RKNet Blog... Thing

This morning my mother copied to me via IM an email or a page she had found. Within contains the most complete list of paranoias, hoaxes, wishful thoughts, and general falderall ever generated via email chain letters. It is a tremendously entertaining read and I absolutely have to share with you all. Oh, and if you don’t digg, del.icio.us and put this on your facebook then bad luck and extreme misfortune will infest your pathetic soul for all eternity. Bill Gates told me so. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

This is pretty cute and I thought you’d get a few healthy chuckles from it. :) I just want to thank all of you for your educational emails over the past year. Thanks to you, I no longer open a public bathroom door without using a paper towel. I can’t use the remote in a hotel room because I don’t know what the last person was doing while flipping through the adult movie channels. I can’t sit down on the hotel bedspread because I can only imagine what has happened on it since it was last washed. I can’t enjoy lemon slices in my tea or on my seafood anymore because lemon peels have been found to contain all kinds of nasty germs including feces. I have trouble shaking hands with someone who has been driving because the number one pass-time while driving alone is picking your nose (although cell phone usage may be taking the number one spot) Eating a Little Debbie sends me on a guilt trip because I can only imagine how many gallons of trans fats I have consumed over the years. I can’t touch any woman’s purse for fear she has placed it on the floor of a public bathroom. Yuck! I must send my special thanks to whoever sent me the one about poop in the glue on envelopes because I now have to use a wet sponge with every envelope that needs sealing. Also, now I have to scrub the top of every can I open for the same reason. I no longer have any savings because I gave it to a sick girl (Penny Brown) who is about to die in the hospital for the 1,387,258th time. I no longer have any money at all, but that will change once I receive the $15,000 that Bill Gates/Microsoft and AOL are se nding me for participating in their special e-mail program. I no longer worry about my soul because I have 363,214 angels looking out for me, and St. Theresa’s novena has granted my every wish. I no longer eat KFC because their chickens are actually horrible mutant freaks with no eyes or feathers. I no longer use cancer-causing deodorants even though I smell like a water buffalo on a hot day. Thanks to you, I have learned that my prayers only get answered if I forward an email to seven of my friends and make a wish within five minutes. Because of your concern I no longer drink Coca Cola because it can remove toilet stains. I no longer can buy gasoline without taking someone along to watch the car so a serial killer won’t crawl in my back seat when I’m pumping gas.. I no longer drink Pepsi or Dr Pepper since the people who make these products are atheists who refuse to put ‘Under God’ on their cans. I no longer use Saran wrap in the microwave because it causes cancer. And thanks for letting me know I can’t boil a cup of water in the microwave anymore because it will blow up in my face…disfiguring me for life. I no longer check the coin return on pay phones because I could be pricked with a needle infected with AIDS. I no longer go to shopping malls because someone will drug me with a perfume sample and rob me. I no longer receive packages from UPS or FedEx since they are actually Al Qaeda in disguise. I no longer shop at Target since they are French and don’t support our American troops or the Salvation Army. I no longer answer the phone because someone will ask me to dial a num ber for which I will get a phone bill with calls to Jamaica , Uganda & Singapore and Uzbekistan I no longer buy expensive cookies from Neiman Marcus since I now have their recipe. Thanks to you, I can’t use anyone’s toilet but mine because a big brown African spider is lurking under the seat to cause me instant death when it bites my butt. And thanks to your great advice, I can’t ever pick up $5.00 dropped in the parking lot because it probably was placed there by a sex molester waiting underneath my car to grab my leg. I can no longer drive my car because I can’t buy gas from certain gas companies! If you don’t send this e-mail to at least 144,000 people in the next 70 minutes, a large dove with diarrhea will land on your head at 5:00 PM this afternoon and the fleas from 12 camels will infest your b ack, causing you to grow a hairy hump. I know this will occur because it actually happened to a friend of my next door neighbor’s ex-mother-in-law’s second husband’s cousin’s beautician… Have a wonderful day… Oh, by the way….. A German scientist from Argentina, after a lengthy study, has discovered that people with insufficient brain activity read their e-mail with their hand on the mouse. Don’t bother taking it off now, it’s too late.-

As you may have noticed, with the advent of automatic updates via Twitter and del.icio.us, yours truly has gotten rather lazy about posting things that you, gentle reader, would find interesting, delightful, or thought-provoking.

