Sun 30 Jul 2006
We start with some big announcements (including the last installment in the sorry tale of Zan’s dealings with M-Audio). Then it’s on to:
* World Wide Web abbreviations.
* X-Ray-proof fatties.
* We Can Be Heroes and Fat Pizza.
Also, we hear from both Black Vulcans before yet another Things that are Dumb segment. This will be the last serious segment for a good long time, we promise.
We won’t be back for two weeks, but in the meantime you can occupy yourself by preparing for our second superhero show, or visiting some of our listeners’ websites:
Larrikin’s photography.
Dr John and Dr Lorne.
The #2 Show!.
July 31st, 2006 at 4:02 am
Who’s going to feed the chickens while you’re away?
July 31st, 2006 at 6:43 pm
We’re not physically going away, Tvindy, just going away from podcasting because I’ll crappily be in at work on Saturday and Sunday. Some birthday weekend.
August 1st, 2006 at 11:47 am
You have to work on your b-day weeking. Damn that Lumbergh. Maybe you shouldn’t go.
August 1st, 2006 at 12:05 pm
Halleluah! Looks like M-Audio has to pay for their crappy customer service by giving up two interfaces for free.
August 1st, 2006 at 1:34 pm
I’d be happy if M-Audio gave me two free audio interfaces. As it is, I just wind up with what I paid for half a year ago.
And I had to look ‘Lumbergh’ up in wikipedia. I haven’t seen Office Space, but I’ve always vaguely thought I should.
August 1st, 2006 at 6:43 pm
I looked at Frappr to see why my marker wasn’t visible.
The Zebulon picture is from the old children’s TV show called Magic Roundabout. The patriarchal character in the UK version of the series was called Zebedee, and had the catch phrase “Time for bed”. Ahh, those were innocent days when you could have father figures with a catchphrase like that on a children’s programme!
When I first went on Frappr I looked up ‘Zebulon’ for a suitable picture to use. I was expecting some biblical stuff but got the original French version of Magic Roundabout whose Zebedee character was called Zebulon. So I nicked that instead.
Anyway, recently listener Jase had added a marker and was ’sitting on my face’. I therefore have just moved my marker west a bit to Swindon, home of the real magic roundabout:
http://www.swindonweb.com/life/lifemagi0.htm
August 2nd, 2006 at 6:18 am
On this week’s Things That Are Dumb: I’ve stopped trying to understand the Middle East and taken to just calling them a bunch of fat babies. As in, “Quit yer whinin’, ya fat babies!” (A reference which, coincidentally, comes from Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, from the makers of Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law) Just like Jana said, it doesn’t matter who started it… ya fat babies. I’ve also started thinking about how things would be different if there weren’t any religions, if people just gave up on all gods and religions from the very beginning. Would they find another reason to attack each other?
August 2nd, 2006 at 10:15 am
Huzzah! The feed is up again (although it’s likely to take a while for the iTunes music store to have it on tap). If you’re in a hurry, remember that you can always copy the URI from our ‘Subscribe to Show’ link in the sidebar and paste it into the ‘Subscribe to Podcast’ window on the iTunes ‘Advanced’ drop down menu. That will allow you to temporarily run our feed directly into iTunes rather than using the second-hand iTunes Music Store feed.
Now I’m off to the post office to pick up my replacement audio interface, which is waiting for me there. Surely this can’t be the end of my technical headaches? I wonder what will happen next?
August 2nd, 2006 at 11:08 am
you HAVE to see Office Space. Classic.
August 3rd, 2006 at 5:49 am
When I was at university, I took a Middle East poli sci. course from a visiting prof. from the University of Tel Aviv. It was a great course, he was very nuetral in his delivery, but I learned little more than the facts — the events and dates, as it were. I formed no opinion on who was right or wrong or the intersection of shades grey. The only opinion I gained was that they were both (see Ryan above) acting like ignorant children. “I don’t acknowledge your existence!” “Oh ya, I don’t acknowledge existence!”
One has to feel for the Jews after World War 2 (and the inquisition and … ), but does that give them the right to steal a country out from beneath its occupants? Yes, there are historical claims, but has this ever happened before in recent history. Of course one can cite colonialism. But in this case, this is very religion oriented. If we’ve learned one thing in history, it is that religions can not share the same sand box.
Signed,
An Atheist For Peace
August 3rd, 2006 at 12:11 pm
My position is that people try too hard to understand the situation. When it comes to religion, I don’t believe for one minute that conflicts like this would be avoided if religion weren’t a factor. People can and do carry on bloody conflicts like this one without religion being a factor, and to me it seems most similar to the many wars and massacres that have taken place in Africa simply because old colonial powers decided to redraw boundaries and borders for their own convenience and brought alien groups into close proximity (and that’s more-or-less what happened with the creation of Israel).
