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Filed under: Humor

Filed under: Internet, Humor

The power of popular culture: 'unfriend' officially enters the American language

Did you even know that there was a New Oxford American Dictionary? I didn't. But with their recent addition of 'unfriend' to the American language, that might soon change. Maybe this was their way of leaving the realm of obscurity... and into hilarity!

"It has both currency and potential longevity," says Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford's US dictionary program. She goes on to add that it has real 'lex-appeal'. Quite. I get the nagging feeling that the senior lexicographer for the NOAD might be short and blonde and very American. Here in England, new words don't enter the language without ratification by a round-table of 12 bearded and wizened lexicographic geriatrics.

There's quite a long list of runners-up. Amongst others: hashtag (always thought this was a bit ambiguous... but perhaps that's my drug-dealing background...), sexting (don't make me explain this one), zombie bank (sadly not a L4D reference), deleb (a dead celebrity apparently). A complete list is available on the Oxford University Press blog, if you want a bit of a giggle.

I wonder why they opted for 'unfriend' rather than 'defriend'. Or maybe defriend is British-English, and unfriend is 'Merkin-English...

What other words do you think we can expect to see in the New Oxford American Dictionary in the coming years? Retweet? Bloggable? ('Weblog' is already in the NOAD!)

Filed under: Fun, Search, Humor

Autocomplete Me is a gallery of Google users' bizarre searches

Google's autocomplete feature for searches can be pretty useful when you're looking for a common search term. Hey, neat! You don't have to type the whole thing! Sometimes, though, Google's suggestions take a turn for the hilarious or just plain weird. A site called Autocomplete Me collects some of the strangest ones for your amusement. Admittedly, some of these might be offensive, so viewer discretion is advised.

Who knew that searching for "the air s" would show you Monty Python's famous "air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?" I suppose that's not too surprising, but "i like to t" will find you a number of strange results, notabiy "I like to tape my thumbs to my hands and pretend I'm a dinosaur" and "I like to pretend Jesus was a mischievous badger." If you took this site and added Bill Cosby, you'd have a show called "Kids Search for the Darndest Things."

Have any favorite Google autocomplete results of your own? Put them in the comments (and send them to Autocomplete Me, of course).

Filed under: Games, Internet, Humor, Op-Ed

Free boobs: It's too good to be true

Ah, Evony. Sweet, sweet Evony. Chances are if you've been online for more than a day or two and you dare step outside the sandbox of Gmail or Facebook and into the seedy underbelly of the beast, you'll have seen the Evony ads.

Take a good, long look at the advert to the right -->

OK. Now what're you thinking? BOOBS? Voyeuristic pleasures of the flesh? 'You know, it looks like she's sleeping... or enjoying herself... or both...'

To be fair, this one actually includes a brief description of the game itself ('build your empire'), but later versions aren't quite as subtle (probably not work-safe).

But we only have ourselves to blame. You see, Evony's marketing ploy must be successful or they wouldn't still be doing it. Sex sells, gentlemen. The promise of sex sells even better! Seriously, a girl pleasuring herself couldn't be further from the truth in the case of Evony, but the image hits your eyeballs and heads straight on down to your animalistic hindbrain. Before you know it -- before your rational, sensible, Internet-savvy brain can kick in -- you're clicking the ad. You're probably clicking her boobs even. It's OK -- we all do it. That's why such ads exist.

You've just been had by the Internet. But who's to blame exactly? Us, for being weak and driven by our biology? The scrupulous Web service providers that hire advertising agencies to shoot girls in skimpy panties and low-cut dresses? None of the above, I'm afraid. The inherent freedom of the Internet comes at a price, and if you think those money-grabbing bastards aren't going to milk it for all its worth, you'd be wrong.

Think about it: if the ad showed a girl gouging her eyes out and eating poop from a cup it wouldn't get quite the same click-through ratio. Why not boobs? Why not delusions of grandeur? Why not promise things you can't deliver on? Why not LIE? Who is going to stop them?

The Internet, in its rampant, unmonitored, ungoverned and anarchic state is full of examples like Evony. Lose 15lbs in 15 minutes! You've won the lottery! Click this irritating and epilepsy-inducing banner to collect your prize! Scan your infected, virus-ridden computer now... and get a bonus malware infection for free! Evony, unlike other cowboys, at least delivers a small portion of its promise -- you can play it in a browser after all -- but that's not the point.

