Idea:  We all have nonstandard characters that we want to use in our posts, tweets, status updates, emails, comments, and what have you.  In the dark ages, one had to enter the character entity in HTML markup to have it show up in a post (entering “ö” for “ö”, for instance.)  Entering the actual character (the “ö”, for instance) could make your character disappear when you hit “Submit” or (!) crash the software that ran the blog or message board (I told you it was the dark ages.)

But now, not only is there better handling for more extensive character sets (such as ISO 8859-1) in web apps (and, crucially, browsers), but using HTML markup in, say, Facebook or Twitter will actually not work.

So: why not keep a list of characters you need most frequently in a place where you can cut-and-paste?

The absolute best place to do this is Google Notebook, but for some unfathomable reason, this product, which is one of Google’s best, is no longer accepting new signups.  So you may have to put it somewhere like an email draft, or a blog draft, or … somewhere else.  It’s best if it’s on the Web, so you can access it wherever you need it.

Each of us has different character needs, but mine looks like this:

♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ ♯
№ ✓ ✔ ✗ ✘
← → ↑ ↓ ⇐ ⇒ – —
« » † ‡ …
♥ ♡ ☺ ☹ ★ ☆ ☠ ☮
® ™ ± ° ℃ ℉
² ³ ¼ ½ ¾ ƒ ℵ ∂ ∞ ∫ ∴
≅ ≠ ¿ ¡ £ € ¢
ñ ç ö æ œ

I also keep a list of frequently-needed words:

Renée
naïveté
über
résumé
Gödel

This page at Big Baer is really useful.  So are lixlpixel live preview and fileformat.info, without which writing on the web would be much more difficult for me.

So, idea:  Play with those and make your own list!

I’ve never tried to share a YouTube playlist before.  Nor, as it happens, create one.  Put this squarely in the “I would have thought it would be easier” square.  I can’t seem to embed it meaningfully or to give a nice graphical preview, so, to make it big at least:

Here is the playlist link!

I would start at the one on the top, the Caliendo.

Let me know what you think.  I think they’re all worth watching and were the best among those I watched.  And let me know if I can do the YouTube linkage better.

A new meme floating about is I Write Like, a statistical analyzer wherein one pastes a writing sample — longer is better — and the software determines, according to metrics the programmer has chosen, which author’s writing most resembles.

Reading on forums, it’s apparently actually doing something, and the author has promised to provide more info on the algorithms.

I posted a chapter from my unfinished sci-fi novel — a bit reluctantly — and this is what I got:

I write like
J. K. Rowling

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

OK.  I guess I can live with that.

The recent Sharron Angle post gets this:

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Pardon me while I go celebrate.  There’s nothing like affirmation by a piece of software using secret criteria.

Say you’re at the mall.  There’s a little table with survey forms.  You pick up one of the surveys.  It reads: “Tell us who your friends are, where you went to school, when your birthday is, whether you’re in a relationship (and with whom), what your interests are, what causes you support, your sex, (continued on back)”  At that point you realize the form is several pages long.  At the end of it it says “Also, please allow us to contact you by email FOR ANY REASON WE WANT, including ads that we tailor to your personal info.”  Now you’re getting excited.  What can I win?  A vacation to Paris?  A new Lexus?  A PRIVATE JET?!  I mean, this is a LOT of info to give a stranger, right?  The payoff must be AWESOME!

So you read the sign on the front of the table.  It says “Fill out one of our forms, and we will tell one of your friends you wish you could hug him or her / send one of your friends a PRETEND cup of coffee / ask him or her, on your behalf, what Simpsons character he or she is most like / etc.”

Do you fill out the form?

Friends:  This.  Is what.  You are doing.  When you accept a Facebook app request.

I usually try to keep trashy family/crime dramas off of this site — mostly because of the terrible problems with the Outlaw post — but this (creepy) story I stumbled upon is, I think, worth a read.

From web:

I’m just sharing my story because some people asked…

Wow… okay, I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to tell anyone about this, but it’s late and I’m sleep deprived so i guess I’ll just write it now and regret it in the morning

First of all, – just for some background: My mom died right when I was born, (she was actually really, really hot- but this isn’t about her. I guess that’s fucked up to say, but whatever.) I actually grew up with my dad’s family, because my dad has all sorts of emotional issues and he bailed before I was born. So you can see, my childhood was really kind of messed up.

