I can see my house from here
Google’s got yet another service you didn’t know you wanted, but now won’t stop using.
From the Google site:
Google Earth combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world’s geographic information at your fingertips.
Man, if Google were Microsoft, I’d be scared silly.
Take a look for yourself: http://earth.google.com.
A “new to me” entertaining Firefox time-waster
Quite by accident this morning, I discovered a neat Firefox feature that many of you probably already know: Typing random mishmash directly into the address bar of Firefox can transport you to magical worlds. Or at least to similarly random Web sites.
Turns out the address bar acts like Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button when you don’t enter a valid address. Typing in “turdhead” for instance, will bring you right to this page. Typing “George Bush” will take you to www.whitehouse.gov.
Strangely, typing my own name resulted in my browser’s transporting to a list of gay comics. Crap, didn’t see that one coming!
Even more new anti-spam measures in place
In my never-ending quest to fill the lives of professional spammers and other lowlifes with heartbreak and disease, I’m now testing a couple of new comment-spam blocking routines that I’ve developed for Turdhead.com. If you have trouble leaving comments, please let me know.
Although Turdhead.com readers never see the spam, I’m inundated with it daily (comments that look like spam have always been forwarded to me for final approval), and it makes it difficult to moderate the site while combing through the queue hunting for real comments. Thus, I’ve decided to let the robots do my bidding: From now on, if it even looks like spam, I simply don’t want to bother with it. Phasers are now set to destroy.
If anybody else running WordPress 1.2 would like to modify their own site to allow this functionality, feel free to drop me a line, and I’ll send you the routines I’ve come up with. Meanwhirl, the comment forms are — and always will be — open.
Thanks,
VeryVito
Turdhead has a birthday!
Wow. Time flies when you’re avoiding real work! I just realized that last week marked the one-year anniversary of the birth of Turdhead.com.
It was one year ago that Li’l Johnny stole the hearts of millions in what turned out to be the one-and-only Flash game we’ve published so far. Regardless, we’ve been surprised by the reception we’ve had, and as part of a self-indulgent look back, we’ll list a few milestones of which we’re pretty proud:
- Li’l Johhny’s World Tour Within days of it release, links to Li’l Johnny’s Aquarium Adventure appeared on ilovebacon.com, albinoblacksheep.com and jengajam.com. By the years end, it was the leading game in Yahoo! UK and Ireland’s 2004 Office Attachments Awards voting.
- The ActionScript Jabberwocky In August, we posted The ActionScript Jabberwocky, an unassuming piece of code/poetry that got its 15 minutes of fame after it was featured on slashdot.org. Eventually, the piece even got notice in USAToday’s online edition and spawned…
- The ActionScript Poetry Contest Inspired by the success of the ActionScript Jabberwocky (and trying desperately to cling to our former glory), Turdhead announced its first annual ActionScript poetry contest in February. The winner was announced in April.
- Multiple Sclerosis fund drive From July – September, we donated the profits from sales of our Jabberwocky paraphernalia to support my girlfriend’s fund-raising efforts in the fight against multiple sclerosis. Although our contribution was modest, she met her goal for the MS 150 fun drive, and I still thank you guys for that.
There were other high points (and low points), but overall, we consider it a successful year (feel free to browse the archives!), and we look foward to many more!
Thanks, everybody!
– VeryVito
Spammers, please introduce yourselves
So I spent another ridiculous amount of my weekend trying to figure out how to stop spammers from hosing Turdhead.com again. The latest wave of septic sludge from these lowlifes has been cluttering the comment in-box for a week now.
You never see it, but I sure do. Every time I log in to moderate comments, I’m greeted with dozens of offers to browse listings for mortgage renewals, Viagara prescriptions and poker tournaments. The best part is that nowadays, the corpse-eating pedophiles (I mean, um, “search engine optimization professionals”) that send this stuff aren’t even linking to their own sites: Their spam scripts are just sending the words “poker” and “penis” a hundred times, inviting readers to search for the terms on Google. In other words, they’re not even really advertising: They’re just annoying administrators now.
And their message isn’t even getting to Turdhead.com readers anyway (Note to spammers: We moderate comments, damn it! Quit wasting all our time!).
So now I’ve decided to appeal to Turdhead.com readers:
If any of you personally know an individual or company that spends their time doing such meaningless activity, please let me know. I’d like to interview them and find out what exactly they hope to gain. It’ll be an objective interview, I promise.
Really, I won’t kill them. Honest.