Category: Stupid

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From the “dead to me” file — Technorati

I was wondering about the relative dearth of traffic recently, and had a look at this site with my adblock turned off. As it turns out this was causing the page to apparently not load; what was really happening was that the page did load, entirely, but then there was a sneaky call to a web site called b.scorecardresearch.com which never loaded, so every non-adblocked call to this site resulted in blank pages and hung browsers. At least on Firefox it’s obvious that there’s a delayed call to a third-party site; with Google Chrome I just ended up with a blank page.

On doing a bit more research I found that this “scorecardresearch.com” site is an advertising beacon, which is annoying enough, but then I found out that the call is made from a script that comes with the technorati widget that was on the wordpress template of my site. As of now this has been removed, and it will not be coming back. To put it plainly, fuck Technorati, for tracking users and screwing up my site. And don’t give me any of this “it’s not our fault” crap, it is your fault. You included this third-party script call into your script, it’s up to you to make sure it works and replace it if it doesn’t. And why exactly are you tracking user activity by IP in the first place anyway?

So, Technorati, you’re dead to me.

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There’s low, and then there’s *low*

There are many, many questions regarding the police handling of the G20 summit that took place in Toronto recently, but this one takes the cake — a 57-year-old leg amputee had his artificial leg forcibly removed by Toronto police because “it could be used as a weapon”, and when he asked for it back he was told to hop. Since when is this in any way acceptable behavior for any human being? Also, when you consider that 700 people were arrested and released without charge, doesn’t that mean that there was little to no consideration of whether arrests were made with cause?

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Oh sure, just don’t let that stop the shrill hysteria!

In the UK a drug nicknamed “meow” was outlawed following what appeared to be the death of two users (imagine if alcohol had been outlawed after a mere two drinkers had died of it!). The ban came swiftly amid much public outrage; however it turns out that neither of the “victims” had taken the drug at all.

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Well, that’s just his answer to everything.

South Korea has officially blamed North Korea for the sinking of the warship Cheonan, and now North Korea is mobilizing for war. So what would John Bolton do about it? WWJBD?

  1. Demand an aggressive restart to the six-party regional talks
  2. Bomb North Korea
  3. Bomb Iran
  4. Option 3 again.

This is of course a trick question as both 3 and 4 are correct. John Bolton would deal with North Korea by bombing Iran… or did he just dredge up an old Word doc and lazily change all mentions of “Iran” to “North Korea” except for that last one? It’s one thing to bomb another country out of malice or incompetence, and another to do so because you’re too lazy to double-check your own documents. Sometimes it seems to me that the only thing standing between John Bolton and an ICC tribunal for crimes against humanity is access to power. Good thing no one’s dumb enough to give this batshit-insane psycho any.

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Online banking FAIL

TFSAs are supposed to be easy to open, but as I found out today it seems terribly easy to screw the pooch. So to ING Direct — fix your registration software because it doesn’t work. There is nothing wrong with my social insurance number — I have used it to register as an employee, to files my taxes, and to open a few bank accounts already and it’s never been a problem before. Hell, I used it to open an RRSP using the ING web site before, yet now my application is rejected because of a problem validating my S.I.N., which hasn’t changed recently. Yeah, I could call and spend half an hour on the phone registering the account, but frankly do I really want to put some of my money into a bank that has no branches AND doesn’t do full QA on their own web software? I don’t think so. So, no linky for you.

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Another place to avoid as a vacation spot…

Imagine this scene — you’ve booked a week’s holiday and enjoyed a bit of Eastern Europe with its tall, leggy blondes and fine beer. You’re getting on a flight to get back to work. Unbeknownst to you Slovakian police have planted explosives in your bag to test their airport security systems, which fail to detect the suspect substance, and now you’re flying at 20,000 feet sitting on top of a bomb and towards arrest. Sounds unlikely? It happened just in the past week.

Feel safer when flying now? Didn’t think so.

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I think this calls for a facepalm…

In a spectacular display of the sort of current-events knowledge and attention to detail that made her an ideal fit as White House Press Secretary under George W. Bush, Dana Perino went on some Fox News pundit show and affirmed that no terrorist attacks took place in the US while Bush was President. Which must mean that I and millions of others just imagined seeing the WTC buildings collapse into a heap of rubble.

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Fact checking… Investors’ Business Daily has heard of it.

In a spectacular outbreak of foot-in-mouth disease the right-wing newspaper Investors’ Business Daily avers that “People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.” Without realizing of course that Hawking IS in fact British and that the NHS didn’t just leave him on a mountaintop to be pecked clean by the crows, something which any American health insurance company would no doubt have done decades ago. This, I’m afraid, is typical of the level of debate in the United States about health care reform.

Note: I’m quite sure that the original article will be removed as soon as it starts getting a lot of traffic, so if you can’t find the quote I highlighted have a look at the article as it originally appeared (local cache).

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Second Strike.

So, how do you repair your public image after an interview in which you praise Hitler? You blame the Jews for the financial crisis, that’s how. At least that’s how it works in Bernie Ecclestone’s mind. Seriously, this guy just doesn’t get it. But there’s a chance that something positive will fall out from this — I don’t see how he’s going to be able to remain at the head of the FIA for very long if he keeps up the Prince Philip act. Even now he’s had to cancel his personal appearance at the formal opening of this weekend’s German Grand Prix and who knows how many other races he won’t be welcome at.

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Rules.

There aren’t many absolute rules to life; to each rule there seems to be an exception, with the notable exception of this one: if you’re a controversial public figure and an associate of Max Mosley, and you’re talking with reporters, you should never, ever say anything that even sounds like “Hitler was a man who could get things done.” In fact unless you’re a historian any discussion involving Hitler probably doesn’t belong in an interview. Can we at least agree on this?