I was in a major funk this weekend, but I did manage to crank out a tongue in cheek Pickabar Theme Song. Every strong brand needs a catchy jingle, no?
Remember all of our great photos from the trip Sarah and I took to Europe in 2003? Of course you don’t, we never actually posted them. I’ve also broken my promise about posting pics from our 2004 vacation (sorry Jarl!).
The truth is, I’m probably never going to sit down and make my way through all of them. Instead of waiting for that day which will never come, I’m going to post the pics one by one…with the help of my favorite pic sharing site on the web, Flickr.
Here’s the first post in the series…
We got to Göteborg, Sweden on Saturday 12/18/04. Our host Sara was in the north of Sweden on a ski trip, but her mom Eva was nice enough to show us around. On the 19th she took us shopping in a small old fashioned shopping area of Göteborg.
We wanted to surprise Eva with a hand made mushroom knife that was available at one of the stands, but didn’t have enough Kroners on hand. I left Sarah and Eva at a toy store and headed to a local supermarket to use the ATM. Unfortunately, the store closed while I was gone and Sarah and Eva were nowhere to be found. At that point I realized that I didn’t have anyone’s contact information, or even the address where we were staying. They came back just as I was starting to wonder how I could find a job in Sweden without knowing how to speak Swedish.
After my stint as the little lost boy, we went to a local vegetarian restaurant. We had a very filling lunch and just enough coffee to get us back to normal operating temperature.
…and I did learn my lesson. When we got back to Sara’s place Sarah wrote down all of the pertinent info on a scrap of paper which I guarded with my life for the rest of the trip!
Longtime pickabar readers probably know I’m a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell. I read “Tipping Point” two years ago, and I finished his new book “Blink” last month.
One of the cool things mentioned in “Blink” was Harvard’s Project Implicit. It’s an online test that evaluates built in gender, age and racial biases with a little keyboard based game. Definitely a great way to kill some time and learn a little bit about yourself.
If you’re not a blogger living in NYC, you may not be aware of the recent city council resolution mandating the inclusion of at least one pic of Christo’s Gates. Well, far be it from me to violate the law. Here (at last) are my pics of the orange attack on Central Park.
Update 02-25-05: Blossom sent me a link to a great (but huge) satellite picture of Central Park and it’s almost gone gates.
Update 03-03-05: My friend Viki posted some pic of the “shower curtains”.
If you don’t run your own blog, you probably haven’t heard about comment spam yet. Well, some sleazy people have started bombarding blogs with fake comments including links to online casinos and illegal pharmacies. Why do they do it? Well, apart from having no souls they want Google Juice. Every link to their site, even fake blog comments, increases their ranking in google. I’ve been getting about 50 a day for the last few months. One day I got four hundred.
A new HTML attribute, “rel=’nofollow’” has been released to take away the google juice that the spammers lust after. It may stop the flood somewhat, but it’s unlikely to really stem it. Why? For the same reason that I get at least ten cialis enlargement spam emails a day…it’s so cheap that it’s worth it for the spammers even if it only works in one out of a hundred cases.
There is another great technique for stopping the spam on Movable Type powered blogs (like pickabar), the MT-Blacklist plugin, which prevents comments that include junk keywords like “texas holdem” using regular expressions and a text file with a list of verboten words. Unfortunately, the current builds of MT-Blacklist don’t work on Movable Type installations running on windows. Those unix guys really hate backslashes in file names! 
Well, I was about to turn off comments, when I got inspired to whip out my Perl hacker hat. I’ve manually updated the comment perl script on pickabar.com to block any posts containing the almighty web protocol specifier (http:). Hopefully that’ll give me at least a few weeks break from manually deleting all of the junk. In case you’re feeling adventurous (which you must be if you’re running MT on windows) or just desparate, here’s my updated mt-comments.cgi script. As always, no warranty is implied…this is purely for the education of those of you who are interested in the inner workings here at pickabar.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# Copyright 2001-2004 Six Apart. This code cannot be redistributed without
# permission from www.movabletype.org.
#
# $Id: mt-comments.cgi,v 1.35 2004/05/17 19:51:25 ezra Exp $
use strict;use CGI;
my $cgi = new CGI;
my $commentText = $cgi->param(‘text’);if ($commentText =~ m/http:/i)
{
print “Content-Type: text/html;\n”;
print “Status: 404 Not Found\n”;
print “\n”;
}
else
{
my($MT_DIR);
BEGIN {
if ($0 =~ m!(.*[/\\])!) {
$MT_DIR = $1;
} else {
$MT_DIR = ‘./’;
}
unshift @INC, $MT_DIR . ‘lib’;
unshift @INC, $MT_DIR . ‘extlib’;
}eval {
require MT::App::Comments;
my $app = MT::App::Comments->new( Config => $MT_DIR . ‘mt.cfg’,
Directory => $MT_DIR )
or die MT::App::Comments->errstr;
local $SIG{__WARN__} = sub { $app->trace($_[0]) };
$app->run;
};
if ($@) {
print “Content-Type: text/html\n\n”;
print “An error occurred: $@”;
}
}
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Ok, it probably wasn’t that hard, but it’s still amazing what a little algorithm can do. Check out the University of St. Andrews Face Transformer if you’ve got a decent pic of yourself and some time to kill.
No, not that kind of nerd. I mean your humble host here at pickabar. Now that Ray is on his way to a career in beat smithing, I’m going to have to work on my lyrical chops. Here’s my second try to flow on a Ray track:
Never had no gun
except the one I shoot for fun,
hold it with two hands
it spits hotter than the sun
Never slung no dope
rockefeller ain’t no joke
sentences will make you choke
faster than klansmen with ropes
I push fat bags of hope
in baggies like coke
Fight devils w/ rope-a-dope
Push a neocon down a slope
If they go into Iran
It’s the beginning of the end
shoulda stopped them at Iraq
america’s been bushwhacked
By a lie wrapped in a flag
And poor kids in body bags
trying to scare a damn fanatic
freedom spread by automatics
P-I-C-K
A B A R
Like EPMD
My brain makes me hard
Now who’s fake?
Go easy, it’s only my second try.
Update 03/03/05: I guess nerds really can rap.
Regular pickabar readers know of my love for “six degrees of separation” type websites, like the The Baconizer. My current favorite in the genre? BandToBand, which shows the common musicians that tie together even the most seemingly different of albums in a snappy little web UI. For example, there are six steps between The Allman Brothers (s/t LP) and Thin Lizzy (Thunder And Lightning).
