DO NOT WANT: Episode 5
The latest DO NOT WANT podcast episode is now up and running at the usual places including Podshow.
Luke was on spring break for this episode, so it’s just me and Joe this time. And no video this time either.
Also, if you haven’t had a chance to check it out, go look at our DO NOT WANT list, which scientists suspect is around a 99.7% ripoff of Colbert’s “on notice” list. Leave a comment about something on the list, would ya!?
Do Not Want: episode 4
Sorry for the delay, but episode 4 is now up and running. There’s both an audio and video version on the Do Not Want page at Podshow.com.
Check it out, give us feedback, make suggestions!
The next podcast will be somewhat delayed due to technical difficulties and whether or not we can get through to Luke or Skype or Xbox Live or something.
Podcast episode 3: in video
Episode 3 of the podcast is now up.
We are still hosting the audio of the podcast at http://donotwant.podomatic.com, but Podshow is a much better site, and allows video.
So, go to http://donotwant.podshow.com from now on.
Do Not Want Podcast
50 Pixels of Evil, Joseph D.B. Ferguson, and your very own mgroves.com have teamed up to create a podcast! The first ever episode is now available at Pod-o-matic.
The podcast is entitled “Do Not Want”, after the famous meme involving Darth Vader from Episode 3, and our mascot is the broccoli dog, seen below.
A note of warning, Pod-o-matic isn’t the best blog/podcast site ever (in fact, it may be the worst), so we may end up changing hosting to someplace else or even hosting it ourselves. However, they have RSS and iTunes feeds available, so we got that going for us…
Maybe a new name?
With the addition of a second author (Tweeder) and possibly additional authors to come, do you think it’s time a renaming/rebranding of mgroves.com to reduce confusion?
I jotted down some blog names during class the other day and I wanted to see what everyone thinks of them. One option is to not change the blog, one option is only a slight rebranding (just make the M stand for something besides “Matt”), the others are just general blog titles that would obviously need a new domain. Note that I’m not going to necessarily do anything with the results of this poll, I just wanted some opinions:
A brief explanation of each:
- “Do Not Want” is based on the famous meme
- “Large Wooden Badger” is from a brief joke in Monty Python’s Holy Grail following the Trojan Rabbit scene.
- “I Want Noodles” is what insane Emperor Ferdinand decreed shortly after he was coronated.
- “Plans are for Fools” is a quote from Oglethorpe from Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
- “Beg the Question” and “Pipe Dream” are just two brainstorming titles that I wrote down.
Watermarks
In case you haven’t noticed, all of the full-size images on mgroves.com are now sporting a small watermark in the lower right-hand corner.
The reason I’ve done this is because I’ve noticed a growing amount of people hotlinking my image to use on their blog or on a forum (like Fark for instance). Since this hasn’t really drained my bandwidth considerably, I’m not too concerned about it. However, it is my bandwidth and I’m paying for it, so I would like to get some benefit from the exchange if possible. Hopefully with a small watermark, I’ll get at least some sort of boost in traffic and recognition.
However, this is NOT a license to hotlink to any image on mgroves.com you want. I still do not want you to hotlink.
If you haven’t seen the watermark yet, click on the images below under “Attachments”.
On the programming side, the way I’ve done the watermarks is somewhat interesting. For each image that gets uploaded, a component of the back-end will create a thumbnail version that’s 100px wide (with aspect ratio height), a “hangnail” version, that’s 64px wide (for misc back-end use) and a full-sized watermark version, which contains “MGROVES.COM” in the lower right-hand corner. I’m also able to toggle the watermark on and off at will. How I do that…is a secret for now.
This whole exercise was an interesting lesson in combining ASP and PHP together. I wanted to use Persits’s AspJpeg component, since it handles GIF files and comes with my hosting package. However, I’ve already written the entire backend in PHP and I didn’t want to change that for the sake of GIF files. The solution involved a seperate ASP file to handle the resizing and rewriting, and the two languages communicated through the common medium of GET/Querystring.
The Backstroke of the West
You know what’s fun to do on a rainy day? Put a sentence of English text into Babelfish, translate it to German or French or something, and then translate that text back into English. For example:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Becomes…
Before the thing 87 year which is the same where human everyone was drawn up this continent, it has with new nation, it is free and our fathers who are imagined, and are lifted up to proposition.
Maybe you can find something funnier. Pretty cool that Babelfish can turn “four score and seven” into “87.” But anyway, imagine if you did that to an entire movie. Like, say, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, or should I say, “Star War: Backstroke of the West”.
Incidentally, “Do Not Want” has become one of the retarded taglines of the Internet, known as a “meme”. For an example, check out the dog picture below.
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