Filed under: Humor

Thumbs down! Firefox users can now "dislike" posts on Facebook

by Jay Hathaway Nov 5th 2009

You might have seen the various petitions on Facebook to add a "dislike" feature to the site, to complement the "like" option in the News Feed. Well, Facebook hasn't listened. However, if you're a Firefox user, you can add a thumbs-down feature to FB with (what else?) a Facebook Dislike add-on.

It sounds kind of silly to keep track of your own dislikes, but it turns out that the extension feeds them into a database, so they'll be visible to anyone else who has it installed. The dislikes blend in seamlessly with the Facebook News Feed, appearing right below regular likes. It looks as if the members of those pro-dislike Facebook groups should be downloading Firefox and checking this extension out.

[via CNET]

Tags: add-on, dislike, facebook, firefox, thumbs down, ThumbsDown

Filed under: Design, Fun, Humor, Fugly Friday

Fugly Friday: Geocities Memorial Edition

by Jay Hathaway Oct 30th 2009

Before there was anything today's Internet users would think of as "web design," there was GeoCities. The homepage service that let absolutely anyone try his or her hand at putting something on the Internet is also one of the cradles of contemporary Web Fugly. In fact, Fugly Friday owes such a debt to the GeoCities aesthetic that this week's installment is going to take a trip down memory lane to look at some early innovations in tearing a human being's eye out using pure HTML.

Today's fugly site, HTML Advanced Tricks & Tips, is a cookbook for everything that make GeoCities sites painful to look at. Tables! Frames! Scrolling marquee text! I will grant you that some people continue to defend tables to this day, but I don't think anyone is defending those animated flame GIFs. Good luck navigating this page by clicking on the text: it's not linked. You're not going anywhere unless you click on those dancing flames. Maybe that's a secret you learn from the "HTML Writer's Guild" once they give you a cool badge like the one on this homepage.

As for the tips themselves? Closing your tags is still decent advice, and cropping and shrinking your graphics was a necessity back in the low-bandwidth heyday of GeoCities. These tips were actually not terrible at the time, but the author has to mess it up by slapping on animated GIFs and encouraging the use of the marquee tag. Between those two, we've covered most of what made every GeoCities page so terrible. Add an autoplaying midi and you'd have a Fugly Tutorial Trifecta.

(This post was made possible by Reocities, a GeoCities rescue attempt that backed up 600,000 pages of potential fugly before Yahoo! shut off GeoCities' animated flashing lights for good.)

Tags: animated gif, AnimatedGif, fugly, FuglyFriday, geocities, HTML, Marquee

Filed under: Fun, Internet, Humor

Halloween costumes from the Internet: happy Hallo-meme!

by Jay Hathaway Oct 28th 2009

While it's still not possible to download a Halloween costume, stepping away from the computer for a few hours to trick or treat or go to a costume party doesn't mean you have to leave the Internet behind. In fact, Know Your Meme has come up with a guide to dressing up as your favorite online meme. They have instructions for everything from Keyboard Cat to the Flying Spaghetti Monster to that rabbit with a pancake on his head.

Unfortunately, because you can't trick-or-treat the Internet (yet), you and your friends might be the only ones who think your costumes are funny. To be fair, though, some of them are really, really funny, and going door-to-door with your kid dressed as the pancake bunny is a guaranteed candy goldmine.

If you're planning to dress up as an Internet meme or something software-related - anybody going as the Mozilla Firefox? - let us know in the comments. And post some photos if you've got them. This is the Internet, after all: pics or it didn't happen!

Tags: costumes, funny, halloween, meme, memes

Filed under: Fun, Games, Time-Wasters, Humor

Topical Time Waster: throw eggs at Steve Ballmer!

by Lee Mathews Oct 22nd 2009

No, today's Time Waster (which we've mentioned before) is not likely to be the most awesome gaming experience you've ever had on your computer. It is, however, a fun way to vent your frustration at the tidal wave of Windows 7 blogging going on today (guilty).

Before you ask - yes, this really happened and there's a video after the break for your enjoyment. Check the YouTube page for some more insight into what motivated the barrage.

Enough with the intro. Grab yourself a dozen eggs, and go give Stevezilla his comeuppance! Or, if you prefer, turn things around and pretend you're Ballmer and fire back at the "nerdy student."

It's an all-out Egg Attack, y'all!

