Go Complain on the Internet

As Americans, we’ve grown up being corrected when using the term black to describe an African American. It has been ingrained in our minds to think of black as a derogatory description. Without much thought, the practice of saying African American has been accepted and followed in our daily lives.

Why insist on using the former (African American) rather than the latter (black)? What does it even mean? Should I insist on being called German American? It’s silly. You’re not from Africa any more than I am from Germany. My skin is white and yours is black. The same idea applies to Asian Americans. Aren’t they just Americans too? I guess nobody calls them yellow though. I’m so confused…

Can anyone shed some more light on this subject?

The Angry Black Woman discusses this very subject of racial terminology at length. She brings up a good point: what if a white person, from Africa, immigrates to America? That would make him or her an African American more than it would make a black person an African American. This is quite the thought provoking subject, is it not?

From reading the comments about usage of the phrase Black American, you can see that there are very different perspectives on the matter. It seems that we all agree to be called American. Some prefer to make a distinction between black and Black. I prefer the former, or nixing it completely, because if you start inferring a certain heritage and lifestyle with the color of your skin you’re likely to degenerate into mudslinging.

Is Barack Obama a Black American or a White American? He grew up only knowing White America but he was very much Black. This is why we must avoid the discrepancy and labels based on nothing more than genetic differences to describe a way of life.

Maybe many black people do live a different life than most whites but can we really go as far to say that it is because they are black? If that’s the case, then why are the lifestyles of whites and blacks slowly converging towards one another? Wouldn’t that imply that the skin color is also changing and that is the reason?

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We all know the feeling when you see an article, comic, picture, video or website that piques your interest on Digg and when you go to click the link you see nothing more than “Server Unavailable” in big, black text. As if that isn’t annoying already, you then start looking at the comments to find a mirror. If that isn’t difficult enough to begin with, you have to read the same fucking comment over and over again: “Only 68 diggs and it’s down!!!!?!!”

Thanks very much, Sherlock!

The issue with seeing that comment so often is bothersome because it insinuates the idea that Digg users have not surpassed a point of being mentally handicapped. You see, somewhere along the line, these Diggers got it in their heads that the number of Diggs was tightly correlated with the number of views. Here’s the problem with that logic. If you view the page, video, porn, comic, penis, or whatever and you decide that you don’t like it, you do not Digg it. Therefore there has been one view and zero Diggs. See how this works?

Well, as you might have come to realize over the last few years, an article hitting the front page is drastically different than it being near the front page or even in the upcoming section. Once it hits the front page there may literally be only seconds before thousands of people are frantically making page requests to that server. Not only is it unreasonable to think that everyone should have a Digg-proof server but it’s also unreasonable to think that once it hits the front page, everyone will actually see the content.

For instance, if this blog hits the front page, it will very likely crash immediately before anyone gets the chance to Digg it. So it may be sitting on the front page for a while and meanwhile nobody can even see what the hell it is. Eventually a mirror may pop up and the Diggs may slowly start rising but until then the Digg count is dead in the water.

The moral of this story is that Diggs and site visits aren’t correlated so shut the fish up.

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Internet data mirroring, digg

Chicago is a wonderful city. Where else in the world can you gaze across the panoramic sky at hundreds of gray skyscrapers, watch the city workers nap while on the clock, and pay ridiculous sums of money in taxes and living costs? There is no other place in the United States that offers such beautiful scenery. Like warm weather and sun? That’s a shame because we don’t get any here in Chicago. Instead we get lots of snow and harsh winds here in the Windy City. And I don’t think its ever been “warm” in Chicago; instead we suffer through a series of heat waves during our short, overcast summers.

Chicago truly is one of a kind. So much so that Forbes thought it was the #6 most miserable US city. Though this isn’t based on the appearance of the city by any means. Rather for commute times, weather, crime, taxes and more.

If you are thinking of moving to Chicago, I strongly urge you to reconsider. If you currently living in Chicago, have thought about leaving, but haven’t, may I ask you something? What are you waiting for? Maybe I’m being a little bit harsh. With the highest sales tax in the country and unemployment rates higher than the national average, I must admit there are some very valid reasons for not being able to leave this God forsaken city. Traits like these have won the city of Chicago (and the State of Illinois) many awards including the number 6 spot on Forbes’ list of most expensive American cities. You can probably tell that Forbes is very fond of “Chi-Town.”

