Monthly Archive for November, 2007

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links for 2007-11-22

LOOK AT ME!!

Been happily using Adblock Plus & CustomizeGoogle to filter the visual noise out of my web browsing for the last few months, and for the most part I hadn’t been too overwhelmed by the experience. Not saying that they don’t do a great job (pretty much perfect, in fact). It’s just that I didn’t really notice a huge difference in the way pages looked, with or without ads!

Until today, that is….

I was looking into some AdWords stuff at work & figured I’d better turn off the blockers to see how things “really” looked. Everything was pretty much as I expected in that department, but Holy Good Goddamn!! I had forgotten just how much crazy-ass ad clutter shows up on some of the sites I visit! It makes me wish there was some way to just block that stuff out so I could concentrate on the damn website itself for a change, and… Heeeey wait a minute. Phew… I feel much better now. Seriously though people… Can we cool it with the ads just a little bit? I mean, I’m not opposed to online advertising in general, but is this checkerboard of banners & animated GIFs and (ugh) Flash on every page of your site really effective? And if so, then how come my TV doesn’t switch into a 5 x 5 grid with 25 ads running simultaneously every time there’s a commercial break? (And incidentally if that ever does happen, can this count as prior art?) Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go wash out my eyeballs…

[editor's note: Not like I don't just read the RSS feeds for most of the sites I visit in the first place, but still!! (and while we're on the subject, WTF is with these enormous "Can't see the video? Click here" ad blocks that BoingBoing is injecting into their RSS lately? Enough!)]

Depends on what your defintion of “Is” is

Via some Wired blog:

Facebook has caved into popular demand and will make the “is” in status updates optional, effective tonight, according to allfacebook.com… Many people ignore it, choosing instead to commit grammatical atrocities such as “Sarah is likes to dance.”

I dunno if I’d call that an atrocity, but I will admit to giving this issue some thought each time I post a status update. That being said, I kind of enjoy working inside an arbitrary grammatical construct (sometimes)!

links for 2007-11-21

links for 2007-11-20

links for 2007-11-19

links for 2007-11-17

links for 2007-11-16

Beowulf: Pro & Con

Pro: Holy ****ing moly…this is the finest “3-D” experience I’ve ever witnessed!

Con: Again with the Uncanny Valley

Regardless, Crispin Glover plays (the voice & “actions” of) Grendel so basically all these arguments are moot.

As you may have noticed…

I’ve been using this “Daily Links” script from del.icio.us for the last several days, in an attempt to keep things from getting too stagnant around here. Still got some kinks in terms of formatting and all that, but it seems like it’s working OK for the most part. Anyway, hope everybody is enjoying the unfiltered del.icio.us.ness!