Category: general

Check out Somewhere on the Masthead–err, Somewhat of an Asshole. MM’s big brother has taken control!

Here’s a screenshot:

This is pretty damn funny.

However…

For this to have occurred, MM must have given BB his own Blogger username and password. Then, BB must have created his own Blogger account, logged in as MM and added himself as a contributor with admin access, then removed MM’s admin access to the blog. (Since MM posted anonymously in the comments, it would appear that BB changed MM’s password so he couldn’t log in. He might have simply done this rather than removing MM’s admin access.)

Afterwards, BB was free to wreak havoc on the blog template.

I suppose it is possible that this happened. But I’m finding myself fairly skeptical. I realize MM isn’t as Web savvy as, say, me, but you would think he would know better than to simply give a guest blogger the password to his own account. There are a few possibilities:

1. MM severely underestimated his brother’s blogging knowledge, and gave him his own account information so as to make the guest blogging as simple as possible.
   I don’t believe this one for a second.
2. MM knew this would happen, and knew that in the end he’d get the keys to his castle back, so he figured it would be funny and allowed it to occur.
   This one is more likely. The control freak that is me would never do something like this, but it’s possible that MM knows how far his brother is likely to go with his teasing and was willing to take the risk. (If that’s the case I would hope he made backups of his blog template and posts.)
3. BB is not a real person, but is simply another character written by MM.
   I really believe that this could be the case. There are clues in BB’s first post. While it is written in BB’s established style, there are moments that feel very crafted. Crafted by, say, a very good writer. Only another writer would probably notice this.

I actually love the idea that BB might not be real. I see MM as a writer who wants to challenge himself. He’s written from other perspectives in his posts, but everyone knew it was him doing it. Could he hoodwink people into thinking that the posts made by BB were from a different person?

So he tried it, first in the comments section. And as time passed and no one blew the whistle, he wanted to go further. So he casually introduced the idea of a guest blog by BB, and when everyone responded with excitement…he took the plunge.

I would not be so suspicious if MM had still been able to post with his own account, there in the comments. Because if BB is savvy enough to change a messy blog template, he would surely know that all he needed to do was “demote” MM’s account, not change the password. This would allow MM to continue posting on the blog, but would not allow him to alter the template or edit any of BB’s posts. The reason I think BB would have done this is simply that there is now a “Contributors” section on the blog. MM can hardly be a contributor if he doesn’t have access to post, now can he?

I realize that this is all assuming a level of Blogger understanding. But to be honest, Blogger is not that difficult. And MM has blogger friends, like Shane Nickerson, who he could have consulted about how to add BB as a guest blogger.

So I really think that this is all an elaborate writing exercise.

And…

…I love it!

If not for the red flags I’ve noted, this would be perfect. And it is absolutely hilarious. Suspend your disbelief for a moment and just imagine that this guy’s brother really did hijack his blog. Look at what he chose to put on there! It’s awesome :D

Whether he’s real or not, I’m looking forward to more BB posts. Or to whatever sort of drama MM has scripted :)

[Edit 2/19 11:55am]: Check it, BB put up a response to this post! I just have a few more points:

1. Pictures don’t prove anything. It could be one person writing who has permission to use pictures of other family members while spinning his tales. It’s the intarweb! We don’t know that anything is real!
2. Note the two reactions from the Masthead/Asshole contributors: from MM, we get the requisite righteous indignation, sure to convince the people who feel sympathy for him that this is in fact a real hijacking; from BB, we get open acceptance of the “conspiracy theory”–and as we all know, one of the best ways to discredit something is to agree that it’s an awesome “idea”. (Implicature, folks.)

No matter what the reality of the situation is, it sure is fun :D

Saving posts to Draft and then Publishing them seems to work. Now I’m testing to see what happens if I just Publish Post.

Edit: This also worked. However, it seems that people have tried the Drafts thing and then had their posts vanish later. We’ll have to see what happens. Still no word from Blogger Support. Until I’m confident this has been resolved, I’m saving all my posts in a text file. I also suggest that people not post comments :(, because Blogger has been eating them.

The Blogger problem is affecting more than just me. Here’s a thread on Google Groups about it.

Apparently if you save a post to Drafts before publishing, it doesn’t destroy the previous post. I’m going to try it with this one. If the previous post does disappear, I’ve got it saved as a text file.

I’ve done a lot of reading yesterday and today about Blogger support and how much it sucks. I hadn’t realized before how bad it was. I’ve contacted them before, with template questions, but that was years ago. Nowadays it seems like nobody bothers to answer emails personally. There has never been a phone number to call for support, either.

I guess I’ll go ahead and talk about my day yesterday.

I was feeling pretty casual so I wore jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers. I also slept in a little; it was nice. As I mentioned, it was a beautiful day, and I had the windows open.

