Google Suggest dissected

Here.

Okay, this must be a joke

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Why I love bash

Here.

Vote for me and get fucked

Here.

No more comment spam?

Here.

My first comment spam attack

Here.

Ah, Christmas concerts

Here, at my new blog.

Using MT with Apache::Filter

Here.

I hate Christmas

Here.

How this blog works

Here.

An unprecedented view into my nerdiness

Here

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But who's to blAIM?

Here.

What's your number?

My blog has moved! Please update your bookmarks/links/feeds to blog.halfacanuck.com. You can find this post here.

Dog-sledding

Here.

Bloglines

So I just rediscovered Bloglines. I say "rediscovered" because I've been aware of it for a while, but didn't really grasp how cool it is until I checked it out again this afternoon (or, possibly, the really nifty stuff has been added since I last looked).

Bloglines is an online web syndication (or "feed") browser. What this means, essentially, is that certain sites (blogs in particular, but also some news services etc.) allow their content to be accessed and republished by outside parties via special interfaces called RSS and Atom. In other words, when you set up an account (for free) on Bloglines you tell it what sites you like to read every day and, if that site has an RSS or Atom feed, Bloglines will trot off and grab the content from that site and display it to you within the Bloglines site itself.

Why is this useful, or even any different from visiting the web site itself? Well, the difference is that Bloglines has a little sidebar with a list of all the sites you've subscribed to and -- here's where it gets cool -- it knows whether the site has been updated since you last visited it and, if so, how many new posts (or news stories, or other pieces of content) there are. Thus instead of going through a dozen bookmarks to check if any of them have anything new to read, you simply go to your Bloglines page and can see at a glance if there's been an update. Think of it as a bit like email, only with web sites.

If that's all there was to it I'd not be particularly excited about it (yes, I'm excited about it. Snide comments welcome). That's how RSS and Atom work, and I've been using a similar standalone program called NetNewsWire Lite to read feeds for ages. What makes Bloglines so damn cool is that unlike NetNewsWire Lite it's able to read not just RSS and Atom feeds but also pages from Xanga, LiveJournal, the new Google Groups 2 service, Yahoo! Groups, Topix.net and can even pretend that an email mailing list is a feed too, showing it along with the "real" feeds in the sidebar.

This means that I can check every single site I read on a regular basis, from Reuters headlines to a bunch of blogs (including, finally, Xanga) in one place and without having to check each manually to see if there's anything new, saving me vital seconds every day. If that doesn't deserve a w00t I don't know what does.

Go out and sign up for Bloglines immediately, and then of course add my blog to your subscriptions. Because it's what all the cool people do.

Yes, I'm a nerd.

The case of the missing beef

My wife and I went grocery shopping today and picked up a three-pound pack of ground beef, since we seem to get through quite a lot of it. This isn't in itself unusual, nor was the manner in which we collapsed spent into chairs whilst the various children who congregate in our house, some of whom are alleged to be ours, unpacked the groceries. When the smallest child (who shall remain nameless, for what follows is partly her fault, and there's nothing cowardly about me placing partial blame on a seven-year-old) presented me with the ground beef and asked what should be done with it, I replied that she should put it on the island and I would deal with it.

The plan was to unwrap the beef, separate it into three one-pound portions, wrap them, and put them in the freezer. Thus I would avoid the normal disaster that unfolds when it comes time to use the stuff, namely me trying to hack apart a frozen mass of beef with a ludicrously large knife, growing more and more frenzied by the second, until I either a) succeed in breaking off a chunk or b) stab myself through the hand.

At this point I too must accept partial responsibility for the ensuing events. Had I gone to work immediately and parceled the meat up there and then, none of this would've happened (though I still insist that Jeremy -- not her real name -- is mostly to blame). I didn't, in fact, do that, astonishing as it may sound to those who know me. What I did do was decide to nip onto the Internet for a few minutes first, possibly have a smoke, that kind of thing. Within 13.8 seconds of opening my laptop lid I had of course forgotten all about the beef, and four hours later went to put a pizza in the oven for supper.

I strolled to the freezer and pulled out the pizza, swiveled jauntily on my heel and made my way over to the stove, and, in the corner of my eye, saw the beef still on the island. I pulled open the oven, slid the pizza in... and realized that something about the beef wasn't quite right, but I couldn't place it. I closed the oven and gave my full attention to the meat, and noticed immediately (for nothing escapes my profound observational skills) that someone, or something, had been gnawing at it.

When I say gnawing, I actually mean taking really quite large bites out of it. And by that I mean taking really quite large bites through the plastic wrap and, in parts, through the polystyrene base, but only on the side nearest the edge of the island. Something like an inch and a half of meat was gone from one entire side, I noted meticulously.

Naturally my first thought was that my wife was the culprit, because boy, does she ever love her steak tartare. But in this case I knew it could not be so, since she'd left for work long before. I then turned my focus onto the children. It is widely known that children are barely above the level of the beast, and ours in particular do, it must be said, occasionally remind one of living in the same house as a small herd of warthogs. Am I suggesting one of them had stooped so low as to eat raw ground beef directly from the packaging, and also eat the packaging, while the others kept lookout and whispered frantic encouragement? Yes. Yes I am.

