The Fallenposters Blog

Consumer advocacy blog, The Consumerist, used my photo of a half empty (or is it half full?) peanut butter jar in a post of theirs regarding the peanut butter salmonella scare.  You can see the post here.

The Consumerist has a flickr group wherein readers can submit photos of their own for possible use in posts on The Consumerist.  This is the second time one of my photos has been used.  It makes me feel tingly and special .

I’ve been a big fan of the Post Secret blog for a long time. Now they’ve made a short video showcasing some more of their snail-mail secrets. The site and the video are moving and touching and sometimes funny and disturbing. But it is one of the best things on the internet.

Here’s one good reason why you shouldn’t use Wikipedia as a reliable source for any kind of research:

In the Wikipedia entry for “Melody,” someone obviously added their own take on “what melody does.” I’m sure it will be changed soon, but how many others will visit the entry before it will? Because of this, no one should ever use Wikipedia entries as sources for research. It can be a good jumping off point, but it should never be cited in academic papers at all. Yet people still do it.

Lately I’ve entered the world of podcasts. No, I’m not making a podcast, but merely just listening to some. When podcasts first came out I tried out a bunch but I couldn’t find anything that I wanted to listen to week-in and week-out. But recently I’ve dived back into it and have found some very entertaining podcasts. I would recommend any of the following podcasts. They are great and really do a good job of making the daily commute go by quicker.

Never Not Funny: The Jimmy Pardo Podcast

I’ve seen the comedian Jimmy Pardo on sporadic television appearances and have always enjoyed his comedy. While perusing the comedy category of the podcast section in the iTunes music store, I found this lovely gem. Its a weekly, hour-long podcast featuring comedian Jimmy Pardo, comedian Mike Schmidt and producer Matt Belknap. The show has a simple format. The three of them sit around the kitchen table in Jimmy’s house and banter for an hour. They tell stories from their lives, make fun of people, and make humorous observations about everyday things. Its kind of like you and a group of your buddies sitting around shooting the breeze. And it happens that you and your buddies are really funny.

The Relevant Magazine Podcast

I’ve been a fan of Relevant Magazine for a few years now. I was introduced to it by my wife, Cheri, while she was working at a Christian bookstore. It is a great magazine that observes popular culture through the lens of christianity. The greatest thing about the magazine is that it doesn’t try to pander to the ultra right-wing conservative view of Christianity that, unfortunately, is what dominates much of the Christian culture. But instead takes an honest look at culture and the Christian faith.

In the same manner, the podcast accomplishes this as well. It has a very similar format to Never Not Funny. It is a roundtable discussion between four editors of the magazine and website. They discuss the week’s new releases in music and film. Then they proceed to “the weekly slices.” This is where the editors each pick an news story from the week and give their opinions on the subjects. Mostly the stories are strange, off-beat, and hilarious. The show typically then has either an interview or some other type of non-standard bit related to the magazine. Then the show ends with a discussion of listener feedback followed by the editorial question of the week (and yes, there is a little jingle that goes with that). This is a great podcast to listen to and it makes me feel like that there are people out there just like me.

The Lost Podcast with Jay and Jack

If you couldn’t tell by now, I love the TV series Lost on ABC. It should be quite easy to understand that I would listen to a podcast about the show. The only reason I listen to a podcast about Lost rather than other TV shows I watch is because of the geekdom that is associated with the show. There are people that take notes while watching the show. They create theories and look for easter eggs that will help explain what the heck is going on. This podcast is dedicated to discussing these things.

The podcast typically has two episodes a week, each an hour long. One episode is recorded right after Lost airs on television. This episode recounts what happens in the show and then discusses it. Then the other episode looks forward to the next airing of Lost and discusses theories on what will happen, takes listener calls, and discusses other things Lost related. The podcast is full of great discussion and is very entertaining.

All Songs Considered

This podcast is NPR’s online music show. It is hosted by Bob Boilen (who has a very soothing voice) and usually runs between thirty and sixty minutes. The show features music from all genres–and I mean all genres. Boilen will introduce new music from around the country and the world. If you love good music and are willing to open your ears to something you typically wouldn’t listen to, then this is a great show for you. It has given me a lot of new artists to look for when it comes to finding new music. The show also allows you to submit your own music to be considered for the show. There are submission guidelines on the website.

Technorati: podcasts, jimmy pardo, never not funny, relevant magazine, lost, all songs considered

I’ve been getting a serious amount of spam comments lately on this blog. Most of them have been one-link comments that have just contained links to various websites that look suspicious. As of yesterday, I was flooded with about 50 spam comments. I temporarily had to set up a moderation so that I could catch them all. But now I set it that if a comment contains any links, it will be placed in the moderation queue for me to approve before it shows up here. I have Akismet turned on for this blog and yet it didn’t catch all the spam that came through this weekend. I guess posting one-link comments is a way to get around it. Akismet seems to mainly look for comments that use certain language (such as Viagra, Cialis, Nigeria, and Stocks) and since these comments only contained a link so another website it was able to filter through.

