Ryan Jones Blog – dotCULT.com Ryan Jones Blogs About Internet Culture, Marketing, SEO, & Social Media

Anybody remember that episode of Cheers where Cliff meets his long lost dad? I watched it last night, and I want to run a hypothetical by the readers of this blog. Sort of a, what would you do in this situation. I thought about it last night before falling asleep, and I wasn’t sure what I’d do. Everybody Comment. It’s no fun if you don’t.

I’m gonna change it a bit though.. here goes

Imagine your father, who you haven’t seen in a long time, suddenly comes back into your life. You spend time together and have a great time. You end up wishing you’d have known your dad better and long to spend more time with him.

Now, your dad tells you he’s leaving the country tomorrow and he’s never coming back. You learn that he’s made millions through illegal means, and he’s leaving to avoid prosecution.

He’s invited you to come with him. You’ll be rich, be able to afford anything you want to buy, AND be able to live with your dad. Let’s assume you don’t have a wife or kids or anything yet to tie you down.

What would you do? Would you go live in paradise never having to work again? Would the way his money was acquired bother you? Would you turn your father in to the police before he left? How would you handle this situation?

Perhaps the only thing that my intro to psychology teacher taught me wsa that correlation does not equal causation. That is to say, just because too things are related doesn’t mean that one causes the other. In Fact, she hammered it in so well that I even did a Previous Post about health and gambling correlates.

A good example of this is the Flying Spaghetti Monster graphic of number of pirates vs global temperatures.

That’s why this story claiming that Alcohol use helps boost income needs to be taken with a grain of salt and some lime.

While it may be true that those who drink more earn more, it’s probably not that they earn more because they drink. What’s most likely happening here is that people who earn more have more disposable income to spend at places like bars.

What do you think is the proper relationship here? That people who drink more are better employees and make more money… or that people who make more money spend more of it at bars?

Ingore this link to my Technorati Profile. They somehow require it to start spidering this blog.

Yesterday I talked about books that I think shouldn’t be banned at all. That got me thinking of some of the other good books I’ve read before, and I figured I should list them here. I didn’t just include good books though, I also included short stories and plays that I think are good as well.

death of a salesman is a classic play by Arthur Miller about national values and the american dream (or if you think small scale, one family’s struggles)

We already covered to kill a mockingbird

no exit is an existentialist play by Sartre. It starts out with a man arriving in Hell… You can find this one free online somewhere, a must read

the stranger is a novel by another existentialist, Albert Camus. It details the interesting take on life that Merssault (a man who didn’t cry at his mom’s funeral) seems to have.

1984 & Animal Farm have so many comparisons to what’s going on in this country right now that every American should be forced to read it.

leningen vs the ants is a short story about a man saving his farm from ants. At one point he digs a moat and the ants simply keep marching into it until they fill it up and cross on the dead bodies of other ants. China could do this to the US if they wanted.

cat on a hot tin roof is a tennessee williams play about mendacity, or as big daddy describes it “Liars and Lying”. I did a research paper on this in school.

the great gatsby was also mentioned earlier so I won’t get into it.

the chocolate war is probably one of the most banned books in America. It’s about high school kids and starts out with one taking a picture of another masturbating.

the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime is a british novel told from the point of view of a 15 year old with a mental problem (like rainman) who’s trying to figure out why his neighbor’s dog is dead.

henderson the rain king is the basis for the counting crows song, and is about a millionaire who goes to africa and joins a tribe.

The Pearl is a short story about a villager who finds a pearl and all the evil it brings upon his simple life.

Internet Slang Dictionary is my book. Buy it

If we have to mention shakespeare, the following plays get my vote:

King Lear, MacBeth, Hamlet, Oedipus

That’s a pretty big list. Sometime this weekend I’ll list the non-fiction books that everybody should read.

Did I miss any? Let me know, leave your reccomendations in the comments.

Google is celebrating our freedom to read with their addition of Banned Books to Google Book Search. (yet they still haven’t added Internet Slang Dictionary)

Take a look at the list though… I remember distinctly reading over half of these books in high school and college. To Kill a MockingBird is still one of my favorite all time books. If you haven’t read it, now’s a good time.

