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Myspace Smackdown
A lot of you have probably noticed that my site has been down lately. This happens at the end of the month when I use up my alloted bandwidth. Don’t ask me to explain how that works, ’cause I don’t really know. I just know it works, and then sometimes it doesn’t. And usually it doesn’t work at the end of the month, after I’ve uploaded my monthly Baby Bug movie.
Thankfully, the really super nice and friendly people who host this site (for free!) have looked into it my little problem and added another TWENTY GIGS to my bandwidth! Yay Stranahans! They love me so much. Twenty gigs is a LOT. Like more than I could ever ever use up. Toby only uses four gigs on his site and he has galleries upon galleries of photography! So I’m pretty happy. I thought I would have to stop making my bandwidth sucking slideshows, but I don’t. I will probably try to keep their size down though, and direct you to flickr more often.
While we were looking into the problem, I noticed that some of the bandwidth suckage was due to myspacers. I’ve noticed this before but it only mildly annoyed me. I put a lot of artwork on my site, so I figure it just comes with the territory that people will steal it. BUT now that my site is going down because of bandwidth suckage, I decided I was going to track down those myspacers and make them pay.
I detest myspace. Myspace.com is like junior high all over again except on the internet. The meat market hook-ups, the cliche yearbook signings, writing “ur” for “you are”, the bad acne… everything! It’s all there in it’s hideousness. Every site I look at blasts me with a song I hate and their design skills make me want to chop off my own head. Clip art and stolen jpegs are plastered all over the place like the inside of your locker. Except it looks worse because it’s all microsoft based and goes completely haywire when I open it with safari. Tables and columns rearrange themselves in such a way that I have to mouse scroll sideways for days to find anything worth reading. It all just gives me a headache. I know there are lots of people out there who use it wisely and have very nice sites, there just aren’t very many of them.
For kicks I decided I would mess with the myspacers. They deserve it. They have been stealing one of the pictures of the beach near my house for ages. The average myspacer probably knows less about html than I do, which isn’t much. Probably somebody somewhere made a template and pasted my code into their html so my picture shows up in the background of their site. Then they passed it on from friend to friend, until there were a bazillion of them (or maybe just twenty, but a bazillion sounds better) who were all hotlinking my image off my server. Well, you know what that means. All I have to do to get them back is just change the image on my server. Piece o cake!
At first I thought I would just write “I wet the bed” or “I eat my boogers” across my image but then I found the most awful embarrassing photo from google images (yeah, I’m stealing too but at least I’m using my own bandwidth) and I copied and pasted it on top of my image and sent it off to my server with same name.
Oh my goodness the results are so funny! I’ve been checking the theiving myspace sites all weekend and reading the comments their friends write to them. Let’s just say I ruined the social life of some budding young youths. I’d love to explain even more but this site is a family site (as in my whole family reads) and the image I posted would be offensive to most of them. But if you’re really curious, email me and I’ll let you in on the fun. It’s been hours and hours of amusement for me. I couldn’t even put the baby to sleep last night because I kept cracking myself up and consequently waking her up.
I almost wish there were more hotlinkers because I don’t want the fun to end.
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super duper car
Nearly a whole year later we finally bought a new car for me. It’s very worth the wait. It’s the coolest car ever and of course it’s red, my favorite color. I never had a red car before. I wonder how many speeding tickets I’ll get.
It really is Toby’s car disguised as a new car for me. It’s a race car. It’s fast and has four wheel drive and turbo and tiptronic and a whole bunch of other stuff that sounds really speedy and important. I really wanted Toby to do a guest blog about it because there is no way I can put in words what is so cool about this car. As far as I’m concerned, it looks cool. It’s red and it has pretty tires.
It’s also super smart. It has a giant electronic brain that tells it when to turn on the windshield wipers, when to turn on the headlights, it even has a little screen in the dash that tells me what pedals to push just in case I turned into an idiot. It has all the fixings. I could go on and on but I’m afraid for all the other cars that will get jealous. Please don’t hate me because I have a super duper car.
I haven’t been driving (besides borrowing Toby’s van now and then) since a month before I had Baby Bug. It was just too hard to steer my old car with the enormous belly in the way. After Baby Bug, Toby got the heebie jeebies about his precious baby (and yes, his precious wife too) in my super low to the ground invisible silver Honda Civic that doesn’t have anti-lock breaks or power steering. It’s a great car. Just not so great as a mom car.
Well, now I’ve got the mom car on steroids. I wish I could get a vanity plate that said something like “BADASSMOM” or something with less letters that says: my car can kick your car’s butt. But that might be asking for trouble when I pull up to a light next to the other moms in their mighty SUV’s and soccer team holding minivans. I really can’t drive this car to it’s full capacity. I’m chicken. It is so fast it scares me. I barely pressed the gas pedal a millimeter and I was going 80 in a 40 zone before I even noticed. It’s dangerous. I think I’m going to have to play it cool.
But I can’t wait to show it off to my brother, the mechanic.