Standard Mischief

I remember my first and last drug test back in the 90s. I was paranoid over a false positive, so it was two liters of cranberry juice the night before and two liters of water the before I went to the clinic. Oh and two liters on the drive down. Blocks from the clinic I hit a gas station for the rest room to relieve the pressure.

Again, aside from some second-hand smoke and perhaps inaccuracies from the test, I had nothing to worry about. I needed that job though, so I was extra bonus careful.

Anyway, I get to the clinic, and I go in the restroom where the toilet water is dyed blue and I am given the sample bottle. I hand it out and she checks it. It’s water clear with a little foam but the temperature is OK, so she has to accept it.

Two days later they call and say that they “spilled it?. I’ll always wonder if they assumed I left the clinic and started to drug binge or something.

Needless to say, the second sample, a day later, was not quite so water clear.

I got the job. It really pisses me off that it was solely hanging on the wizz quiz.

(This memory dredged up thanks to Xavier.)

The fifty eighth Carnival of Cordite is up over at Gullyborg’s, and this week I’m in on it. I was aiming my rel=”nofollow” blog post towards other bloggers and I think the Carnival is geared towards gun readers, but I applied anyway and was accepted. There’s a ton of good reads so it wasn’t because of lack of content. Anyway, check it out.

I stopped by the Shoppers Food Whorehouse today to get some saline for nasal flushing. It was near the Sudfed, (or where the Sudfed used to be).

(Click on the picture for higher-rez, larger image picture (222.5 KB), as a pop-up if you allow javascript)

I’ve seen the little cards before, but this was a new twist. As you can see from the photo, the store has most helpfully put little signs by the little cards that you carry up to the pharmacy. (where you get carded, and you need to sign a little book that goes to your friendly neighborhood police department) The little signs let you know how much the Overloads will let you buy in one visit.

Nanny state us to death, why don’t you?

Truth be told, I don’t think I’ve taken any Pseudoephedrine HCL since the pills came in little glass bottles (unless it was hidden in multi-symptom cough syrup). I’ve found the stuff pretty ineffective in my system. Those little bottles, by the way, went the way of the dodo because some little bureaucratic dim bulb thought that by requiring only the push-through-foil-type packaging , illicit meth manufacture would cease, as it would be too much bother to remove and crush the pills. Guess what? People on meth have amazing focus power, so much so that identity thief and the meth focus needed to piece together shredded documents go hand in hand.

Of course, once the overlords realized that one of their stupid regs didn’t do jack in the War on (some) Drugs they repealed it right? Right?

Fortunately, this is pissing off a bunch of good citizens. Peoples, when you get mad over the extra hassle, when police come to question you because you bought too much allergy medicine this month, don’t blame the meth-heads. Blame the Overlords responsible. Blame your congress-critters and the minions that mindlessly do their bidding.

Related Tags: War on (some) Drugs, War on Drugs, sudfed, pseudoephedrine, Meth, Methylamphetamine

I talked about using the rel=”nofollow” tag yesterday, here’s how I know some of you weren’t using it. It’s a simple Cascading Style Sheet trick (css), an this trick is for Firefox Only. I’ve just started schooling myself on CSS but I think the tags are just instructions to your browser on how to render things. Anyway, not important.

If you want to see the rel=”nofollow” tags when you are browsing, all you have to do is drop a few lines in your UserContent.css. If you have a stock install, you probably don’t have that file yet, so you can created it using notepad or something. If you have the file, you can add the lines to your existing file.

This page: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder tells me that for most users with MS windows XP or 2k, the file in question should be in:

C:\Documents and Settings\[Windows login/user name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\[Profile name]\chrome\

for Linux:

/home/[username]/.mozilla/firefox/[profile-name].default/chrome

Mac:

/home/[username]/Library/Mozilla/Profiles/[Profile name]/

I don’t have a Mac or a MS Windows box around to double check this, tell me if I messed up, please.

Again, unless someone has been tuning your install, you probably don’t have a file called UserContent.css yet.

