mgroves

Everybody knows it. Everybody knows it. Everybody knows it’s true. Oh, yeah. You gotta do the best you can. And work out twice a day. Don’t ask me why I said it. Because I already forgot.

Todaybor Day is Labor Dabor. So no working!

Benedetto is the name of the soldier/popcorn maker, just in case you don’t watch Homestar Runner that much.

I have no idea what this is, where it comes from, or why it was made. It’s kinda a catchy tune, but…uh…well just watch for yourself I guess.

Still not as good as….APACHE AHHAHAHAAAAA

So, I just added Gravatars to the site. These are little icon-sizes avatars that you upload to one site, and they travel along with you to any comment on any blog that supports gravatars. How does this work, you ask?

Step 1: You upload your gravatar and associate that picture with your email address (or more likely an MD5 hash of your email address).

Step 2: When you leave a comment on a blog, you type in your email address (many sites require it but don’t display it publicly). Previously, I didn’t require it, but did display it publicly. Now I’ve changed it: it’s still not required, but it won’t display publicly. I only use it for gravatars, and, of course, I will continue to sell email addresses to evil spamming corporations for huge sacks of money (kidding!).

Step 3: When I’m creating the HTML for the comment section, I simply plop a gravatar URL in an image tag, like so:

img src=”http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=[md5 hash of email address]&size=[image width from 0 to 80]”

Easy as that! Doesn’t require any registration on my end, and is ridiculously simple to implement. I think with the new site, I’m going to make email address and webpage a seperate field, and require email address (but again, not display it publicly). That seems to be the standard for most blogs, and I certainly think it’s always good to follow the crowd!

Here’s my gravatar, good old Larry Csonka:

Also, I’m going to take another crack at captchas, since they are sometimes annoying and I’m still getting spammed…

I was introduced to the writing/art of Tristan A. Farnon way back in my Junior year of college. Some guy in this chat room/game that I used to go on quite a lot introduced me to Leisuretown, which distracted me from my schoolwork for many hours. QA Confidential may be my favorite individual web comic of all time. It details an experience as a Q.A. tester at a software company (which I can only assume comes from Farnon’s personal experience).

Here are some panels (note that these are not children-friendly comics):

Somewhat of a recurring theme in Leisuretown: a self-loathing main character trying to function in a world of idiots. Here’s an example that makes me particularly happy, talking about coworkers who think their plays on words are clever, original, and relevant.

Here’s some panels from another favorite, The Javascript Doctor. A Javascript enthusiast struggles to create a useful forum in an Internet full of stupidity.

78,317 posts, what a busy bee! And this is the response he gets…

Tristan no longer updates Leisuretown, but does have a daily comic at Jerkcity, which seems a lot like Leisuretown, but in smaller doses:

   

I drink lots of Coke. Any by Coke, I mean the brown stuff made by the Coca-Cola company, not just any old gas water. Thanks to that and some of the begging that I’ve done, I was able to accrue a decent amount of Coke rewards points.

Not enough for a luxury Meditteranean cruise or anything, but enough for a few small things. First, I picked up a $20 off coupon code for SpaFinder. I plan to use this to purchase a gift certificate for my wife to use on our trip to Houston.

I also picked up a $25 gift certificate to any Hilton restaurant. I plan to use this on a visit to Spencer’s, which also happens to be in Houston. I’m not sure what most people were expecting to get from bottlecaps, but I’m very pleased with the stuff I’ve gotten so far. Namely, lots of Coke goodness and $45 worth of stuff for my vacation.