Photoshop Phriday

There are a lot of bizarre little Web sites on the Internet. One of them is SomethingAwful, which does a pretty good job of being funny and sometimes offensive. They have a contest every week called Photoshop Phriday, where you are given a theme and offered the chance to create an image to go with that theme. Sometimes they put out a starting image and people make changes to it. Definitely amusing, if you are not easily offended! That is always the problem with sites that are based on user contributions, of course.

Link to site

I am the number 6 Google result for "cat-proof software"

Statcounter (the site I mentioned which showed what browsers people were using to visit my site) provides a lot of cool features. If I had my own Web server, I could get this same information by perusing my Web server logs, but since I am running a site through Google's Blogger service, I don't have access to those.

Statcounter logs all sorts of information, for example, computer IP address, operating system, browser information, screen resolution, and more. One of the other things that is cool is that it can tell you how people found your Web site, assuming they didn't just type it in to their address bar.

For example, if you Google:
Professor Cameron blog

I am the first result for this. This makes sense. If you were to then click on that Google link, I would be able to see that someone Googled that and found me using those search terms. I can also see which search engines people used to find me. Of my recent visitors, 55 found me using Google, 7 using Bing, 4 using Yahoo!, and 1 using Ask. (Note: Statcounter only logs the most recent 500 visits for free users, and many of them didn't find me using a search engine, hence the small numbers).

I sometimes will pop on the system and see how people for finding me, and there are always some interesting results.

For example, I have a number of searches I would expect. The following searches led people to me (again, some Google, some not):
interesting computer stuff (name of the blog, that makes sense)
professor cameron (makes sense, that's me)
fun stuff with professor cameron (I assume someone just forgot the name of my blog here)
eric cameron pccc us (that's me!)

In addition, there are searches that turned up specific blog posts of mine. I have a number of searches related to computer hardware disposal (due to a recent post), PCCC Panther Alert (something I've discussed a few times - PCCC's emergency alert system), Zune disaster (an older post), an assortment of things related to Microsoft Office hotkeys, and other such searches. As a matter of fact, I am the number 6 result on Google for cat proofing computer due to a post from last year.

Then, there are the bizarre ones. These serve to show me that search engines, though amazing, still have a ways to go. Here are some of the bizarre searches that have led people to my site:

• simple one touch notification pagers from chef to servers 163-001
• i get taken advantage of a lot
• AVERAGE TIME WASTED WAITING FOR OLD COMPUTER
  
• Bergen Community College, "flight simulator"
  
• Professor Cameron porn
• wife playing world of warcraft when supposed to take children +subpoena

Some of those are bizarre! I wonder what was going on in that last search...

Anyway, you can see searches like Professor Cameron porn would lead you to this site because somewhere in a page is each of those words. I posted about pornography a few times, and of course Professor Cameron is on every page, so yeah, that works.

I am pretty sure whoever was searching for that was disappointed when they found my blog.

How Old Spice just changed social networking

I was watching the baseball All-Star game the other night and there was an Old Spice commercial that came on. This commercial featured a good looking guy basically telling women that their man doesn't look like him, but they could smell like him. It was really over the top and goofy.


So yeah...amusing enough, I chuckled. Were this the end of it, that would have been enough, but the commercial producers arranged for their Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit sites to allow people to tweet/post questions. The actor, a former NFL hopeful named Isaiah Mustafa, then posted an incredible amount of responses...all of which were done in a towel in his bathroom as if he had just left the shower. Some of them were to famous people, and some to random people. Some of the celebrities he tweeted videos to include Demi Moore, George Stephanopoulis, Ellen Degeneres, Rose McGowan, Ashton Kutcher, Ryan Seacrest, Starbucks, and perhaps most famously, Alyssa Milano. Alyssa Milano went back and forth, with the actor posting four videos flirting with her, and even sending her flowers in real life, and prompting Alyssa Milano to post a video response in a towel of her own (view the entire set of videos here).

Apparently, he responded with over 180 videos over a few days, and had 5.9 million video views in the first day, according to this article. The amazing part is that this is getting news coverage, and celebrities are basically giving Old Spice free advertising. This is just one of the most amazing Internet buzzes I have seen. Sadly, the videos seem to be done for now according to the Twitter feed, but I wouldn't be shocked if Old Spice brought them back based on the popularity.

The question for Old Spice is always "will this improve sales" and the answer isn't clear at this point. If nothing else, they generated buzz!