As for whether the state of Israel should have been created, it’s a moot point because it’s there now. Human populations have been moving and displacing one another since the dawn of time; there are Israeli citizens who, if the state of Israel were to disappear, would be foreigners in any other country, so why shouldn’t they have the same right to live in their homes as anyone else? What would people say if the Breton people of northern France demanded that England be abolished so that they can return to where their ancestors lived before they were displaced by Saxon invaders in the Dark Ages?
For much of its history, Islam has been a powerful influence for tolerance, preaching that Christians, Jews and Muslims are all ‘children of Abraham’ and should live together with mutual respect. The religion hasn’t changed, so I don’t see any reason to blame religion. My point in the show was that these conflicts are perpetuated by people bloody-mindedly clinging to their own sense of being victims and having the moral high ground, whether they’re fighting over land, religion, or who took the last beer out of the fridge and didn’t replace it.
Hateful, extremist maniacs will always find a reason to feel persecuted and direct hatred towards others, whether they’re Osama bin Laden or Donald Rumsfeld.
August 3rd, 2006 at 3:39 pm
I agree with your point, all of your points, but never deny the role of religion. It’s not dismissable, especially in the middle east. Or Northern Ireland. Or India/Pakistan. Or Indian Sikh/Hindu. Or Suuni/Shia in Iraq. Or anti Shia in Iran who claim Islam was forced upon them. Or Bosnia. Or Darfur. Or … it’s almost endless.
But, with that said, I’m glad my room mates used to keep the fridge refilled! Somewhere in there I think I ran out of steam and lost my point.
In conclusion … touché!
August 5th, 2006 at 7:01 pm
Zan, it was strange, so much of what you said in the podcast on the mideast was what I was saying to a co-worker the night before. Was Zan eavesdropping, I wondered as I listened to this episode.
I said it all without the accent though.
—
Ehhh… religion and faith I can do without. Of course the problems in the Mideast do all come down to the desires, greed, anger, prejudices of humans but in the Mideast it is usually religion that provides impetus and justification for bloodshed and violence. It has rarely ever been a balm for peace. It enables alot of abuse between people that the application of pure reason and compromise could prevent or sort out. There would be a hell of a lot more peace in the world without religion, faith etc.
But you’re right in your implication that even without religion, there would certainly still be bloodshed and violence. There are religion free wars going on every day… money, drugs, missing audio interfaces are all triggers of violence in 2006.
All that said, I’m looking forward to the return to hi-fi BYU courtesy of M-Audio!!
P.S. Found myself humming the theme at work tonight. Stay out of my brains!
August 6th, 2006 at 3:01 pm
Bob’s Yer Uncle: currently ranked 44th at Podcast Alley. Maybe the M-Audio interface isn’t such a good idea after all!
August 7th, 2006 at 1:23 pm
I worked with a woman who always said “Whack, Whack, Whack” for WWW. Weird, but cute.
August 7th, 2006 at 5:56 pm
I have heard Americans call the // as Whack Whack.
Stranger www is an abreviation for world wide web ( which is shorter to say, try it)
August 8th, 2006 at 4:16 am
I’ve never heard anyone call the // “whack whack” but I’ll probably hear it somewhere now that you’ve brought it up.
Hey Zan or anyone else subscribed using iTunes. My feed has still not updated with the latest show. Anyone else having this problem? Looks like I’m gonna have to go temp fix for now.
Hope you have a happy birthday despite having to work. Don’t let the bastards grind you down!
August 8th, 2006 at 12:59 pm
Hey Adam,
When I look at our feed on iTunes, it has show 34, but then nothing before it until show 22. I’d recommend using the direct feed for now - I’ve gotten past the point of trying to fix missing stuff on iTunes, as it just seems to refresh itself very infequently. Missing material seems to appear by itself a matter of weeks later, and as far as I know I can’t really do anything about it in the meantime. I can see everything in the code for the feed; it’s just iTunes’ cache’d version which is incomplete.
August 8th, 2006 at 6:44 pm
I, too have heard an American say “whack” for /. It was at a conference, and he said it a lot of times during his talk. He was from Microsoft, though, so I just assumed it was a Microsoft internal slang thing.
So, with whack=dumb in mind, during questions at the end I asked, “Do you say back-whack for \ ?” He wouldn’t answer me, and from his face he certainly didn’t appreciate the joke.