This upsets me possibly more than it upsets you, because after all no one likes to feel like they’re shirking their most important duties. The particularly astute may notice that I have taken the author count on the side bar from 4 down to 1.

I feel as though I will be much less inclined to badger my friends into producing material for this website if I do not count them as “authors”. In my mind, an author on this blog should be committed to posting something original at least once per week, if not more often. I barely make this quota myself at times, and would by no means wish to start imposing it on others. Therefore I have decided that they are welcome to contribute at any time, but will only have the burden of being considered an author should they desire it.

That said, I am looking for a few good creatures who can type, who would like to contribute or be a full-fledged author. It’s not a job, I cannot pay anyone for writing here, not even myself. It is purely voluntary. As you may have noticed there really isn’t much of a theme going here. Pretty much any subject goes. Those highly prone to inflammatory remarks, spamming, and being generally hateful need not apply. We here (and I guess at this point it’s the royal “we”) at RKNet are fans of chaos, but not of wantonly pissing off others for no particular reason. What say you, any takers?

Because I’ve caught a serious case of Twitter fever, I’ve added the TwitterTools plugin, which will daily dump my meaningless tweets (from my personal twitter, not the RKNet twitter) into a single post. The benefit of this is that you, gentle readers, will be privvy to the exciting (HA) life of yours truly, and get the added benefit of all the neat links that I tweet, but neglect to del.icio.us and totally don’t bother blogging about.

The other plugin is more for me, and doesn’t have nearly as much of a direct effect on the content of this blog (yet). I finally got around to adding the WPStats plugin and I honestly don’t know how I went without it for so long. Granted, the stats provided by FeedBurner are pretty good, but I need something more directly related to my actual site traffic. While additions like Clickheat are fun, they aren’t necessarily the strongest measure of visitors and activity. In a text-based medium, you’ve got to know what text brings people to you, and what text keeps them there.

Pretty excited about the whole thing. You should be too! It ultimately means I can monitor to see what makes you the visitors the most happy, and increase the volume on those subjects to 11.

P.S. How do the google ads look? Obtrusive? Not awesome enough? Discuss. I’m hoping that they will eventually start actually trending towards being “contextual” so there can be some halfway decent sponsors in the mix. I also have designs on cleaning this place up (a lot) and re-appealing to Project Wonderful’s review staff so I can then allow real humans to display fun ads for their neat stuff on my blog.

If anyone is subscribed to the straight up site RSS feed of RKNet, I’d encourage you to hit the RSS link in the header of the site for the Feedburner feed, because I just added:

• Flickr automatic updates - which I promise to try and make interesting!
• del.icio.us automatic updates - a once-per-day summary of what kind of bookmarking I’ve been doing. That way all the lurking SEOs can learn my sources and super-special secrets without having to check too many things or stalk me on Twitter! (Note: This last statement is fueled by paranoia, and by the fact that I feel like I’m getting a lot of friendings by random SEO people lately. What gives?)

Good stuff!

Today I put a click mapping app on RandomKitty.net. It will give me “heat maps” of where people click when they are on the main page of the blog. I may add it elsewhere, but the home page needs an overhaul before I do that. If you’d like to view the current heat map of RKNet, go to http://www.randomkitty.net/clickheat and log in with the username and password of “checkit” (no quotes obviously). You’ll have to look at the whole week or the whole month to really get any data, and most of that was me clicking random areas to generate data that I could view to test my installation. I look forward to getting a little eye-tracking information for the site. I’ve been doing a lot of usability reading lately and I know that observing the patterns of people who visit your site is a great way to learn how to cater to them in a more educated fashion. (Or I could just ask: how do you like the site? Is it easy to use? Entertaining? I love feedback, good or bad.)

