RKNet Blog... Thing

Looks like I had spoken too soon about URLtea being back in it to win it.

An astute commenter on my previous “URLTea Dead” post just tipped me off to the site being dead, again.

Below is the text I got when visting the main site.

Site Temporarily Unavailable
We apologize for the inconvenience. Please contact the webmaster/ tech support immediately to have them rectify this.

error id: “bad_httpd_conf”

Of course no word from them using Twitter. Although funnily enough when I went to check their twitter profile to confirm…

Another Twitter outage. Nothing new. Still, at least with the screen (as shown in the image above) I was given upon hitting the site, I was immediately aware of the issue, and was given some kind of assumed reassurance that the Twitter team would be working to repair the issue. URLTea’s “error page”? Not so much.

Once again I wish to invite the URLtea operators to touch base with their users, and let us know about outages, and the future of URLtea. With a growing number of URL-shortening services out there, it becomes less and less apparent why I or anyone else should use URLtea. If you guys are interested in building a service, or a company, which people feel comfortable sticking with and recommending, it is in your best interests to communicate once in a while.

Twitter is notorious for outages at this point, but they’re discussing it publicly and making it clear that they are working to fix these issues. Dreamhost has issues regularly, which they report to customers via RSS and other direct-to-customer methods (i.e. not just posting it up on the site and assuming people will go there to read). Rackspace has blown up a couple times, too, and they sent out a slew of direct-to-customer emails. The reason these companies still get the attention that they do is because they respond to these incidents.

So what’s the scoop, URLtea?

Now here is a bit I haven’t done in quite some time! The Words To Know series had all but died. Tonight I feel like shaking the dust off, brushing away the cobwebs, and putting WTK to work once more. I’ve decided to go easy on the old girl, by featuring two terms, and peppering the descriptions with other delightful terms to incorporate into your vernacular. On we go!

Our first featured term is: Adroit - This is a handy way to turn a shocked and braindead exclamation of “Whoa! Skills!” into a pithy bon mot. For example, when watching Sonny Chiba in the film The Street Fighter, one might be able to say something like “That was the most adroit instance of someone’s testicles being pulled off I think I’ve ever witnessed!” Not-work-safe clip below for those who may not have had the good fortune to see the whole film. (Which, by the way, I strongly recomend to anyone.)

Our second word for the day is: Obstreperous. Obstreperous is a fantastic word to use to describe someone’s putrescent offspring who have decided that it would be a fantastic time to start various types of boisterous carrying on (running, yelling, messing with others’ belongings, etc.) when you have just been sealed onto a several-hour flight. It certainly passes over in polite conversation a lot more readily than simply turning to your seat mate to comment that the plane’s younger passengers are in fact “little fucking assholes” who should, in fact, have a rigorous application of chloroform applied to them posthaste. To make such a comment could be considered maladroit - the opposite of our first featured word - due to its utter lack of tact. The child pictured below, though adorable, may be one of these children whom the label of “obstreperous” applies.

Or perhaps these three might be more prone to various hijinks.

Hope you enjoyed this edition of WTK as much as I did! (If you did, won’t you show some comment love?)

URLTea used to be my favorite URL shortening service. Emphasis on used to be. For (and I’m guessing here) I’d say the better part of a month, every time I have attempted to make a shortened URL or visit the site, it’s been coming up error, 404, you’re looking for what again?

Does anyone know what became of URLtea? Their last post to Twitter was 6 months ago. Their Google code page doesn’t have any news. Alex King seemed to predict its downfall but none of the commenters have anything helpful to add.

URLtea creators and primary supporters! Where have you gone? Will you be bringing the site back?

I liked your tea towel background and your awesome bookmarklet tool. Don’t let me suffer in a sea of plain jane tinyurls!

On the recommendation of a friend, I watched this earlier and was left with many thoughts. Many questions. Anything that raises questions is of interest.

