Jeff Chausse
Digital Strategy + Design
Yak Shaving
I have a new favorite bit of lingo: “yak shaving”. Yak shaving describes something I spend an enormous amount of time doing, but for which I’ve never had a good term.
This mailing list post is supposedly the very first mention of the term on the Internet. Unfortunately, it does not actually explain where yaks come into the picture. It does, however, define the term:
You see, yak shaving is what you are doing when you’re doing some
stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what
you’re supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal
relations links what you’re doing to the original meta-task.
Seth Godin wrote a post which better ties the term to the definition:
Yak Shaving is the last step of a series of steps that occurs when you find something you need to do. “I want to wax the car today.”
“Oops, the hose is still broken from the winter. I’ll need to buy a new one at Home Depot.”
“But Home Depot is on the other side of the Tappan Zee bridge and getting there without my EZPass is miserable because of the tolls.”
“But, wait! I could borrow my neighbor’s EZPass…”
“Bob won’t lend me his EZPass until I return the mooshi pillow my son borrowed, though.”
“And we haven’t returned it because some of the stuffing fell out and we need to get some yak hair to restuff it.”
And the next thing you know, you’re at the zoo, shaving a yak, all so you can wax your car.
The Blog Spam Arms Race hits Chausse.org
Frequent readers of this site (if there are such things) may have noticed a lot of comments (appearing then disappearing) praising how wonderful my site is, then linking to some random web page.
Here’s why… WordPress (the blogging software behind Chausse.org) has a feature that is supposed to allow automatic posting of comments ONLY if they’re from people who have already had comments approved. I say “supposed to” because it’s not working so well for me. Not sure if I broke it or what, but things are getting through automatically, regardless.
As far as I can tell, the purpose of these spam comments are to make you slip up when moderating comments (either before or after they make it online). It’s easy to go through a list of posts like “PLAYY POKEER ONL1NE N0W!!!” and drop the bomb on the bad guys, but it’s a lot harder to scan through a list of 200 friendly looking posts, without accidentally deleting perfectly resonable comments.
Anyway, regardless of why these spam comments are happening, and regardless of why the unapproved posters are still showing up, I’ve decided to do something about it. If you post a comment now, you will notice a “captcha” graphic which you must deciper to post your comment. Sorry for the inconvenience, but things were just starting to get out of hand…
Pixel Ads
Every once in a while I stumble upon an entire sub-genre of web site that I had no idea existed. Today, I discovered “Pixel Pages” – sites where advertisers purchase really tiny ads on a big grid. Sounds bizarre, but there are some interesting variants. Pixel Wars is a directory of such sites. Apparently, it all started with The Million Dollar Home Page, which has made over $370,000 –in less than three months! Wow.
Pissing Contest Shuts Down Chunks of the Internet
The Internet was designed to withstand nuclear warfare, but apparently not childish disagreements between backbone providers. A territorial pissing match between Level 3 and Cogent has effectively shut down huge sections of the Internet for millions of people around the United States.
How I understand it, the dispute boils down to something like this:
“Our network is bigger than yours, so you should pay us money to connect to it”
“No, our network is bigger than yours, so you should pay us money to connect to it”
“No, ours is bigger!”
“Nuh-uhhh!”
“Yes-suhhh!”
Ad infinitum…
Thanks a lot, guys, for providing an excellent argument for government regulation of the Internet backbone! That’ll make everything swell.
1 Terrabyte Free Email Service – Yeah, right…
MailNation appears to be offering free email with a terrabyte of disk space. Now, disk space is pretty cheap these days, but a terrabyte of disk space will still set you back a cool grand or so. They’re probably just assuming most people would never use that much space (probably the same strategy Google was using when they announced a free gigabyte of space).
Besides, if you have a terrabyte of data, and you’re relying on a free webmail host to keep it safe – well, you should re-evaluate your plans.
Adventures with Ruby on Rails
I’m finally starting to explore Ruby on Rails in earnest. I’m sitting here reading Agile Web Development With Rails, and some of the stuff I’m learning you can do with Rails is making me giddy. For example, cleaning up submitted input to “escape” special HTML characters (in order to not blow up the page layout, or worse yet, your database) is always a pain to deal with in web programming. With Rails, you do this. Let’s say you have a variable called “input”. To “clean it up”, you do this:
h(input)
That’s it! One letter and you’re done!
I can see why they call this agile web development.