1984, The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, and The Sun Also Rises (along with some non banned books like The Stranger and Death of a Salesman) helped shape the very person I am. Without these books my mind wouldn’t be open to the things it is today.

To ban the books on this list is a travesty. None of these books deserved to be banned, they deserve to be mandatory reading for all Americans; 1984 especially.

How many of these books have you read? I Myself have read 9 (and seen 2 movies). Do you think any of them deserve to be banned? Let me know in the comments.

Wait, stop. What’s that on the right? Yes.. dotCULT now has an RSS Feed!! That’s what I’m writing about with this update. It’s a great time to tell you about something new.

My Newest site: FeedButton.com.

(See the button on the right)

I got tired of seeing sites with a ton of little “add this to google, yahoo, etc” buttons on the side so I created FeedButton. It’s a way to simplify that, without worrying about updating. Go ahead, try it out and let me know what you think.

A future non-beta release will include better customization and stats on who’s adding your feed! Stats are being collected now, so when we roll them out you won’t lose any data.

In an attempt to protect children from internet predators, the house of representatives passed the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) last month by a vote of 410-15. While many representatives will surely use this bill a stepping stone to the upcoming elections, it’s unlikely that the bill will actually protect children from online predators.

The new legislation effectively bans social networking sites, chat, instant messaging, and blogs from any schools or libraries that take federal money. Blogs, short for web logs, are sites that feature articles and comments that can be written by anybody. The theory behind the DOPA act is that preventing children from accessing places where predators hang out will keep them safe.

Critics of the bill claim that banning access from schools and libraries will only make students more vulnerable to online predators. They argue that instead of sheltering students from the internet resources would be better spent educating children on how to stay safe on the web. Critics cite MySpace’s large popularity as well as the age old “students are more attracted to things that are prohibited” argument.

As Michigan representative John Dingell (D) says “So now we are on the floor with a piece of legislation poorly thought out, with an abundance of surprises, which carries with it that curious smell of partisanship and panic, but which is not going to address the problems. This is a piece of legislation which is going to be notorious for its ineffectiveness and, of course, for its political benefits to some of the members hereabout.”

The only un-arguable benefit of the DOPA is the fact that it will ensure more class time is spent on educational issues. (it’s rather hard to argue that MySpace and chat rooms offer constructive classroom material.) Some educators however feel that this is a job best left up to the schools, not the federal government.

Some Michigan librarians are also concerned about blocking potential educational material found on blogs, as well as extremely vague language describing “social networking sites”. Under the bill’s definition sites like Amazon.com that allow user comments could qualify as “social networks” and thus would be banned from libraries and schools.

See, I can write newspaper style too!!

I don’t understand what all the Hype About Facebook is all about. (If you haven’t figured out what’s going on… click one of those links)

So let me get this straight. If I post a picture of me hitting the bong in my underwear and talk about my sexual exploits on the internet for all my friends to see, that’s ok. But alert them immediately and say “hey, Ryan posted some new shit”, and that’s bad? How is that a privacy concern? It doesn’t make any sense

RSS is a good thing, not a bad thing. If you don’t want people to know what you post the second you post it, don’t post it.

It’s not a privacy issue if you posted it to the internet for everybody to see. Kids, you need to understand this: If you can even think of 1 person now or in the future that you don’t want to see something, don’t post it to the internet anywhere.

If anything, this facebook “mishap” alerted these people to the sensitivity of the material they’re posting online. That’s a good thing.

note: I know I talk about RSS being good and dotCULT doesn’t yet have RSS… don’t worry it’s coming. I haven’t coded a backend yet. I’m still doing these posts directly into the database via SQLyog.

We’ve all grown to be familiar with (yet greatly resent) the litte “type the letters in this box” features when commenting on blogs. They’re called Captchas and they’re designed to be sort of a Turing Test; something that humans can easily do but computers can’t.

Their real goal is to cut down on automated programs called Spambots that post links to porn, pill, and poker sites. We’ve even seen articles about spammers fighting back. Some have even created free porn sites where you get porn as long as you solve a captcha between each image. You’ve gotta give them credit.

The latest wordpress plugin isn’t an image of blurred letters though, it’s a math problem. Matt Cutts recently upgraded his blog, and it now asks me to “Please add 8 and 2” before I can leave my comment.

