Remember the good old days, when if you configured your web browser to remember cookies for a site forever, you wouldn't have to log in again all the fucking time? Gosh, those were the days. Before sites kept a useless shit-ton of server-side session state that they felt the need to constantly expire on you. Or before they decided to log you out every N days for "security" reasons.

Also remember when if you told your web browser to remember your user name and password for web sites, that worked? When people actually used HTTP authentication instead of crazy-assed bullshit involving JavaScript and Flash and turning off autocomplete, because they know better than you? Yeah. Those were the days.

Dear Interweb: fucking knock that shit off.

1. I still don't understand how Twitter is in any way superior to posting one-liners to Livejournal.
2. I'm also not clear on how it's any better (or even any different) than idling on IM.
3. I barely use the thing, but @rstevens said my name the other day, and I immediately got 50+ new followers. Then I mentioned it here in passing and I got 150+ more. I think half of them signed up an account 30 seconds before that. Who the hell are you people? No, don't answer that, I don't really care. Jesus.
4. Those of you who post daily dumps of your twitter messages: fucking knock that shit off. It's annoying.
5. In re point #1, I will now make a policy of posting more one liners to LJ. Possibly even from my phone.

Just for laughs, I took a look at the schedule for the "Web Two Dot Oh Expo" that's invading my fair city next week. Oh, the Humanity.

• "Intro to Blogs & Social Media Marketing 101."
• "What's your enterprise mashup strategy?"
• "Strategic Domain Name Selection for Increasing Traffic and Conversion Rates."
  -- I think they mean "typo-squatting".
• "How to take your search engine optimization skillset to the next level, even if you're already a savvy search marketer."
  -- I'm 99.9% certain this is code for "how to MAKE.MONEY.FAST with a fake spam-blog."

Since the PearLyrics guy gave up, every now and then I look for a new iTunes plugin that downloads and displays lyrics. There are surprisingly few. But I recently came across GimmeSomeTune, which, despite the terrible name, seems reasonable. But I think it gets lyrics only from lyricwiki.org, which means it doesn't have a very big set to choose from. Still, the UI is mostly reasonable, and it has a menubar iTunes controller built in too (I had been using ByteController for that.)

To: MYSPACE
Re: cats or lesbians.

torgo_x takes us on a tour of what it's like to run a 13.5 year old copy of Mosaic Netscape 0.93b on the modern interweb.

There used to be an archive of the old mcom.com pages at dotnetat.net but that's no longer resolving.

BTW, if anyone has a copy of 0.4 for Irix, please give. That was the very first release to ever leave the building, and it's the only one missing from my archives...

This is Facebook:

Also, the same joke but not as funny, except for

The Pancreas sent insulin to Mercutio Ritz's Islets Of Langerhans 11.05am

Dear Lazyweb, is there yet anything better than PearLyrics for getting lyrics into your ID3 tags in bulk?

In case you don't remember, there was this handy program that would display the lyrics of the currently-playing track, and if it didn't have any, would do some searches.

Then, the author got a C+D from Warner and panicked.

Then, in a marketing coup, Warner sent and "apology" for the "tone" of their letter -- but, notably, never told him that he could continue distributing his program. So they got a lot of credulous good press from the bloggoweenies, and still got what they wanted: fewer people having easy access to lyrics.

(Yeah, I'm looking at you, Boing Boing: they didn't change their behavior one whit, and you passed along their insincere press-release apology anyway without ever noting the nakedness of that emperor.)

Anyway.

My copy of PearLyrics seems not to work so well any more, presumably because whatever hardcoded searches are built in to it have gone somewhat stale. Source was never made available, and the author hasn't stopped hiding under his rock.

Is there anything better?

(Yes, I know there are rumors of Apple building this into the iTunes store, but those rumors are two years old, so I'm not holding my breath. Also the current Yahoo offering is worse than useless, which does not bode well for that in any case.)

The Art of Wikigroaning

The premise is quite simple. First, find a useful Wikipedia article that normal people might read. For example, the article called "Knight." Then, find a somehow similar article that is longer, but at the same time, useless to a very large fraction of the population. In this case, we'll go with "Jedi Knight." Open both of the links and compare the lengths of the two articles. Compare not only that, but how well concepts are explored, and the greater professionalism with which the longer article was likely created. Are you looking yet? Get a good, long look. Yeah. Yeeaaah, we know, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. (We're calling it Wikigroaning for a reason.) The next step is to find your own article pair and share it with your friends, who will usually look for their own pairs and you end up spending a good hour or two in a groaning arms race. The game ends after that, usually without any clear winners... but hey, it beats doing work.

I think it's hilarious that this orange truck — CA license plate 4Y84599^* — is going to be parked in front of Google's notional DNA Lounge for (possibly) years, based on how infrequently they update the satellite imagery!

See also:

• Robot Exclusion Protocol;
• Starbucks To Begin Sinister 'Phase Two' Of Operation.

Google Shareholders say "Go right ahead, be evil."

This is the proposal that was rejected. Google's board of directors, and a majority of their shareholders, think the following is a bad idea:

1. Data that can identify individual users should not be hosted in Internet-restricting countries, where political speech can be treated as a crime by the legal system.
2. The company will not engage in pro-active censorship.
3. The company will use all legal means to resist demands for censorship. The company will only comply with such demands if required to do so through legally binding procedures.
4. Users will be clearly informed when the company has acceded to legally binding government requests to filter or otherwise censor content that the user is trying to access.
5. Users should be informed about the company's data retention practices, and the ways in which their data is shared with third parties.
6. The company will document all cases where legally binding censorship requests have been complied with, and that information will be publicly available.

Dear Lazyweb,

The fax machine we have in the office is a piece of shit. Not only is it slow, but I noticed the other day that the cartridge doesn't contain toner, it contains, basically, carbon paper on which everything that the thing has ever printed is easily readable. Wow, that's secure.

There seem to be a zillion services out there that let you send and receive faxes via an email gateway. So many that they clog the googles. Are any of them any good? Do you use one?

I'm hoping for something like: sign up with a service that gives us a new telephone number such that when someone faxes something there, it shows up in my inbox as a PDF or JPEG or something. And likewise, a web page or email address that lets me attach an image that will be delivered to someone else's telephone number.

(Suggestions that involve buying modems and running software locally will be summarily ignored.)

Update: Hey, what do you know: Macs have this shit built in, and it actually just works, out of the box! You just plug the internal modem into a phone line and it'll dump incoming faxes in a folder, print them, and/or email them. And sending faxes is on the Print menu. It's almost like the future.

This is so not what living in the future was supposed to be like. Not even twenty minutes into the future.

Max Headroom Season 1: 7 hr 36 min remaining
Max Headroom Season 2: 64 days 3 hr remaining.

Every time I've ever tried to use BitTorrent for anything, this is how it goes. Based on past experience, I expect that each of these will get to 98.2% and stop there forever.

"Here we have a hyperbolic display of blogs using both the WWE and the ICWSM 2007 data sets.

Green links are one way; blue links are reciprocal. LJ is over the eastern horizon, DailyKos is in the middle, Boing Boing is northeast, and porn is in Japan.