The point is: the Internet is simply too good to be true. The problem is not that there's fake stuff out there -- there will always be fake stuff -- it just happens to be damn hard to separate the good stuff from the fake stuff. You never quite know what you're going to get after you click a link.

So remember, if something is FREE!!! or relies on a picture of BOOBS, it's too good to be true.

In fact, if you don't want to be fooled by advertising, just download whatever we feature here at Download Squad -- I guarantee we'll never sell out and recommend a boob-branded download.

Filed under: Social Software, Humor

Thumbs down! Firefox users can now "dislike" posts on Facebook

You might have seen the various petitions on Facebook to add a "dislike" feature to the site, to complement the "like" option in the News Feed. Well, Facebook hasn't listened. However, if you're a Firefox user, you can add a thumbs-down feature to FB with (what else?) a Facebook Dislike add-on.

It sounds kind of silly to keep track of your own dislikes, but it turns out that the extension feeds them into a database, so they'll be visible to anyone else who has it installed. The dislikes blend in seamlessly with the Facebook News Feed, appearing right below regular likes. It looks as if the members of those pro-dislike Facebook groups should be downloading Firefox and checking this extension out.

[via CNET]

Filed under: Design, Fun, Humor, Fugly Friday

Fugly Friday: Geocities Memorial Edition

Before there was anything today's Internet users would think of as "web design," there was GeoCities. The homepage service that let absolutely anyone try his or her hand at putting something on the Internet is also one of the cradles of contemporary Web Fugly. In fact, Fugly Friday owes such a debt to the GeoCities aesthetic that this week's installment is going to take a trip down memory lane to look at some early innovations in tearing a human being's eye out using pure HTML.

Today's fugly site, HTML Advanced Tricks & Tips, is a cookbook for everything that make GeoCities sites painful to look at. Tables! Frames! Scrolling marquee text! I will grant you that some people continue to defend tables to this day, but I don't think anyone is defending those animated flame GIFs. Good luck navigating this page by clicking on the text: it's not linked. You're not going anywhere unless you click on those dancing flames. Maybe that's a secret you learn from the "HTML Writer's Guild" once they give you a cool badge like the one on this homepage.

As for the tips themselves? Closing your tags is still decent advice, and cropping and shrinking your graphics was a necessity back in the low-bandwidth heyday of GeoCities. These tips were actually not terrible at the time, but the author has to mess it up by slapping on animated GIFs and encouraging the use of the marquee tag. Between those two, we've covered most of what made every GeoCities page so terrible. Add an autoplaying midi and you'd have a Fugly Tutorial Trifecta.

(This post was made possible by Reocities, a GeoCities rescue attempt that backed up 600,000 pages of potential fugly before Yahoo! shut off GeoCities' animated flashing lights for good.)

Filed under: Fun, Internet, Humor

Halloween costumes from the Internet: happy Hallo-meme!

While it's still not possible to download a Halloween costume, stepping away from the computer for a few hours to trick or treat or go to a costume party doesn't mean you have to leave the Internet behind. In fact, Know Your Meme has come up with a guide to dressing up as your favorite online meme. They have instructions for everything from Keyboard Cat to the Flying Spaghetti Monster to that rabbit with a pancake on his head.

Unfortunately, because you can't trick-or-treat the Internet (yet), you and your friends might be the only ones who think your costumes are funny. To be fair, though, some of them are really, really funny, and going door-to-door with your kid dressed as the pancake bunny is a guaranteed candy goldmine.

If you're planning to dress up as an Internet meme or something software-related - anybody going as the Mozilla Firefox? - let us know in the comments. And post some photos if you've got them. This is the Internet, after all: pics or it didn't happen!

Filed under: Fun, Games, Time-Wasters, Humor

Topical Time Waster: throw eggs at Steve Ballmer!

No, today's Time Waster (which we've mentioned before) is not likely to be the most awesome gaming experience you've ever had on your computer. It is, however, a fun way to vent your frustration at the tidal wave of Windows 7 blogging going on today (guilty).

Before you ask - yes, this really happened and there's a video after the break for your enjoyment. Check the YouTube page for some more insight into what motivated the barrage.

Enough with the intro. Grab yourself a dozen eggs, and go give Stevezilla his comeuppance! Or, if you prefer, turn things around and pretend you're Ballmer and fire back at the "nerdy student."

