I signed up for Mint.com hoping that I could use it as a free, online replacement for Quicken. It turns out that Mint.com doesn’t allow you to enter cash transactions (for no clear reason) so my hopes were quickly thwarted. I still get emails from them sometimes, though, so I went to the unsubscribe page, linked from the emails, to try to opt out. Here’s the page:

Ignoring the fact that I can’t uncheck the final checkbox, take a look at the totally legible submit button (or is it a clear button?):

It gets no clearer when you mouse-over it:

Oh, and it’s not just Firefox, here’s the site in Internet Explorer:

Same legibility problem:

Same mouse-over problem:

It’s almost as if they don’t want you to be able to unsubscribe. Go figure. Boo Mint.com, I hate you.

The AV Club reviews A Beginner’s Guide to the Internet starring John Turturro (a Lycos presentation):

John Turturro, in what could very well be his most challenging and rewarding role to date… as a former-teacher-turned-aspiring-stand-up-comedian and vocal proponent of the Lycos search engine whose car breaks down in a small Pennsylvania town. Booting up his laptop in the middle of a homey diner, Turturro and his fancy computer are first gazed upon with horror and suspicion by the town’s feeble-minded, technophobic residents… A Beginner’s Guide is at least partially redeemed by a bold lead performance by Turturro, who conveys his character’s almost transcendental love of the Lycos search engine with subtlety, dignity, and an almost messianic fervor.

Sadly, the film isn’t listed at IMDB… or really anywhere else.

Of the top 100 websites, there’s a surprising number (38) that I’ve never heard of:

• 8 – Hi5.com
• 14 – Fotolog.net
• 20 – Skyrock.com
• 23 – Megarotic.com
• 24 – Mail.ru
• 26 – Seznam.cz
• 27 – QQ.com
• 35 – Youporn.com
• 40 – Megavideo.com
• 41 – Wretch.cc
• 42 – Free.fr
• 43 – Sina.com.cn
• 44 – Yandex.ru
• 45 – ImageVenue.com
• 49 – Onet.pl
• 50 – Vkontakte.ru
• 51 – MetroFlog.com
• 52 – Uol.com.br
• 54 – Allegro.pl
• 65 – Odnoklassniki.ru
• 66 – FC2.com
• 68 – Netlog.com
• 71 – RedTube.com
• 75 – Rambler.ru
• 76 – WP.pl
• 77 – Nasza-Klasa.pl
• 78 – Lwiw.hu
• 81 – 163.com
• 83 – Taobao.com
• 84 – VNExpress.net
• 86 – Yourfilehost.com
• 89 – Fotka.pl
• 90 – Sendspace.com
• 94 – Badongo.com
• 96 – Badoo.com
• 97 – Terra.com.br
• 98 – 6.cn
• 100 – Globo.com

Various local versions of Google.com are in the list 22 times.   RumorsDaily is ranked 433,041.

When I saw that the concept behind ROFLCon was “to assemble every famous internet meme or celebrity to come to Harvard in the spring of 2008 to attend a conference,” I thought I had a decent chance of being invited. Sure, if this were a year and a half ago, I would have had a much better chance, but I figured a few people might remember.

But alas, perusing the list of people they’re looking for, I apparently didn’t make cut. Tim Hwang, I’m saddened by this. Even the One Red Paperclip guy got invited! We were doing our things at the same time. *Shakes head in disgust.*

I need to fire my agent.

Cross posted at Snakes on a Blog.

Google Reader’s “Trends” provides more information about my RSS reading habits than I want to have:

From your 80 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 6,358 items, starred 51 items, shared 0 items, and emailed 5 items.

That’s too many.

This webpage has an annoying domain name.

“Bjork, Bjork were you brought by the stork?” begins the Bjork Song, the most memorable thing ever produced by the long defunct Brunching Shuttlecocks. Here’s the song in its entirety:

The Bjork Song

“Or were you created from butter or cork?”

Lore Sjoberg’s Brunching Shuttlecocks produced 88 Lines About 42 Presidents using the Nails’ 88 Lines About 44 Women as a model. It came out pretty good:

88 Lines About 42 Presidents

Lore should wait another year and write up four new lines about the two most recent presidents to make the whole thing line up even better.

I don’t really know if this game is winnable, but it’s nice to try.  Just do what you can to avoid making the smug guy’s head explode.

Is there any way for me to see yesterday’s Republican debate, in its entirety, online? If not, why not?

Since I’ve been celebrating canceled television shows a lot as of late, I want to move into the field of long defunct comedy webpages. My old favorite, Brunching Shuttlecocks, has been dead for a long time (Lore, it’s primary author, moved on to write funny stuff for Wired).