While it’s a better approach than the image.. (they are pretty hard to read), it’s even more flawed. A simple Google Search will show that there’s already a few other sites using this plugin. To write a spambot to take advantage of it woud be trivial:

1. Search Google, extract urls
2. Foreach URL, visit page and fill out form with spam
3. Parse for a regular expression like Please X Y and Z
4. do the math, fill out the form next to it, submit your spam.

For proof of concept, I’d write such a script, however it would be against my ethics. It would only take me 10 minutes though, honestly.

The captcha / addition is a flawed method of thinking. The goal of a spam bot isn’t to spam one website, if I only wanted to spam Matt, I’d do it by hand. The spammer’s goal is to spam as many websites as possible as quickly as possible, so any universal attempt to stop it will easily be cracked.

Instead of doing what everybody else does (captcha, math problems, kitten auth, etc) it’s far more beneficial to do what Jeremy Zawodney does. Jeremy has all of his commenters type “Jeremy” in a box before continuing. It’s real easy to code a bot to do it, but since it’ll only work on one site there’s no point. If somebody does keep spamming him repeatedly, Jeremy just bans the IP by hand.

I say let’s abandon the captcha idea in favor of making the commentor type something site related into the box. That’s how this site is going to work when I’m finished re-coding it.

There’s 2 approaches to security. One involves throwing up big walls and armed guards, etc (the captcha). The other involves simply not making yourself a viable target in the first place.

Dear Scott Adams,

You sir, are an insensitive asshole. No, seriously. Not only that, you’re a coward as far as the blogging community goes. Ask anybody, you never pull a post after it creates controversy. It’s just not what bloggers do.

Now, on to your comments:

Readers of the Dilbert Blog know that I believe death is not a laughing matter, unless the guy who gets killed is in the process of bothering dangerous animals

No, still not funny. I don’t care who dies, a corporate exec, convicted murderer, or actor I never watched; death isn’t funny. You may have not liked his work, but the guy died doing what he loved in the name of conservation and education. It’s not funny, show some respect for the dead. I’m not even a fan of Steve Iriwn, but I was a fan of Scott Adams.

along the same lines, please have a look at your website. You’re a fucking sydicated cartoonist… do you really need the extra $3.00 CPM that your stupid popup ad provides? I stopped going to dilbert.com years ago because of that.. now I just guess the URL of each day’s comic, and snag your bandwith onto my personal homepage. Seriously, popups are a bad idea.

While you’re at it.. Dilbert is a work related cartoon.. so why do I constantly see girls in bikinis and sex related ads on the site?

As cartoonists go, you’re the blink182, greenday, or whoever else can be labeled as a sellout.

I just wanted to let you know…is $3.00 per 1000 impressions worth pissing off all of your visitors? It’s not to me.

Here’s some more work related cartoons that actually understand that…

User Friendly
BugBash

I just got back from vacation to find the terrible news that Steve Iwrin (the crocodile hunter) has passed away. While the cynical side of me wants to say it was bound to happen eventually, it’s always sad to see a real talent pass.

Let’s face it, there wouldn’t have been an animal planet television network if it wasn’t for Steve. He turned millions of people on to once boring nature shows, and for that he’ll never be forgotten. It’s not what you take, it’s what you leave behind you when you go…. Steve left an interest and desire for knowledge in the hearts millions of viewers.

On a lighter side, (or scarier side depending how you look at it) President Bush recently issued the following statement: “My message to the world is this: Just treat us as we treat you…”

George, in case you haven’t realized, this is a bad idea. America’s general attitute toward the world is “we don’t care about you, agree with us or we’ll make your life a living hell.” Your “eye for an eye” idea is a good one, but not if you’ve made it your life’s mission to go around poking people in the eye.

I just picked up a CD of The Himalayans and it’s pretty damn awesome. It’s the band that Adam Duritz was in prior to Counting Crows, and the original authors of “round here”. If you like that type of music, please pick up their CD.

Also, Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers are coming to the Magic Bag in November. If you wanna go, let me know. Tickets are $12. (they’re the band formerly known as the refreshments (everybody knows the world is full of stupid people…) and also did the King of the Hill theme song). ok, that’s enough for now. Happy Labor Day, and RIP Steve.