Anyways, growing up I feel like there was always a lot of distance between me and my sister. When I was about 17 or 18 I first noticed that my sister was a hottie.

I don’t want to go into to many details about it, but basically what happened is that I accidentally found a video that she made of herself. I knew she didn’t make it for me- but I thought she was so fucking beautiful that I watched it twice. Probably would have watched it a hell of a lot more, except that like right around the time I found the video, all this crazy shit went down and I had to leave home. (My dad’s family who I was staying with got in bad trouble with the law. I never talk about it).

Sooo… I was totally lusting after my sister at that point. She was also having bad trouble with the law. She was actually in custody when I left home.

My friend and I went to go pick her up. When I saw her that day, after seeing the video, I have to be honest, I just wanted to fuck her brains out. Looking back on it now, it’s pretty messed up- but I think she had feelings for me too. She actually kissed me right after we came to get her… and it wasn’t a sisterly kiss, you know? I mean, it wasn’t like ridiculously sexual or anything, but it definitely wasn’t sisterly.

After we left, we all went to crash with my Sister’s friends. On the trip there, my friend sort of implied that he wanted to get with my Sister, and I got a little jealous. He’s a good looking guy- and even though she was my sister- I just felt like he was competition. Not much else happened between us for a while except some maybe-sexy hugging.

Pretty much everyone in my life at that point was wanted by the government, so we all moved around a lot. I’m not saying that I’m proud of it or anything, but it was kind of an awesome time.

My friend and my sister never hooked up I don’t think- but I thought there was some serious sexual tension going on between them. It was around that time that I got really badly hurt in an accident. It was fucked up. I almost died. But when I was in recovery my sister came to see me, and out of the clear blue sky she started gives me this awesome, slow, passionate kiss on the lips.

Sadly (although, I guess for the best) nothing ever came of it. We spent some time apart… and I started to get really religious, so I tried not to think of her that way. It was actually going well for a long time- like I was totally over her. But I have to say, like a year or so after all that stuff went down, we were out sailing (not like a date or anything romantic like that), and she was wearing like the hottest bikini I’ve ever fucking seen and it brought back all the old feelings. Sigh.

A little while later she actually wound up with my friend from before (the sexual tension guy). I can’t say I was surprised.

But even after she was shacking up with my friend, there was one time we were at a party… my friend was inside, and my sister and I were outside alone. It was a really intimate moment. I think something might have happened, except that I killed the mood when I told her that Darth Vader was our father and that I had to go face him.

The frequency of people failing to get my jokes on Facebook suggests to me that I’m either far less clever than I think I am or far more clever.

Or maybe both?  I asked two logicians if this could be possible.  The first replied, “It seems paradoxical that you could be more clever than you think and not more clever than you think because we’re used to a formal logic system that prohibits the simultaneous truth of a postulate and its negation.”  The second logician then said to the first, “You know what else seems logically impossible?  Your MOM!  ‘Cause she’s so FAT!  Oh, SNAP!”  The latter then explained that his assessment of the obesity of the former’s mother might be amended if he were to “exclude her middle”.

Oh, and we had this conversation immediately after walking into a bar.

My Facebook account was attacked in a method detailed in this online story.  Except, in my case, my password and email address were not changed — although they should have been.

If you hear of a Facebook friend in London without a penny, take a moment to check their story — it’s most likely a scam that’s seeped into the social network … Facebook user accounts have been hacked, opening them up to scammers who then use it to send live chat messages to their friends asking for help…

The messages claimed the person was “on a trip to London, but had been mugged, and was now marooned without passport or cash somewhere in North London”.

I was able to change my password, log off, log in again, and post a message to my peeps that the hacker was not me.

Now FB has disabled my account, presumably to make sure everything is fixed, as the story linked to above mentions.  This means that, most likely, that Facebook is either monitoring IPs or IMs.

Have I mentioned how much I fucking hate Facebook?

Hey, you remember some years ago when we all headed over to WWDN to, essentially, make fun of someone, and he turned out to be an admirable, decent, articulate, multi-faceted, stand-up example of a guy?  Well, Brent Spiner‘s now on Twitter.  And the man is a genius, in an amping-snarkitude-and-wit-to-eleven kind of way.

