i’ll get back to work in a moment.

my thoughts on NBC’s coverage of the equestrian sports: it sucks. even online, you can’t watch the full competition unless you do so live - and that means 7:15 wednesday morning for the dressage competition. NBC’s prerecorded video feed for the dressage portion of the 3-day event seems limited to two or three highlighted riders.

pff.

RSVP, and don’t forget, X marks the spot.

following my not-quite-diatribe about the ridiculous ondcp report, i began to wonder if the problem (politicized research) was being exacerbated by poor reporting skills. and while an n=2 doesn’t make for a very good sample (at least where N=the universe of washington post reports on surveys or studies), evidence for the poor reporting skills hypothesis is mounting.

take today’s wapo article covering the findings of the third annual autovantage road rage survey: for two years in a row, washington region drivers have been found to be the fifth-rudest in the nation. staff writer jonathan mummolo takes this to mean “we aren’t getting any ruder.”

wrongo, jonathan. what it means is that our relative ranking hasn’t changed. it doesn’t say squat about our actual level of rudeness. we may indeed be getting ruder, or (unlikely) we may be getting more polite. don’t you idiot uneducated moronic journalists know anything about basic research?

*sigh* at least there’s free iced coffee at dunkin’ d tomorrow. and no, they’re not related.

godaddy.com has by far been the most responsive of service providers that i have contacted with DMCA infringment notices. in under 2 hours, i received a response indicating they

have suspended the site in question pending a resolution. Please allow up to 30 minutes for these changes to take effect.

very nice. thanks, godaddy.com

(or at least partially)

update on the content scraping/copyright infringement issue: there were two offenders. one has been suspended; the other is still pending because the contact listed with the copyright office is not a recognized e-mail address. so off i’ll send a second letter to the contact listed on the whois database results.

(oh, and it surprises me not at all that the offending page that has been removed now defaults to a sited called “onlinecashcow.”)

lately i’ve noticed an uptick in the number of sites scraping my content and reposting without permission, primarily by splogs making heavy use of adsense.

so far i’ve issued appropriate DMCA notices of copyright infringement to the service providers of said splogs; i’m now awaiting responses. it’s mostly a pain in the ass for me, but i’ll be damned if i’m going to ignore it.

interestingly, by linking back to my original posts (an attempt to squeeze under fair use?), the splogs make it easy to track down their provider. wordpress automatically includes a whois link in the link notification; after following it, i search the u.s. copyright office service provider agents list for the contact information of the provider’s designated agent to receive notification for claimed infringement. and off goes a modified boilerplate notice of infringement (note: if you’re going to use the boilerplate at the link, proofread it first - it’s chock full of poor grammar and spelling errors).

i’ve also sent a complaint to google, as the splogs violate the adsense TOS.

bah.

update 10/29/07, 2:30 pm: i just got a reply from google, which fascinates me to no end because they provide an online mechanism for complaints regarding sites using unauthorized content with adsense. it seems they only pursue complaints made in writing and delivered via hard copy (snail mail or fax). furthermore, they prefer to contact the complainant via e-mail. nice double-standard, google.

i’m not sure what good it will do to send google a notice - all they do (according to the letter) is forward the notice you send them to the “responsible web site publisher.” (any guesses as to whether they forward such correspondence via e-mail or hard copy?) at any rate, i’ll see if the original notices have any effect before bothering further with google.

the text of their reply to me is below the fold. (more…)

the latest crop of heineken ads - for the “draught keg” - royally piss me off. okay, i figure i’m not the target audience, but still. exactly how demeaning to women do beer commercials have to be to move product?

women as beer-dispensing robots. oh, yeah. makes me want to go out and buy heineken. not.

so both g and i lost our phones last night. i left mine in the cab. got ahold of the cabbie this morning, gave him my address. he said he’d drop the phone off around 4. he hasn’t. i forgot to ask him for a) the cab company; b) his name; and c) the cab number. i’m the stupidity.

so i called the cell phone provider, which for the moment shall remain nameless. turns out they can suspend the accounts, which prevents anyone from using the phones. yay! great! however, it also means that when you call our numbers, you get a “the number you have dialed has been disconnected, changed, or is no longer in service” message.

anyone see where i’m going with this?

there’s no way of disconnecting your account from your handset so that the phone is useless but the account is still usable. you know, so that you could change your voicemail message giving callers an alternate number. or allowing incoming calls, so that people could leave you messages which you could periodically check. useful feature, wouldn’t it be? that’s the annoyance.

ugh. neither phone has lost phone insurance; the account is what… six months old, maybe? so new phones are going to be full price, which sucks, because i’m at a job where my only internet access is through the phone, and web-ready phones are Not Cheap. both stupid and annoying.

gah. gah. gah.¹

well, at least i passed the bar. and new phones can be acquired tomorrow, i suppose.
_______________________________

¹ in the midst of all this, i’m realizing how used to having a cell phone i’ve become. i practically feel crippled without the damn thing, even though i’ve got all the numbers backed up online. what if i’m out and about and need to call someone? or someone needs to call me? to think i survived 28 years of my life without a cell phone, no problem.

hmmm. i’ve got skype on my laptop. maybe i’ll just carry that around with me and dart into free wifi cafes should the need arise. no? no, you’re right. that’s just silly… right?

recent doings in these parts, now that we’ve resigned ourselves to the architectural horror that is our new neighboring home (complete with clay lion heads adorning the front doors and a garage door that looks like it belongs on a barn):

we had our boundaries surveyed. turns out the fence between us and our rear neighbors is, at one point, four and a half feet into our property. and this spring, said rear neighbors poured a concrete slab one foot from said fence as the foundation for a shed. we’re planning on tearing down the existing fence, and erecting one a few inches inside our side of the property line, to match the lovely fences we had erected when the architectural horror went up.

so they’re busy next door jackhammering away at the concrete slab, so we can put up our fence.

so kind of them.

oh, yeah - and the maintenance/repair of ten of our windows is going to run us slightly over six grand, which all said isn’t horrible, but does mean that i should get off my duff and get re-employed.

and snuffy is licking my laptop in sympathy. great pooch, ¿no?

misplaced apostrophes, especially when used in a plural (and mistakenly creating a possessive) peeve the googly moogly out of me. especially when they appear in “professional” publications.

take, for example, this snippet from petplace.com’s daily dog newsletter:

The closet is the first place the Watsons look now if Ellie is missing. She’s been found there a few times as well. She is microchipped now and Judith swears that she will never get lost again. The Watson’s adore their little Yorkie!

while i’m sure the watsons’ dog is happy she wasn’t lost, and that mrs. watson’s happy to have found her, i’m irked that the newsletter doesn’t have a copyeditor who can catch the misplaced apostrophe. how awful for the watsons. and my poor eyes.

(i’m sure there are those who are perpetually irked at my tendencies toward irregular capitalization, so there ya go.)

so some guest-host yabbo on tyt this morning described the rantings the vtech killer sent to NBC as “bad goth poetry.”

kindly remove your head from your arse, whoever you are (rj eskow?) subbing for menkowicz. there’s a huge difference between “goth” and “sociopath.” maybe you should learn it. you’d look less like a total moron.

while you’re at it, read this. granted, it has some overgeneralizations (for a better history of goth, or just a snapshot of the goth ethos, check out anything by sexbat. he’s been around forever. i sent him an e-mail in ‘93 asking him where he’d been all my life. he wanted to know what years i was talking about, specifically.), but it’s more accurate that the nonsense the media spews most days. (more…)