yjblog

So ye good ol’ nonsense rag (uh, Straits Times Interactive) has started charging for access, with their solidly loyal online readership of 2171 subscribers (out of 280,000 registered users).

I’d be a pretty upset web-advertiser if my audience shrunk 10,000% overnight, but, hey — at least the Straits Times got some “news” articles out of it, saving themselves the trouble of actually reporting on things that matter. For example:

• “STI now costs money. Suckahhs!!!@~!”
• “Aren’t we generous, 50% discount for print subscribers!”
• “STI gets first subscriber, OMG OMG”
• “Forum users both complain about and commend STI; see, we can do balanced reporting even if it’s on trivialities”
• “STI will cease to be free tomorrow has already 2171 subscribers! OMG r0×0r $$$$ we r teh w00t”.

(Note that these articles actually did get published, except I can’t link to them so I had to paraphrase just a little for the titles.)

Not to mention giving their graphic designers a great chance to use the ubiquitous Singaporean “BANNED” sign to stamp out the “free” in a “FREE ACCESS” banner.

Going to the site now, you’ll notice that even the headline summary pages aren’t accessible to non-subscribers. All is not lost, though: you can still subscribe to RSS feeds of STI’s headlines (with short summaries) using the old feed addresses. Here are some you can add to your newsfeed client (e.g. NewsFire for Mac, or BlogLines for the web).

• Headline news: http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/mnt/xml/prime.xml
• Singapore news: http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/mnt/xml/singapore.xml
• Forum: http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/mnt/xml/forum.xml

I don’t have addresses for the rest of their sections (really, why would I get world news from ST?) and the RSS page is now subscribers-only, but you can probably guess what they are. Try replacing the URL with world.xml or sports.xml.

One can sign up for the world’s longest email address at this site: http://www.abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz[...]abcdefghijk.com/. It’s too long to even fit on this page.

The site proudly declares on its front page:

It is so long that:

- Some web forms are unable to read your web address

- Some email software cannot be configured

- People have a hard time typing in your email address

- Companies think your email address is fake

… and it’s FREE!

Freeee!! Quick, get one!

Via the Google Blog’s amazing ability to point out people I know from school (it seems everyone I know in CS ended up working there or Microsoft): Lilly gives us a tale of the Google laundry room, washing one’s underwear, and a chance encounter with Colin Powell. Very amusing.

From designer Jon Hicks, who was travelling to SXSW and encountered one of those voice-activated help-lines when calling about his missing bags.

“Please state your last name after the tone I’msorryIdidn’thearthat.”
?!!

“Please state your last name.”
HICKS

“I think you said Hickson. H-i-c-k-s-o-n. Is this correct, please state yes or no”
NO!!

“You said no. Lets try again. Please state your last name”
HICKS

“I think you said Heaters. H-e-a-t-e-r-s. Is this correct, please state yes or no”
NOOOOOOO!!!

“Thankyou, accesssing your records now. (bidee-bidee-bidup-bidee-bidee-bidee). Thankyou for waiting Mr Heaters, your baggage arrived yesterday…”

Poor results for British accent over a voice-recognition system in Texas? Who’d’ve thunk.

I looked at my old website (carefully archived/hidden in the depths of my laptop), and read through the blog-like entries I used to write periodically from 11 April 1998 to 14 July 2000. A few things struck me:

• I used to hand-code and hand-archive these entries in Dreamweaver. After writing each entry as a separate HTML page, I’d insert the code into the combo-box selector for my entries and upload everything to the server using FTP. Was I ever this patient?! What the fuck.
• Perhaps as a result of the hassle, I only uploaded an average of 12 entries a year. However, these entries tended to be a lot more reflective than my current nonsense — my previous post was on USB takoyaki, for goodness’ sake — and I only actually wrote when I had something to write, not when something amused me and I wanted to point it out to my friends and other random visitors (hello!).
• Without a comments or referrer system (such dark, dark ages), I had no clue who was actually reading my stuff; occasionally, someone would surprise me by telling me “That sounds a lot like what you last wrote on your website” and I would go “You mean you actually read that shit?! WHY WHY WHY?!”. (No, really.)
• Nobody called it a “blog” back then, but we’re all tired of hearing about “blogging before the term was even in use”, aren’t we.
• I wrote in a far less restrained manner than I do now. All that youthful exuberance has drained away over the years. Or maybe I’ve started to care about what people think when they read this, given that I know this time that people actually do, umm, read this. And see all my terrible grammar and sentence structures on display, for all to see my terrible sentence grammar. On display. Structure?
• I do like this one line I found, even though I find it very hard to believe I wrote it five years ago: “I still claim very often that my head hurts, because it doesn’t, but I’m sure it should.”

I really won’t post any of my old entries on this site, because… I don’t know why, but I’ll think of a suitably poor reason and neglect to tell anyone. Sorry. Here’s the silly little Photoshop graphic header I made for the old site, though.

I don’t know where I got those random words from. I don’t know where they went, either.

Almost cooler than USB Sushi:

99 more days to ORD! Actually, 14 more days till April 1, at which point I stop having to go back to camp, according to my boss. Unless he’s playing a very cruel and elaborate April Fool’s joke on me.

95 more days till the other countdown begins, though. Sobering.

As I’ve previously mentioned, I manage my unit’s personnel database (with the servicemen’s NRIC, medical PES status, date of birth, phone numbers, etc.) — nominal rolls, in military-speak. Today, my Company Sergeant-Major walked into the office at the end of the day to ask for some manpower info:

CSM: I need someone to help me manage the gym. Can help me find from your nominal rolls someone from the company lines who’s PES C and can make it one?

Me: No problem encik… I send you a list of the PES C people tomorrow (side note: end of the day mah, going home already).

CSM: Eh, must be those can make it one leh.

Me: Aiyah, encik, my nominal rolls don’t have a column for whether someone can make it or not.

CSM: #%@^%*&!!

I’m not sure why this amused me so much.