Anyway, in my first installment of ripping off Lore’s old site, here’s a little piece called Your Roommate Sings the Indigo Girls:

jbg has started up season two of This Podcast Sucks and a main theme of the season will be his search for remarkable activities that he can hopefully accomplish during season three.

This is an excellent idea.

I sent him a few suggestions, which he can use or dismiss as he sees fit, but my favorite suggestion, and one that I really hope he chooses, is:

Build an accurate and life-size version of yourself out of paper mache and then pose for pictures with it in public places around Boston.

I can’t explain why I think this would be fantastic, I just know that it would be.

The Troops Out Now Coalition (TONC) is an organization based at TroopsOutNow.org which is, presumably, against the current Iraq war. Its About Us page, surprisingly, doesn’t come right out and say this, but you can figure it out. Anyway, their header graphic is this:

Shrunk to fit, click to big-ify

1. Fund Jobs Not Prisons
2. LGBT Contingent
3. Immigrant Rights!
4. Stop Racism and Police Terror
5. Healthcare for ALL
6. Bring the Troops Home
7.  Women Speak Out
8. (Handicapped logo)
9. IMPEACH Bush!
10. ??? (Looks like $$$ for Bridges & Others)
11. Students Strike!
12. Justice for Katrina Survivors

Only one of these was clearly anti-war.  A few could be anti-war with a little finagling (LGBT Contingent, Women Speak Out, IMPEACH Bush, Students for Strike!) while most of them a unrelated progressive causes.  If you’re an anti-war coalition, why are you getting bogged down in Katrina issues?  Shouldn’t you focus your energy and your efforts on only one cause? Despite majority American support, you haven’t been able to accomplish your goals — could this be one of the reasons why?

This reminds me of last week’s anti-war protests.  It seemed like half of the protesters’ energy was focused on non-Iraq war issues.  Ralph Nader got up there and talked about Lebanon.  Lebanon?  The protesters were arguing about Israeli apartheid, 9/11 cover-ups, abortion, a Pat Tillman cover-up, Cuba’s socialist revolution, a war on Christians and whatever this lady’s talking about. Seriously, supporting Cuba’s socialist revolution?  That’s what you want to be talking about right now?

So, yeah, Troops Out Now Coalition, why do you have all these other issues on your header banner?  Is that really how you want to present yourself?  When you have a cause that has popular support and you could actually be successful with, is it wise to attach other, less popular, issues? There are a lot of anti-war voters who are not pro gay rights.  There are a lot of anti-war voters who are not anti-prisons.  Why alienate them?

Do you really want to be the Troops Out of Iraq and 11 Other Issues Coalition?

A few days ago I was lamenting the inability to search Amazon.com for products sold by Amazon rather than by third party vendors who charge more for shipping and have a decidedly fly-by-night feeling to them. Thankfully, Lori points out that it is sort of possible:

Many of the Amazon.com store categories let you refine your search in the left column. As you refine, you’ll get an option to limit results “By Seller”. Choose Amazon.com to limit your results to the items sold by Amazon.

You have to search for something, say routers, then choose to limit your search to a category, say Electronics, and then you’re given the option to limit your search by vendor to Amazon.

I wish this were a little bit more transparent and that you didn’t have to first narrow your search to a category before you can filter by vendor (why doesn’t Amazon have some sort of Advanced Search option?) but its definitely better than nothing.

Well, they don’t really find her, she’s not missing, but San Jose University’s Spartan Daily has posted a story about the Amy Pressman fiasco.

Is there any way to search Amazon.com so that the site only displays items actually being sold by Amazon? I don’t trust the other shyster companies that sell things through Amazon, offer poor customer service, and charge their own, irrational shipping rates, but there’s no immediately apparent way to filter out these bad guys from Amazon.

Anyone have any idea?

By the way, when I said the other day “[d]amn you Linksys, you’ve screwed me again!” the reason it was “again” was because of this well known, well documented issue that they haven’t bothered to fix on routers that they continue to sell. When using the wireless features of the Linksys WCG200 combination cable modem/router, the unit stops working under heavy load and requires a manual reset. This will happen extremely frequently if you’re a heavy Internet user.

The fact that they continue to sell the modem is baffling. Don’t buy products from Linksys, they don’t support them and their offshore tech support is extraordinarily difficult to deal with.

I bought a Wii.

Upside – games.