Just remember, when he’s parrying people, he’s actually saying “fuck you”, and remember that when he says “fuck you” to them, he’s actually saying “fuck you” to you, and remember that even though he just told you to go fuck yourself, the man’s got a rapier.  Or, in better words than mine, from his abduction fantasy:

I drifted higher and higher. I was convinced I was a part of the light. But I wasn’t. It was a portal of some sort and I was being sucked in.  It felt strange.  Unlike any sucking experience I’ve ever had.

I’ve been using last.fm for about 2.5 years now (hi Karina!), and I’ve been scrobbling my music for much of that time.  Eventually, patterns should emerge.  Such as this compilation of my “Top Artists” that it displays for me:

1. Pearl Jam
2. Eddie Izzard
3. Nirvana
4. The Chieftains
5. Frédéric Chopin
6. Tally Hall
7. Queensrÿche
8. Stone Temple Pilots
9. Led Zeppelin
10. Argerich / Freire / Kremer / Maisky [performing Saint-Saëns's Le Carnaval des Animaux]
11. Lacuna Coil
12. Tool
13. Rush
14. Dream Theater
15. Loreena McKennitt

I’m not sure I could/would have come up with that exact list in that exact order on my own, but, yes, that’s a pretty good ranking of my tastes, save maybe the Saint-Saëns, which is pretty much all Aquarium, and pretty much all Niall.

Now, why and how that list could represent the top 15 choices of one person is left as an exercise to a suitably intrepid and demented reader.

𝌐 mcgees.org has had mega-fun with automatic translators; first Babelfish with holiday cheer, then (unsolved) puzzles with Google Translate.

Now here comes translationparty.com, doing one thing and doing it well: in and out of Japanese (always a fun language for translators) until equilibrium is reached.

I was ecstatic when I found a stable oscillator (order 2), but it turns out those are quite common (even if the site doesn’t recognize that it’s stable at order > 1.)  Then I found an order 4!  A→B→C→D→A.  Here it is, with thanks to Eddie Izzard.

OK!  Beat that!  Game on!

(No one is going to play, is he?  Then I will be very   )

Offered to me:

I accidentally tried to pay a seller through PayPal with an old bank account.  The payment fizzled.  I now have a PayPal balance of -$4.72.

To resolve the negative PayPal balance, I need to pay PayPal with a credit card.  No problem.  I try to add my credit card.  I am told that I have the maximum number of credit cards on my account, and have to delete one before I add another.  I go to delete a credit card, and:

I cannot delete a credit card because I have a negative balance.

Me, in May: Why URL shorteners are a bad idea

tr.im, today:

tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately.

Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward.
However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009.
Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.

We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed.
No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.

There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t
justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner.
There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.

We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you.

Where oh where do I tweet a cleverwhittled140 to say that Twitter is down?  Here?  Ha!  I get 14 more characters starting NOW:

I don’t think I have the willpower to have kept myself from clicking to find out what filled the ellipsis on this excerpt from a Google search result:

A hotbox, a slang noun used to refer to a woman who is eager for sexual intercourse (from … causing it to fill with smoke in order to maximize the effect.

BeaverRepel.  WTF?  Is this anyone’s #1 problem in life?  Can I live in that world?  I got there through a Google Adwords link from a search that I assure you had nothing to do with repelling beavers (don’t even try, Bob Mike.)  At least the phone spammers guess reasonably correctly that I might have an expiring auto warranty.  That’s a huge net being cast for people in beaver danger.

Google Voice.  Seriously, you had to see that coming.  Your phone data is something that Google didn’t have yet.  When Microsoft introduced IE, people had a fit (a web browser!  For free?!  Integrated with the OS?!!!  Begone, you!)

But now: Google introduced a web browser, and no one batted an eyelash, because in the grand scheme of things — the grand scheme apparently being “centralize, cross-reference, and mine all the world’s information” — a web browser is no big deal.  A voice number that records your calls?  Egads.

I’m being Chicken Little.  You know — they brand themselves “Don’t Be Evil”, which is cute-and-cuddly-and-anyway-how-bad-can-they-be?  I have friend who work for them, and they’re great guy.  But Adsense — a main revenue stream?  Fucking Nazi.

Will I use it?  Hells yeah.  But mark my timestamp: the fourth and fifth verbs in “centralize, cross-reference, and mine” are “control” and “charge for”.