Upon probing them, however, I was greeted with such expressions of wide-eyed innocence that even I, a heartless cynic, momentarily forget the savagery of their true nature and concluded they were not the perpetrators of the horrific crime scene upon which I had stumbled. It seemed as if my investigation had come to a dead-end. I turned back to the kitchen, my face a picture of despondency.

But wait! I stopped dead in my tracks. Could it be that the dog, whom I shall call Winston (for that is his name), was looking at me somewhat guiltily? I met his gaze. Our eyes narrowed and locked. Sweat formed on our brows. He tensed. I raised a single eyebrow. For untold seconds we stared unblinking at each other, like two titans meeting over a chess board, or a pair of gunslingers in a town of insufficient capaciousness. The mournful wind bounced a tumbleweed between us, but neither did it distract. Like Kennedy and Khrushchev were we in this Herculean clash of wills. And then... And then he crumbled, averting his eyes with a tiny submissive whimper, the whimper heard around the world. I had broken him! Yes. Yes, now it was all so clear! It wasn't my wife who had munched surreptitiously on the tasty protein carelessly set aside in the kitchen. It wasn't any of the various children, sunk in depravity as they undeniably are. It was him all along!

But the pulse of glory victorious was soon replaced with bitter self-recrimination. What kind of a detective, what kind of a man, would not have turned his attention to Winston before any other? Why did I not immediately deduce the link between the missing beef and this constantly hungry, infamously disobedient hound? Why did I not recall at once his daring late-night forays into the garbage bag, his apparently insatiable lust for fresh meat? Suddenly it all clicked. What a fool I was!

I shook myself out of it. Yes, perhaps I should've made the connection sooner, but I had made it, and that was the important thing. But as logical as that seemed, as true as it may have been, yet my anger increased with every step back to the canine-caused carnage. How could I have been so stupid? Am I really that short-sighted? I ripped the remains of the plastic wrap from the meat and threw it approximately in the direction of the garbage bag. Winston, who has apparently been secretly trained since birth to show up the very nanosecond even the possibility of food is considered, unwisely decided then was a good moment to approach me for scraps.

Well, that was the final straw. A tiny but vitally important blood vessel burst deep inside my brain and I flew into apoplexy. Plunging my fingers into the fleshy pulp of beef slightly back from the point to which it had been violated I tore off the contaminated strands and, shaking with blind rage, hurled the dripping mass wildly at the dog's head. I did it again and again and again. Very soon I'd stripped off another half-inch from the edge of the meat, all of which I flung furiously at Winston, until there was no more bad meat to remove. I took a deep breath.

It was then it occurred to me that tossing handfuls of succulent grade A beef at a permanently famished carnivorous animal was not perhaps the most heinous of punishments I could possibly devise. I looked at the dog. He was wolfing down the last remaining morsels, near-orgasmic joy afire in his eyes. I sighed and tried half-heartedly to conjure up more fitting penalties, but by then my anger was abating. The beef-throwing had soothed me and reason was resuming its seat. I divvied up what was left of the godforsaken stuff and encased it in GLAD Wrap, then deposited the now significantly-less-than-one-pound chunks in the freezer.

So what is the moral of this story? It's tempting to say "procrastination can only lead to extra work," but that's too easy an answer. I believe there are really two lessons here: first, don't ever get a dog. Actually, that's it. Just don't get a dog. Or, if you do get a dog, fit extensions to the legs of your kitchen island. Or remove all his teeth. Or turn vegetarian. And never trust Jeremy with meat. But it's much simpler just to not get a dog, or, if you already have one, set it free. It'll be happier that way. And even if it isn't (say, if it's immediately and fatally run over by a truck), you'll be happier. Trust me.

Updatage

My life is, as you know, a helterskelter whirlwind of frantic activity. One day it might be sitting for several hours at a time staring blankly into space; another day it might be descaling the kettle (though, to be fair, I've not actually done that in quite some time, because we have no C.L.R. and vinegar isn't quite up to the task of removing the quarter-inch-thick layer of limescale clinging tenaciously to the element).

Following are the most interesting things to happen in my life recently:

• I got a commission to write a story for Urban Male Magazine, Canada's answer to Maxim. The pay isn't great (which is to say really, really quite bad) but it's planned to be a double-page spread so it'll look good in my portfolio.
• I called the travel editor of the National Post to find out if she read the story I sent to her over a week ago, and it turns out she's been away and couldn't find the email. Greatly relieved. So I sent it again. Hopefully I'll hear back from her this time, along the lines of: "Dear Ross, You're the most fantastic writer the world has ever seen, bar none. I will pay you one half of one million dollars for this story."
• I am still distressingly close to the beginning of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. The time I take to finish it might itself be measured on a geological scale.
• I found a new(ish) browser that I'm very partial too. It's called Camino and it's based around the same rendering engine as Firefox, but is much more lightweight. This means new windows open pretty much instantly instead of taking a couple of seconds like they did in Firefox, page loading is quicker, and I can once again boast that I use an obscure browser. Also, it's only for Macs. Suckers.

As you can tell, the last few days have been unusually exciting. I realize this post strayed wildly into "uninteresting personal diary" territory, but I intend to make up for that with a scintillating post after I've made supper. Whirlwind, I tells ya.