Tech geek flame warz

Flame wars take wildly various shapes depending on the nature of the forum, but the bottom line is usually the same: one poster believes “A,” the next poster says anyone who believes in “A” is an idiot, and the war is on*.

On my ENT forum, folks have fought over the age at which septoplasty is a safe operation; more recently, there was a big stink over one poster’s anti-Christian sig line. On Karen’s ArachnoBoards forum, arguments range from the sublime (bickering over the finer points of tarantula cladistics) to the ridiculous (“My spider bit me!” “Really? You’d have to be an idiot to get bitten!”) It always boils down to the same thing.

You’re stupid.

No, you’re stupid.

Only a stupid person would come up with such a lame response.

What amazes me: no matter how genuinely, ridiculously, and undeniably STUPID an idea might be, someone, usually several someones, will adopt that idea and defend it to his last breath. Case in point: high def TV aficionados and their high-priced power cords.

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I need to learn how to do this

Boogie Nights — Star Wars Edition.

And I’ll bet many of you thought my LOLPOTTS! post scraped the bottom of the juvenile humor barrel. Hah! You don’t know how deep my barrel goes.

I’d love to learn how to make a video mashup. I tried googling “video mashup tutorial” and found out that “mashup” has many meanings. And why can’t programmers speak Idiot like me? Hey! “Mashups for Idiots” — maybe that’s what I need to google.

I have a meeting from hell tonight. See ya later.

D.

Computer me literate not

I had to laugh when, in a recent email, Eugie Foster rejoiced over me being a WordPress blogger. She thought I might be able to bail her out of certain problems she’s having with The Fix’s reviewer interface.

But if you had a moment, I’d appreciate any insight you had that would keep me from having to wade into the code and hack it up from scratch.

And a moment later she’s talking about tweaking Stylesheets, like that’s something I know how to do. I guess I’m flattered. And I guess this makes me more sympathetic to my patients who greet me with blank looks when I lapse into Medicalese.

Anyway, I’m wondering whether to upgrade to WordPress 2.3, but I don’t understand what any of the improvements mean. Not a single one. How can I appreciate native tagging support when I don’t know what a tag is? What are canonical URLs? And what is TinyMCE? It sounds like a midget rapper.

And I’m sure this post of Dean’s is funny, but I don’t even have the knowledge base to make a mistake like that, let alone understand why it’s so moronic.

Bottom line? All I want from WordPress is the ability to post videos. Lyvvie figured it out. Time for me to try, too.

D.

Sauna come-ons I can handle

It’s all these pokes, vampire bites, pirate invitations, zombie attacks, and naughty gifts I can’t manage. Facebook is stressing me out.

First, the sauna story. It’s not much of a story. In fact, if you don’t know my brother-in-law, I doubt it’s any kind of story at all. Well, here, try this: conjure in your mind the most macho homophobe you know. Good. Keep that image in sharp focus.

Karen’s brother managed the Y nearest my med school. Back then, I wasn’t much for exercise. I would go maybe once a week during an “active” phase, ignore the gym for months at a time, faithfully pay my membership dues — what a waste. When I did haul my flabby ass to the Y, I liked to lounge around in the sauna. I figured the heat would get my heart rate up into that critical target zone. Twenty minutes of that and my work was done.

One evening, I became aware of funny noises emanating from the only other person in the sauna. Slippery noises. Pud-pounding noises. As I left, I took note of a towel around the man’s waist and what appeared to be a busy hand.

Was this a come-on? Who knows. I was a little uncomfortable (although, unlike Tucker Carlson, I didn’t bring any of my med school buddies back with me to rough the guy up), so I left. No, the funny part came when I told my brother-in-law. He managed the joint, so I figured he would want to know so that he could tell the janitors to do some extra cleaning.

Okay, I’m lying. I knew he would have a fit and I was eager to see him unravel.

He wanted a physical description of the guy. Was he tall? Short? Old? Young? What color was his hair?

Sorry, man. I wasn’t looking that close.

Come on, I’m telling you, this is important. Everyone signs in. If you can think of any identifying information, we can figure out who it was . . .

On and on, way past the point of funny. I never could give him any info besides, “I’m pretty sure it was a guy.” I suspect the not-knowing drove him mad. Not long after, he began managing a different local Y.

Anyway, about Facebook. What is all this stuff? Every time I show up, there’s a half dozen new invitations. SxKitten and Dean keep biting me. Can’t they bite each other? And they want me to be a pirate, too, them and Da Nator and Cap’n Dyke; and people keep poking me! I get bombed and super-poked. People want me to be honest with them.

