Month: January 2005

Soctopus Attacks Oscar, Film at 11

Soctopus Attacks Oscar, Film at 11
As you probably read elsewhere, the 2005 Oscar nominations were announced this morning and you all know what that means… The Third Annual web-goddess Oscar Contest has offically launched! This year the first prize is a one-of-a-kind, never-before-seen sock creation: the Soctopus! (Thanks to Christopher for suggesting the concept.) Second and third prizes are the ever-popular mini sock monkeys. Remember, do your research and take as much time as you need before you enter because you can’t go back and change your entry later! But don’t wait too late, because ties can be broken based on who put in their guess first… Good luck everyone!

Oh, and if you want to see more pictures of Soctopus in action, here are some shots of him attacking the Snook. (Matt used them to create the awesome promo image for the contest this year.) In terms of his construction, he’s a slight cheat since I actually used two pairs of socks. The skinny black tie was a joke reference to the modern tuxedos worn by guys like Brad Pitt, and the hat just seemed like the perfect accessory. Matt thinks it makes him look like a “ska-topus.” I can see that.

Soctopus   Eek!   Ack!   Squelch...

nofollow

The brains at Google have had a brilliant idea: identify user-submitted links on a blog via a special tag and then don’t follow them. This means that the assholes who make comment spam posts will have less incentive, since Google won’t index the links and thus increase the PageRank of their crappy phentermine scam pages. I’m going to have a go at implementing it here.

Curse of the Korean Pot Belly

Curse of the Korean Pot Belly

Me: *yawn*
Crochet Lady: Tired?
Me: Yeah, exhausted. I went to bed at 9:30 last night and I still feel like I could fall back asleep! Probably just my allergies, combined with this depressing rainy weather…
Crochet Lady: And the bub. *smile*
Me: Wha–? Bub?
Crochet Lady: You know… *gestures towards my stomach*
Me: BUB!? That’s not a baby! It’s just my, my, my, you know, POOCH! I’m not PREGNANT! I’m just FAT! Good grief, I need to start wearing my apron again with the sign that says “NOT A BABY.” Just because a person has a predisposition to carry their extra weight in front doesn’t mean you can automatically assume that they’re WITH CHILD. Sheesh! That’s it; I’m going back on my diet today. No more carbs. That means I can’t do my DEEP-FRIED MACARONI EXPERIMENT, which I guess is fine because people might have thought I was some BIG HORMONAL PREGNANT WOMAN suffering CRAZY FOOD CRAVINGS, and GOD KNOWS I wouldn’t want THAT…”
Crochet Lady: *slinks out the door*

MythBlog

Snookums helped me write a little script today that automatically uploads information from our TiFaux* to my website. It’s down there in the right column under “recording.” Currently it’s set to list the shows that we recorded on the previous day. I just thought it was sort of neat.

* TiVo isn’t available in Australia, so we’ve got a homemade “personal video recorder” system that consists of a Linux PC running MythTV. It doesn’t have all the fancy TiVo predictive features, but it does a pretty good job of including all the shows we want to watch.