If you are lucky enough to be able to afford a car, you get to avoid the trains and the fear of getting mugged. However, owning a car in Chicago has its own downfalls. As many Chicago locals will tell you, the second season in Chicago is road work, in addition to winter of course. With roads narrower than many grandfathers urethra that are littered with pot holes, it is far from ideal for such a populous city.

You would think that with taxes so high, many of the problems could be solved. Of course with corrupt police and a highly corrupt government, not much of anything ever gets done here. Hopefully a younger generation will grow up sick of the corruption in Chicago and do something about it. Luckily for “Crook” county officials, this will probably never happen because young Chicagoans get some of the worst education in the country.

It took me a long time before I got totally fed up with Chicago and decided to move away to Southern Illinois. Strangely, what put me over the edge was my nicotine addiction. I used to smoke at least a pack of cigarettes a day living in Chicago. Of course now that I’ve moved from that wretched and stressful city, I smoke far less.

The one thing I can say I thoroughly enjoyed about Chicago were the bars. There was something strangely comforting about walking into a Chicago bar and getting a smell of the smoke, alcohol, and Italian sausage grease that the obese people of Chicago excrete from their pores. Of course it wasn’t long before they took away my last pleasure of living in Chicago. When the smoking ban went into effect, banning smoking in nearly all public places, including bars, there was no real reason for me to stay in Chicago.

When cigarette prices rose above $7 in Chicago, I was faced with a tough decision. Give up smoking, as it was costing me a fortune, or move. I spent many sleepless nights in bed trying to weigh the pros and cons of living in Chicago.

For many of the same reasons listed earlier in this rant, I decided it was time to pack my bags and leave for greener pastures and to enjoy my oh-so-sweet cancer sticks. That’s right. I’d rather kill myself slowly than spend another day in the city of Chicago.

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You know what really grinds my gears? Those goddamn links that force your browser into an endless dance of someone swinging their dick around in circles to the tune of You Spin Me Right Round by Dead or Alive. The latest implementation of this abomination is www.makemoniesonline.com. Fortunately, I’ve been tricked into clicking this damn thing so many times that I’ve become an expert at quickly closing the browser without ending the task forcefully.

I use Firefox and so should you.

When your browser starts flailing homosexually around your screen, follow this list and you should be safe from the dreaded dick roll:

1. Make sure the browser window is in focus
   • Using alt+tab is the easiest way to do this when the window keeps jumping around away from your mouse
2. Immediately press Ctrl+F4
   • This will attempt to close the current tab that is open, which is the swinging dick of course.
3. Hold Enter or Escape
   • Usually a Javascript alert will appear and will continue to be on your screen until you get through the entirety of the song or whatever is happening. The last popup will be a Continue or Exit screen usually. If you hold down Enter or Escape, one will keep you on the page and one will close it. It usually changes, so its easiest to just hold down one of the keys and if it works, good, if not, then hold down the other when it starts over.
4. Be careful for “clicking” the link again
   • When you hold Enter to close all of the alerts, sometimes the page will close, only to take you back to your previous page where you clicked the link. If this happens, the link will probably be in focus while you’re holding down the Enter button. This case will bring up the link again and you’ll have to start over. So if you see this happening, you can hold Enter for a while and then slow down and go one by one towards the end.

Good luck. May your days be dick roll free.

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Internet dick roll, make monies online

GTalk pisses me off because it won’t stop blinking. I decided to go complain on the internet because nobody in “real life” gives a hoot.

If you don’t know what Gtalk is, you can find it in your Google email account on the sidebar where it says “chat” (yes, very tricky). It’s really useful because it incorporates AIM into it so I can chat online with babes all day without ever needing to open an application — well, other than Firefox. The titlebar (or tab) of the browser blinks when you receive a new message. This feature is very handy so you don’t forget about your chat windows or you don’t waste precious time checking the tab or window every 13 seconds.

The issue at hand is the fact that the window or tab also blinks when you’ve already read your most recent messages. It sort of dilutes the usefulness of the original feature. Sadly, this hasn’t been fixed yet and it’s a bit depressing. The chat works very nicely other than that.

Google, you’re an embryonic rockabilly polkadotted fighter pilot! Silly Google!

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