Tags: egg throwing, eggs, EggThrowing, steve ballmer, SteveBallmer, time-waster

Filed under: Fun, iPhone, Humor, Weird Wednesday

Weird Wednesday: what does an iPhone know about making love?

by Jay Hathaway Oct 21st 2009

Welcome to a special "hump day" edition of Weird Wednesday (pun very much intended). An iPhone can do a lot of things, but can it make you better in bed? A new app called Love Vibes says it can. It works like this: Install Love Vibes on your iPhone, set the firmness of your mattress, and then, ummm, engage in activities. The app uses the iPhone's accelerometer to measure vertical and horizontal movement, and somehow manages to convert that into a score that indicates your prowess at making love.

On top of the obvious challenges of getting a partner to let you bring your iPhone to bed, it's not really clear how Love Vibes determines your score. The "duration" rating is obvious enough: how long did your session last? Stamina, variety and passion are a little more dicey. Although the science behind the app is based on surveys that indicate these are all desirable qualities, it's not clear how Love Vibes gets scores out of your accelerometer data.

I tried faking it out by moving the phone around wildly for a bit, hoping this would provide enough passion and variety to rate an impressive score. "Shaking the phone won't get you a high score," it told me. Huh. Well, what if I just move the phone rhythmically back and forth for a while as I do the exact opposite of making love - eating Doritos? SPOILER: just as in romantic encounters that don't involve an iPhone or anything Cooler Ranch flavored, rhythm is the ticket to a good review. You didn't need an app to tell you that, right?

Tags: iphone, love vibes, LoveVibes, making love, MakingLove, sex

Filed under: Fun, iPhone, Humor, Op-Ed

Breaking: iPhone users 300% more likely to Tweet after sexy parties

by Sebastian Anthony Oct 21st 2009

News just in: iPhone users are three times more likely to Tweet or Facebook their sexual antics than BlackBerry users.

I'll just put into words what you're all thinking: what a big frackin' surprise. Apple users more vapid and self-centered than other-brand gadgeteers? Say it ain't so!

In fact, stereotypical Apple users are a classic example of modern-day 'Napoleon complex' (or 'short man syndrome' as you might know it by). Their gadgets -- their white, creamy, curvy, brushed-aluminium gadgets -- are compensating for something else. In this case, a lackluster sex life: 'Yeh, totally jst gve her some juice, lol.'

Anyway, moving on, back to the news rather than what we already know. This new report from Retrevo finds that 36% of all under-35 year olds update their Facebook wall or Twitter accounts post-coitally. Perhaps unsurprisingly, men are twice as likely as women to take part in this godawful practice.

I guess we should just be grateful that the report focused on what happens after rather than during... After all, we know someone paid to have the Passion app rate their performance between the sheets.

[via CNet]

Tags: facebook, iphone, post-coital, sex, survey, twitter

Filed under: Developer, Fun, Troubleshooting, Humor

Troubleshooting with your Teddy Bear

by Grant Robertson Oct 16th 2009

My buddy Dave once shared with me a bit of computing wisdom which I've since found invaluable.

"Proper troubleshooting requires a Teddy Bear."

As it was told to me -- long ago in a university computer lab not so far away -- there was a sysadmin who became frustrated with the number of questions he was asked by student developers. It wasn't that the questions were invalid, or that the students weren't thinking them through. Rather, his frustration was with questions which found their own answers.

Students seeking his help would begin to explain the problem they were working on. More often than not, they wouldn't finish explaining before having an "Aha!" moments; That tiny moment of clarity every developer, admin or desktop analyst seeks as a part of their job.

Being forced to explain the problem had some effect which thinking about the problem alone didn't. How can you achieve the same mind-altered state without bugging the sysadmin, or taking a handful of Adderol and Xanaax*?

The weary sysadmin found a brilliant solution. He attached a teddy bear to his desk, and forced anyone who wanted to ask him a question to address the bear and explain the problem.

So, the next time you're halfway through asking a collegue a question and find yourself saying, "Wait, I think I just got it, never mind!", remember to thank them for being your teddy bear.

* Download Squad does not condone the abuse of Adderol, Xanaax or any other prescription drugs. Just sayin'.

