the web while my mind crunches the next hurdle I have to navigate. There are like six billion channels, literally, and nothing is on. There's not much point in taking a day off (I already got marked down for unexcused awesomeness) because at home, I'm pretty much using the same internet. And you manager types who think I should be quantizing my time or carpe-ing my diem need to die in a fire. Programming well is thinky work. And thinking requires webcomics. It's all in the Bible, somewhere.

I really wonder what my life would have turned out like if I'd grown up in the rock-beating, wheel-inventing days of Before The Internet. I probably would have gotten addicted to laudanum or absinthe or something and done whatever the prehistoric version of "checking my email over and over" was.

But then I would have invented rocket lasers and killed everyone, twice.

Sometimes, It's Not My Funny

1:18:29 PM Teleolurian Kordyne: google.com/analytics

1:18:44 PM Teleolurian Kordyne: you have to post some code into your page so it gets daily readings

1:18:55 PM Kerplunk: where do i put it

1:19:05 PM Teleolurian Kordyne: well, sign up for the account first

1:21:00 PM Kerplunk: i have to give them my phone number

1:21:05 PM Teleolurian Kordyne: not really

1:21:18 PM Teleolurian Kordyne: they never call

1:21:52 PM Kerplunk: this tells you who exactly looked at your page

1:22:00 PM Teleolurian Kordyne: well, it can give you IPs

1:22:09 PM Kerplunk: can i put this on myspace?

1:22:13 PM Teleolurian Kordyne: yeah

Note: I have since found out that myspace restricts javascript posting, so google analytics doesn't work on myspace. Instead, you should use mixmap.

1:22:20 PM Kerplunk: fuckin sweet

1:22:52 PM Kerplunk: i want to know who looks at my shit

1:23:03 PM Kerplunk: muah ha ha ha ha

1:23:14 PM Teleolurian Kordyne: you non techies are hilarious

1:23:21 PM Kerplunk: laugh it up

1:23:21 PM Teleolurian Kordyne: this is like the simplest thing in the world

1:23:49 PM Teleolurian Kordyne: and you all act like suddenly somebody gave you the KEYS. to the whole fucking planet.

1:23:55 PM Kerplunk: thats like me saying its easy to insert a tampon

1:24:00 PM Kerplunk: you wouldn't know, now, would you?

1:24:04 PM Teleolurian Kordyne: touche.

Amazon Secretly Loves You

Shortly after Big Media tried to diss Apple's iTunes by supporting DRM-free music downloads on Amazon, we now see Amazon staging a new software and game download service. Unless you're really against paying for music, software, and the like, the thought of Amazon rolling out a digital download service has got to feel pretty sexy for you. I'll tell you this- if they ever move into DRM-free, standard format video downloads, I will love them unconditionally forever with what I keep in my pants.

Microsoft. Yahoo. What The Hell: Apple

Okay. So Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo!, apparently to bolster their flagging search engine business. This has nothing to do with webmail, at all, even though the combined email share would top 90% of the email market.

Yeah, right.

Under the watchful eyes of the state, who have time and again accused Microsoft of antitrust violations of epic scale, I think they're trying to pull a fast one. Yahoo! and Microsoft combined have somewhere around zero chance of defeating 600-pound gorilla Google in the search engine market, even with their combined technologies. But webmail? Isn't it curious that even the iPhone that Ballmer was so quick to dismiss uses Yahoo! webmail instead of Gmail?

I mean, from Apple's perspective, it made sense. Apple probably went to Yahoo! and said, "We've got this phone. Gmail has two gigs plus of storage..." and Yahoo! said, "well, we can shift our budget around and do unlimited storage, if it's lucrative enough for us." And now Microsoft stands to gain Apple's contract (nothing compared to the rest of it), 90+ percent of the webmail market, and a healthy set of email data to pitch marketing links to. Don't be surprised if, once this hostile takeover is completed, your email about the Dodgers gets delivered with its own little link attached.

Am I fearmongering? Maybe. I'm positing a world in which a wealthy company like Microsoft uses its time-repeated offensive and sometimes ludicrous code to invade personal privacy in the name of corporate gains. Lord knows, that's never happened before.

Even More Programming Goodness

It's like I fell asleep in class one day, except that then I woke up as Haskell Curry. Xplor.In is going through a pretty interesting transition right now, where it functions less as a means of obscuring your urls and more as a method of seeing what all my friends feel is worth posting to it. (Now that I've got the bookmarklet in my bookmarks bar, I just sort of post anything that looks slightly interesting).