The only thing that sounds vaguely interesting: Shaina sent me a naughty gift, but to find out what it is, I have to add Naughty Gifts to my Facebook applications. And to do that, I have to send five naughty gifts to my friends.

Fine. Done. But now I get an error message telling me sorry, Facebook fucks up sometimes, hey, it happens. We’ll let our admin know sometime real soon, ‘kay? So did my friends get their naughty gifts, or not? And why can’t I customize the naughty gifts? WHAT’S THE DAMN POINT IF WE’RE GIVING EACH OTHER THE SAME NAUGHTY GIFTS?

I’m too Type A for Facebook.

D.

Are we having fun jetzt?

Historian Richard Westwood-Brooks is auctioning a collection of Nazi era children’s board games:

The games include Bombers Over England, a form of bagatelle or primitive pinball where players score points for “bombing” British cities, shipping or lighthouses.

Another, based on Snakes and Ladders, sees players take their U-boats from a German port to the Royal Navy base at Scapa Flow, sink British warships and try to make it back home.

Another is a game where players drop weighted paratroopers onto a representation of the English countryside.

You can view a short slide show of pictures of the games here.

Reading these stories, what tickles me is the implication that Nazis were somehow unique, indoctrinating their children so early. Yet there are no shortage of “shooters” out there (games in which the goal is to shoot as many of the enemy as possible), including games targeting, excuse the pun, “Middle East terrorists.” Oh, and don’t forget my #1 Abomination, Left Behind, the Game (in which you target the faithless), currently being enjoyed by our troops in Iraq.

Funny thing, though: Nazis are among the most common human villains in video games nowadays. Guess there’s no question of political incorrectness shootin’ up a bunch of brown shirts. But the Nazis are fighting back . . .

While anti-gaming critics are busy worrying about a mod that sees two fictional characters engaging in consensual sex, a neo-Nazi organisation has released a game designed to promote racial divisions and encourage violent acts against members of ethnic minorities.

The PC first-person shooter is titled Ethnic Cleansing and is published by Resistance Records, which also distributes racist ‘White Power’ music. Resistance Records is owned by the National Alliance, the biggest and most active neo-Nazi group in the US.

Players take on the role of either a skinhead or a Ku Klux Klan member – dressed in full KKK robes and carrying a noose – and explore a city that’s clearly based on New York. The object of the game is to kill black and Latino people, described as “predatory sub-humans”, and their “Jewish masters”.

Read the rest of that article to discover some truly special moments from the game.

This is worrisome: when I read this out loud to my son, his response was, “Yes, but is the game any good?” Oy vey.

D.

Noooooooo!

The main reason I switched from Blogger to WordPress: Blogger crashes; WordPress doesn’t.

But Firefox does. Less often than Netscape, admittedly, but it still crashes. This time, it ate my Thirteen. I was eight deep into my Thirteen; now, somehow, I only have items 1 and 2.

It’s 11 PM and I’m tired. All you’re gonna get is a teaser, folks, a hint of tomorrow’s Friday Fourteen.

D.

Help! My website disappeared.

That would be doctorhoffman.com, not this one, silly.

I can’t remember whom I paid to host that website. I presume I must have lapsed in my payments. Frequently, we get emails from people trying to steal host service from our present server, so I’ve lost track of whom our REAL server is. Oops. I never said I was good at the technical end of this business.

Short of going back through our checkbook, is there any way online to figure out what happened?

D.

Oh, you who are wise in the ways of spam . . .

As some of you know (those of you who snoop the bottom of the page), I use Spam Karma 2 to gobble my spam. And it does a damned fine job of it, too, with one exception: Nokia Ringtones.

I hate these bastards. Somehow, they’ve outwitted my every attempt at blocking them. Daily, I get anywhere from 1 to 30 trackbacks (trackbacks, not comments) from “Super Blog” expressing insightful sentiments like, “Hey nice site” or “Free mosquito ringtone.” Incidentally, I can’t imagine anything more heinous than a mosquito ringtone.

These trackbacks come in from multiple IP addresses, but they’re all from one URL, “Super Blog.” Since they’re trackbacks and not comments, blocking the URL does nothing. I suppose I could block all trackbacks, but then I wouldn’t have anyway of knowing what y’all are saying about me!

Any bright ideas?

D.