The actor, based on this, was signed to a deal with NBC, who hope to capitalize on his buzz and create a sitcom.

Check out the tweeted video responses here:
http://twitter.com/oldspice

Bill Gates joke

I was reading an article by one on my favorite writers, Joe Posnanski, about Lebron Jame and where he will end up.  As a Knicks fan, I am hoping the answer is New York, but we shall see. The article had a joke that was similar to one I had heard about Bill Gates.  It went something like this:

Bill Gates dies and meets with St. Peter in purgatory.  St. Peter says to him "Bill, you did a lot of good in this world, but you are also responsible for Windows ME and Windows Vista.  I'm going to let you decide whether you want to go to heaven or hell, we will take a tour of each."

St. Peter takes Bill on a tour of heaven, and there are angels playing harps, things like that.  Bill thinks this is nice, but is curious as to what hell looks like.  St. Peter takes Bill to hell, and the devil himself takes Bill on the tour.  There are warm, sandy beaches with beautiful women on the beaches, people drinking and playing volleyball, warm sunshine and laughter. 


The devil returned Bill to St. Peter and gave Bill the choice between heaven and hell, and Bill chose hell. 


A week later St. Peter decided to check in on Bill and see how he was doing.  When he got there Bill was chained to a wall, being burned and tortured by demons.  St. Peter asked "How's everything going?". 

Bill said "This is nothing like the hell I visited last week!  What happened to the hell I visited with the beaches and sunshine??"

"That was a demo," replied St. Peter. 

(I've also seen the ending "that was just the screen saver")

Easter Eggs

The term "Easter eggs" refers to features that are hidden inside of a software program, DVD, or other such technology.  For example, back in the original Nintendo days, there was a game called Contra.  You started with three lives, and that was a pain.  However, you could also enter a code (now known as the Konami code - after the game manufacturers) to give you thirty lives.  It's been years since I played the game, but I still remember you had to hit up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, and then Start, and you would start the game with thirty lives.  That was my first experience with Easter eggs.  Nowadays, you can find many sites that list the Easter eggs in video games.  Aside from video games, many DVDs now come with Easter eggs built in, as you can find on this site. 


There are typically Easter eggs built in to software, as well.  For example, Microsoft Excel 97 used to have a flight simulator built in to it, but Microsoft apparently removed Easter eggs in their software in 2002.  Note that sometimes people get confused as to what is a hidden feature and what is an Easter egg.

Anyway, even Google has some Easter eggs in it, and I saw an article showing some of them.

Top 15 Google Easter eggs

Web Celebrity Hall of Fame

Wow, this is an interesting site (though possibly not safe for work).  College Humor has put together a list of what has to be about 75 sites that have gained fame throughout the years...from "Chocolate Rain"...to "Numa Numa"....to "Angry Ginger Kid" (no relation) to the "GI Joe Spoofs".  This is apparently a part of their site that has been up for years, but I hadn't seen it until today.  Definitely very cool to see many of the Internet memes put together in one place.  At one point or another, I have seen most of these things show up in my mailbox or over an instant message.

Warning: This may suck hours from your day.

http://www.collegehumor.com/web-celeb-hall-of-fame/alphabetical

Probably Bad News

If there is one thing I like, it is looking at the world around me and being amused by it.

Probably Bad News is a site that accepts user submission of bizarre and poorly worded newspaper, online, and television news reports.  It's definitely worth a click, though it may not be safe for work!

probablybadnews.com

Cat-proof your computer

So, I ran across this site today and, it's interesting to say the least.  You can buy software to cat-proof your computer.  Really, for those cat owners out there, is this a problem worth software for?

I think my favorite feature is the one that detects cat-like activity, and plays a sound that annoys cats to chase it off of your keyboard.

This is not a joke, from what I can tell:

http://www.bitboost.com/pawsense/

Finding Porn by Accident on Google

When I teach Google to my CIS 101 classes, I find that many people have never even noticed the "Advanced Search" option, which allows you to use more advanced options (such as how recently the site was updated).

Likewise, when searching for images, there is an option to allow you to change how images are filtered.  The default is for images to be filtered at a "Moderate" level, but you can switch this to more and less restrictive levels.  If you switch the filtering off, you get some interesting results, to say the least.

