Street View and the Patriot Act

To anyone who is of the belief that Google Street View is "the Patriot Act in action", please go educate yourself before opening your mouth and sounding ridiculous. Google just added a ton of new locations, so I'm sure there will be more of an uprise by silly people than ever in the next few days. But before you speak and cause me to bang my head against my desk, please consider the following:

• Google is a corporation, not a government agency.
• Street View is not live, so please quit looking for the camera right outside your house. It already drove by 6 months ago.
• Google only travels on public property that any bozo can take pictures of (and when they accidentally stumble onto private property, they get in trouble for it and take it down)
• Google has technology that automatically blurs out faces and license plate numbers, so no, your wife can't tell that it was you leaving the strip club in the middle of the day. You might want to throw away that shirt though, just to be safe. If you're still worried about it, you can always hit the "Report a concern" link at the bottom of the image. It might also be a good idea to stop frequenting strip clubs in the middle of the day, pervert.

How many golden rings DID my true love give to me?

Most people would answer "five". According to the actual lyrics, they'd be wrong. Take a look:

On the fifth day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Five golden rings,
Four calling birds,
Three French hens,
Two turtle doves,
And a partridge in a pear tree.

"My true love" sent all those things just on the fifth day of Christmas. If what most people assume was correct, it would instead say something like this:

On the fifth day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Five golden rings, in addition to the
Four calling birds sent to me on the fourth day of Christmas,
Three French hens sent to me on the third day of Christmas,
Two turtle doves sent to me on the second day of Christmas,
And the partridge in a pear tree sent to me on the first day of Christmas

But it doesn't. So instead we are left with the following gifts from said "true love":

1 x 12 = 12 Partridges in (a) pear tree(s)
Note: it is unclear whether each partridge got it's own pear tree or not
2 x 11 = 22 turtle doves
3 x 10 = 30 french hens
4 x 9 = 36 calling birds
5 x 8 = 40 golden rings
6 x 7 = 42 geese a-layin'
7 x 6 = 42 swans a-swimmin'
8 x 5 = 40 maids a-milkin'
9 x 4 = 36 ladies dancing
10 x 3 = 30 lords a-leapin'
11 x 2 = 22 pipers piping
12 x 1 = 12 drummers drumming

And you thought 8 maids a-milkin' sounded like a lot! We now have a total of 364 gifts, nearly one for each day of the year. Of those, there are 184 birds and 84 of 'em are either a-swimmin' or a-layin' (even more birds!). I don't know about you, but I think I'd rather just get a digital camera or something.

Alumni Addition

My high school has an "Alumni Addition" of their newsletter. No, it's not a math club. It's an embarrassment.

The newest 3 letter word

Jobs is a 3-letter word? Funny how you don't see this all over the news. Probably won't even be an SNL sketch about it.

TB

Person A: [Wearing a Tampa Bay Rays hat]
Person B: What does that stand for? Don't tell me....The Bears!

USDA

Person A: What does "USDA" stand for?
Person B: United States Department
Person A: of....?
Person B: America

*names have been changed to protect the ludicrous

Brinkster

My webhost is Brinkster. I have highly recommended Brinkster to the few clients that I have as a web developer. They have a great referral program.




So go get yourself a Brinkster website. Seriously, they're great.


However... like every good thing, there are side effects, and Brinkster is no exception. So, here is my disclaimer: Brinkster may cause headaches.

For example, your website might all of a sudden go down without you doing a thing. You won't know about it until a user tries to go to your website and sees nothing but the domain name listed there. So you will go to chat with Brinkster support and ask what's up and they will tell you the following:

"Windows updates were run on the computer and this caused the operating system to crash. We rolled back the updates that were run on the server this morning. This corrected most of the errors, but left the computer unable to communicate with the rest of the network or go online. We have built a new server to replace the one you were on and are moving the website files from the backups made a few hours before the crash. Once the files are restored, the website will be online. We truly apologize for the down time you have experienced today."

If you have an ounce of common sense, you will proceed to inquire whether they sent an email out explaining this because even though you didn't see one, you give them the benefit of the doubt and figure that you just didn't see it. Brinkster will respond:

"No we did not. Unless users were coming into chat earlier in the day.

We do not have an email system in place to do this."

Then you will proceed to bang your head against the desk, thus creating the aforementioned headache. That their server crashes and leaves your site down for hours is bad enough, but for them to knowingly not bother to have a basic system that at least informs their paying customers of the situation is simply inexcusable.

There are other things that may induce the side effects as well, but I won't bother to write them down because someone already did.

But by all means, if you need a website, go with Brinkster (using one of my reference links, of course). Just be wary of the potential side effects.