See you in June
I was surfing the web this morning and got really annoyed that one of my favorite bloggers hadn't updated her site in a while. "Why even have a blog if you never update it?" I huffed. Then I remembered about this thing. Which brought me to the conclusion that I need to stop pretending that I have time to update the site right now.
So I'm going to take a few months off. It's not exactly time off from updating the site, which I clearly don't spend much time doing, but time off from my daily feelings of guilt and ineptitude for my inability to regularly update my blog. It's not like I'm trying to publish daily articles in the American Journal of Physics here.
Anyway, I'll probably start updating again sometime this summer. Probably June. If you want to be notified when I start updating again, sign up in the little NotifyList box to the right.
And please, no riots or mass suicides. I know it will be hard to live your life without the sporadic wisdom of this site, but it's only a few months.
Best comment ever
Christina says:
Watch out with the court shows, they will suck you in. Then, one day you find yourself watching and screaming at Judge Maybellene on the television, "you tell 'em, girlfriend" That's when you know life is over for you...(not that I know this from personal experience or something).
What's scary is that, contrary to what I was willing to admit in my previous post, I have watched Divorce Court. I SWEAR I've only seen it twice. But one of those times I did find myself thinking something along the lines of, "You tell 'em, girlfriend!"
A farewell to email
For those of you who are confused and thrown off by all these new words here on the main page, let me explain by saying that I did not plan to update the site today. I got all comfortable in my office chair to go through email but soon realized that I can't for reasons that I will detail below. So, rather than do something else, I figured I might as well throw a new post up.
Luckily I won't have to deal with these email woes anymore because I hereby renounce electronic mail. Unfortunately I'm awful at talking on the phone (who knew that was something you could be bad at) and am too lazy to write letters, so I think that leaves smoke signals and the telegraph for future correspondence. I know, it sounds inefficient and possibly dangerous, but once you hear the events of the past week you will agree that I really need to just give up on this whole email thing:
MONDAY
My friend T. BCC'd me on an email she'd sent to a girl who used to be a friend of mine. They'd recently had a falling out and T. wanted to get my input on her response to Former Friend. I gave her my very, very honest opinion and hit Send. But something didn't feel right. So I checked my Outbox right before the note was about to be sent. Ah, yes. I had replied to all. So that could have been, uh, really bad.I went to investigate how this could have happened. After all, I don't usually make stupid mistakes like that. I quickly found that I no longer have a Reply button in Outlook. Seriously. How does a Reply button just disappear? The fact that the Reply to All button is now in its place is setting me up for some serious social conflict.
TUESDAY
I check my Qurb spam folder and sift through 817 spams to try to catch any legitimate emails. Unless friends have started emailing me about Cialis and girls who like to **** **** in the ********* it was all spam. I go to my computer two hours later to find that I have 280 new spam emails. I also get a voicemail from someone I met at a social event who'd emailed me but never heard back, her email obviously lost in the depths of my Qurb folder.Meanwhile, most people using Hotmail, MSN and some other carriers don't get email from me at all. My main email account is on a blacklist ever since a spammer used it as his reply-to address a few months ago.
WEDNESDAY
I wake up to 593 new spam emails. I email J. to whine about this but my email won't send. I check my Outbox to see that none of my emails have been sent since Monday night. I immediately start cursing my server and start to investigate what the problem is.After torturing my server for hours trying to get my email to send I realize that it is not an issue with my server at all. I then blame my laptop. Nothing works. I slam my fist onto the keyboard in frustration and dislodge the Shift key. Meanwhile, I can still receive email so I communicate with J. by writing him messages using the "Tell A Friend" feature for Buttafly articles. So all my emails to him have the subject "Jennifer has sent you an article from Buttafly.com!"