It's an all-out Egg Attack, y'all!

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Filed under: Fun, iPhone, Humor, Weird Wednesday

Weird Wednesday: what does an iPhone know about making love?

Welcome to a special "hump day" edition of Weird Wednesday (pun very much intended). An iPhone can do a lot of things, but can it make you better in bed? A new app called Love Vibes says it can. It works like this: Install Love Vibes on your iPhone, set the firmness of your mattress, and then, ummm, engage in activities. The app uses the iPhone's accelerometer to measure vertical and horizontal movement, and somehow manages to convert that into a score that indicates your prowess at making love.

On top of the obvious challenges of getting a partner to let you bring your iPhone to bed, it's not really clear how Love Vibes determines your score. The "duration" rating is obvious enough: how long did your session last? Stamina, variety and passion are a little more dicey. Although the science behind the app is based on surveys that indicate these are all desirable qualities, it's not clear how Love Vibes gets scores out of your accelerometer data.

I tried faking it out by moving the phone around wildly for a bit, hoping this would provide enough passion and variety to rate an impressive score. "Shaking the phone won't get you a high score," it told me. Huh. Well, what if I just move the phone rhythmically back and forth for a while as I do the exact opposite of making love - eating Doritos? SPOILER: just as in romantic encounters that don't involve an iPhone or anything Cooler Ranch flavored, rhythm is the ticket to a good review. You didn't need an app to tell you that, right?

Filed under: Fun, iPhone, Humor, Op-Ed

Breaking: iPhone users 300% more likely to Tweet after sexy parties

News just in: iPhone users are three times more likely to Tweet or Facebook their sexual antics than BlackBerry users.

I'll just put into words what you're all thinking: what a big frackin' surprise. Apple users more vapid and self-centered than other-brand gadgeteers? Say it ain't so!

In fact, stereotypical Apple users are a classic example of modern-day 'Napoleon complex' (or 'short man syndrome' as you might know it by). Their gadgets -- their white, creamy, curvy, brushed-aluminium gadgets -- are compensating for something else. In this case, a lackluster sex life: 'Yeh, totally jst gve her some juice, lol.'

Anyway, moving on, back to the news rather than what we already know. This new report from Retrevo finds that 36% of all under-35 year olds update their Facebook wall or Twitter accounts post-coitally. Perhaps unsurprisingly, men are twice as likely as women to take part in this godawful practice.

I guess we should just be grateful that the report focused on what happens after rather than during... After all, we know someone paid to have the Passion app rate their performance between the sheets.

[via CNet]

Filed under: Developer, Fun, Troubleshooting, Humor

Troubleshooting with your Teddy Bear

My buddy Dave once shared with me a bit of computing wisdom which I've since found invaluable.

"Proper troubleshooting requires a Teddy Bear."

As it was told to me -- long ago in a university computer lab not so far away -- there was a sysadmin who became frustrated with the number of questions he was asked by student developers. It wasn't that the questions were invalid, or that the students weren't thinking them through. Rather, his frustration was with questions which found their own answers.

Students seeking his help would begin to explain the problem they were working on. More often than not, they wouldn't finish explaining before having an "Aha!" moments; That tiny moment of clarity every developer, admin or desktop analyst seeks as a part of their job.

Being forced to explain the problem had some effect which thinking about the problem alone didn't. How can you achieve the same mind-altered state without bugging the sysadmin, or taking a handful of Adderol and Xanaax*?

The weary sysadmin found a brilliant solution. He attached a teddy bear to his desk, and forced anyone who wanted to ask him a question to address the bear and explain the problem.

So, the next time you're halfway through asking a collegue a question and find yourself saying, "Wait, I think I just got it, never mind!", remember to thank them for being your teddy bear.

* Download Squad does not condone the abuse of Adderol, Xanaax or any other prescription drugs. Just sayin'.

Filed under: Social Software, Humor

I Just Made Love maps global lovemaking

If you want to know where in the world geeks are getting lucky, look no further than a new site called I Just Made Love. As the site's name implies, users can place a marker anywhere on the map, showing where they just made love. Were you on a boat? That's ok, you can drop a marker in the water, too. Markers are anonymous, so there's no embarrassment involved (but no bragging, either.)

Where I Just Made Love gets a little less Safe For Work is in the details you enter. Sure, you're not putting in your name, but you can record whether you were indoors or outdoors, and select one or more positions you found yourself in during your escapades. You can see these details for any marker on the map by clicking on it.

