Tweeter-bots?

It didn't take me long to figure out that some people on Twitter aren't there to tweet so much as to collect followers. Getting their 1000th follower is more important than posting their 1000th tweet. So, I normally don't do the mutual follow-back thing on Twitter; follow me and I'll follow you. I changed this policy, however, when I set up the account for our local NRA Members' Council. I figured that the point there is to get pro-RKBA news to as many eyeballs as possible; even if those eyes only have eyes for the count of their followers. However, I just made an exception to that.

I had a follower who had no eyes.

I had this one follower show up to both accounts. On my BrewingAle account, I just didn't bother with the mutual follow back. I looked at this "person's" recent tweets and there was nothing interesting there. If they want to keep following me, fine. I'll pass on the clutter, though.

For the MC account, on the other hand, I did the follow back. At first I just ignored the tweets; silly, vacuous stuff that looked as though this person didn't understand how to reply to a tweet. Then I notice that the tweets fell into two categories: Tweets that referred to women's clothing and accessories, and tweets that looked like collections of random words strung together into somewhat grammatically correct sentences. It was that second group that tipped me off.

This is a robot!

The sentences followed a pattern: A proper name as the subject, not a Twitter handle; A verb, usually come conjugation of the verb "tweet"; and an adverb. Then I noticed another pattern: This person never sleeps. The tweets were showing at all day long, several every hour, 24/7. Also, the clothing related tweets looked like auto-generated responses to other tweets that mentioned these products. I'm guess that a search engine touched these off.

So what's the point of this 'bot? I suspect that it was a proof of concept program. The random sentences are just to collect followers while the product tweets were the payload. In this case, the writer was tweeting about other people's merchandise, but the final release would probably push his own wares.

Well, at least this spammer isn't stealing bandwidth or processor time on an infected machine.

Bin Ladin gets his raisins

I thought that he got smoked years ago. Oh well. Better late than never.

ATT Uverse... Don't do it!

I've decided that ATT Uverse just plain sucks. I haven't had Internet that cuts out this often since this ol' dial-up days. If you've been considering ATT, my advise is to go with anyone else!

BTW: I'm posting this via Verizon. ATT is on the fritz again!

Wow... Just wow...

Where does one begin? This video is just jam-packed with industrial grade stupid. I don't know which is worse... Jesse Jackson Jr. blaming the iPad for unemployment or him calling for the American people to choose jobs in obsolete industries over their 1st Amendment freedoms...

What morons decided that this pinhead belongs in Congress?

Term limits

One lifetime only?

Raul Castro proposes political term limits in Cuba | Top AP Stories | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

The sound of heads popping

I'm listening to Ted Nugent on NRA News right now. And if you listen carefully, you can hear the Pop! Pop! Pop! of liberal heads exploding in the distance.

A question of scale

Congress is near deadlocked over ~$40 billion in proposed cuts. How much is that compared to the Federal deficit? One commentator put it this way: If the deficit is a Quarter-pounder combo from McDonald's, the proposed cuts are ¹⁄₅ of one French fry in that combo.

The host saga

If you will recall, I wasn't very happy with the responses I got from FreeServers.com when I complained about their antiquated software (including an out-of-date server kernel). I never got a satisfactory answer from them; just apologies without any pledges to actually fix the problems. As a result, I moved that site off of their servers and onto a new host. The billing department, as opposed to tech support, actually sounded concerned about my complaints. To their credit, they didn't try to hard sell me into keeping their crappy service. I guess they've heard this before.

I moved that site to a host I've used before for other projects: ipower.com. I'm very happy with them. If you're looking for a web host, give them a look.

Not a pretty mental picture

Software Firm Looking To Hire Naked Coders - Slashdot

Atlas-Shrugged-Movie.com unavailable

This is a good sign, no matter how you look at it.



Either there are tons of people interested in the movie, or it's generating enough buzz to attract a DDoS attack from concerned looters.

Green energy

Fair and balanced?

George Skelton at the LA Times writes about "subversive" Republican activists thwarting the "democratic process" by holding GOP toes to the fire over Jerry Brown's tax schemes. There's a brief tease about how Brown's labor allies are just as inflexible. But does that point get further discussion? Of course not! That doesn't fit the media template.

So that's how that works

I was wondering how that last picture got to the right place. Clever Blogger uploaded it to my Picasa account. I had just hit the picture button without thinking about it.

A fine haul

Bottling again

That hefeweizen is finally ready to bottle. I'm also putting some of that American stout into bottles as well.

The stout really benefited from an extra month in the keg. The hops mellowed a bit. Now there's a bit less bitterness and more flavor from the hops. There was also a hard water bite that was overdone that's gone now. I suppose that next time I should do something to accentuate the malt character more.

Finally: Something that John Kerry and I can agree on

Reducing taxes on small brewers

The mysterious minds of TV executives

What's up with the execs at CBS? What part of "Charlie Sheen" didn't they understand when they hired Charlie Sheen? Why are they getting upset with him for acting like... well... Charlie Sheen?

There's just no way that the grand poobahs at CBS didn't know what they were getting when they cast Sheen on 2½ Men. If fact, they had to have been counting on Sheen's history as a dyed-in-the-wool Hollywood bad boy as a way to attract an audience. And he certainly has delivered over the years. So why act surprised and upset now?

Poor journalism

The York Press needs to hire better journalists.

This story from January 21 recounts the terrifying day that Englishman Tim Stark found a .22 cartridge lying in the street.

THE HORROR!!

But one question remains unanswered thanks to some shoddy reporting: Did Mr. Stark wet himself? And if so, did he wet himself before or after he made his frantic call to the police to report the dangerous bullet?

The vicious Fossgate Bullet!

I suppose that it's a good thing that there wasn't a rabbit nearby. Imagine the carnage that might have resulted!!

I also got rid of that Tweety button thing

Either no one clicks it or it doesn't work.

An unfortunate change

There used to be a list of FReeper blogs over there on the sidebar. I had to remove that because most seemed to be dead. The one exception is AnnaZ, who I've added to the blogroll.

Now I'm not the guy to lecture about neglected blogs, but at least one had never been posted to. Others hadn't seen the light of day since 2005. Why am I complaining? I got that list from another FReeper who put in quite a bit of effort compiling a list of FReeper blogs. I wish I could remember who that was. It's sad to see their work go for naught.