For lunch I met up with Brooke and David at the Boll Weevil. It was soooo good. I had the Cool Hand Luke (a turkey sandwich with tomatoes, cucumbers, and mayo). All of their sandwiches are served on this thick, sweet, honey bread. I could just sit and eat the bread by itself. Maybe with a little butter. Mmmm.

I had pasta salad with the sandwich. The pasta salad had black olives in it. I decided to see if I still hate olives. Surprisingly, they weren’t bad. The flavor was an interesting counterpoint to the sweetness of the sandwich.

I ate my whole sandwich and most of the pasta salad. Then we all decided to have dessert! o_o

I had Kentucky Pie, because I figured I should find out what pie was representing my home state. It was chocolate, walnut, and coconut, and they warmed it up, and it was delicious. I’ll have to have that again.

Brooke had some kind of cake/pie thing with alcohol in it. Bourbon? I forget :P I tried a little of it, and it was decent.

David had Grasshopper Cheesecake, which is chocolate and mint. I didn’t try it, but it looked awesome. He had to scrape pieces off of it because it was a big hard chunk. :D

After lunch I went back to work and stayed there until around 7 pm. I got everything done that I needed to get done and headed home.

I was supposed to meet up with Brooke, David, Mari, and Kelly that evening for dinner and putt-putt, so I first turned on my laptop to continue some downloads (of course) and then fretted about what to wear. I have outgrown most of my pants. I guess I have been eating too much (duh). Finally I chose my work pants and my black shirt with blue flowers, and I grabbed a long sleeved shirt in case it got cold. Brooke called and I headed out to meet everyone at Kinja.

Alas, when we got there we found that they close at 8 pm. (How ridiculous is that?) So when Mari and Kelly arrived we all decided to go to Mikoto instead. It’s practically right across the street, but I managed to overshoot it as usual (their sign is so invisible ;P) and had to turn around.

I was still pretty full from lunch, as you might imagine, so I didn’t order crazy amounts of food. I had my old standby, unagidon (and boy was it good) and some maguro nigiri (which was delicious). I also ordered some shrimp tempura and sushi rolls for Sean to eat later.

We sat around BSing for a long time until finally we decided we should leave so the Mikoto people could clean up–they closed at 9. We headed out into the parking lot, where we realized it was getting cold, but still decided to go to Bruster’s for ice cream.

I don’t know why, but we went to the Bruster’s in Evans. It seems like that’s a lot farther from Mikoto than the Bruster’s in Augusta Exchange, but maybe I’m on crack. It didn’t really matter, because the Evans Bruster’s is right down the street from Cheryl and Reid.

I didn’t eat any ice cream. Mari got Cinnamon Bun. I’m not sure what Kelly got. Brooke and David both got Chocolate Marshmallow. Mari’s parents came and had ice cream too: Bonnie had Coffee Oreo and Antonio had regular old Chocolate, which is informed us is the absolute best ice cream flavor, period.

We hung out for a long time after Mari’s parents left, just talking. Sean was supposed to get off work at 10 and come meet up with us, but it was kind of cold to play putt-putt, so finally we all decided to just go home. I brought Sean’s sushi back to the house and put it in the fridge.

He came home and ate the sushi while we watched an episode of Kyou Kara Maou and two episodes of Smallville.

I was interested to see Kyou Kara Maou 60 with subtitles. It was neat to see how much I had understood, and great to fill in the gaps of the things I hadn’t quite caught. For example, I couldn’t make out for the life of me what Bob was saying in his emails. His voice is deep, and they used a kind of reverb on it, I guess to show that it was email. Regardless, I couldn’t pick out any words, so it was nice to see what he said. It was also great to see Yuuri’s Maou speech translated. I had tried to translate it myself, and I’d done a fairly good job, but I couldn’t understand it with just listening. I had to try to figure out the sounds he was making and then figure out what words they might be and then do a rough translation of the sentences. It was nice to see that I wasn’t totally off-base.

I also have a better understanding of that scene now. Since they were all under the impression that they couldn’t use majutsu on Earth, Yuuri was totally BSing. (Which brings up a question: when did he start remembering what he does as Maou? Unless someone quoted him one of his Maou speeches, I’m not sure how he knew to format the speech and say “seibai!” at the end.)

The Smallville eps were cool. I actually watched the one with Chloe and the ghost last week when it came on TV. The new one was neat, though. I knew right away that Lionel had sent the package, and it irritated me to no end. It sucks that Martha doesn’t know Lionel knows, because then she might have seen through it. I guess she does know he had an inkling before…but she might think he’s lost all that knowledge. At the end of the episode, Sean said, “I’m still not sure how much of him is Lionel and how much is Jor-El.”

After we finished watching those eps, we went to bed. And that was yesterday!

Today Sean is supposed to go to a LAN party at William’s. Before that, Brooke and David are supposed to stop by. Sean is still in bed…so I’m not sure how it’s all going to work out.