I wonder how some of this spamming works sometimes too. Checking my blog stats, I notice that these past couple days my traffic hasn’t increased dramatically at all. So that means that the spammers were somehow posting these comments remotely–without having to actually visit my site. My guess is that they were using some sort of robot that searches out blogs for spamming purposes.

For the last few months I’ve began receiving spam in my GMail account that has been getting through the normally outstanding spam blockers. These have been getting through because the text is embedded in a GIF file that shows up embedded in the body of the e-mail. So there is no actual text for the spam blockers to sort through, thus it gets straight to my e-mail. I’ve been getting at least a few of these each day and it has been quite aggrevating.

But there is hope. Matt Haughey has come up with an ingenius way to stop those e-mails from getting into your inbox. He has outlined the steps to stop this madness at his blog A Whole Lotta Nothing.

I wanted to comment on there how grateful I was that someone finally found out a way to get rid of those annoying e-mails, but I can’t figure out how to comment on that blog.

Arrrgh! Its simplicity irks me because I wish I would have thought of this months ago. Oh well, props to Matt Haughey!

Recently I’ve gotten addicted to rating items on Amazon.com. This is a part of my goal to “improve” my recommendations. But I have been having some issues with this system.

If I give a book, DVD, or CD a high rating, then it’ll spit out recommendations for books by the same author, movies by the same director, or CDs by the same artist. Now I understand that their logic for this is that, “Hey, if he loved that one Kelly Clarkson album, then surely he’ll love every other album made by an American Idol contestant plus any other pop music!” This, thankfully, is not the case.

Surprisingly, I like “Breakaway” by Kelly Clarkson. But that doesn’t mean that I necessarily want to go out and buy Carrie Underwood’s, Bo Bice’s and Clay Aiken’s albums.

On the same course, I’ve read and enjoyed a number of Kurt Vonnegut’s books . And now because of that, Amazon feels that I need to have every book written by him. Now I’m sure some may argue that Amazon got this one right, but I don’t really feel that way.

The main thing that irks me about it is that I know that I like Kurt Vonnegut, and I’m sure that I would love every one of his books. But why can’t it take that logical step and recommend something else? Who knows, I guess it has to do with the algorithm it uses. Until they fix that, I’ll continue telling it that I’m not interested in Britney Spears’ oeuvre.

As prompted to by Lorelle, this post is a small tip on how to use the RSS Sidebar Widget in your WordPress theme. Note, you must be using a WordPress theme that allows the use of a sidebar for this to work.

A neat thing that I like to use on WordPress is the RSS Sidebar Widget. Its a widget that allows you to make a section on your sidebar download the latest entries of whatever RSS feed you want it to download. As you can see, I’ve made a sidebar widget that uses the RSS feeds for both my Last.fm tracks and my Netflix queue. This allows me to make my blog a little more personable. Let’s use my Last.fm tracks as an example.

First, you must navigate to the website that has an RSS feed you wish to use. Here, we’ll go to my Last.fm profile page. Then you must find the link to the RSS feed. This is usually found by looking for one of the standard RSS feed images. Here, it is located in the top right of this screenshot.

Once you click on the RSS feed image, more than likely, it’ll bring you straight to the URL for that RSS feed. Most of the time, the page corresponding to this link will be mostly code, but don’t worry about that. What we really need is the URL. All you need to do now is copy the URL for the RSS feed.

Once you’ve copied the URL, open up your WordPress. On your Dashboard, navigate to the Presentation tab, then the Sidebar Widgets tab.

On the Sidebar Widgets page, drag and drop the RSS Feed widget into the Sidebar section and click the Options box. In the options box, paste the URL for the RSS feed you wish to use, give the feed a title (usually the title of the RSS feed), and set the amount of items you wish to have displayed.

Personally, I usually set the item limit to 5 so as not to make my sidebar too clunky. The widget will allow a maximum of 10 items.

After you input this information, close the options box, click “Save Changes” and your blog will now have an RSS sidebar widget. You can add more RSS widgets to your side bar by creating them in the bottom portion of the Sidebar Widget page in WordPress.

There are plenty of uses for this widget. Like me, I share my recently listened to tracks and my Netflix queue. Others may wish to include things like top news stories from their favorite news organization, recent posts on other blogs, or just about anything else that has an RSS feed. And there is no shortage of those on the web.

Man this is pretty sweet. I’m using this new extension for Firefox called the WordPress Sidebar. It creates a sidebar within Firefox so you can post, look at your stats, etc. All without having to go to the WordPress website (which tends to load very slow for me for some reason).

I found this off of Ruff’s blog.

Tom Servo

Originally uploaded by fallenposters.

Even though I’ve known about this site for a while, I decided to finally give in and try it. This is a picture from my flickr site. This seems like a pretty useful tool for uploading pictures and such so that I can share them with people and also to be able to post them to my blog (as I am doing right now; how meta). This is a picture of Tom Servo that I use as an avatar for many sites.