I also signed up for a Twitter app that will now auto-feed the new posts to the RKNet twitter account. I’m hoping that it will spread the news a little more effectively, maybe get a couple more people on the proper RSS, so they can tell me the Twitter update is annoying and can I please turn that off? I’ve also collected a lot of unique and bizzare followers on Twitter here lately, although I did end up following zefrank, and I even participated in a project to tell really short bedtime stories. (There are some really sweet ones in there.) I’m contemplating signing up for a reverse item, that will post my tweets to the blog, but that could be pretty blah if it’s just me. It would be way more fun if the other writers also posted their tweets.

I just got turned down for displaying Project Wonderful ads, but I’m not down about it. It’s just inspiration to really clean up the home page, get some content squeezed out of the fascinatingly weird group I hang out with, and resubmit. Besides, setting up a PW account was an important step for me. Not so I can subject you the viewer to ads here, but so I can eventually promote RKNet and monetarily support sites that I visit and enjoy at the same time! Win win. Besides, I am in the process of setting up another app that will hopefully drive some more traffic, maybe provide you the gentle readers with some links to other fun internet items (as if you need anything else but RKNet! PFFT!), and perhaps even drag in a little cash for yours truly. Mmm… delicious petty cash.

Speaking of del.icio.us, I finally figured out how to get a feed of links put up by people in my network. It’s like a whole world opened up. I suddenly understand the social value of the site with stunning clarity, and I have to say I’m networked with some folks that have great taste in linking.

The more I experiment with the various services, apps, and information sources that are out there, the more fun I have. It may not all be terribly productive, but most of it does provide me with opportunities to meet new people and learn new things, and I think that’s pretty valuable, don’t you?

Cumul.us is a cute little site that shows you the weather for your area, lets you and people in your area make predictions on what the weather is going to be like in the near future and declare how you intend to equip yourself (clothing-wise) for said weather.

It’s interesting, and does show the weather, but it’s clearly a marketing tool for their apparent affiliate: ShopStyle.com.

Found via del.icio.us RSS.

Behold the philosophical wonders that unfold when you find everything to do but update!

G: you know what’s a funny word? “crunk”
kittymcgee: agreed
why was it invented?
G: as a descriptive term for being various kinds of loaded, instead of just drunk, is my assumption
kittymcgee: true….but what does the c stand for?
cocaine drunk?
kittymcgee: aha!
G: I always assumed it was “crazy drunk”

And in a slightly more “philosophical” vein….

me: The two rules for success are:
1. Never tell them everything you know.
pick007: yay!
uhm,
yay!
me: http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/selfref.html
pick007: before i open this, is it a link to the second rule, or is it a lnading page of icons that make fun of me etc…
me: tsk tsk
would I make fun of you?
pick007: ok, hold on
yes!
i am your underling,
me: well that doesn’t mean I have to make fun of you
pick007: well it doesnt mean you wont either!
me: we’re getting into a bit of a loop here
pick007: maybe im just drawing on harsh experiences, and I SHOULD BE PRAYING AND GIVIING THANKS THAT I HAVE A NEW AND MORE UNDERSTANDING (goddamn caps lock) nurturing cult leader
me: Yes I’m much more forgiving and kindly than your average brainwashing group alpha
pick007: yes! you must be punished! now drink that keg cup! and no sipping, take it down!
me: At least until the proper initiation starts, but the best way to break free of previous imprints to make room for new imprints and ways of thoughts is through shock, and sometimes that means violence and debasement
pick007: see thats what i was expecting, harsh debasement, and otherwise initiation
me: I’m experimental. The traditionalist ways of fear, mystery, and sometimes bloodshed WORK, but I question their necessity
pick007: …and the only way to know for sure is to practice them, and take in the effects
me: Consider the zen roshi, who beats the pupil on the head with his staff, sometimes for no reason at all. it works, but is there another way?
pick007: no.
me: Destruction of the ego results in rebirth into a fresher mindstate, but there’s got to be a safer way
pick007: i suppose one could ask: if there were another way, how would one still valiate their roshidity
me: well the pupil eventually becomes the master, and despite the paradigm-breaking nature of their learning, they may still take on some prorgramming and mannerisms of those who guided them
pick007: yes. for paradigm breaking itself is a structured paradigm, which is even desirable for human purposes, I mean, purposes
but without stick whacking, would they still be roshi?
or are they roshi because they whack stick?
on a related note: would investiagtion of Godel’s theorem provide more insight into how to define a self reference joke? for a minute, I would have said “i get it” but upon further reading, I question it now, as there seem to be jokes which, uhm, well, for lack of a better term, “dont reference themselves”. or the people telling them.
would possibly either of the words: ironic, or oxymoronic appear in its definition? or for that matter, any of the “…ronic” words?
me: chronic?
pick007: exactly
me: I would say the most amusing, directly self-referential “joke” in there is the Recursive loop statement
pick007: i like that one
i like them all, and i think theyre all funny.
it was just the name i questioned mostly for examples like: anyone who sees apsychiatrist…
me: mm
yes
pick007: yes you agree? or yes is the answer? like 42?
me: yes I agree
on a somewhat side, but still related note, theoretical math is downright sexy
pick007: oh my god yes!
that goes without…
me: :3
I wonder if anybody’s done a shirt that says I <3 Quantum Mechanics
maybe Quantum Theory would be better
pick007: yea, or, ” I 2x= y,z <{3.1} quantum theory
?
you should do it
but i want 3% royalties for giving you the encouragement and support to live your dreams
so, I cam up with 3 self reference jokes, and i want you to tell me what you think, which one's your favorite, and if any of them fits the theme better. ready? a) bob sagat
b) bob sagat is.
c) bob sagat is not.
me: ahahaha
wtf
pick007: dammit. i was afraid youd say that.
ok, what about, d) Bob Sagat is funny.
me: well that’s just all lies