Ah well.

Now, to see if this will post!

I made a post before I left for lunch about how I feel great today. When I got back, it wasn’t there, and my computer had restarted so I didn’t have it in my browser to repost. I recreated it from memory and posted it. Then I noticed that the original post was in my RSS feed…so I made a new post with the original time and posted that. Then I noticed that the other post was gone…Blogger seems to be eating the previous post and replacing it with whatever I put up.

So I’m going to put both posts in this post, and you can marvel at how accurately I recreated the original post. Or laugh at how different the posts are. Whichever.

Original post, 12:09 pm:

I got plenty of sleep last night, and the weather is gorgeous. I have the windows open in the office right now so I can look out on the hills and pine trees and enjoy the cool breeze. The sky is filled with puffy white clouds, and the sun is warm. I’ve got Cowboy Bebop remixes playing, and I’m getting plenty of work done. Even better, I’ll be meeting Brooke and David for lunch at Boll Weevil!

Life is good. :)

When I was driving in to the office, I thought to myself that the morning felt wonderful. It was already warm, with a soft wind. It’s the kind of air that makes me feel like something’s going to happen. It’s a traveling atmosphere. It’s brisk and comforting and it promises a lovely day.

I get a similar feeling in the spring and fall in general, a feeling of change, of something new. It’s my favorite feeling in the world :)

Recreated post, 2:42 pm:

I got plenty of sleep last night, and the weather is gorgeous. I have the windows open here in the office so I can look out at the pine trees and rolling hills and enjoy the cool breeze. The sky is filled with puffy white clouds, and the sun is warm.

As I was driving in this morning, I thought that mornings are great because they are filled with an air of anticipation. There’s something about the cool of the morning, the feeling of the day warming up, just the general atmosphere that makes me feel like something exciting is going to happen. I feel the same way in spring and fall generally; it’s my favorite feeling in the world.

But I when I went out to lunch today I realized that the feeling was still there; it wasn’t confined to the morning. It’s a spring day.

And I feel great :)

So, which one do you prefer? ;P

Here’s hoping Blogger doesn’t eat this post too.

MSNBC: Cleric offers reward for killing cartoonist

“If the West can place a bounty on Osama bin Laden … we can also announce reward for killing the man who has caused this sacrilege of the holy prophet,” Qureshi told Reuters, referring to the $25 million U.S. bounty on the al-Qaida leader’s head.

Scarily enough, I can almost-sort-of understand this point of view. We even see similar (though obviously not exact) things happening with Western church leaders. Blasphemy is a big deal, and people need to realize that.

Of course, I think there is a big difference between drawing a picture and killing thousands of people.

This just makes me wonder if we are ever going to get to a point where we can co-exist. I want to believe we can and will, but there are so many people out there willing to disregard other people’s feelings, and so many people eager to take offense, that I’m pretty positive it won’t happen in my lifetime.

(I was thinking about Kyou Kara Maou the whole time I wrote this post. Too bad we don’t have a Shibuya Yuuri–someone who believes completely in the idea that people can understand each other, and who conveniently has the power to make it happen.)

Mainichi: Girl left dangling on outside of train for 1 kilometer

Company officials said the one-carriage train entered Hokkosha Station at about 5:45 p.m. on Wednesday. The driver saw a high school girl and boy on the platform, and departed from the station after thinking that the girl had stepped inside.

The girl, however, was still outside the carriage, and was left clutching onto a handrail on the outside of the door, using a 5-centimeter gap near the bottom of the door as a foothold, as the train traveled along the tracks.

About one minute later, the driver noticed the girl. He stopped the train and took her inside the carriage. The girl said a button to open the door of the train had failed.

“I pressed the ‘open button,’ but the doors didn’t open and the train departed,” the girl was quoted as saying. The high school boy on the platform had apparently been seeing her off.

More senseless murders in Iraq. Why?

How can we make it stop?

Hahahaha!

At least she didn’t, say, fry up some eggs, causing a thin film to collect on the floor.

Or something.

;>

On Monday I went to Riverwalk with Brooke and David. I finally have the pictures I took uploaded, and here they are.

This one’s my favorite:

ABC News: Batman Takes Aim at Osama

At the WonderCon 2006 comic-book convention in San Francisco last weekend, legendary comics writer and artist Frank Miller revealed that Batman would hunt down bin Laden and al Qaeda in his next DC Comics graphic novel.

In “Holy Terror, Batman!” the Caped Crusader goes after the terror leader and his organization after Gotham City is attacked by terrorists. Though the graphic novel’s title is a take on Robin the Boy Wonder’s catchphrase, Miller said there was nothing campy about the story.

[…]

He said his anger over both the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and subsequent acts of terror worldwide had inspired his latest work.

