Author: Jon

Is Wikimetro a scam?

Recently, I got an email from someone I’d never heard of from Wikimetro.org wanting to talk about advertising on my site here.

Drupalcon, Who is the contact for discussing advertising on your blog Complaint Hub? We have received 24 requests this week for advertising on Complaint Hub, and the page has been viewed 69 times. Our website, wikimetro.org, is the largest online BlogAd marketplace with more than 50,000 blogs in more than 2,300 US cities and towns. Here’s a link to your blog on wikimetro: http://list.wikimetro.org/market/info.aspx?blog=822 If you are agreeable to scheduling a time to talk on the phone about this, please tell me a good time by contacting me at this link (choose phone): http://list.wikimetro.org/contact.aspx I’ll cc my assistant to set up a time to talk, if there’s interest. Alex Rawlings Wash DC BlogAd Account Direct Email: alex.rawlings@wikimetro.org Website: www.wikimetro.org Motto: “Everything Local” Frequently Asked Questions: http://www.wikimetro.org/wikimetro_guide Tel. +1(202) 470-0961

It sounded a bit scammy to me, especially because by addressing me as “Drupalcon”, they clearly didn’t actually look at the site, but just scraped it with some script. A bit of Googling made it sound like Wikimetro was a scam, but nothing really concrete. So I looked at the local blogs they had listed as participants and emailed one I recognized to ask if Off Seventh was actually participating, or just being used to bait others. I got an email back, and it turns out Off Seventh was totally unaware of the deal Wikimetro claimed to have. So, the conclusion I draw from this is that Wikimetro is a scam. If they contact you, I suggest being very cautious. Edit to add: Follow-up from Wikimetro is here.

Shame on you, Columbia Heights

Over the weekend, I noticed that someone stole the Bell’s Beer sticker off the back window of our car. It may have happened over Halloween, I haven’t been paying that much attention to the car. I like to think that the person who did it felt that I was promoting drinking and driving, and stole the sticker as a protest. I wasn’t, for the record, promoting drinking and driving – one of the huge advantages about living somewhere like Columbia Heights is that there are tons of places you can go drink where you never ever ever have to drive home. Wonderland, Marx Cafe, Saint Ex, all fantastic bars that I can walk to easily, not to mention everything on U Street and Adams Morgan. Anyway, if the person felt I was making a statement like that, then I forgive you for your misguided attempt to make the world a better place. If not, however, I hope you got a paper cut from the sticker. It’s not a big deal in either case – those stickers only last a year or so, and I’ll be back in Kalamazoo next month, when I planned to get a new sticker anyway. If anyone who works for Bell’s is listening – how about some inside-window stickers so it’s safe from the elements and from would-be thieves?

What a glorious world we live in

No, not the election yesterday, though that certainly was glorious. I don’t have time to do justice to the election, so I will just say that I have never seen people dancing in the streets over a President, and I’m looking forward to the coming years. The glorious thing I’m talking about is the search box in Firefox 3. I was making a dumb joke in my novel about Keira Knightley. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t know how to spell her name. So I went to the search box with its awesome autocomplete. By the time I had typed “kie”, which is not how you spell her name, the first result was her name, spelled correctly. Now, keep in mind, I didn’t actually perform the search, I just looked at the suggestions that Firefox gives for what I might want to search for. Actually, I did do the search, but just to verify that I had the correct spelling. I did. Can you imagine this sort of information so readily available even five years ago? Sure, it wouldn’t have been hard for me to find out how to spell her name. But the only way it would have been easier this time is if the Open Office standard dictionary was hooked up to some online dictionary that was constantly updated. So maybe someone should get on that.