Only the del.icio.us RSS feed can produce such gems as:

http://ascii.techhappens.com/ - An ASCII art generator.
http://www.dumblittleman.com/2007/10/10-surefire-ways-to-kill-your-crabby.html - Seen near a lifehack.
http://www.myscienceproject.org/j-shot-3.html - Located in the vicinity of jello shot instructions.
http://link.ezer.com/tools/google_serps_rank_checker.asp - Nearby a SERP rank checker.

It’s such an endless treasure trove of stuff. I would recommend subscribing, and not necessarily trying to review all the links that come through each day, but to use a feed reader with a search option to locate links of interest to you.

I use the feed reader built into Opera, and the “Quick Find” search function native to the reader searches both titles and content for whatever you’re looking for. However, it does seem to only return whole strings. For example, say I know there’s a link somewhere in my feed reader for Puppy Chow name brand dog food. I can search for “name brand dog food” but not “name brand food”.

I’m always looking for more snazzy, user-generated feeds of neat info and ways to keep track of it all.
What is your favorite feed reader and its favorite feature?
What are your favorite feeds?

Unless you've been living under a rock without the internet or any human contact, you have undoubtedly heard of a phenomena referred to as “lolcats” or “cat macros” and sometimes “oh god another fucking lame ass meme”.
http://www.icanhascheezburger.com is a collection of these pictures, mostly cat-related but there are a few gems that center around other members of the animal kingdom. Maybe I'm lame for saying so, but I think cats and pictures of cats with really obvious or bizzare or blatently misspelled captions are really funny. I couldn't tell you exactly why I think so; perhaps in this small way I'm rebelling against the blah-ness of what's popularly considered funny. Then again, these cat pictures are getting awfully popular… 473 del.icio.us bookmarks and counting, and about 251 diggs last I checked! WOW! Maybe I'm not such a rebel afterall, or maybe all it means is I'm not alone in enjoying snickering quietly to myself and muttering “oh I see what you did there” at bold captioned pictures of cats!

read more | digg story

Just to give you a taste of what you're in for if you aren't terribly familiar with the whole “cat image macro” thing, I give you the namesake photo of the site!

http://thepartyparty.com/thepartyparty.com/Podcast/Podcast.html
Behind the “cut” image located here, is a video file of the most disturbing version of Sunday, Bloody Sunday I have ever seen/heard.
It’s safe for work, unless of course your boss is a real hardcore Republican who wouldn’t appreciate Bush footage being manipulated like that.
This site seems rather naked right now, not a lot of information to be had on what The Party Party is, aside from musically inclined.
Still I stumbled on this in my daily comb-thru of the del.icio.us RSS and felt inclined to share.
What do you all think?