THURSDAY
About 3,000 Google searches later I determine that SBC has prevented me from sending email from non-SBC accounts. It's a free feature that comes with their DSL package called "Surprise! We Started Blocking Port 25 and Didn't Tell You About It!"I dig out my last bill and call the 800 number for tech support. An automated message tells me that the number has been changed to a 900 number and it will cost $19 to call it. I curse SBC and vow to switch to cable as soon as possible but decide to go ahead and pay the ridiculous fee to get them to stop blocking the port on my account. After one ring I hear a garbled recording of some music and a woman talking in a low, husky voice. I decide I like the new ambiance of the tech support line. Nice touch. As usual I'm tuning out what she's saying and just waiting to hear what number I need to push if I'm using Windows. But then I hear something about "pleasure" and "fantasies" and realize that I am probably not on the phone with SBC. So, $19 later, I see that I transposed the last two digits of SBC's 800 number.
Anyway, I'll spare you the rest of the story since it just involves a lot of listening to hold music and trying to understand SBC tech support over a patchy connection to India just to have them tell me I can't make that request over the phone. But I think that you will all agree that I am just not meant to use email anymore.
Meanwhile, until I get set up with smoke signals or carrier pigeons or something, those of you who know me might want to keep me off emails sent to multiple recipients for a while since my tendency to talk smack doesn't mix well with the new placement of my Reply to All button.
A Christmas shout-out
It's been an amazing year in the blogosphere, especially if you read the blogs I do. I've been following the witty-and-yet-heartbreaking-at-the-same-time writing of Getupgrrl, Julie, Karen, and Tertia for the past year and often find myself laughing and crying at the same time as they've detailed their experiences. (For those of you who don't read these blogs, you should start. Click on those links and read through the archives. It's powerful stuff. And you'll never look at a speculum the same way again.)
I've never been a big fan of blogs and think that 99.99% of them suck, but I have to say that I follow these chicks' blogs religiously. In fact, one of many reasons I haven't updated my own site this month is because I've just been sitting at my computer hitting Refresh on A Little Pregnant and Chez Miscarriage to make sure that Julie's baby and Grrl's pregnancy are still okay.
So in the spirit of the season and writing an entire post without bitching about anything for once, I send my warmest Christmas and holiday wishes to Julie, Karen, Tertia and Grrl. I sincerely wish you all the best in '05. Thanks for making an internet connection worth having.
Beware of blog
Oh, yeah. This thing. I've been spending so much time reading other people's blogs that I kind of forgot about my own. Besides, lately I haven't had any opinions other than "sleep is so amazingly wonderful and overrated. I miss it."
The main blog I've been keeping up with is my husband's. He finally got his own site since he loves to talk about politics and economics and other stuff that I deemed too boring for any of my sites. International free trade agreements? Who cares! Fat Joe videos? Now that's fascinating stuff.
Anyway, I need to keep up with his site since it seems that everyone else we know is reading it. We know this by the volume of email he's received from people we know who've found the site. (Tip: If you're ever not getting enough email and want to fill up your inbox quickly, start a political blog and tell your friends about it.)
Continue reading "Beware of blog"Welcome Fat Joe fans: a review of search terms
I was looking through my stats at the search terms that led people to this site. About 40% of them referenced Fat Joe in one way or the other. Glad I can be of service. For your amusement, below is a list of some of my other favorites:
man getting hit in the balls video
"lean back" video ho
gordon`s fishsticks
macarena america`s home videos footage
how to do the rockaway dance moves
britney spears + objectification
xxx flash games fun
pregnant women and cat turd
what is rockaway
fat joe moving to mars
effect of worms in pregnancy
'pants falling down'
can i call you tiger? rowr.
girls gone wild-crew t-shirts
women lifting video
Clearly my site is attracting the crème de la crème of the internet.
I don't hate CSS
After all that bitching, it turns out that the Mozilla problem was with HTML, not CSS. I officially retract my denouncement of the lovely Cascading Style Sheets.
For those of you who care, I had a comment that had a lot of dashes in it and for some reason Mozilla therefore didn't recognize the end of the comment.
WRONG: <!------------------------------ Mozilla hates this -->
RIGHT: <!-------- now Mozilla is happy -->
By the way, this has been a blessing in disguise because it forced me to install Firefox. I have to say, it's awesome. If you use IE you should really consider getting it. It only takes about two minutes to install, and it's free. The only downside is that it feels kind of lonely to surf the web without all the spyware and viruses.
