Standard Mischief

Excuse me, yea I love the business model, but I just have one small quickie question:

Why the heck can’t you cookie me to save my preferred volume level? I mean that’s what cookies are for, to save preferences. You must be confused and think that cookies are something only designed to record minutia about your customers that you can store and regurgitate on demand to the NSA, but it ‘taint so. Look, I know you spent forever creating your flash based players, and they work pretty cool, but for some strange reason you’ve decided to default the volume level to ?eleven?, and it’s real freaking annoying. Fix it.

That is all.

Related Tags: YouTube, Google Video, cookies, annoying, loud, eleven

standardmischief $ sudo ping -f XX.XX.XX.1 -c10 #TEH GATEWAY

standardmischief $

My tubes to teh internets have been pretty clogged lately. Like it’s been going in and out every fifteen minutes or so. My ISP have the unfortunately not unique customer service method of giving really crappy tech support in the hopes that you will just deal with it and go away.

My biggest problem calling customer service is that I don’t have a MS Windows box. Never mind that *nix machines, routers and gateways are the sanitary-tee fittings that tie teh whole series of tubes together.

Also, Verizon just dug up our yards to run FiOS (which is optic fiber to the premises), although I’ll bet their customer service isn’t any better either. I had an outage when the Verizon crew had a “Miss Utility” moment and knocked my landline out for 48 hours.

It’s the last half hour before service closes, and I’ve been on hold for about 13 minutes. Anyone want to lay odds that I’ll get a tier one yahoo before 10pm? Looks like it’s time to shop around for other service.

OK, so here you go:

(Click on the picture for higher-rez picture (167 KB), as a pop-up if you allow javascript)

So here’s what I did. I took a standard dollar bill that I legally possessed and did some stuff to it. I took a Sharpie? marker and XX-ed out “federal reserve”, and wrote in “NOT FEDERAL NO RESERVES”. Then I added “WORTH ABOUT 18?” and “IN 1968 MONEY” (that year being the year we went off the gold standard.)

Although I don’t intend to confuse anyone in to thinking this is a virgin dollar bill, I failed to remove or obfuscate ?The United States of America?, I hope that’s not a problem. I think I’ve really added something here, and I’m thinking of selling this piece on Ebay for say $1.50 or so.

I also want to let everyone know that I find Sharpie? markers useful for all kinds of stuff, including enhancing the playback quality of purchased prerecorded music.

I also want to make it clear that I, in no way, shape or form, want to cause any harm to the MD-34 bridge over the Potomac (that being the last piece of infrastructure I think I took a photo of.)

So what do you think? Is this art, or is this terrorism? Or do only the Attorney Jackasses get to decide that?

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you should probably read this over at SayUncle’s and this here in my own blog.

(Whew, three posts for this day! I’m gonna take the rest of the week off)

Rather, to go with the earlier post, this is a list of the part of my feed list where the feeds are full text, and comments are allowed, and it’s not too much of a pain in the ass to post a comment. I also prefer places that don’t hold every single comment until it’s blessed by the pope. I find crap like that tends to choke the discussion. Anyway, here you go, with the feeds in plain text:

Standard Mischief
http://standardmischief.com/feed/

Of course I keep tabs on my own feed. How else do I tell if something’s broke?

SayUncle
http://www.saysuncle.com/feed/

I probably pump more content into the comments here than in my own blog.

View From The Porch
http://booksbikesboomsticks.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Usually something good and/or funny daily

Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey
http://jacquelinepassey.blogs.com/blog/atom.xml

There use to be considerable libertarian chatter here, but recently has tended to be more personal and gambling related. Some SpecFic chatter. Recently she has been voted ?most stuck-up bitch in teh blogsphere?. The people who hate her and just have to tell her that are even more amusing. Much more entertaining than non-Libertarian non-Girl.

The Countertop Chronicles
http://countertop-chronicles.blogspot.com/atom.xml

I stuck him here near JMPP just because.

Ravenwood’s Universe
http://www.ravnwood.com/index_20.rdf

Not as prolific as he once was, when he blogs, it’s good.

ladyada’s ranting
http://www.ladyada.net/rant/?feed=atom

If you can’t tell by now, I have a thing for women who can drive a stickshift, shoot straight, speak the truth, have their financial shit together, or own there own handtools.

