After some thought and deliberation, I’ve decided to post these pictures of Sydney even though Bunky seems to think that a few of them might remind readers of this. I’m here to set the story straight, though. Although pictures like this one do look kinda sketchy, here’s what really happened: Bunky picked up a sweater for Sydney from Disney World because Sydney gets cold during wintery walks outside. However, it is just as hard to dress a cat as it is to dress a four-legged furry baby, and the sweater does not have buttons. Eventually we did get it on him, but it took the two of us working in tandem (it was like a 99-hit combo attack). You can also see him wearing his new step-in harness. The sweater did keep him warm, but it makes him walk all stiff and funny, and I’m not sure if he likes it…
As a final note, Sydney is not one of those pets that dresses up all the time in ridiculous outfits. He usually roams naked, but we force him to wear clothes when it is really cold outside and he wants to go for a walk.
In a rather unexpected turn of events, Wordpress was recently found to be guilty of spamming Google and other search engines. Through clever CSS cloaking, Wordpress used its high pagerank (as every WP blog links back to Wordpress.org by default) to draw visitors to a large number of shady articles. Reading it over, I’m not surprised or really critical of Matt’s decision to try to make money off advertising on the Wordpress site. I built Adsense ads into the Sea Slugs! Anime Blog and while I am not making huge dollars, it helps pay for some of the costs of maintaining the site. Open source software is not the most lucrative of endeavors, and if advertising dollars can make the product better, I’m all for it. The worst part is that any backlash against Wordpress, whether through popular opinion or search engine retaliation, will only hurt innocent Wordpress users, and that is something that Matt should have realized ahead of time. Plus, when you look at the code… well, it really was pretty sketchy.
I tried to dredge up some threads from the support forum, but the moderators are closing every meaningful thread about the article. They claim that it’s because the support forum is not the right place for the discussion, but I completely disagree. So far, this is one of the only ones that has survived.
If this story had broken a day later, I could have at least hoped it was an April Fool’s joke… The worst part of it really is that Wordpress has devoted so much to publicly fighting annoying spam, but behind the scenes, it was guilty of keyword spamming and cloaking T_T.
On the flip side, you’d think Google would have learned to ignore that kind of simplistic coding by now.
There was an interesting article today about how many computer users react violently when their computers crash. The guy who threw his computer into a deep fryer was pretty smart, but so was the fellow who tried tossing the PC out the window before actually opening the window. Nice work!
I have had so many hard drive crashes in my life that it doesn’t even phase me anymore. I make occasional backups, but most of the time the data lost isn’t even that important. Physical hardware crashes are always the hardest to take, however, because that means you have to cough up money to replace parts.
Oh man, in an amazing run of luck (the only good luck all season), my team, KaleidoStars, managed to sneak into the 4th seed and make the playoffs for fantasy NBA. My last opponent mailed it in completely, and so I was able to vault from 7th place (top 6 make the playoffs) into 4th. Kungfucius’ OSU Buckeyes took 3rd, but that’s a little misleading, considering that he finished 11.5 points/games ahead of me. Currently I’m getting spanked badly by “Don’t Eat Brown Pooh” as the injury bug has continued to torment me. Of my top 5 draft picks (A. Kirelenko, B. Miller, M. Bibby, K. Martin, and R. Jefferson), only one is uninjured and playing now. Of my bottom 5… well, not one is on my roster anymore (due to either season-ending injuries, or a bad case of suckitis). Kirelenko was out most of the season and just when he got back and started heating up, his season ended with a broken wrist. Brad Miller was a stud, but is out for the rest of the season as well (his teamate Kenny Thomas has been good, but isn’t center-eligible). K-Mart has performed as expected, but has battled injuries all season long, and it’s hard to predict when he will or won’t play. And of course RJ was out early with an injury as well. Overall, this has been a terrible fantasy fantasy NBA team, but the silver lining is that this season has been an interesting and captivating one. Waiver diving has become a weekly event for me, and a few gems came out of the rubble. I did manage to completely steal Stephen Jackson (due to his suspension), and Brevin Knight has been an assist machine (when his ankle is working). Josh Howard has been quite good (a lot of rebounds for a wing player) and Brezec has been servicible as a center. Other than that, it’s been a lot of one-week stands with various scrubs who had a good game or two. With all this information, maybe next year’s draft will be a little more successful (and lucky!). I guess I should have taken Dirk with my first round pick, but it seemed like a good decision to go with AK47 at the time.
On the NCAA front, I haven’t done that hot, but Illinois is still in it and I have them pegged to win. As a small consolation, I am guaranteed to not finish last. It might not sound like much, but when you’ve only picked about 28% of the winners correctly and you’ve spent most of the dance at the bottom, you have to take what you can get.
Pets and Plants | Kabitzin 3/31/2005 | 
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