“Emotionally, it’s really raw,” Miller told the WonderCon audience. “Imagine the powerful rage when someone crosses the passion between a man and a woman or a man and his city.”

The graphic novel probably won’t be available before 2007. Wouldn’t it be cool if someone kicks Osama’s ass before then? :>

Man, I stayed up too late last night :>

My neckaches and wild emotional state are probably a result of stress. I spoke with my endocrinologist about my mood swings, and she had me take a pregnancy test. It was negative. Since I haven’t had another period, I will be resuming progesterone. Hopefully that plus the knowledge that I have the power to control how I feel (to an extent) will balance me out.

I realized yesterday that I have been putting a lot of undue stress on myself. I wanted a house so badly that I was punishing myself for not being ready to buy one. While we are on the road to a good downpayment, we aren’t financially stable enough to get into a mortgage. As Mom said last night, I shouldn’t compare myself to other people. I should focus on what my situation is and work with that information only.

I had gotten to the point that I was trying to deny myself any creature comforts, like going places (too much gas money) or eating out. Removing the things that made my life bearable was not the correct solution. I am having a hard enough time as it is living with my in-laws. I need to let myself relax.

It all came to a head yesterday and the day before, but now I’m calm.

I want to thank everyone who was there for me. Em, your email made me feel so loved and understood. You were the first to tell me that it was okay to be upset. Thank you. AJ, thank you for commenting and lending me your support. I know it’s tough to be my brother sometimes ;> But you have always stood by me and I know you always will. Thank you. Jered, your comment made me feel so much better. It’s a little scary to be looked up to, but at the same time it gives me a nice healthy dose of reality. You’re right, I’m not a loser. Thank you. Mom, you are so understanding, and yet so level-headed. Your wisdom and sympathy helped me gain some much-needed perspective. I feel like I can handle my life now. Thank you.

Why am I still up?!

Well, I watched Kyou Kara Maou 62-64 again, and paused them a lot to breen. I have a little better understanding of what went on, though Bob’s reasoning in 62 is still foggy. I caught a little something in 64 that I didn’t catch before, which was cool.

I’m kind of waiting for Sean to get home, but who knows when that’ll be. He tends to stay late at work on his night shift. I should probably go to sleep.

However, bittorrent is teasing me…it claims there’s only 26 minutes left on this download. Do I wait for it? Will it suddenly drop down to 0 k/s and drag on for eternity, like it’s done since yesterday? Or will it actually finish?

You scored as SG-1 (Stargate). You are versatile and diverse in your thinking. You have an open mind to that which seems highly unlikely and accept it with a bit of humor. Now if only aliens would stop trying to take over your body. SG-1 (Stargate) 94% Moya (Farscape) 88% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 81% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 81% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 69% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 63% Serenity (Firefly) 63% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 56% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 56% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 50% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 44% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 38% Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

Via Kirkie.

Reuters has two stories up today about the modern tradition in Japan of women giving chocolate to the men in their lives on Valentine’s Day. The first article discusses how tired women are growing of the time and expense involved.

According to an Internet survey, 70 percent of working women said they would be happy if there was no tradition of giving “obligatory chocolates” to their boyfriends or colleagues.

Nearly 60 percent said they felt unhappy as Valentine’s Day approached, citing the cost and time it takes to shop for the gifts, which are finely calculated to express just the right emotions towards a boss, a colleague or a true boyfriend.

The custom has grown into a sweet 50 billion yen (245 million pound) market for Japan’s chocolate makers, some of whom rake in 20 to 30 percent of annual profits in a few short weeks.

At the end of the article, it is mentioned that women are more and more starting to spend a lot of money buying chocolate for themselves. The second article goes into this phenomenon more deeply.

It used to be Japanese women gave men a gift of chocolates on Valentine’s Day.

These days, they’re more likely to buy pricey chocolates costing up to $200 (115 pounds) a box as a treat for themselves.

[…]

Until recently, most Japanese women bought cellophane-wrapped sweets in bulk from drugstores to give to colleagues or school friends as an “obligatory chocolate” on Valentine’s Day.

[…]

Premium chocolates are often imported from countries like Belgium and France, with imports worth 36.8 billion yen in 2004/05, up about 36 percent from a decade ago, according to association estimates.

Chocolate aficionados are also beginning to favour high-quality sweets with a high cocoa content and complex tastes, achieved by blending bulk beans with prized flavour beans from countries like Venezuela and Ecuador.

The Japanese, however, are still modest chocolate consumers by global standards, swallowing about 4.85 pounds per person each year, compared to Switzerland’s 24.9 pounds and Germany’s 23.1 pounds.

As for me, I’ve been buying Sean chocolate regularly since Christmas (he favors dark chocolate and has especially enjoyed Hershey’s Dark Kisses), so I’m not sure I really need to do anything :> (Besides, I haven’t come across a dark chocolate Valentine’s box.)