Using notepad or something, create a file called UserContent.css in the proper directory. Add theses two lines to the blank file you created:

/* distinctly shows rel=nofollow links */
a[rel~=nofollow] { color: yellow !important; background: black !important; }

(yup, that’s only 2 lines of code, and one is a comment. If you already had a UserContent.css file, just add those two lines in at the end)

That’s it. Important! Save the file and restart Firefox. This is what it will look like:

(Click on the picture for higher-rez picture (61 KB), as a pop-up if you allow javascript)

This is a screen shot of this page. The first Gun Guys link (yellow text on black) goes to the Gun Guys website and has the rel=”nofollow” tag. The second link looks normal, and does not have the tag, but points to TheHighRoad web forum.

You can see the comment Sebastian left too. The link to his webpage is a rel=”no follow” one by default.

If you ever get sick of it, you either delete the file and restart (if you created it) or just edit out those two lines if you added them to an existing file.

Related Tags: stupid CSS tricks, rel=”nofollow”, Cascading Style Sheet

This blog entry goes out to my fellow pro-RKBA bloggers. I have a favor to ask and a little tech tip to pass on to ya.

I know it’s as natural as breathing, when we blog, we link. But sometimes we blog about something we don’t want to promote. Example: The Gun Guys.

The Gun Guys

We all know by now that the slick slimy whomever that’s behind this and other sites is anything but a straight shooter, yet we can’t stop blogging about the maggot. The site is pure fraud, lies, and distortions. Yet we go there anyway, and we get ticked off, and we blog.

Every single time you blog and link to something, you, as a good blogger in the eyes of the search engines, cast your vote with whatever blogger cred you have achieved. You are proclaiming to the Internets that this site here is worthy of your attention. In Google-speak, you are “leaking” a little of your “pagerank”. That’s kind of confusing because it implies that you have a certain finite amount of cred and you are handing bits of it out. While you can change a site’s ranking in a search engine by linking to it, by doing so you are not taking yourself down a notch, unless your site starts to look to the search engines like a “link farm” (generally hard to do, don’t worry about it).

There’s a work-around here though. It was initially promoted as a cure-all against comment spam. As you may have noticed, it didn’t work. However, it’s still useful, and it’s been endorsed by all the major search engines. It’s called the “nofollow” tag, and it’s really easy to use.

So when you are editing your blog entry, this is how you usually code a link:

<a href="http://standardmischief.com/2006/05/04/ stop-linking-to-the-btard-rel-nofollow-the-gun-guys/">Now here's a cool little HTML trick!</a>

But if we didn’t want to promote a site, this is how we would add the “nofollow” attribute, with the attribute portion shown in bold:

<a href="http://standardmischief.com/2006/05/04/ stop-linking-to-the-btard-rel-nofollow-the-gun-guys/" rel="nofollow">Look at this loser, everyone knows this trick already!</a>


So if you can edit the raw HTML code that makes up your blog entry, (Which is the default on blogging software like WordPress) you can use this tag. I’ve never used Blogger and the like, but I assume this is fairly straight forward on every platform.

Question: What about the comment area of my blog? What about the comments I’ve already left on other blogs?

It’s probably already done by default by your blogging software. As far as I know, Google was first to endorse the tag, and they have used their massive influence to get it widely adopted. Surf to a page that has a link in it’s comment section and look for yourself (That’s a “Control-U” in IE and Firefox). I know it’s the default already in WordPress and Blogger, probably most everywhere else too.

Question: Whoops, I’ve linked irresponsibly in the past already, it’s too late to fix that, right?

Nope. You can go back over your blog and add the tag back in. It won’t happen right away, but major search engines will eventually reread your site and rerank their listings. On Google, this is called the “Google Dance“, and it happens roughly every month. For instance, you may have noticed in the past that you were #1 for the Google search “Hog Lard“, yet you check back after a bit and found that that’s no longer the case. That’s the Google Dance. Rankings are constantly shifting.

(More Q&A below the fold)
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