There are the same number of syllables in “whack” as “slash”, so it isn’t quicker to say. The thing even looks like a slash. Do the vast majority of people says slash or whack in the US? If it’s only a few that say whack, perhaps the rest of us can tell them to “whack-off”?
August 8th, 2006 at 11:40 pm
I always thought I was super-wicked cool for saying triple-W.
Chicks dig it.
August 9th, 2006 at 8:23 am
Any thoughts on Mel Gibson? Schadenfreude is a delicious indulgence.
Happy Birthday Zan!
August 10th, 2006 at 1:50 am
Hay Zan and Jana!
Thanks so much for the plug we really appreciate it. I haven’t listened to this episode of your podcast until today as I’ve been crazy busy the past little while and have only just started to catch up on my podcasts today. It was the most awesome Zebulon researcher extraordinaire that told us we got a plug on your show. Thanks for sharing your listeners
and I hope you don’t mind me playing a clip from your show on ours.
Sam
August 10th, 2006 at 7:16 pm
Here’s wishing you Happy Birthday, Zan!
In the show Jana asked why web sites sometimes use www as a prefix and sometimes not? Here, from the horse’s mouth (Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web), is the answer:
Why does one use “www.foo.com” as a server name? Why not just “foo.com”?
It is a convention. I suggested it early on, in this guide, and I am of two minds about it now.
An alias was a better alternative to “pegasus.foo.com” which typically resulted when someone who happened to have a machine called pegasus started to run a web server for foo company. (The www prefix on a computer name also allows one to guess that it was a web server. This allowed early estimates of the numbers of servers, for example.)
In those days I suggested an alias www.foo.com for the HTTP server in line with existing Internet practice of ftp.foo.com for the FTP server and mail.foo.com for the smtp server, and so on. These aliases could, even if originally on the same machine, be moved to point to machines of appropriate size as necessary.
You don’t have this flexibility of configuration if you point everyone at “foo.com” itself for all services. Typically early webmasters could not have comandeered the “foo.com” address itself.
Nowadays, however, the web server may be far and away the biggest service foo company has, and it might make sense to give it pride of place. Remember you can only do this with one service.
You could use http://foo.com/ which is after all easier to type, even though people expect to have to type the “www”.
Whatever you do, it is important not to do both. If you do both, you will halve the effectiveness of caching of your pages, as caches won’t realise that the page under www.foo.com and under foo.com is the same.
What we currently (1999) do in the W3C site it to redirect any traffic to w3.org to www.w3.org. So if you miss out the “www.” by accident or for speed, them you end up at the canonical www.w3.org address. I would recommend doing a forward one way or the other whichever you chose as your web site’s cannonical definitive address.
[Published on www.w3.org, site of the World Wide Web Consortium.]
August 11th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
Zan,
About the iTunes feed lagging, try this: Every time you update your feed, ping iTunes at: https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast?id=xxxxxxxxxx where xxxxxxxx is your iTunes show number. Also, I just saw all your shows from 22 to 34 in iTunes, but I had to scroll to see them. I manage a podcast of > 180 shows, and the pings keep iTunes up-to-date. ITunes only caches ~100 shows, though. No problems, because one someone subscribes, they connect to your then-current RSS feed, and the iTunes Store is no longer involved.
-V
August 11th, 2006 at 6:30 pm
Thanks Zan! I went ahead and subscribed through the show feed and got my fix. It still has not shown up in my iTunes feed, but it doesn’t matter. Even though I have two listings for Bob’s Yer… in my iTunes once I update it in the iPod there is only one listing on the iPod. It’s all good.
October 24th, 2008 at 1:11 am
There was this guy see.
He wasn’t very bright and he reached his adult life without ever having learned “the facts”.
Somehow, it gets to be his wedding day.
While he is walking down the isle, his father tugs his sleeve and says,
“Son, when you get to the hotel room…Call me”
Hours later he gets to the hotel room with his beautiful blushing bride and he calls his father,
“Dad, we are the hotel, what do I do?”
“O.K. Son, listen up, take off your clothes and get in the bed, then she should take off her clothes and get in the bed, if not help her. Then either way, ah, call me”
A few moments later…
“Dad we took off our clothes and we are in the bed, what do I do?”
O.K. Son, listen up. Move real close to her and she should move real close to you, and then… Ah, call me.”
A few moments later…
“DAD! WE TOOK OFF OUR CLOTHES, GOT IN THE BED AND MOVED REAL CLOSE, WHAT DO I DO???”
“O.K. Son, Listen up, this is the most important part. Stick the long part of your body into the place where she goes to the bathroom.”
A few moments later…
“Dad, I’ve got my foot in the toilet, what do I do?”