Save the internet, round Two

Alright, the last save the internet campaign failed to sway enough members of congress to kill the issue in the house committee to ensure that the internet remains free and accessible to everyone.  It’s up for vote on the house floor next week and I’ll be damned if I don’t do everything in my power to get everyone I know to at least look at the issue.  Please, just click the link below, sign the petition, and fight for the internet we’ve all come to know and love.  Don’t let big telephone companies take away our freedoms.

Do something now at http://civic.moveon.org/save_the_internet

Battlefield 2

Picked up Battlefield 2 for Xbox 360 the other day.  I absolutely love this game.  I played the demo for a solid week before I got it, so I had a bit of an advantage going in against all those other nubs.  I think out of my first five matches, I probobly averaged 50 points per game (that’s a good thing).  My performance dropped pretty quickly after that, however.  I think the match chooser in ranked games sorts by rank, so once I got up to around Master Sergeant, I was playing with people around my skill level and I started to get between 25-35 points.  Still, that’s better than average, so I can’t  complain.  My first 200 kills were with the engineer kit, no exceptions.  I’ve since adapted and can perform fairly well with sniper and assault too.  Still see no reason to have support, and I haven’t given special ops it’s fair share yet.  Yeah, blah.  If you want to play with me, my gamertag is RedKrieg.

Next weekend…

…I’m going to VT to visit my cousin!  I’m thinking maybe kegger, but we’ll see.  Should be a ball!

In related news, fuck The Bamboozle and their fucked up over protective policies.  I can’t fucking stand when a music festival bends over backward to appease the parents of the 14 year old crowd to get them in there.  It ruins good things.

When advertisers prey on Myspace ignoramuses

I’ve seen at least three different sites claiming to be a "see who’s looking at your myspace" deal…  They want you to post a bulletin with a link, picture, whatever.

That can’t possibly work.

The bulletin is never displayed on your profile, so there’s no way to track anything but who is clicking your bulletin.

The ONLY way to track visits to your profile itself would be to add code to your profile page linking to an off-site image.  Bulletins will not work.

I could write a backend to collect the referrer url whenever an image was requested, but said image would have to be on your profile, not in a bulletin.

All those "profile trackers" are doing is getting you to go to their site and increase the chances you’ll click their advertisements.

If you really want to see who’s requesting your profile, get a good webhost and start grepping your logs for requests to that image.  The referring url will include a token from which you can derive your friend’s friend ID, which could in theory be linked back to their profile.

I personally don’t know what encoding algorithm is used for the token, so no…  I won’t write you a friend tracker.  If anyone out there is willing to provide me technical info about how that token is encoded, I’ll be more than willing to write said tracker for you and tell you what you need to paste into your profile.

K, thx.

More IE hate

If you’re an Internet Explorer user, you noticed the splash page suggesting you download Firefox.  That was me.  It won’t show up again for two days assuming you have cookies enabled, so don’t worry about it too much if you’re accessing this from, say, an internet cafe or your work place.  If it’s the former, please suggest to them that they install Firefox.  If the latter, please round up all your IT personnel and get a petition going for senior management to get Firefox approved for your environment.  Your sysadmins will thank you in the long run.

Google AdSense

As much as I love Google, I chose not to sign up for their AdSense program to try and rake in a bit of cash from this desolate corner of the intarweb.  Why you might ask?  One of the provisions of their "Program Policies" is that one must not include "Sales or promotion of beer or hard alcohol".  That’s just not how I roll, so I’m gonna go have another beer and drift off into a peaceful slumber.

Good night world!