I hate CSS
OK, I just found out that my site looks like this on Mozilla. Which makes me seriously unhappy, because it's supposed to look like this.
This is all because I suck at CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). For those of you who are fortunate enough not to be familiar with it, CSS is a sort of add-on to HTML that was created for the specific purpose of giving me a headache. Unlike good 'ol HTML, pretty much every browser interprets every CSS tag differently, so when asshats like me attempt to design their own sites using this language (which Movable Type requires) it ends up looking like crap in every browser except for the one I use.
So...would you guys do me a favor and write a comment telling me if my blog looks anything like this to you? Hopefully this screenshot will look somewhat familiar to you. I'm seriously hoping that I don't have a bunch of Firefox or Netscape 2.1 readers here. I'm hoping that, like me, all of my readers dutifully support The Man and use IE on Windows so that I don't have to try to redesign my entire site with one hand as I hold the baby all day.
Thanks.
Pardon the interruption...
I will be upgrading my version of Movable Type this week. I needed to upgrade since I wore out my current version with the constant updating. Ha-ha. Actually it's an attempt to combat the spammers. So if the site is down at any point check back soon.
Meanwhile, the baby is still waking every two hours round the clock so I'm still not coherent enough to post about anything other than late-night infomercials and what I watched on the Food Network today. Hopefully I'll be able to resume my frequent posts about important topics like spam and nail polish in a couple of weeks.
Tons and tons of great links
Well, I am officially past my due date. Therefore I am now going to focus 100% of my mental energy on complaining about being past my due date and wondering when I'll go into labor, which will leave little time for updating the blog for the next week or two. So I've decided to post a collection of my favorite links that should keep you from doing anything productive until I can start updating again.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Every good collection of links should begin with stuff from the Best of Craigslist, the famous message board where people post a little bit of everything.
- "Careful, Poop on there!"
- Thoughts on "secret Santas"
- "PERSONAL JET PACK!!"
- An important lesson about booze and porn
Next move on to Brad the Game. Don't miss the cast of characters. (My husband does not see what is funny about this at all. I think it's pure genius.)
Now spend a bit of time clicking around The Brick Testament to remind yourself that there are people in the world who have even more time on their hands than you do.
Use the Anagram Generator to discover that "Inject Non" and "Con Jet Inn" are anagrams of "Jen N Tonic".
Brace yourself for the grisly photos of When Office Supplies Attack, courtesy of Ze Frank, whose site is a regular treasure trove of procrastination:
It's time to dive into David Still's inbox. Send an email to anyone from David Still (yes, it really works). Then read through some of the replies he's gotten and write them back as David.
Time for a drink. Make sure you know your Colt 45 from your Schlitz with this handy guide.
I hope you have your can of Schlitz handy, because this game that guesses the sitcom character or dictator you're thinking of is really going to freak you out.
Fun with Google: have a Google Fight, then use Googlism to find out what Google thinks about you, your friends, or anything else.
Don't play this game. The goal is to make an unbroken chain between the two white sides of the board. It can't be done. I am a very angry person when I'm on this page. Play one of these classic Flash games instead.
And, finally, find out what kind of people respond to online personal ads placed by "metalchick" (scroll down for responses).
OK, that should keep you busy until I'm updating again. As always, thanks for reading.
"If you write it, they will bitch."
A friend who is considering starting a blog asked me if I had any tips from my experience with Buttafly and this blog. The only thing I could think of was this: "If you write it, they will bitch." There are a lot of sensitive, angry little people in the world, and they all have internet access. There is no subject too pointless, no topic too ridiculous that you won't offend somebody by writing about it.
For those of you who have any doubts about that statement, read the comments from my posts about Tiffany and Fat Joe. Yes. It's true. There are people who get hysterical when you talk about 80s teen idols and Top-40 pop rappers. (One of my friends asked if I wrote those myself to have something to talk about. I swear, I did not. These people actually exist.) The best part is that for some reason these people tend to come back, thus providing endless entertainment for the rest of us. One wonders what the thought process is here. Perhaps: "I must now check this blog hourly so that I can jump in if she dares to speak of P.Diddy!"