Tags: cool, geek, teddy bear, TeddyBear, tricks, tricks-of-the-trade, troubleshooting

Filed under: Social Software, Humor

I Just Made Love maps global lovemaking

by Jay Hathaway Oct 12th 2009

If you want to know where in the world geeks are getting lucky, look no further than a new site called I Just Made Love. As the site's name implies, users can place a marker anywhere on the map, showing where they just made love. Were you on a boat? That's ok, you can drop a marker in the water, too. Markers are anonymous, so there's no embarrassment involved (but no bragging, either.)

Where I Just Made Love gets a little less Safe For Work is in the details you enter. Sure, you're not putting in your name, but you can record whether you were indoors or outdoors, and select one or more positions you found yourself in during your escapades. You can see these details for any marker on the map by clicking on it.

The most obvious complaint about I Just Made Love is the lack of personal accounts: geeks love data, and there has to be a market for a service that would let you track your own ... activities ... over time. On the other hand, anonymity for all users means that more people are likely to enter new data points, making the site more interesting to browse.

Tags: just made love, JustMadeLove, lovemaking, map, sex

Filed under: Fun, Humor

Larry Ellison does near-standup comic rif on cloud computing

by Grant Robertson Oct 5th 2009

I've come out pretty strong against the fad of "cloud computing", which has spent the better part of the last year at the top of my most-hated buzzword list. In private, I've even been known to threaten that the next PR person to send me a release using the word "cloud" was going to get it, right between the Prada frames.

So, imagine my glee while watching one of my heroes -- Oracle's chief samurai warrior and jet pilot, Larry Ellison -- drop effortlessly into a riff on cloud computing while talking to a room at the Churchill Club.

Ellison makes a pretty solid argument that cloud computing isn't just the future, it's also the present and the past. This from a man who just bought Sun Microsystems -- a company which sported "The network is the computer" as its slogan, more than a decade before the first marketroid said cloud.

In Soviet Russia, cloud computing makes fun of you.

Take the leap to see Lawrence "Shecky" Ellison in action.

Tags: cloud computing, CloudComputing, ellison, oracle, shecky

Filed under: Security, Symantec, Humor

Nice try, Symantec! Cheesey video warns against free antivirus

by Lee Mathews Sep 29th 2009

Back in July, a Symantec exec predictably talked down free antivirus apps. This week, the cheeky devils behind Norton Antivirus have turned out a real tour de force. Seriously. It's a flippant look at the old adage "the best things in life are free."

The spot starts by mentioning love. Yeah, that's free, right? Sure, except for weddings says the straightman - those could cost as much as *gasp* $10,000! I'm not sure what year Symantec thinks it is, but I'm pretty sure many weddings run well in excess of three to five times that amount.

What about kids, those are great - and free! No, jackass, that's another bad call on your part. They're expensive too, says Unfunny Guy. Really? Thanks for pointing that out.

Tags: free-antivirus, norton, symantec

Filed under: Fun, Time-Wasters, Humor

Kanye West apology generator - Time Waster

by Jay Hathaway Sep 17th 2009

To appreciate the Kanye West apology generator, you may need some background: by now you've probably heard about rapper Kanye West's outburst at the Video Music Awards, interrupting teenage country star Taylor Swift as she accepted an award. Even if you don't have a TV, I'll bet you've noticed that "interrupting Kanye" has gone viral, and it's almost unavoidable on the web. While Kanye's stunt is kind of played out as a joke already, his blogged (but quickly deleted) apology to Taylor Swift is a more fertile comedy goldmine.

Kanye's propensity for blogging in all caps is already mildly hilarious, but when you combine that with a heat-of-the-moment defense of his actions -- written and posted while he was still at the awards that night -- you've got something really special. All you need to do is fill in the required fields, Mad Libs style. No description I could write would do justice to Kanye's original post, so I'll just present this apology I generated for some of Download Squad's lead bloggers:

I'M SOOOOO SORRY TO GRANT ROBERTSON AND VICTOR AGREDA, JR. FOR WRITING THE POST. I SPOKE TO VICTOR AGREDA, JR. RIGHT AFTER. GRANT ROBERTSON IS VERY UPSET !!........... I'M IN THE WRONG FOR POSTING AND DELETING!!!!!! I'M SORRY TO MY FANS IF I LET YOU GUYS DOWN!!!!! I'M SORRY TO MY FRIENDS AT DOWNLOAD SQUAD. I WILL APOLOGIZE TO GRANT ROBERTSON 2MRW. WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD!!!! EVERYBODY WANNA BOOOOO ME BUT I'M A FAN OF BLOG!!! Y'ALL KNOW!!! BOOOOYAAAWWWWW!!!!!!! AIGHT I GAVE MY APP TO MIKE ARRINGTON WHEN THEY DESERVED IT... THAT'S WHAT IT IS!!!!!!!!!! I'M NOT CRAZY YALL, I'M JUST BEING REAL. SORRY FOR THAT!!!MUCH RESPECT!!!!!