The following video is intended for audiences who are willing to ask questions. Questions about religion. Questions about authority. Questions about government. Questions about the world all live in. The author of this post takes no responsibility for the contents herein, and furthermore does not claim to believe in part or full the views expressed herein. However, the author does have strong interest in all the covered subjects. It is best you go into this blind. For if I were to explain the outline of this video to you, you would surely form prejudgement and that is not ideal at all. The author very much wishes to know your thoughts regarding this film, and have discussion about it. We here at RKNet are willing to entertain any and all view points. Moderation will be conducted by Giania. The other authors of RKNet will express their own views. Regardless of disagreement all (non-spam) comments will be allowed and encouraged. The point of asking questions is to get answers. Every person’s answer is important to us. Please help us explore these ideas by giving your feedback.

Caution, this film is 2 hours long. It is recommended that you visit the film’s site for source information and larger formats of the film.

Until I started looking at the Analog 6.0 stat reports for the site, I had no idea what a shemagh was. Now I know it’s a it’s a style of head wrap which originated in the Middle East. If you really want to know how, ActionGear.com has a pretty handy tutorial (with pictures!).

However, you’re probably wondering what middle eastern head and face protection has to do with site analytics. I am rather mystified myself!

Observe the following:

Up until this very post, I have never talked about shemaghs. How could I if I had no idea that such a thing existed? (Well I’d seen the head wrap in films, mainly, but never in person and never knew what it was called.) I don’t show up in the first five pages of regular Google search results for the term “how to tie a shemagh”. Ditto the first five pages of image results. Nor blog search results (although I personally think I should show up for a lot more terms in the blog search category, this is one I should not show up for which makes this outcome unsurprising). Yahoo’s first five pages of results also pulled up no mention of my name. I checked the first five pages of MSN as well, just to make sure I wasn’t crazy. Still no mention of this site.

So what gives? Where does this rogue data come from? I am on shared hosting, but this is just plain out of the blue.
I am on shared hosting, granted, but my stats thus far has been without grievous errors like this. Any masterminds want to take a stab at why such a thing might happen? (Also, feel free to make fun of me for the quality of the other search terms that I legitimately DO show up for. lol mudkips.)

All this talk of Mudkips (and having to troll around Google Labs for something work related) got me to thinking, just how popular is this whole “mudkips” thing, and what about rival Pokémon meme, Seaking?
Well, the results are in!
The winner for longest running search item? Seaking.
Current most popular? Mudkips.
Overall though, I’d say the winner is Seaking by a huge margin. Fuck yeah, Seaking!

Although I couldn’t help but notice, when adding Slowpoke (Hey guys, am I late?), I got some articles too. Talking about some hybrid Lexus. Funky. In typical Slowpoke fashion, this search lags way, way behind the others. Fitting, really.

Search result totals (as of a few minutes ago):
Seaking - 1,110,000
Slowpoke - 624,000
Mudkips - 359,000 for mudkip, 122,000 for mudkips

Clearly, even though there’s a rise in popularity of the newer gen meme fodder, Mudkips, there is a serious lack of content for this topic. Although to be fair, I think Encyclopedia Dramatica probably has the subject covered well enough for us all. If you don’t know that ED is not safe for work then you haven’t been around the block. So I’ll tell you right now, that it’s not safe for work, and if you’re really very worried about that, then you should probably not go around the block. They do however have a link in there for a PDF on scientists’ attempts to study the development and regeneration of axolotls, which as we learned earlier today, are the closest thing we get to Mudkips on this side of our Quantum Reality Tunnel. Science will find a way though, it always does. Yay science!

Anyway, all of that was really just some blatent search related infoporn, exposing me for the meme-addled child I truly am. Do they have support groups for this kind of thing?

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.

Last night the most remarkable series of things happened, resulting in a delightful print out just for you!
In #ormgas (the IRC channel for the OCR internet radio broadcast), Leissi pasted the following -

Notice: This Department requires no physical fitness program: everyone gets enough exercise jumping to conclusions, flying off the handle, running down the boss, knifing friends in the back, dodging responsibility, and pushing their luck.

