Thanks for sharing this post, I found this article while googling for some information on SQL, useful comments and great points made.

The title of the blog post in question? Apple Inspired by Disney from 2004. The topic? How what looks like a FireWire logo is in the floor of the ship in Flight of the Navigator. I doubt that post came up while googling for SQL info. What’s even more perplexing is the link provided by the spammer: www.musiclyricsnow.net/j/jayz/forever-young/

So, spammers & SEO idiots — still not awesome.

GrandPiano…

Hello I bookmarked this site. Thanks heaps for this!… if anyone else has anything, it would be much appreciated. Great website Super Pianoforte Links http://www.en.Grand-Pianos.org Enjoy!…

So here’s the deal… Mr. Piano Douche (as I’ve now dubbed him, though his real name is Tomasz Michalowski¹ according to his WHOIS lookup) seems to post everything from the IP 93.89.194.8. So if you want to block him, goto Settings:Discussion. There’s a blacklist at the bottom enter that IP on one line and “grand-pianos.org” on another (just in case his IP changes).

Oh, and Mr. Piano Douche, if you’re reading this, go to hell with all the other obnoxious spammers!

1. And according to Google, there may be many people with this same name.

Take the typical blog (like this one you’re reading right now, fascinating, right?), newer posts are usually above older posts. So if you wish to read chronologically, you must read bottom-top. But for the most part, that’s not a big deal as you’re still reading a large block of information.

Where this backwards way of reading really gets annoying are services like Twitter and Facebook (and now comment threads on Gaweker sites like Lifehacker). In this situation you’re reading small snippets of information. If you’re only concerned with what’s happening right now, it’s not that big a deal. But if you want to read chronologically to get a sense of the larger conversation, it’s a down-right pain in the ass:

Reading an entire page like that is tiring. It’s downright backwards. So I pose this simple question: why don’t these services offer a chronological view? And even more, why don’t third-party applications like Twitterrific offer a chronological view?

Am I in the minority on this or does it just make sense?

• I can get my website listed on Google!
• I pay too much for software.
• My watch says a lot about me.
• I should eat more acai berries.
• Despite already having a BA, I need to get my degree online… in any field!
• I should stop paying so much for watches.
• My sperm count is low and there’s a handy medicine to fix that!
• I need a new watch.

I really don’t know what it is about watches, but that’s overtaken V1@6ra in my junk folder.

We don’t believe used games are in the best interest of the consumer. We have products that consumers want to hold onto.
[...]
Used books have never taken off. You don’t see businesses selling used music CDs or used DVDs.

I understand the point of view from the games companies. Used games mean people are buying games without the publisher getting a piece of the pie. But they’re not in the interest of the consumer? That last bit is just to show how out-of-touch Reggie might be. There are entire businesses selling used books, CDs, and DVDs. I know. I’ve been to them. I’m even — dare I say it — a customer of such stores! Oh, the horror!

Let’s look at it this way. A customer plays a game. They finish it… to the end. (Or, much to the dismay of Reggie they *gasp* might not like the game that much. More on that later.) That game can then either sit on a shelf and gather dust, with maybe the occasional play for old-times-sake.  Or, that game can be sold (either directly, or through a used-game business) to someone who wants that game.¹ The game actually get used, and it’s producing less waste as only one copy of the disc (and packaging) is used instead of two.

To me, that sounds like a pretty good deal for both consumers involved.

I believe what Reggie takes greater offence to is the very idea that someone might no-longer wish to own one of their games. “The consumer likes having a brand-new experience and reliving it over and over again,” he says. Now think about that. I’ll even repeat that in a quote block so you might re-read it:

The consumer likes having a brand-new experience and reliving it over and over again.

Did you catch that? In case you didn’t, let me break it down.

• “The consumer likes having a brand-new experience…” Okay, they like to experience new things. I get that.
• “…and reliving it over and over again.” But wait, I thought you just said they like new things?
• If they’re reliving said things, they’re not new anymore.
• If they’re not new, wouldn’t the consumer want to go and find something new?
• If they’re experiencing something new, do they have a use for their previous experience (game) outside of nostalgia?
• If they don’t have a use for it, why can’t they let someone else use it (for a price) to whom the experience would be new?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I still have a few of the games I completed. But most, I sell. Zelda: Twilight Princess? Beaten (by both me and the wife… yes, I have a wife). Sold on Craigslist. Super Paper Mario? Beaten, sold. Super Mario Galaxy²? Guess. I enjoyed those games thoroughly (especially Zelda). But I was done. I moved on. There’s no reason for me to keep them. Other games like Smash Bros. Brawl³, I keep as it has greater replay value. Though that can also be argued that the replay value of multi-player games like that does provide a “new experience,” and therefore not old yet.

In the end, the used games industry might not be a good deal for someone, but that someone is the publisher, not the consumer.

1. This is the First-Sale Doctrine.
2. Side note: what’s next? Super Mario Universe? That’s just silly.
3. Yes, these are all Nintendo games. That’s kind of the point.

