Wednesday, October 23, 2002

Ok, I was wrong. It is based on Radio at least to some extent - I read through the source more. I also found the rankings at xmlstoragesytem.com...today alone, 5,406 hits, 816,756 hits since 10/7/2001. Wow. Am I just being petty, or is there a legimate beef with this hit counting?
8:33:05 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Holy shit! filchyboy, a blog here at Salon, is somehow related to safersex.org, which is the third site you see when you search for "sex" on Yahoo. Oh, and it's #1 for a search on "sex" on Google. safersex.org isn't a Salon blog, and yet it's got the Radio referer code for *two* Salon blogs in its front page - filchyboy's main blog, and his images blog. Today, according to the rankings, the image blog has received over *4,000* hits since midnight Pacific time - it's 5:15pm PDT right now. A little more research revealed that only the image blog stats got all the hits for safersex.org - the journal blog stats didn't get any of them. I'm betting this is because the image blog's javascript came after the journal blog's javascript in the safersex.org page. There's actually a third hit counter/referal log thrown in there as well - this one goes to radio.xmlstoragesystem.com. I can't find any rankings or referal pages there, but I'd assume there's something similar to what we've got on Salon. I'm not saying this guy's a criminal, but he is kind of a dick. His blog didn't get 4000 hits today - another page he owns did. If safersex.org was a Salon blog, I'd be less irritated, but it's not. It's not even running Radio. Filchyboy, if you read this, please, stop being a dick. Take that code out of your page.

8:22:47 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Argh - I have to reset all my templates. I'm *hoping* that the backups I kept are able to just roll over into the new one. I'm posting this entry mainly to force everything to re-render...
7:57:16 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Just reinstalled Radio - it had completely blown up on me. I'm hoping this'll clear up my problems (upstreaming, memory, etc...). And my Law and Order DVDs seem slightly out of sync - sound and video. Since the DVD player is also the home theater system, that's potentially very bothersome. For now, I'm just going to assume I'm an idiot and hallucinating...
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U.S. Ranks 17th in Freedom of the Press [Slashdot] Yay us.
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Guerrillas seize Moscow theatre. A group of gunmen thought to be Chechen rebels storm a Russian theatre and take the audience hostage¸ threatening to blow up the building. [BBC News | WORLD]
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Say Hello to Sanjeep, Er, Sam. At Indian call centers, employees are given U.S. identities and taught to sound 'American.' As these back-office operations grow in number, so do the resulting cultural clashes. Manu Joseph reports from India. [Wired News] I'm fascinated by the export of mass-producable low-level white collar jobs to India: call centers, sustaining programming, etc...cheap workers (I don't know how much Cisco's contract programmers in India make, but I'm betting it's no more than half of what an American doing the same job would get - and there's no benefits.) who speak English fluently. I don't know quite what to make of it, but it's interesting.

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Some Guantánamo Prisoners Will Be Freed, Rumsfeld Says. The defense secretary said that a small number of the nearly 600 prisoners would be released to their home countries because they were no longer of interest to the U.S. By Katharine Q. Seelye. [New York Times: Politics] I'm going to hope that this includes the Kuwaiti 20somethings for whom there's NO evidence at all that they're in ANY WAY connected to al Qaeda or the Taliban.

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The Illusory Prague Connection. For an administration that has prided itself on a disciplined approach to public pronouncements, the Bush team has offered confused and scattered assertions about Iraq. [New York Times: Opinion] "Most Americans — two-thirds, according to a Pew Research poll this month — believe that President Saddam Hussein of Iraq had a hand in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Trouble is, no hard evidence of such a link has been made public." - from the above editorial. The Times editors pretty much nail the point - sure, both al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein hate the US, and some limited cooperation (safe harbor for on-the-run Qaeda leaders in Iraq, possibly small arms or limited financial aid) but it's pretty comical to think that they're going to bridge their very, very large gaps to come after us in tandem. If the US had been faced by a similar organized Islamicist terrorist network in the '80s, we'd've been cooperating with Iraq against the terrorists, don't forget.

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Brazil's Democracy Takes a Chance. If democracy is to persist, one question must be answered: Will democracy better people's lives?/ By Jeffrey W. Rubin. [New York Times: Opinion] In the case of Brazil, democracy can't do any worse than oligarchy and capitalistic cronyism. The right may be doing well for itself in DC, India, France...but Sweden, Germany, and Brazil show that there are other options.

12:14:45 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

I'm a bad boy - I'm skipping work today. I just wasn't in the mood to go to work, I've got something like 10 days of PTO waiting to be used, I had to clean out my car and do laundry, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 comes out today, my copy of the first season of Law And Order on DVD got delivered yesterday, new comics come out today...oh, and it was snowing when I woke up. Yeah, it's a good day to stay home. I needed a break.

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