The hard streets of Columbia Heights

I was out with the kid on a trip to DCUSA for a few pictures frames this evening. She got mad when I stopped to look at frames in Bed Bath and Beyond, so I thought I’d take the long way home and give her a chance to settle down. I was heading south down 13th NW, about to cross Harvard, when there was a bit of a commotion. It looked like someone driving north on 13th was trying to turn left onto Harvard, which is one way in the other direction. There was plenty of honking. “What an idiot,” I thought. “The signs and the honking aren’t tipping him off?” Then a man got out of the car, which was now stopped in the middle of the intersection. He was holding a shotgun. Now, at this point I was a little nervous. The kid was sleeping, which I suppose was good, but her big fuzzy winter outfit is not, in fact, bulletproof. Then I saw all the police cars. More arrived as I stood there. The man with the gun was DCPD. That was mildly comforting. More officers poured out of the cars, at least a dozen. They quickly went up the walk to the northwest corner of Harvard and 13th and banged on the door. At this point I decided I was going to take my daughter and get out of there. Before I left, the police had entered the building, and I could hear them yelling at someone to get down. I’ve never seen the police break down a door. And in truth, I didn’t actually see them open the door. But I don’t think anyone let them in. I’m going to watch the Columbia Heights forum to see if anyone knows what happened. Hopefully the police got whoever they were after and no one got hurt.

Real authors doing Novel Writing Month

One of my favorite authors, Charles Stross, is going to do Novel Writing Month this year. Stross’ Iron Sunrise is one of my favorite books, and those of you paying attention know that I’ve met him over delicious beers at the Brickskeller. I know Nanowrimo is not quite the same for someone who makes a living writing novels as it is for someone who just wishes he had the motivation and dedication to make a living writing novels (You’ll notice I don’t say I lack the skill – I have the skill until I prove otherwise). But it’s cool to be writing along with someone who writes really cool stuff, who is successful doing professionally something that I do now and then as an amateur. Now I just have to figure out how to get my daughter to sleep for a few hours in the evening so I can actually write my 50,000 words.

Experts Exchange sucks

If you’re a programmer, you’ve probably come across Experts Exchange while searching for help on some programming problem. Today I was wondering if sqlldr could generate a table for you, or if you had to make the table, then run sqlldr. It’s not important. Unless you know the answer. Anyway, the first result for whatever it was I searched for was from Experts Exchange. This sucks, because while they let you read the question, you have to pay (or start a free trial) for the answer. So they often come up on Google, but the question is never helpful. Yes, I could pay for the answer. I won’t, but I could. What I’d really like to do is never get results from their site when I search. Can you do that with Google? You should be able to.

Great moments is passive-aggressiveness


Originally uploaded by thetejon

I know this may seem slightly ridiculous coming from a guy who runs a blog called Complaint Hub, but doesn’t it make you laugh when someone goes to a whole lot of trouble to publicly complain about something they could (and should) just fix themselves?

THIS IS A FLOOR SHARED REFRIGERATOR
Please toss out old food
IT SMELLS!!!

NEED VOLUNTEERS TO CLEAN REFRIGERATOR AND FREEZER
SIGN UP SHEET?

I think it should be a law – if you put out a request for volunteers with a sign-up sheet, your name should be first on the list. The laziness here is really astounding. Well, not really, I’m never really surprised by how lazy people are, but it should be astounding. Not only has the sign-maker not actually done any cleaning, but he or she didn’t even put up a sign-up sheet.

Twitter will kill us all

I thought this was idiotic when Gizmodo mentioned it, but now Slashdot says that this is actually the US Army. This is terrifying.

A chapter titled ‘Potential for Terrorist Use of Twitter’ notes that Twitter members reported the July Los Angeles earthquake faster than news outlets and activists at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis used it to provide information on police movements.

Do you know what else is both ubiquitous and super dangerous? AIR. It’s highly flammable, and it’s friggin’ everywhere. I pray every day that no one tells the terrorists. And you know what else is really dangerous? WATER. It makes us drown. Think what could happen if Al Qaeda found that out. And the Earth is over seventy percent water. I hope Osama Bin Laden doesn’t read my blog. You know why education and health care in this country is always short on money? It’s because we pay people to conduct studies like this.