B10[m|g]

I like Y! movies' recommendation system, for it usually turns out quite ok. If they say I like a certain movie, a lot of times, it's true. But ermm, either their system is way off here, or I have a seriously bad taste.

52 people have rated this movie with an average of "dreadful", yet Yahoo happily informs me that I'll probably like this movie. Yay!

movies

Today, 19 years ago, one of my favorite pictures of all time was taken

tank man, tiananmen, china

Recently, my contract with Debitel (a Dutch phone company) ended. Since another company could make me a nice deal (with my Nokia N95 8GB), I decided to switch over to them and to cancel my account with Debitel.

Today I received a call by one of the Debitel telemarketing guys. The slick guy told me my contract was about to end (yeah, duh, I already canceled it) and that he could offer me a really nice deal.

As usual, I let him finish his whole story (which, like usual, was way too long). And to make it more fun, I just didn't reply, making him feel awkward and chatting longer. After his whole speech, he asked me if I was interested. I told him politely that I already canceled the account and moved on to another provider.

"Ok", he said, "than we just have to check the information real quick. Your name is [full name]?". In my privacy paranoia, I asked him "Why do you need my information. I already canceled the account and thus I have nothing to do with you anymore. "Oh?", he replied, "I thought you wanted to accept the new offer". So I believe my privacy paranoia saved me here. If I'd confirm the records they already had on file, he'd probably trick me into accepting the new offer.

... bastards.

debitel,, telemarketing

A little less than a year ago, I created a simple scraper for the Fokke en Sukke cartoon website. It would spit out a RSS feed that I could include in my bloglines. Yay, so far so good.

Slowly but steadily I noticed more users until a certain MS Vista widget start querying it every 20 minutes (for no reason, for there aren't that many updates). At first I had no clue what was going on. Huge amounts of IP addresses started querying the feed, all with a cryptic "x-gadget:///gadget.htm" HTTP_REFERER.

After some searching, I found the author of the widget and asked him to please lower the rate of querying, for my poor old home server was not used to the stress put on him. Luckily he promised to patch it soon.

Then I figured: why not have Yahoo! host it? So I've hooked up a terrible simple pipe that seems to handle the load well.

Stats:
Published on 01/02/08
113572 runs

Taken that it's only 01/06/08 now, I may assume that it gets requested around 28393 times a day. Thanks for taking away the pain, Yahoo! :-)

yahoo pipes, fokke & sukke, fokke, sukke, rss, cartoon

Another year has passed (well, almost) and that means that I have to listen to Wesley Willis again (I usually do that at Christmas too, but hey, New Year's Eve is a fine time for Wesley too).

This year, I found the Wesley Willis song generator So, let's close this year with a Wesley song on new year's eve!

New Years Eve with B10m by Wesley Willis

I like you a lot in the long run.
New Years Eve with B10m is very special to me.
You can really rock your ass off.
You can really get in the groove.

NEW YEARS EVE WITH B10M!!!
NEW YEARS EVE WITH B10M!!!
NEW YEARS EVE WITH B10M!!!
NEW YEARS EVE WITH B10M!!!

You can really get in the groove.
I like you well.
You really whoop Saddam Hussein's ass.
You really whoop a llama's ass.

NEW YEARS EVE WITH B10M!!!
NEW YEARS EVE WITH B10M!!!
NEW YEARS EVE WITH B10M!!!
NEW YEARS EVE WITH B10M!!!

New Years Eve with B10m is the best.
You make the joyride music.
I like you well.
You are the best in the long run.

Rock over London,
Rock on Chicago.

The heartbeat of America - that's today's Chevrolet.