Crickets Chirping

I thought I was done with recursion but it is apparently not done with me. Behold: Tic Frac Toe.

This thing is really cool.

[link via defective yeti]

I was at a friend’s housewarming party this weekend, and since he’s in the software industry there was much geek talk. The subject of blogging came up, and one of the guests commented on how people blog about stuff they wouldn’t want their parents to know, and that can lead to some embarassing situations.

Rule: Don’t blog anything you wouldn’t want your parents hear you say.

That’s fine. I, like most of my peers, have a relationship with my parents which has evolved over the years to the point where I feel comfortable telling them just about anything. So this rule doesn’t really change much for me.

However- I have gone through the process of having content removed from Google’s index, I am starting to become aware of a different sort of problem. Getting your site to not show up in search engines is going to become increasingly difficult. Publishing out here is a one-way operation. Write-only. And quite possibly very permanent, if you believe the internet is going to be around for another thirty to fourty years.

This means that your musings, proclamations, rants and confessions are now part of an indestructable public time capsule that can and will be re-visited by future generations whether you like it or not. So I suggest-

A Better Rule: Don’t blog anything you wouldn’t want your kids, who don’t even exist yet, to read twenty years years from now.

Of course this only really applies if you have kids or are planning on having kids. I’m completely uninterested in reproducing, ever, so I don’t worry about it.

Sorry kid(s?), if I was totally wrong about that and you’re reading this in, like 2020 or some shit (that doesn’t make it okay for you to cuss. when you’re 30 like me it’ll be okay.). Grandpa didn’t really plan on having kids either, but I never took that personally and you shouldn’t either.

Oscar read about this in Wired and brought it to my attention. I would be doing you a disservice not to bring it to your attention as well.

Exhibit A: Slick Rick, ca. 1988

Exhibit B: Sujan Stevens, ca. 2005

Incidentally, I had a Green Eggs and Ham moment the other day. I put a Sufjan song on a mix cd. Jacksonville. It’s actually pretty good.

It’s a goddamn plugin I wrote for motherfucking wordpress. Check out the “Swear Jar” shit on the sidebar to the right.

Yeah, I bet you just thought I was talking shit when I said I was gonna do this.

It’s understandably bare-bones at the moment. The list of naughty words is hard-coded and there’s no admin page for it yet. All bad words are worth 1. 1 what? I don’ t know. It’s just an arbitrary unit right now. I haven’t decided what to do with it besides keep track of it.

Perhaps I’ll donate that amount to charity at the end of the year. Or I’ll paint that many easter eggs for orphans. Or put that many kittens into a basket and take a motherfucking picture of it just to make up for all the goddamn cursing I do. Or make some calculation based on the difference between the swear jars for comments and my posts.

Well what the fuck do you think? If you’re running WordPress and want to try it out, let me know or post a comment and I’ll clean up the source and put it up here.

I want to write some bloggy kind of software thing. Some ideas I’m considering:

The Swear Jar – a wordpress plugin, or maybe even a cut-and-paste-able chunk of javascript that adds a “Swear Jar” sidebar to your blog. Every time you cuss in a post, the number that appears in the swear jar increases. There could also be a swear jar for comments, which should be tracked separately. The swear jar could be something you actually contribute money to. At the end of the year you donate the dollar amount to a charity and the the jar is empty again.

My Comments – I, like lots of other bloggers, comment on other people’s blogs. It would be nice to have a sidebar on my blog that links to all the comments I have made on other people’s blogs. I’m kinda hazy on how to implement this one since blogging software is pretty non-uniform in how you post and manage comments.

TrueCraig’sList – Craig got some flack a couple of times from the merciless Austinist readership for posting articles that bore resemblance to something previously posted on craigslist.org. I would take this to an extreme, and automate it. The script reads the Austinist rss feed, looks for posts by TrueCraig, runs them through babelfish.altavista.com to spanish and back, then posts that retranslated article to a blog on www.truecraigslist.com. Predated to the week before Craig’s original article. Then it posts a trackback from the truecraigslist.com article to the original on the Austinist.

If I could only do one, which one would you want me to build?

