This GG Allin Bobblehead... What do you even say about it? I guess you could say there's More Blood And Filth, because, well, this is the second edition.



(Via Boing Boing)

Every movie that Jason Stratham is in is the same (you could say the same for every Guy Ritchie movie, too). That said, this one had a more far fetched and interesting premise and I wasn't disappointed. Give it a shot.

Rhode Island's Knowledge Retention Summit made an interesting decision when they chose a Twitter hashtag.

Life imitates art when the wrong twin is released from prison after a visit from his twin brother.

Then this from Chris Piascik who I haven't linked to recently, but whose handiwork adorns the fancy logo up on top of this blog.

Via this Esquire weekly links collection from a couple weeks ago, these two remarkable finds:

shesjack is 16.




And I don't think Lyric is much older.


Youth today, huh?

A couple weeks ago, I noticed that whenever I mistyped a domain name, instead of getting a "Server not found" message or being redirected to Google, I was being redirected to a RCN search page. Not the end of the world, obviously, but still annoying.

I had heard about other ISPs utilizing DNS redirection or DNS hijacking on user accounts "as a service", otherwise, I don't know if I would have realized what had happened. I especially don't remember RCN in Boston/Somerville informing me of this added benefit or telling me how to get rid of it. Google let me know that other folks have gotten their ISPs to remove the service by opting out, so I gave it a shot.

I looked everywhere in my account for an opt out before sending an email to RCN Customer Service. I would have called, but this post made me think I'd be better off emailing them and waiting for a reply instead of frustratingly trying to explain the problem up a chain of customer service representatives. RCN refers to this service as PaxFire, but I didn't want to confuse things by using proper nouns. I sent the following email to around 10 in the evening:

It appears that DNS redirection was recently turned on on my account so that when entering text in the browser address bar if the text was not a website the page that loads is a RCN search page as opposed to Google. I would like to opt out of this service please.

By 11 the next morning, I had a response and solution:

...I reviewed your account and it needs to be updated. The PaxFire opt-out has been added to the account and in order to pull a non-PaxFire IP address, a good thing to try would be to power cycle the modem...Once complete, the PaxFire service should not be active on the Internet connection.

Another Somerville RCN user was also able to get the redirect removed by sending the above note to them, so it seems to work.

I had also mentioned my displeasure on Twitter and got a response there the next morning as well. The lesson? If you want good, quick customer service from RCN, email or Tweet at them instead of calling. Though, if they won't fix your problem, it's not going to be fun either way.

I hope I don't get throttled for this.

Bill Simmons' new book, The Book of Basketball, came out this week. ESPN celebrated by posting 5 excerpts from the book. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

If Muto, by Blu, isn't all over the web soon, I don't understand the internet. Called "An ambiguous animation painted on public walls" the graffiti is literally animated. Phenomenal. Yes. Yes. More. Yes.

A statistical on whether NFL teams should attempt more onside kicks. The answer is yes, sort of. If an opposing team is not expecting an onside kick, the rate of recovery is actually quite good, around 60%. However:

The catch is that teams can’t do this very often. The key is that the onside attempt is unexpected. As soon as a team is known for sneaky onside kicks, its success rate will go down. But this isn’t such a bad thing. As opponents are forced to respect the threat of an onside kick, their normal kick return blocking will suffer, allowing overall net kickoff distance to improve. Ultimately, there would be an equilibrium, making life more difficult for the receiving team.

Thanks, Dave!

In a column celebrating the the 30th anniversary of Sugar Hill Gang's seminal hit 'Rapper's Delight', this Boston Globe column discusses how odd it is that the song is one of the few pop hits in recent history to not have a chorus, while barely touching on the fact that it's probably the only pop hit in recent history to be 15 freaking minutes long.