People make fun of me because of my total lack of design skills, as is certainly evidenced by Xplor; the color scheme looks like somebody's retarded kid won the web design trophy in the Special Olympics. Somehow, I thought that owning a Mac would make me effeminate, trendy, and especially good at interior design, but it turns out that while I know exactly what color any random hex string will give me, I have a lot to learn about making them not look like a melted box of crayons.

Obviously, I can't take criticism on any level without trying to do something about it. I was just going to urinate in the coffeepot, but then someday I might forget and drink coffee, so instead I made sure everyone knew I could fake pretty by designing my really-truly home page in shades of grey. Mostly because you can get away with being a color moron if everything is in black and white.

How The Magic Happens

Of course, I'm aware that I'm smarter, funnier, and more sexually attractive than about two hundred percent of the internet. The point is, without my totally awesome and yet crippling brain disease, I'd probably be just like everybody else out there (except the attractive part, that comes from stuffing socks down my pants). It annoys me that in this day and age, almost all the blogs I read are glorified linkdumps, offering up somebody's halfhearted opinion about somebody else's carefully gathered content. In such a cluttered mess, finding the original post is like playing "Who's Got The Button?".

Now, I'm not sure why anybody reads my blog, since it's pretty much just me being massively conceited and talking about how my life is awesomer than Superman's. Every post can pretty much be reduced to the following:

"Something happened to me, or maybe someone else. Everyone but me is stupid. I'm married, or maybe I'm not, since I use the words 'wife' and 'girlfriend' interchangeably. I have done so many drugs in the past year that it would take an aircraft carrier to actually deliver them to my house. Damn hell ass fuck. I have a huge drinking problem and I hit girls. Regardless of this, women invent new modes of travel just to come over to my house and blow me."

Still, I haven't yet been banned from the internet as hate speech. Therefore, since in a perfect world every blog would be as funny as mine and every blog writer would be drop dead gorgeous and waiting for me on my doorstep, here's a few things I try to keep in mind for every post.

• Whenever any idea crosses your mind, expand on it to try and generate content. It doesn't matter if you just suddenly think, "I bet scientific research would conclude that all frogs smell like ass" - indeed, that's pretty typical of the things I consider sharing with the rest of you. If I can find a way to make it obscene or at the very least distasteful, I've got something to go on. (This post began with me thinking about how mindblowingly amazing I am).
• Every time I post, I try to come up with a brand new, fantastic simile. You could say something like, "girls really like me". Yeah. Real clever, Hemingway. Instead, you could say, "women cut off and sell their feet just to hobble over to my apartment". Maybe even "chicks usually jump me like the CIA on an Egyptian tourist". Just the thought of all those footless Egyptians make me want to grow a beanstalk. Click the link. I'm not talking about a plant.
  
• Sometimes something happens to you that's fantastic, but the events around it are gay. The secret is to lie. That's not what I do, because nothing boring ever happens to me ever, but if the rest of you would just take the time to make up a more interesting reason why you were at the erotic bakery when suddenly the manager turned into an octopus, I'd be far more inclined to read about it. After all, the internet isn't about you. It's about me.
  

100th Post Celebration

It's been such a long and lovely time, and now What I Actually Hear has turned 100. As part of the celebration, I added a bunch of new quotes to the Magic Hate Ball (the ID goes up to 59 but I deleted a few). You know you want to see them all.

There's still a couple of weak ones in there, but I'm flexible. Let me know which ones you don't like or whether there are any clever bits of hate you want to add.

Review: Agile Web Development With Rails, Second Edition

Agile Web Development With Rails is a book about programming Rails, which is a web framework written in Ruby, which is the language that octopuses would write freaking sweet video games in all the time if they weren't so busy eating sharks. Ruby on Rails came from the Basecamp project written by David Heinemeier Hansson, who is very loud and kind of annoying but it's okay because he wrote Rails.

Ruby As A Language

If you've ever written anything in Ruby then you already know that it's impossible to stop programming after you start. Soon you're inventing dumb, complex projects just because Ruby translates thoughts to programming so incredibly well that you can't help yourself. I have written strange, unspeakable magicks in Ruby that I'm pretty sure you have to be a twentieth-level wizard to cast. I can cast them because I cheat on my rolls.

The Book Itself

When I got in my car to come home from work tonight, suddenly this gigantic moth started buzzing around inside my windshield. At least, I think it was a moth. From the size of it, it might have been a small dragon. 

Immediately, I screamed like a girl and rolled down all my windows and tried to get it to get out of my car by begging and swerving my car around. I'm pretty sure everyone who saw me leaving the parking lot just thought I was a badass driver because I'm all asian and I drive a Nissan, but really I was just trying to keep the moth from flying in my ears and laying its eggs in me. It's really hard to drive when you have your hands over your ears, but I managed to make it to a parking lot a few buildings down. Then, I looked for a book to smash it with.