And the offending message doesn't even have to come from you directly. You wouldn't believe how upset some people can get by a talking coffee cup, as I found out when I first posted the Oracle of Starbucks. For a while my name wasn't on it as author so people would write the Oracle directly. Some emails were just filled with expletives, some were stern admonishments that the Oracle's predictions were offensive, but my favorites were the ones that filled a couple pages telling the Oracle how completely inaccurate his assessment of their personality was. I realized then that if a picture of a coffee cup with a face drawn on it powered by a crappy PHP script could send people through the roof, anything was possible.
I like to think of this blog as a sort of living monument to that concept. One of the downsides of Buttafly is that other readers can't see all the emails I get. But thanks to Movable Type's fabulous comments feature it's like sharing my inbox with all my readers. The good, the bad, and the you-just-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it.
I'm really starting to like this whole blogging thing.
A post for Azura
I spent a little bit more time on Azura's site today and realized that BlueRook didn't even find all the plagiarized entries -- almost every single post she's made lately was originally from my site:
Since everything I write eventually appears on her site, I created this one just for her. This way she can copy and paste it in its entirety and not spend her valuable time changing a few words here and there to make it seem more unique to her.
==========================
[Begin copying and pasting below]
So the other day I was hanging out with some of my peeps in the AOL chat room and posting a few messages to the Justin Timberlake fan forums and my mom was all like "you need to clean your room" and I was like "plz, w/e" so NEway I went to make a post to my blog but realized that I have no life and nothing to say (LOL) so I went to Little Yellow Different and ripped off some posts from Ernie.
So last night I was going to post to my blog again so I went to LYD again to get some "new" material LOL but then I realized that that wouldn't work cos he actually has a job and does something productive w/ his life so the stuff he writes about wouldn't apply to me at all. Then I was like "I need to find a blogger who sucks and doesn't have a job and writes about pointless bullshit so that it'll sound like my life when I rip off all their posts" and I was like OMG Jen N Tonic would be perfect for that! So ever since then whenever I want to write something to my blog I just go to jenntonic.com and copy and paste one of her posts. To save myself some time I might eventually just have my site automatically redirect to hers and just ask her to put up my photo in place of her own. That's it for now. TTYL!
Ah, plagiarism
Look at this cool collage I put together! It's some pics of me and my pals, just chillin' and keepin' it real. I put a lot of work into this to reflect my originality. I thought the funky sun in the middle there was a nice touch.
Actually, this is not my collage. It just felt kind of good to take credit for someone else's work who is currently passing off my work as her own. Does this remind you of this at all? Or this and these two? Big thanks to BlueRook for pointing this out.
This is not the first time I've been plagiarized. I found my Friendster article on about four different sites a few months ago, each claiming it as their own. That was more fun though because they were using the images on my server (morons) so I replaced the images with really offensive stuff, thus horrifying their visitors until they noticed and took it down.
What is wrong with people?
Spam drama
This week I had the privilege of receiving a spam email that was sent to a distribution list that I was involuntarily put on and cannot unsubscribe from. Normally I would not exactly consider this a privilege. However, the fact that this was an unsecured list so any time anyone replied it would go out to the whole group, and there were a lot of morons on there who a) don't understand how email works and b) didn't know they were on the list, combined to make my junk mail folder its own little reality show.
There was the man who just had to reply and let everyone know that he uses Linux, a few people who just wanted to say howdy to the other nice folks on the list, the woman who decided that this would be a great networking opportunity and posted her resume ("I just hired a new employee who I met through a virus email!"), and a man named Jim whose mental state deteriorated with every new reply.
I have condensed the 50+ emails I received as part of this debacle into one thread for your viewing pleasure. Email addresses have been removed to protect the idiots. I mean, "innocent."
Best if read from the bottom up:
Continue reading "Spam drama"Just when you think you have a cool domain name...
