Taiwanese animated news: Snooki

I've been loving the NMA animated news "reenactments" that have been featured on The Soup and elsewhere, but googling around for it, I found perhaps the best one of all, centered around Jersey Shore inmate, Snooki:



Best of all is the last few seconds of the video boldly predicting the coming end of her 15 minutes.

Really, Google?

I got to the CalTrain station this morning in time to catch the 7:25 train so that I could get into work a little early. At 7:27, the signs suddenly said that the train was delayed 12 minutes. I thought the prospects for making up that time in route and still catching the 8 AM shuttle bus were dim, so I decided to check Google Maps on the phone to see what traffic conditions were like.

So Google pissed on my back and told me it was raining.

Here's a great example of what I'm talking about. Here's what Google said at one particular point in the trip:


And here's actually what was going on at the time:


Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't equate a "green" traffic status with 10 mi/hr.

Thanks for nothing, big G.

I wonder what they were really thinking

I don't think I quote or point to other blogs too often.

But I saw this one on EngrishFunny, and just had to share it:



Now, I can understand the "Toilet for ladies only" part, but what's up with the "Don't choking" warning?!

YouTube fun!

Check this out. It's not the first time I've seen this sort of thing, but they've done a relatively good job. It's not quite Cookie Masterson material, but I have high hopes that they'll get better over time.

There's a site for that

What amazes and sometimes amuses me about the Internet is the sheer variety. The secret ingredient on tonight's episode of Iron Chef America was Pineapple. I was intrigued by something Alton said made me curious, so I looked up the wikipedia article on pineapples, and since I had the computer in front of me, I wondered how one went about growing pineapples. Well, you ask a question, you you get an answer.

Google Gears geolocation considered wanting

Google Gears is an interesting bit of functionality you can add to your browser. One bit of it includes the ability for a site to ask where you are located.

Now, you might wonder how it's possible to turn an IP address into a geographical location. There are databases that try and do this in a fairly inaccurate way by figuring out which ISP you're using and putting a big peg in the middle of their service area. But a much better way is to use DNS LOC records, when they've been provided by the domain owner.

Well, I have provided an accurate LOC record for kfu.com.

The algorithm for turning an IP into a location is a 3 step one with DNS:

1. Get the name of the IP address by doing a reverse lookup on the IP. In the case of the machines here in the house, for IPv6, you'd get the individual machine's name, and for IPv4, you'd get "nat.kfu.com."

2. Do a LOC lookup for the name. In most cases, this won't get you a match, since the LOC records are generally applied at the domain or subdomain level.

3. Start lopping words off the left side of the name, looking for LOC records at each step until you get to "."

If you do this, you'll get the right answer almost instantly for the machines in the house.

Alas, if you ask Google Gears, the answer you get is "Hayward, CA" and a lon/lat a block east of the Hayward BART station.

Um, no.

Too much javascript

You know you've been doing way too much javascript when you catch yourself doing crap like this:

html += '<a id="linkToFoo">...</a>';

...

$('#divToAugment').append(html);

...

$('#linkToFoo').click(function() {
    window.location = '/foo/bar.html';
});

Hint: If all you want to do is make an 'a' tag clickable and have it take you to another URL, there's a much easier way...

Google hosed me

I took my car in for service last night, with the plan being to take CalTrain from work, as usual, but get off at the station close to the dealership and walk to go pick it up.

I settled on this plan because when I asked the iPhone's Google Maps app to give me directions from "Sunnyvale Caltrain" to Sunnyvale VW, it said that the route was about a mile.

Well, it appears that it decided that "Sunnyvale Caltrain" meant any CalTrain station in Sunnyvale... of which there are two. It's about 1 mile from the Lawrence station to Sunnyvale VW, but it's about 3 miles from the Sunnyvale CalTrain station. If it had said that it was a 3 mile walk and showed me a mostly southerly route, I probably would have known to try Lawrence instead.

So, thanks, Google. You clearly knew best when you thought I didn't mean the Sunnyvale CalTrain station when that's exactly what I typed in.

AP screws up statistics, film at 11

From this story about a deadly helicopter ambulance accident, comes this little tidbit:

It was the sixth fatal crash involving medical helicopters this year, according to federal data, including one just last month in Maryland that also killed four.
[...]
On Sept. 28, a medical helicopter carrying traffic accident victims crashed in a Maryland suburb, killing four of the five people on board. On June 8, a copter crashed on an isolated ranch in the Sam Houston National Forest in Texas, killing a patient and three crew members. Those and other crashes have raised questions on whether medical ambulance flights are overused.

Really?

Six incidents and you're ready to question the safety of medical ambulance flights? How many people die every year in four-wheeled ambulance accidents? I'd rather question whether or not perhaps helicopters are underutilized as ambulances if I were merely inclined to make judgments on accident statistics in isolation.

Stupid AP. No cookie for you. Instead, you get the Golden [Citation Needed] award.

Gizmo vs CalTrain

Gizmo seems bemused by my HO gauge CalTrain.

More YouTube: Fun with dry ice

No, it's not the coolest or most fascinating dry ice related video on YouTube, but I thought it was pretty cool.

Statistical stupidity

ABC News recently had a video on My Yahoo that had the "worst" foods purported to be good for you (alas, I don't have a deep link to the video). First on the list of diet soda. The silly woman said that those who drink diet soda are heavier than those who don't, so you shouldn't drink diet soda.

Uh, newsflash: You've got the cause and the effect backwards there. People who are heavy drink diet soda because they know they're heavy. The ones who aren't heavy drink whatever the hell they want because whatever they're doing is working for them (or at least isn't a problem).

It's like saying bariatric surgery causes obesity because only obese people have it done.

Has Apple lost their tiny little minds?

Go click on this link.

It's a 404 page now, but it used to be the home of Apple's retail stores. Why they'd move that page is a giant mystery to me, but whatever.

Go to the bottom of that page. There's a link to click on to visit an Apple retail store. That link takes you to -- wait for it -- that same page.

I have no words.

EDIT: At some point later that week, they fixed it. It was, at the time however, yet another thing that was annoying me that particular day (the iPhone 3G launch day).

Web stupidity

Why do webmasters create "About us" links on their web pages? Isn't the entire site "about you"?

6 times out of 10 when I visit a web page, it's because I want to either call them up or get their address. Typically the best way to get that is to click either a "store locator" link or a "contact us" link. I like it when sites put those on their pages.

The anti-example of that level of cluefullness is the web site for the Camino Medical Group. First, when you go there, it redirects you to their parent organization, which has a deep link back to their site. That's pretty stupid. Furthermore, there is one of those stupid "about us" buttons, but there is no easy way from the front page to find a list of clinics and their addresses. I had to click "find a doctor" and from that page, "find a location."

To quote one of the old VW TV ads, "You get an F."

You don't know Jack on the web!

The folks at Jellyvision, once responsible for the "You Don't Know Jack" series of quiz games have sort of moved in a more... corporate direction. Now they want to take their expertise at conversational interfaces and make demos and attract flash for marketing. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose.

But all is not lost! They are making YDKJ snippets available on the web for free - including the Daily DisOrDat. To get you in the mood, why don't you have a taste? The subject of this DisOrDat is particularly apropos.

Just so you know, I scored. Huh huh.

P.s. I tried to embed it on this page, but the flash didn't work correctly. Oh well.