Downside – I occasionally get the following message when attempting to access the Everybody Votes Channel:

Data could not be received. Please confirm your Internet connection in Wii Settings and try again later. Error Code: 230500.

It turns out this means that my wireless router sucks:

The routers listed below are provided to customers by their Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Due to the way the Wii console interacts with these routers’ firewalls (sometimes called an SPI firewall), it may not be able to connect online, even when using the Nintendo Wi-Fi USB Connector or the Wii LAN Adapter…

Linksys
WCG200 ver. 2
WCG200-CC
WCG200-CC ver. 2

Netgear
CG814W
CG814WG ver .2
CG814WG

RCA
DCW725

Damn you Linksys, you’ve screwed me again!

My friend Jeremy has a podcast called This Podcast Sucks. For months know he’s been asking me to listen to it and I haven’t because I don’t own an iPod. How can you possibly listen to a podcast without an iPod I ask him? He has never given me a satisfactory answer.

Anyway, in anticipation of my future iPod purchase, I actually went back and listened to the first three episodes on a borrowed iPod (the only possible way to listen to a podcast). Since I’m so far behind, I can breeze through them in quick succession like watching a TV show on DVD. It’s great. If only the content were great too. It gets less funny by the week.

Oh wait, I meant MORE funny.

Ok, that wasn’t really my joke.

Go listen to it, it’s good.

Mayor Accidently Sends Racist Porn E-Mail to TV Reporter. Woops!

YesButNoButYes pointed me to a video called Internet People from MethMinute39 which does a fairly quick and comprehensive rundown of a lot of the people who become well known through Internet memes:

1. Dramatic Prairie Dog
2. South Park – The Spirit of Christmas
3. Star Wars Kid
4. Numa Numa Kid
5. Back Dorm Boys
6. Napster Bad^*
7. Winnebago Salesman Gets Mad
8. Evil Bert
9. Goatse (link to Wikipedia for obvious reasons)
   
10. JibJab’s This Land
11. GI Joe PSAs
12. You’re the Man Now Dog
13. Spongemonkies Like the Moon^*
14. Andy Milonakis Sings the Super Bowl is Gay^*
15. Ask a Ninja
16. Average Homeboy Denny Blaze^*
17. LonelyGirl15
18. House of Cosbys
19. Chad Vader^*
20. ZeFrank
21. Lazy Sunday Rap
22. Kid from Brooklyn
23. Bubb Rubb
24. George Lucas in Love
25. Racist Kramer
26. MySpace the Movie
27. Chuck Norris Facts
28. Geriatric192
29. Mahir (I Kiss You)
30. Stanley Kubrick Audition
31. Leroy Jenkins
32. Homestar Runner
33. Grape Stomping Fall
34. Paris Hilton Sex Tape
    
35. All Your Base Are Belong To Us
36. Diet Coke and Mentos
37. OK Go – Here It Goes Again
38. Shine (The Shining trailer remix)
39. Sneezing Panda
40. Dick in a Box
41. Rocketboom
42. Yacht Rock
43. Snakes on a Plane
44. Angry German Kid^*
45. Otters Holding Hands
46. Dax Flame
47. Bride Cuts Off Hair
48. Colbert’s National Correspondents Dinner
49. Little Superstar
50. Lightning Bolt
51. Kelly Shopping for Shoes^*
52. Tom Cruise on Oprah
53. White and Nerdy
54. Kevin Federline’s Popozao Interview
55. Washington Washington^*
56. Ashlee Simpson Lipsynch
57. Boom Goes the Dynamite
58. Lily Tomlin Swearing from I Heart Huckabees
59. Peanut Butter Jelly Time
60. Christmas Lights
61. Captain Kirk sings Rocket Man
62. Evolution of Dance
63. People Getting Hurt (general)
64. Talking to Webcam (general)
65. Chocolate Rain
66. I Like Turtles

^* I hadn’t seen the starred items before creating this list.

Dennis Knopf provides YouTube what it really needs: a collection of “booty shaking” clips, but without the booty.

The Director of IT Management Issues at the GAO has an unlikely name. Total pwnage.

Right before I left the country, a reader suggested that he knew who posed for the “Where is Amy Pressman” photo. I’ve looked at the actress the reader suggested and posted some side by side photos in the original thread. What do you think?

Look, I understand that your name is Craig, and you want to make a list of your favorite movies, but you just can’t call it Craig’s List.  I recognize that it’s not your fault that another guy named Craig came up with the same name for his idea a few years before you, but you’re just going to have to go with something else.  Like I’ve said previously, sometimes you just need to acknowledge that the internet is smarter than you and you’ve got to move on.