I've always loved Buttafly as a name for a website. Though I sound slightly like an asshat when I say it in polite conversation, I generally like the ring of it. (Some sophisticated person at a cocktail party: "My website is a political forum called IndependenceAndReason.com. What's yours?" Me: "Uhh, Buttafly.com" Them: "Ah, Butterfly, how lovely." Me: "No, Butt-a-fly." Them: [Pretends to see someone they know and quickly walks away]).
Also, I've always thought that Register.com's algorithm for generating alternate domain names if the one you wanted is taken is pretty accurate. For example, if you try to register WomensClothes.com and it is taken, it might suggest the available domains WomensFashion.com or GirlsClothes.com instead. Good stuff. They clearly have an accurate system for understanding what your site is about based on the domain name.
Well, because I'm incredibly anal retentive, I recently tried to register Buttafly.com just to make sure it wouldn't let me (I need a hobby, I know). It did show up as taken, and I was just about to close the browser when I happened to see Register's alternate suggestions for my domain name. I don't know what I would have expected the alternate suggestions to be. WittyFunnyGreatSite.com or FascinatingWritingByJennifer.com would be too much to hope for, but this? Their suggestions were:
ass-a-fly.com
rear-a-fly.com
fly-a-butt.com
a-butt-fly.com
...And the .net and .us versions of all these gems were available as well. My initial reaction was to be pissed at their crappy algorithm for offering such base, insulting suggestions. Then again, this is a website that I have used as a forum to turn gangsta rap lyrics into PHP code, analyze the French translation of Doggy Dog World, refer to Native American transvestite midgets, and post a survey asking visitors to rank various reasons why I should kill myself over the crappiness of my site.
Perhaps the algorithm is just really, really advanced.
Norton AntiVirus vs. actually having a virus: a feature comparison
90% of the time my computer does something that drives me insane and/or makes me think I have a virus, I eventually discover that the annoyance in question was actually caused by Norton AntiVirus. (The other 10% of the time the culprit is my wireless card, the Netgear WG511T -- NEVER buy this.)
Just this afternoon I spent an hour sifting through arcane server logs to try to determine why I had no access to email. Alas, I disabled Norton and my email problems disappeared. It seems that Norton had detected that one of the emails on the server contained the MyDoom virus, so it shut down access to email with no warning or message explaining what it had done.
That got me thinking...so what if I actually got the MyDoom virus? Would it be that bad? Hell, if it didn't shut down my access to email I might prefer it to Norton. I did a bit of research and put together a feature comparison matrix for Norton and two popular viruses, SoBig and MyDoom.
| FEATURES | W32. SoBig.F |
W32. MyDoom.B | Norton AntiVirus + Internet Security |
| Blocks random images in IE and Netscape by making them look like broken image links, thus causing you to look like an asshat when you email webmasters to tell them their images aren't loading |  |
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| Disrupts workflow by popping up message box every time an email is sent | |
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| Causes email to lag while sending; this delay is noticeably longer when the email is important and must go out immediately | |
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| Occasionally disables email altogether with no warning or explanation, making your sys admin hate you after repeated calls telling him that the server is down when it is actually just fine | |
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| Subtracts $60.00 from your checking account | |
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| Occasionally disables internet connection with no warning or explanation, leaving you to wonder what the hell's going on | |
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| Pops up warnings every time you open an application that accesses the internet | |
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| Causes 20 - 30 second delay each time Windows starts up | |
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| May slow browser | |
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| Contacts remote servers | |
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| Tries to crash Microsoft and SCO's websites | |
Hungry Like the Wolfowitz
My husband and I stayed up until 5am the other night trying to think of titles for this blog. In my tired deliriousness I settled on Jen N Tonic. A pretty damn good decision, considering the alternatives:
touched by an angle
jen n juice
kill me now
giddyup
dolphin sandwich
disgruntled ninja
lemme holla at y'all for a minute
it doesn't take a village
15 minutes of lame
i did not have sex with that womyn
hate is sometimes a family value
hungry like the wolfowitz
ouch! that's my ear!
i have some bad news for you...
catshit surprise
good with the lady-boys
I don't know if I'm proud or embarrassed that there was no alcohol involved in the creation of this list.