Cracked.com (a Web site that may not be all that safe for work) had an article about this - they discuss nine seemingly innocent searches that end up with pornographic results on Google image search.

Read on unless you are easily offended.
Link to Cracked.Com Article

A Really NSFW Situation

NSFW stands for "not safe for work".  It is an abbreviation someone might use when sending an email with questionable content to a friend, as in "check this out, but it is NSFW, so make sure you read it at home".

A few weeks ago, something that takes NSFW to a new level showed up in the news.  Two people who work at Cornell University were having an affair, and somehow, the guy just happened to copy the entire business school.

Now, leaving aside issues of whether this person was being self destructive and actually wanted to get caught or not, this is just awful.  Lesson learned here?  If you are going to have an affair, use your home email, not your work one.  Just remember, when you get a work email account, most companies reserve the right to read your email if they want to, because you are using their systems.  Also remember, they typically reserve the right to monitor your Internet, because after all, their computers and their Internet.

The site below has the entire email exchange, and I warn you now, it is NSFW.
http://guestofaguest.com/news/breaking/breaking-the-email-scandal-that-just-shook-cornells-campus/
(and yes, this was also reported on sites like Business Week, so it is legit...but on BW's site you need an account to read their full story)

Random paper generators

In what started as a joke, some people at MIT put together a "random abstract generator". It's a tool that will generate a random Computer Science abstract. The funny part is that the papers, though grammatically correct, just really don't make a ton of sense. For example, I just generated this one:

Evaluating Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games Using Amphibious Theory
Abstract
Knowledge-based communication and RPCs have garnered great interest from both scholars and cyberinformaticians in the last several years. After years of technical research into sensor networks, we prove the investigation of flip-flop gates. Our focus here is not on whether model checking can be made amphibious, embedded, and robust, but rather on proposing new symbiotic modalities (Soder).

It's giving me a headache to try to interpret all that.

Basically, there are some conferences that will basically accept anyone's paper, regardless of if it makes sense or not.  So, using this random program generator, the authors of this tool were actually accepted to present at conferences, even if what the abstract said was complete gibberish.

Edit: Here's the link to the generator: pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

Okay, I understand now

...so, I really never understood exactly why people in the medical field couldn't just watch TV shows like House, M.D. and just enjoy it. Even if there were minor issues, who cares?

(I love the House, M.D. reviews done by Scott @ Polite Dissent, by the way)

I suppose I got a taste of it yesterday. I was flying back from a mini-vacation on JetBlue, and they have DirectTV. I was watching Judge Mathis (I do like the real-life court shows), and one kid was suing another over a laptop. The way the accuser presented his case made me want to punch the television. He told the judge how his friend had downloaded pornography, which caused the computer to crash. (Does that happen? Sure, but he presented it as if that is the only thing that can happen if you download pornography). Okay, minor issue. The guy then told us how his friend had spilled his beer on the keyboard which "caused the operating system to break".

For the more computer savvy of you, I am sure there are at least two issues in that sentence. The part that concerned me is that the Judge just agreed with him. Come on, bring on someone who knows how to use a computer or something. If I were the Judge, I would have figured this guy was just as likely to have caused the computer to fail with his lack of knowledge about computers. Next thing you know, he'll accuse the guy of breaking his Interweb too.

So, medical people who get irked with House, M.D., I can now relate.

"World Changing Inventions"

There are many things that people think will "change the world" that don't end up doing much or even happening. Sometimes we think "this would be a cool idea", but there are reasons that they don't succeed, or even happen.

I think it's instructive to look back on things and see why.

For example, let's take the idea of videophones. It seemed like a logical progression from phones, right? We started with radio - voice only - and moved to TV - voice with video. Why not start with telephones and move to videophones?

Well, because people don't want to get dressed, or shower, to talk on the phone.

Seems like a great, logical response, but people invested millions of dollars in this technology anyway. Now, though we have cell phones that take video, and we have Web based videoconferencing. Will video phones ever happen? It's kind of doubtful at this point.

Warning: Language as always on cracked.com is a little, um, raw.
Cracked.com article

License plates for computer geeks

A friend sent this along and I had to click on it. These are some computer people-type license plates that folks have found pictures of.

http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/08/25/23-awesome-license-plates-for-computer-geeks/

I think my favorite has to be "su root". If you understand that, I wouldn't let you near my Linux box (that is, if I still had one).

You Suck at Photoshop

I have posted this before, but it's definitely worth a revisit, especially since there are now two seasons worth of episodes.