The most obvious complaint about I Just Made Love is the lack of personal accounts: geeks love data, and there has to be a market for a service that would let you track your own ... activities ... over time. On the other hand, anonymity for all users means that more people are likely to enter new data points, making the site more interesting to browse.

Filed under: Fun, Humor

Larry Ellison does near-standup comic rif on cloud computing

I've come out pretty strong against the fad of "cloud computing", which has spent the better part of the last year at the top of my most-hated buzzword list. In private, I've even been known to threaten that the next PR person to send me a release using the word "cloud" was going to get it, right between the Prada frames.

So, imagine my glee while watching one of my heroes -- Oracle's chief samurai warrior and jet pilot, Larry Ellison -- drop effortlessly into a riff on cloud computing while talking to a room at the Churchill Club.

Ellison makes a pretty solid argument that cloud computing isn't just the future, it's also the present and the past. This from a man who just bought Sun Microsystems -- a company which sported "The network is the computer" as its slogan, more than a decade before the first marketroid said cloud.

In Soviet Russia, cloud computing makes fun of you.

Take the leap to see Lawrence "Shecky" Ellison in action.

Read more →

Filed under: Security, Symantec, Humor

Nice try, Symantec! Cheesey video warns against free antivirus

Back in July, a Symantec exec predictably talked down free antivirus apps. This week, the cheeky devils behind Norton Antivirus have turned out a real tour de force. Seriously. It's a flippant look at the old adage "the best things in life are free."

The spot starts by mentioning love. Yeah, that's free, right? Sure, except for weddings says the straightman - those could cost as much as *gasp* $10,000! I'm not sure what year Symantec thinks it is, but I'm pretty sure many weddings run well in excess of three to five times that amount.

What about kids, those are great - and free! No, jackass, that's another bad call on your part. They're expensive too, says Unfunny Guy. Really? Thanks for pointing that out.

Read more →

Filed under: Fun, Time-Wasters, Humor

Kanye West apology generator - Time Waster

To appreciate the Kanye West apology generator, you may need some background: by now you've probably heard about rapper Kanye West's outburst at the Video Music Awards, interrupting teenage country star Taylor Swift as she accepted an award. Even if you don't have a TV, I'll bet you've noticed that "interrupting Kanye" has gone viral, and it's almost unavoidable on the web. While Kanye's stunt is kind of played out as a joke already, his blogged (but quickly deleted) apology to Taylor Swift is a more fertile comedy goldmine.

Kanye's propensity for blogging in all caps is already mildly hilarious, but when you combine that with a heat-of-the-moment defense of his actions -- written and posted while he was still at the awards that night -- you've got something really special. All you need to do is fill in the required fields, Mad Libs style. No description I could write would do justice to Kanye's original post, so I'll just present this apology I generated for some of Download Squad's lead bloggers:
I'M SOOOOO SORRY TO GRANT ROBERTSON AND VICTOR AGREDA, JR. FOR WRITING THE POST. I SPOKE TO VICTOR AGREDA, JR. RIGHT AFTER. GRANT ROBERTSON IS VERY UPSET !!........... I'M IN THE WRONG FOR POSTING AND DELETING!!!!!! I'M SORRY TO MY FANS IF I LET YOU GUYS DOWN!!!!! I'M SORRY TO MY FRIENDS AT DOWNLOAD SQUAD. I WILL APOLOGIZE TO GRANT ROBERTSON 2MRW. WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD!!!! EVERYBODY WANNA BOOOOO ME BUT I'M A FAN OF BLOG!!! Y'ALL KNOW!!! BOOOOYAAAWWWWW!!!!!!! AIGHT I GAVE MY APP TO MIKE ARRINGTON WHEN THEY DESERVED IT... THAT'S WHAT IT IS!!!!!!!!!! I'M NOT CRAZY YALL, I'M JUST BEING REAL. SORRY FOR THAT!!!MUCH RESPECT!!!!!
It probably won't be as funny next week, when this whole thing is ancient history, so strike while the iron is hot. Post your own Kanye Apology in the comments.

Filed under: Internet, Humor

Kanye interrupts Arrington at TechCrunch50

We simply couldn't resist.

(In case you didn't catch Kanye West's antics at the Video Music Awards this weekend, here's some context.)

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The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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