In this case, among other things, she knows what end of a soldering iron to hold. Not a lot of blog here.

the IDIOT
http://www.saltypig.com/blog/atom.xml

The potty-mouthed poster child for the armed and polite libertopian society we all want. He was actually my first commenter and didn’t really like my ?mutant-libertarian? leanings.

Hmmm, was it something I said or is this another quirk of Blogspot? I notice the Blogspot blogs most of all flip-flop their feeds. Anyway the damn feed is broke now.

sheer potentiality
http://philwelch.net/atom.xml

Phil pumps a lot of insightful comments into JMPP, not so much here. Infrequent blogger, but when he does post it’s about half insightful, and about half personal.

The Gun Blogs - Online community for gun bloggers
http://www.thegunblogs.com/node/feed

SU’s place for everyone who wants to try their own gun blogging, for free.

Dr. StrangeGun, or how I learned to love the odd…
http://drstrangegun.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Not a lot of content, but insightful.

Tinotopia
http://www.tinotopia.com/fulltext.xml

Not a lot of people blogroll him, which is surprising. ?Knee-jerk? libertarian, but he doesn’t exactly splash that all over his banner. He’s had an online presence for forever, so Tino probably already got there firstest with the mostest. Cranky consumer.

Curiouser and Curiouser
http://www.memestreams.net/users/acidus/?type=rss

Whitehat Hacker. Memestreams feeds are annoying because whenever another memstreamer comments on the original post, the feed is updated like it’s a fresh post in my feed aggravator.

Fish Or Man
http://fishorman.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Insightful commenter from SU’s blog. Not a lot of content.

Lean Left
http://leanleft.com/feed/

My attempt at ?balance?. So far it’s pretty good.

the munchkin wrangler.
http://munchkinwrangler.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Not a lot of content, but when this breeder isn’t talking about his kid, it’s always good.

McAdamSandwich’s Quest For Knowledge
http://mcadamsandwich.blogspot.com/atom.xml

not a lot of content, but it’s usually funny or interesting.

PawPaw’s House
http://pawpawshouse.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Ex-tanker, LEO, Republican. We don’t always see eye to eye but he’s always worth reading. He has a camp follower named Junior, who has a good website or two but needs to blog by himself.

TriggerFinger
http://triggerfinger.org/weblog/servlet/export/rss

Another commenter from SU. Good stuff.

Penn
http://penn.typepad.com/penn/rss.xml

Leah Penn, an interesting commenter from JMPP. The blog is 25% insightful, 75% used as a personal file cabinet. Fairly regular blogger.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but if you are a blogger, and you don’t run ads, and you only blog because of some strange need to rant or desire to sway opinion, please explain to me why you don’t have a full text feed on your blog.

Really, I’m just about ready to cut a few of you loose. I want to read your content, but all you care to deliver to me is the first 40 words or so.

So on that list is someone who posts twice a year, but usually has outstanding content.

There’s also a freedom loving gulcher who only has amazon referrer links, and pumps her own books.

There’s another freedom loving lady, and also an ex cop who both rarely, if ever, post any pictures.

There’s also a few people who use Blogger’s free service, and who seem to like to play with the available options, and every few months they seem to toggle between teaser and full text. All of them are at full text right now, thankfully.

And finally, there is a prolific blogger with fantastic content who uses free hosting to serve all his cool logos. For some strange reason, my browser gets instructed to download all his graphic every single day that I go visit his blog, even if there’s a perfectly good copy of the exact same logo already in my cache. Needless to say, loading all his content everyday is a real dog.

If you are writing excellent content, I’ll come visit anyway to read the comments, and more than likely, I’ll leave my two cents too.

I know my feed reader has a few issues, (for instance, on multi-author blogs, I don’t always get the author’s name) and I plan on trying out a few different systems, but when I’m troubleshooting, I read the raw XML, and for you non-full text people, my reader isn’t the problem.

You want me to read your content. I want to read your content, as long as it’s not a pain in the ass, and there’s absolutely nothing on my end I can do about it if you don’t offer a full text feed (unless someone out there makes my dream RSS reader that could be programed to selectively scrape and cache content.)

Basic Tech Tip: You can read the raw feed like this (you may have to download and install cURL, but it’s available for every platform. I believe that cURL ships with Mac OS X).

$ curl http://your.sooper-duper.feed/rss.xml | more

Type at this at your command prompt.