Now, I’m all for having social-network links in blog posts. Hell, you’ll notice them below posts on this site. I think these links should be there if you need them, but pretty unobtrusive. I like to think they’re pretty subtle here. Hongkiat, apparently, has a different opinion:

This is what we call whoring. That image is only slightly narrower than the content column. The thing was (relatively) huge!  At least it wasn’t an insane list of sites a mile long, such as Real Tech News a few years ago. (The image was made for a fark post a long time ago. They’ve gotten much better since then.)

Remember kids, Sharing is Caring™, until you force the diabetic kid to eat a Twinkie because you think it’s good for him.

For the most part, this looks like a decent redesign. However, two things that might get on my nerves:

Stream

The stream shows you all posts from your friends in real-time. This keeps you up to date on everything that’s happening. You can control who appears here.

I’m glad I can control what’s there, but I don’t want to see everything my friends are doing in real time. This is called a fire hose. I hope I can still control what types of posts show up.

Highlights

Featured photos, events, notes and more that you don’t want to miss. Stories are chosen based on what your friends have interacted with.

Notice the ‘featured’ part. I can almost guarantee that means ’sponsored.’¹ Great, so if some people on my friends list decide they like some shitty band, I’m going to get ads highlights about it. Why not base it on what I interact with?

Lastly, it pretty much goes without saying that FB Duct Tape will no longer work on this page.

1. And if not, how does something my friends post get chosen to be ‘featured?’

• Convo
• Za (as in pizza)
• Webinar
• Lifestream
• Funnest
• Natch
• Vaycay
• Staycation

And I’d like to add to that (in no particular order):

• Webisode (It doesn’t matter if it’s on TV, the radio or the Internet, it’s still a fucking episode.)
• Esurance (Shut the hell up already!)
• Mancation (What, it’s a different vacation if men are involved?)
• Blogosphere
• Manscaping (No, just… NO!)
• Guestimate
• Web 2.0 (Can we just upgrade to Web 3.0 and be done with it?)
• Long-tail
• Synergy
• Beta (Sorry Google, you have officially diluted the meaning of this word.)

• Bassnectar (dubstep/glitch/hip hop/IDM)
  
• Burial (dubstep)
  
• DJ? Acucrack (electronic)
• Mike Doughty (of former Soul Coughing) (alternative/indie)
• edIT (glitch/hip hop)
• Glitch Mob (glitch/hip hop)
• Modeselektor (electronic)
• Ratatat (electronic/post-rock)
• Simian Mobile Disco (electronic)
• Switches (alternative/indie rock)

If you disagree, tough.

What I wanted to hide and why:

• “People You May Know” — Lately, this has turned into “People you probably don’t know, but were have the same town and are 10-12 years younger than you!” and “People who live in the same city!”
• Invite Friends — I’m not going to bug people to join Facebook.
• Find Friends — I don’t want to import my IM and Gmail address book.
• Maybe sponsors and ads? — This is really a maybe. At first, I really wanted to block them, but then ads for Threadless started showing up. For now, I’ve just taken to “thumbing down” ads that I have no interest in.

When all was said and done, I had a much cleaner interface:

How I did it

Since I already had Adblock installed, I figured I would start there. The nice thing about Adblock now is that it can block based on CSS selectors. Now, you don’t need to know what that means, only how it works. In Facebook, for example, the “People You May Know” section is labeled as “pymk” in the source code (div.pymk) and the “Find Friends” is identified as, oddly enough, “findfriends” (div#findfriends)¹.

You may be saying “so great, but how do how do I block them?” Well, here’s how: Open up your Adblock filters. Here’s what I currently use (which you can download as an Adblock Filterset, which also includes blocking the beacon):

• ##div.pymk
• ##div.invitefriends
• ##div#findfriends
• ##div.adcolumn (if you really want to block ads)
• ##div#home_sponsor (because most of the time, it’s just a Facebook ad)

If there’s something else you want to block on the page, get ready to get your hands dirty. Goto View:Page Source, then do a search for the text in or near what you want to block. You should see something that looks like<div id=”somethingorother”>. Great, that “somethingorother” is what you need. Since this is an ID, we’d use this format in our filter: “##div#somethingorother”. If it was instead <div class=”somethingorother”> it would be “##div.somethingorother”.

But sometimes Facebook can try to confuse you.  For example, the “People you may know” section actually had two classes, “sidebar_item” and “pymk.” In this case, it was easy to figure out which one to use. (Had I used “sidebar_item,” I would have blocked other things, too.

Now, this might not be worth the hastle for you. That’s fine. There’s other ways. If you have the Stylish plugin (mentioned yesterday) for Firefox, there’a a whole page of easy-to-install scripts that can take care of some of this for you or even change the layout/style of Facebook. Just beware, many of those scrips are outdated and probably won’t work now. Though there is one that caught my eye: Cleanup Facebook. It might do too much for you though, it looks like it hides any non-default app boxes & news feed items as well as ads.

1. The reason the first uses a period and the second uses pound/hash is the first is a class and the second is an ID. This isn’t a technical write-up so I won’t go into too much detail about CSS other than that.