Trouble | Tim Murtaugh

A New York Times Oopsie?

Feb 3, ’06 1:33 PM

So, the NYT has an article about housing in NYC, and they framed it around a rediculous post on Craigslist — a mattress in a hole in a wall 8 feet off the ground. Of course there was interest, and the NYT checked it out.

Check out the caption:

Now check out this snippet from the third paragraph of the article:

Later in the article they refer to Drew Hart again, this time confirming it’s the same Drew my mentioning his age (19) again.

What’s up with this? He “didn’t want his last name published,” but we’ll do it anyway?

Nice.

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My Newest Pet Peeve: Focus-Stealing Banner Ads

Jan 5, ’06 6:25 PM

I’ve seen this guy a few times, and it irks me each and every time, and I’ll tell you why.

When the ad loads, it uses Javascript to grab your cursor and put it into the first field in the form. This has two negative effects (one of which I can’t believe the hosting sites put up with):

It means I can’t use the keyboard to navigate the page — to scroll down, I most often use the space bar to scroll a page at a time, but since the ad has put the cursor in a text field, I’m just entering spaces into it, and it’s quite disorienting when my browser stops behaving the way I expect it to.
If the ad is part of the way down the page, when the focus is captured, the page scrolls with it. This happens on MSNBC articles — the page automatically scrolls to the point of the ad (since that’s where the focus is), so I have to scroll back up to see the headline and the first few paragraphs.

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Comment Spam == Out of Control

Dec 6, ’05 3:49 PM

spamburger

So far today I’ve gotten a few hundred comment spams. This is a periodic thing; every couple of months the bots hit the site hard.

This is interesting to me because this site has a fairly low readership, which confirms the idea that the spambots aren’t even being selectively pointed to blogs upon which comment spamming would be effective. They’re just taking a shotgun approach, which isn’t really a surprise I guess.

So, sorry to anyone who wants to comment, but I’ve taken the defences up to the next level. In order to comment you need to register. (Registration info will never be used in any way except to enable you to log in to the site.)

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Email Problems…

Sep 20, ’05 12:06 PM

I’m having some domain issues, and one of the results is that email isn’t working well.

If you need to get a hold of me, try emailing me at tim (at) cloudking (dot) com.

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Rove: Oh SNAP!

Jul 11, ’05 5:18 PM

So it’s pretty much confirmed that Karl Rove was the one who leaked CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name to the press, and despite the White House’s frantic attempts at spin, CBS reminds us:

For two years, the White House has insisted that presidential adviser Karl Rove had nothing to do with the leak of a CIA officer’s identity. And President Bush said the leaker would be fired.

A million people just gave deep-throated schadenfreudal laughs, and they can’t wait to see how this shakes out — if there is any decency or honesty in the Bush administration, Rove must go.

» CBS News: White House Mum On Rove Leak

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Tim Murtaugh

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