Struck with inspiration, I decided to make a poster from this material. I also decided that the various cautionary signs from the game Portal, with their wet-floor-sign-guy-in-major-peril quality, were the absolute best to give some graphical window dressing to this wry jab at working life. (I realize the quote is rather old, but I’d forgotten all about it until Leissi was kind enough to remind me of it.)

After several fruitless searches (shocking with the amount of slavering Portal fanatics out there) in the ever-convenient Google Image Search, I finally dug up a panel of Portal’s caution signs. It wasn’t very large so I tried to resize it cleverly, but the end result was still fuzzy. Seeing as this was meant to be a five minute haha on my part, I wasn’t terribly concerned.

I did however take the time to change the saying slightly to make it more apropos to my own current working life. Pleased with myself, I saved a copy as a jpg and slapped it up in #ormgas, and in #ectomo.

I left shortly thereafter, and thought nothing of it, until I came in this morning and checked my gmail. What appeared before my eyes, but a white knight from the depths of #ectomo, Maicro, come to clean up the fuzzy Portal images and raise this snarky little geek joke to the next level of professional subversiveness.

Without further ado, a giant jpg for you to print and share with all the people who fill you with levels of contempt that are at best unhealthy and at worst result in much head explodey.

One million thousand thanks to Leissi and Maicro for their invaluable contributions in the field of snarky, passive-aggressive sign leaving technology. If you have opportunity, comment with links to photos of this particular sheet in action.

Go on and just tell me what’s wrong with this picture! I don’t know if it’s coincidental or contextual but either way it is downright hilarious! Well, except for the obvious reminder that the Almighty Google is not really all that mighty. Especially when you pit them against the hundreds of thousands of people working day and night to hack the crap out of them for personal gain.
The image links directly to the slashdot article in question.

So I came into work this morning, only to have a co-worker mention to me that AdCenter, MSN, and Hotmail all weren’t working for him. I checked a couple things and the sites loaded up just fine for me, but when I tried to log into AdCenter I got a friendly message saying that they were down for the time being.

Curiouser and curiouser. Then my first tweet of the day appeared:

trodrigues: msn servers are down. thousands of young portuguese girls commit mass suicide.

Intrigued, I decided to start tracking instances of “MSN” through Twitter IM. Boy, was that ever a mistake! The messages - most of them not in english - began pouring in, and my IM window has been blinking like mad all morning.

Some of the highlights:

(matheusodorisi): gente, o msn naum entra de forma alguma! appocalipse now!
(s1mone): @kakah o MSN morreu! Vida longa o GTalk!!!
(pvdp): Kom msn niet op.
(jonviray): MSN down for anyone else? people here at work are getting piiiissseed……
(hdur): Supongo que MSN enfurece a los dioses de Pakistán.
(Hausdorff): MSN産経のページ，なめてんのかって位重い
(justinkeller): Adium users: is MSN giving you problems today?
(jcloop): what the fruit is wrong with MSN messenger AND Hotmail??
(agenteinforma): MSN fora do ar não só no Brasil: http://tinyurl.com/3a4qyr
(jaredavery): What a nice start to my day. Had to help mum get in to Hotmail because MSN Messager did not want to work for her.
(cl0): who cares if you can’t get on msn? chances are not many people will wanna talk to you lot anyway ;)

And tons more comments like that. Lots of suggestions to try Meebo or defect to Gtalk. None of them seem to have any concrete intel on WHY MSN/Hotmail/et al are down, or if they do I don’t know enough portuguese/spanish/insert-other-languages-here to make it out.

I would like to note, that from my end, MSN messenger (using Pidgin) worked just fine, as did visiting LiveSpaces. The home page of Hotmail loaded up but I didn’t bother trying to log in.

Anybody got any good dirt on the situation?