• My name is Chuck.
• I looooove eggplant parmesan.
• I went to college in Arizona.
• I started a company that IPO’d three months after it was incorporated.
• I was a character on Guiding Light.

Oscar sent me this gem: it’s a trebuchet up for auction on ebay. Right here around Austin, too.

Forces of evil compel me to bid, obviously in response to the Jesus-carpentry relationship.

12:00 midnight – go to sleep.

1:00am knocking at the door, open to reveal crank whore asking for roommate. “Roomate is sleeping.” she: “oh. do you have any money you could spare then?” me: “no.” slam door. Go to wake up roommate to tell him about this, but he’s not there.

2:30am roommate comes home with two girls who are very noisy. Roommate barges into my room to wake me up and request that I join in their revelries. I decline. (no, seriously, this is actually a new story, different from the others that start the same way) They play ping pong on the back patio, talk really loud and use a halogen lamp to illuminate the festivities. The lamp shines directly into my window.

2:45am roommate comes back into my room, this time much more insistent that I join him. I launch into tirade, full of swearing and criticizing his willful unemployment, and that I have to get up in the motherfucking morning like a normal human being and would he take a goddamn look at the fucking light streaming into my fucking bedroom window when I’m trying to sleep.

3:30am they’re back inside. I walk past them to go unplug the halogen lamp since they’re no longer using it but are too fucking inconsiderate to turn the goddamn thing off. The two heifers say hi, sort of apologetically, but contine to cackle like chickens after I go back to bed.

4:00am they’re in the den still drinking, spilling beer on the rug and talking with their “outside voices.”

4:30am Things quiet down. I plan my next move. Spend a whole fifteen minutes contemplating it.

4:45am I get up, barge into roommate’s room to find him and one of the manatees in various states of undress. I state, “So barging into someone else’s room in the middle of the night is kind of an invasion of privacy and disrecpectful of their personal space, right?” Roommate, covering his crotch: “uhhhh” Me: “Yeah I thought so. You have until the end of this month to find a new place to live.” Roommate: “that’s an interesting perspective.” I start making breakfast.

4:50am Barge back into roommate’s room and mention to him and his lady friend, that his speed freak skank friend from up the street came by earlier asking for money.

5:00am Continue making breakfast. Put a mix cd in the stereo and crank it up. Roommate comes out and turns the stereo off. Says to me, “You know, you don’t have to be a dick about this. We’re trying to sleep.” Me: more swearing and something about him being The Dick Who Won’t Let Other People Sleep.

Fucking shitstain. I can’t believe the shit I’ve put up with in the name of our supposed friendship.

7:00-9:00am Sleep. A whole two motherfucking hours of it.

9:30am Hop in the car and head to work. I notice the car pulling to the right. I stop and get out to take a look. It’s a flat tire, front passenger side. I change it out for the spare in a gas station parking lot, and go back home. Livid.

9:45am Barge back into roommate’s room demanding to know what the fuck that was about. He insists he doesn’t know. I suggest that it’s a pretty goddamn funny coincidence that I kick him out of my house and a couple of hours later find my one of my tires all fucked up. He insists on taking a look at the tire, all the while saying that neither he nor one of the porkers he brought home from Barfly’s would have done such a thing. I don’t know these women, and I am finally realizing that I do not know my roommate either. He points out two nails in the tire and suggests that I might have run over them and that’s why the tire went flat.

A plausible explanation, but fuck that noise.

I would be a goddamned idiot to think that me kicking him out had nothing to do with the flat tire. Either he did it or one of the cows he brought home did at his request or on his behalf.

If that flat tire was a terrorist attack, then I’m George W and he’s Iraq. I really don’t give a fuck. I’ll connect the dots and make leaps of logic to justify something that should have happened a long time ago. And if I’m wrong then it’s his bad luck, not mine.

Thank you for reading what is hopefully the final chapter in this saga.

The rule: make a phrase with [plural noun] [conjunction] [plural noun].

• Pickup Lines for Porcupines
• Tossed Toupees and Trebuchets
• Egos and Eggshells
• Maybelline Queens or Coke Machines
• Oninists and Optometrists

Bonus points for alliteration, rhyming and suggestive material. Am I weird for making lists like this?