Learning Perl 5 (Revised Edition) could have wasted the moth, but it's seriously like six inches thick and my arms are too girly to pick it up. Ajax on Rails is a smaller book and I could have gotten it down into the corner where my windshield and dashboard meet, but I didn't have it in the car, because seriously, who tries to do something in Ajax and pulls out a book? People just go to the website for prototype.js and read that stuff there. I don't even know why I own that book.

Luckily, David Heinemeier Hansson's fantastic book was there. I didn't want to sit in my car in the parking lot while everybody drove past me, so I just kept swerving down the road and launching the Rails book at my windshield trying to get the moth. For a while, I kept missing and I thought it was going to fly in my ears while I was holding the book, but eventually I got a lucky splat and killed it and gained a billion experience. The cover is so shiny that the moth just fell off onto the passenger seat, so I left it there to scare girls away. I was so excited that I forgot about driving over to Fancy's to inject blendered girl scouts into my femoral artery, like I was going to do, and instead just thought about Rails all the way home.

The Pretty Cover

AWDwR(SE) has a very pretty cover, with a skateboarder doing a totally awesome rail slide in blurry motion. The skateboarder represents Web 2.0. In the bottom left corner is a really neat little icon that says "Rails" underneath a picture of an octopus's engorged tentacle. This represents the octopus-like versatility of Rails.

In the bottom right hand corner, there are the names of the people who wrote the book, which includes the guy who invented Wendy's and David Heinemeier Hansson, who has a very long middle name.

The Words Inside

I mostly have this book for reference, because I already know how to write things in Rails. However, having had the last edition of this book (which is called AWDwR(FE)), I was surprised that Rails now has RJS, which is a way to code Javascript without looking as stupid as you would by actually writing things in Javascript. I find this has tremendous value even if I never ever code anything in RJS, because it gives me more reasons to tell people why Rails is important and good.

At work, we use a framework called creovel, which is kind of like Rails' retarded younger brother who owns a Vincent Black Shadow and always beats him in races. (Rails drives a Vespa.) Creovel is a very good framework for not having to wait for another Ice Age for your page to come up, which is what happens if you use Rails. Also, I had to say something good about creovel because all my bosses wrote it and they could potentially form some kind of Boss Voltron and beat me up.

Final Score

David Heinemeier Hansson   8.6/10

Ruby 11/10

Octopus Logo 14/3.14159265358979323846 (yes i know this by heart i win)

Creovel f(n)

Moth Killing Powers 46/52

Total Score: Eleventy Billion

Web Entrepreneurs Are Idiots

So, I'm working on this website for Fancy. Let's say it's a home-study college course (it isn't). Let us also say that some of the most fantastic idiots in the history of humanity come up with these half-cocked ideas for websites as if though their brains were wired to occasionally just spit neurons into the vast depths of space.

I've met some people with brilliant concepts. Heck, I'm friends with more than a couple. These are people who understand how consumer markets work and aim to fully achieve the realization of their dreams via the intertubes. Then there's this guy, whose ideas are so fundamentally retarded that it's like his mother missed with the coat hanger somewhere in the first trimester.

Imagine that you're a consumer who has no idea what a diploma mill is, and therefore think it's a good idea to take an online college course. This represents ignorance on your part, but it doesn't make you an idiot. Now, let's say you're hard at work trying to learn your advanced physics through html, reading equations that really don't make much sense and trying to cram them all in your brain so you can pass a joke of a test.

You're really concentrating, right? You open up TextEdit and jot down some notes. You drink coffee, and you stare at this screen until your eyeballs rupture.

And then this window pops up asking you about some tramp you nailed back in high school while you were rolling on ecstasy. Seriously. Just to make sure you didn't stop studying, and to make sure you are who you really say you are.

Suddenly, your train of thought is derailed. It's like somebody just pissed on your exposed, demyelinized spinal cord. Whoops. What was a Lagrange Multiplier again? So you've got to rewind and go up a paragraph and try and get back on track.

And then the fucking window asks you what you ate for breakfast. Now, whenever you think about the loci of stationary points in a constraint algorithm, your mind is inevitably drawn towards the image of a Bacon McGriddle in your hand while you drive to work from the point on the side of the highway where you decided you were too drunk to keep going.

Brilliant work, gentlemen. Future generations will praise you. You are truly the golden standard of what it means to be a man.

Web 2.0

The corners of the images have been rounded off so as to not harm any users. In addition, we've built all the functionality into clever-looking flashy things that will confuse you, but if you're Timothy Leary it will blow your socks right off.