The feedback I gave on Google Voice:

I need my son to be able to reach me whenever, wherever, from any phone.  To wit: I need a (semi-secret) 800/888 number routed to my GV # (I’ll pay for the minutes), the ability to accept collect calls (I’ll pay), and the ability to accept international “reverse-charge” calls (again, I’ll pay.)

Double-tasking the toll-free number to allow me to use GV through a domestic payphone, in an emergency, or (these still exist) area code-limited landline accounts, would be desirable (nearly essential.)

(K7.net has you beat on one front, until you accept faxes.)

What an awesome service.  When you have transcripts of everything I’ve ever said or written, copies of all my files, histories of everything I’ve ever read, searched for, and every website I’ve ever visited, and all my buying habits, will the next step be to clone me?  I don’t think you can instruct my Touchpad to take a DNA sample.  Yet. 

Well, enough about me.  Let’s talk about you.  According to Alexa, the following are true:

• mcgees.org has an overrepresented population of college-educated visitors, 25-44 year old visitors, and visitors reading at work.
• Males are hugely overrepresented, as are childless visitors.

There is no mathematical guarantee that these overrepresented groups all intersect, but ignoring that momentarily for the sake of humor, this post is predicting that you are a college-educated man in his mid-20s to mid-40s who has no kids and likes to read this site at work.  Anyone ahemBobMike see his face in the tortilla?

[link]

From a survey site:

In order to ensure quality survey results, our system has built-in checks that evaluate the quality of responses and the length of time our panelists take to respond to a survey.  The lack of quality and/or short response times suggest that you have not read the questions thoroughly enough to provide thoughtful responses.  Thus, we regret to inform you that your participation in this study is no longer necessary.

I guess I’ll pretend to be less skilled at thought and keyboarding if I want my cookie next time.

Problem: Attempt to watch Dollhouse

Attempted solution: Visit Fox On Demand

Result:

We’re sorry, but only the following operating systems are supported at this time:

    * Windows XP or Vista
    * Mac OS X 10.3 or greater

Here’s one way to get me to click on your ad:

The shirts are crazily overpriced, which is sad, because, in addition to that one above, tons of them are fantastic, including ones depicting an argument between mathematical constants, consoling a dwarf planet, featuring friendly crocodilians parting, helping panhandle for a Montoyan cause, and trying a weirdly-semantic pickup line.

No kickback and, as I said, ridiculously overpriced.  Still tons of fun to browse.

Theorem: When I tweet a tr.immed URL, and see in the URL report “Czech Republic on Mac OS X” and “Canada on iPhone”, and am able to say “Oh, I know who those people are!”, I probably have too few followers.

I believe that I have been reading too much dialogue between kittehs: when I saw the URL for the (sublime) doihaveswineflu.org, I pictured a photo of a hung-over-looking tabby asking “Do I haves wine flu?”

OK, so, fine, I joined Facebook, after I said I wouldn’t.  It took 25 minutes, the bulk of it taken up by importing contacts.

It appears to be a critical mass thing: it becomes more and more useful as the number of people using it goes up.  Which is fine, but I still feel rather ridiculous at the site — a feeling that should be quickly dispelled should I reconnect with long-lost friends.

Most of the site is designed, in my opinion, fairly well.  But I am completely baffled by something.  When I search in their search field, I get a list of all people matching my search.  How do I see their profiles?  I am really good at this stuff, and I am completely stymied.  I can send friend requests, compose messages, or see their friends.  I can find their profiles through Google.  But surely there is a way to do it natively.  If I haven’t seen the person in 20 years, I might not recognize him or her from a photo.

Hi,

Joshua here.

I made $8198 last month answering surveys online.  Here is a picture of the check I created in Photoshop.

I joined this great survey company.  Several, actually.  They give me $0.35 every time I answer a survey such as “Which is better?  Nike or Adidas?”, as long as I agree to a certain number of offers.  Yeah, they all present the same offers, which would only be relevant if the underwriters checked to make sure you haven’t signed up more than once.  Just use different email addresses each time.  Doesn’t matter.  I still have an imaginary $8198.

Why am I mentioning this?  It’s free imaginary money.  Why wouldn’t I want to share this with you?  Hold on, let me give you a link.  Never mind that it’s a tinyurl link.  No reason for that.  Nothing to do with the fact that it embeds my affiliate ID, and instead of $0.35 I get $5 from the site if I get you to give your information.