There is a series of Photoshop tutorials (training) called "You Suck at Photoshop". They are very informative and I've learned stuff about Photoshop watching them. However, there is a twist. It's basically half comedy and half training. It's training, but set against the story line of the guy teaching you Photoshop going through a rough time in his life. It's very amusing. My Web Graphics class seemed to like it a lot last week.

It's kind of NSFW (not safe for work) - there is some cursing involved - don't click if you are easily offended!

Link to Site

Crazy Email Hoaxes

We get them all the time. Our friends or coworkers think it is a great idea to forward something - something that makes them angry, or makes them laugh, or something.

OMGWTF They are raising kittens in bottles like bonzai trees!!!! (Not really)

Bill Gates wants to give you money! (No, he doesn't). This little girl is lost! (no, this was resolved four years ago). Help me get money out of Nigeria! (No, this doesn't work).

These things invade our email boxes all the time. If I get an email that I really think is true, I always run it through a quick Web check. One site that does this very well is Snopes - the Urban Legends Reference Pages. This site has been around in some form or another since 1995, and is very reliable when it comes to anything you might think is, well, crap. For example:

Some recent examples of Web crap that I've heard include a false list of books Sarah Palin banned in her hometown of Alaska, a false claim about all of Barack Obama's funding coming fromMiddle Eastern nations, and other such things. It is election season, after all! Snopes is a great read, just for laughs, and also a great reference.

Web Links:

• 8 Crazy Web Hoaxes (MSN)
• Urban Legends Reference Pages (Snopes.com)

Painting online

One of my biggest weaknesses is that I am not a very good artist. I've got a very logical mind, and the creative process just never really worked with the way my brain works.

For those of you who have been in my class, you know my famed drawing of someone using a computer and communicating with their friends in chat as they also use Microsoft Word...which has also been called "stick figure touching a box".

Ok, so my art skills aren't that great. Even if they aren't, I've had fun at times messing around in programs like Microsoft Paint or Adobe Photoshop.

Paint is of course free, but the issue is that you have to save your art and then either upload the or email to someone else. There is a Web program on art.com that allows you to do basically the same things you do in Paint, with a few more options added in. In addition to all those, you also have the opportunity to share the drawing, and your friends can watch your creative process in action - it stores the exact keystrokes you used to create the painting, all for free.

For example, the quarterback on my fantasy football team got injured, and I created a visually stunning representation of how this injury happened:
http://artpad.art.com/gallery/?k6usn815mt0s

Amazing to see the creative process in action, is it not?

Web Site Link:
http://artpad.art.com/gallery/

Awards Scams

Back in the mid 1990's, I ran a Web site that had some decent traffic. I used to get a lot of emails from people who wanted to give it awards. A lot of times, however, these people just wanted me to post a link to their Web site so they could steal some of my traffic.

The same thing still seems to be happening, not only with Web sites, but also with software. For example, this programmer created a program that did not run, and used a service to submit it to a bunch of software download sites. Can you believe 23 of them gave it a five star rating? Remember, this is a program that did not run or do anything!

Link to article

I suppose the part that scares me the most is how sites display banners that say "Hacker Proof", or programs display ads on their Web site that say 100% spyware free. Most home users do not know the difference between a McAfee certification and some no-name site that isn't worth anything.

What not to do in PowerPoint (Archives)

I know I've posted this before, but it is something I am showing workshop participants and I wanted to make it available.

Don McMillan does a comedy routine about what not to do in PowerPoint. I had never heard of him, but I definitely am amused by this routine!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=HLpjrHzgSRM

Friday Funnies: Hardball Made Easy

Sometimes people just have brilliant ideas in advertising.

As a kid, I remember all sorts of videos for sale, promising to teach you baseball. The people teaching you were never the big name superstars, they were always some guy you had never heard of.

Easton (a company that makes baseball bats) but together a series of videos that are based on a fake former baseball player trying to teach baseball skills. As someone who enjoys baseball, these videos cracked me up. For example, here's a quote from one of the videos:

"Better that they learn about pain from us than a bitter ex-wife"

The videos do feature some real baseball players as "guest instructors". They feature Carlos Zambrano of the Cubs, Brad Hawpe of the Rockies, and Matt Kemp and Andre Ethier of the Dodgers.

http://youtube.com/user/ScrappyRon1