It probably won't be as funny next week, when this whole thing is ancient history, so strike while the iron is hot. Post your own Kanye Apology in the comments.

Tags: apology, generator, kanye west, KanyeWest, MTV, time waster, TimeWaster, VMAS

Filed under: Internet, Humor

Kanye interrupts Arrington at TechCrunch50

by Victor Agreda, Jr. Sep 14th 2009

We simply couldn't resist.

(In case you didn't catch Kanye West's antics at the Video Music Awards this weekend, here's some context.)

Tags: bitstrips, cartoon, comic, humor, tc50, techcrunch50

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Windows, Open Source, Humor

Off the Clock: Pr0nSpider helps you - er, your friends - safely download NSFW images and videos

by Lee Mathews Sep 12th 2009

Intro: Off the Clock is something we've kidded about in our newsroom for a while. The plan: write up some apps that aren't quite made for the 9-to-5(ET) RSS feed. Nothing serious, just harmless, grown-up, after hours stuff.

It's pretty rare that you can tell a software developer is totally up front about what truly motivated him or her to develop an application. In the case of Pr0nSpider, however, it's painfully clear to anyone who's been in his situation that he's being straight up with us.

Any technician I've ever met is all too familiar with the "thems not my pr0ns" speech. Born of the frustration caused by yet another "I dunno how my PC got so screwed up, dog" phone call, Pr0nSpider aims to keep your clueless-but-horny pals from getting into trouble. Well, at least from getting their Windows PC in trouble.
Here's how the magic happens. Fire up Pr0nSpider and select some categories (like the Jeopardy-esque Potpurri). Press go, and it springs into action, hoovering the appropriate inappropriate images from a handful of well-known sites. They're automatically dumped into Program files\Pr0nSpider\Output (or Program files x86\... on 64-bit Windows).

Tags: downloader, images, off the clock, OffTheClock, porn, pr0n, pron

Filed under: News, Google, Humor

News that wasn't: OMG, Google just made the search box bigger!

by Lee Mathews Sep 10th 2009

Yesterday, people were tripping over themselves writing about big news from Google. TechCrunch almost got it right, snidely calling it "the mother of all updates." Unfortunately, that's where the humor ended.

The rest of the post -- like nearly everything else that was written up about the change -- was a pretty dry look at the mind-numbingly dull addition of a few extra pixels in width to Google's search box.

A few pixels means bigger? Come on. That's wussy stuff. On the Real Man's scale of bigness, the search box would have been embiggened to look like the mother of an input area in the image above. You want search front and center? Don't muck about with a measly 100 extra pixels, go all the way.

I use Google, and I enjoy reading news about changes to their products and services -- when it's actually news.

Obvious omission: Mick Dundee weighs on in big vs. BIG after the break (video).

Tags: google, news that wasnt, NewsThatWasnt, search

Filed under: Internet, News, Humor

11 p.m. is officially party time on the Internet

by Jay Hathaway Sep 2nd 2009

A new study has determined that Internet usage is highest at 11 p.m. Eastern Time. Although there's a big jump around 4 p.m. - people at work getting bored, probably - and a gradual increase in traffic starting at 8, it turns out that 11 is peak time. I can definitely speculate about what so many people might be doing online at that hour of the night, but it turns out that I don't have to. The study looked at that, too. If you guessed "porn," you're right! Traffic for pornography (and Internet video in general) plays a big part in the 11 p.m. spike.

While YouTube viewing is at its highest around midnight, gaming peaks at 8 and stays strong until 11. The study's authors speculate that's because a high number of World of Warcraft raids are planned around those times. No word from 7-11 on whether sales of Funyuns and Mtn. Dew see a big increase around 7. The study seems to have used a large enough sample to be reliable: the participating ISPs account for about half of North American traffic.

Tags: internet, nighttime, study, traffic, usage

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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