They pay me every time I earn $20.  By check, in the mail, like clockwork.  I’ve earned $19.99 four-hundred ten times.  Look, that’s $8198.  It’s all mine.  As soon as I get that last penny from each of the sites, I’m buying a Saturn with cash.

It’s OK if you use a Private Mail Box and pretend it’s a residence address.  It actually gets you even more free stuff, like survey companies that subscribe you to newspapers and collect the referral fees.  Doesn’t bother me.  I just don’t pay the bill.  Eventually the papers stop coming.  Who could this hurt?

They’re out there.  They’re free for the asking.  Don’t go looking for yourself, though, let me do the looking.  It’s the only way I can accumulate imaginary money: by getting more victims.

OK.  Bad satire.  This is leading up to a point.

The point is: we all know those survey sites are lies.  Fortunately, I’ve done extensive research, and there happen to be a few really great ones.  You’re my friends.  Why wouldn’t I want to share these with you?  Hold on, I’ll send you the link.  What is this “tinyurl” of which you speak?

OK.  Head-fake.  Here’s the real point.

The point is: there are sites that genuinely give you free stuff.  If you are prepared, if you own a domain and can create throwaway addresses in case they get swamped, and you invest a little time, you can get real rewards.  I got a laptop lap desk at Borders.

OK.  Satire should stop.

Except, it’s not satire.  Not really.  I can actually show you the lap desk if you come over to my cottage.  Why wouldn’t I want to share this with you?

The answer is, because the internet has cried wolf.  No matter how much you love and trust me, no matter how many times I give you just the URL and not an affiliate link, there is going to be something untoward about it — or, even if there’s not, you’re going to wonder what my cut is.  I sincerely don’t have a cut.

My email address is joshua@mcgees.org.  This is where I entreat you to email me and, if you’re a friend, quietly slip you the URLs.

Except: I’m not going to tell you.  Not reverse psychology.  Not more satire.  Not cruelty.  I’m just not a fucking whore.  And even if you got the free lap desk at Borders, the cost of the requisite anti-louse body shampoo would be higher than its value.

They’re out there.  Really, they are.  Just like some strangers with candy just happen to be paid to hand out free candy (I got Jelly Bellies from the briefcase of a businessman at an airport, as an adult, after I said “What do you do?”, He said “Sales rep for Herman Goelitz”, and I said “Oh, that’s Jelly Bellies, isn’t it?”)  But for fuck’s sake: it’s not worth the time.  It’s not worth the nausea.  It’s not worth the lice.  Do something more honest and less icky, like check payphones — I know for a fact there are now seven in Los Angeles county — for returned quarters.  109 quarters and you get a lap desk.

UmYeahWow.  WorldCat is awesome: “Search for books, music, videos, articles and more in libraries near you.”

Amazon pays out affiliates every time their account tops $10.  This is about the normal range for such programs.

Google Adsense, on the other hand, doesn’t pay out until the user has accumulated $100.  This means that there are potentially millions of dollars in the accounts of content generators with $99.99 or below in their accounts that Google will not, and may never, pay.  This is hardly fair.  $100 in ad revenue for a small site is a lot.  Anyone think there’s a class action coming?

Also, for readers of the feed, you may note that I’ve put advertising in the feed now.  Hope this doesn’t drive you away.  If it doesn’t, would you please make it a practice (not just for me, but for all blogs) to click on the ad in the post after you’re done reading, as a “Thank you”?  You needn’t do any more than this.  It would help fund the hosting of this site, and would do the same for other bloggers.

GM might have been a good idea.  AT&T also.  Microsoft.  Starbucks.  But for nimble, agile, groundbreaking, and iconoclastic, there need to be Davids to all the Goliaths.

eBay has one, and it’s called Delcampe.  If you’re American, shred your ideas about always speaking in English, always using U.S. means (e.g., PayPal) to pay, always using U.S. catalogues, always assuming that we are still in an American century, and behold the future.  Delcampe: the future is here, it is cheap, and it is overseas:

Sign up there, get your first positive feedback, and I’ll get Much Needed Actual Money.

I thought about sending this to my “Everyone!” email list, but thought better of it.  I owe half of the list members large amounts of money, and two thirds of them I don’t know well enough to bombard with political messages (there is a very interesting overlapping-sixth in there.)

For y’all, though, http://www.fivethirtyeight.com.

You’ll thank me.