22 July 2007
MyBlogLog Sunday mini reviews
Filed in: MBL sunday
Be a MyBlogLog member.
Visit this site sometime before 11am Sunday and leave a comment below with a link to your best post of the week. That is it! The rest is up to chance.
Around 11 am on Sunday I will take a screenshot of the MyBlogLog widget in my sidebar. If you are one of the 10 faces and you have left a comment, I will do a mini review of your site based on your best post.
It is quite a popular feature and there are some competitive guys out there always itching for a mini review. Your review stays on the homepage (PR5) all week and stays in the archives forever!
If you leave a comment but aren't included in the mini reviews, at least you will have publicised your best post to the masses who call by during the week for a look.
Hope to see you.
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| "Your name" is a Kiva lender | "Your site's screenshot" SmartLink Widget | Funny HQ humor store |
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. Round-up of world news
Filed in: Ed's blog spot
Ed the Editor's personal blog corner
I take a quick pisstakers' trip through the week's highlights from Time With tongue firmly in cheek I include a take on the drugs scandals, bombings and politicians shaping our lives today. To keep our feet firmly planted in reality, I end on a reference to San Diego's Comic-Con!
Have a good week till next week.
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| "Your name" is a Kiva lender | "Your site's screenshot" SmartLink Widget | Funny HQ humor store |
Widgets are available
The widgets are a fit-and-forget dynamic link to cool blogs in each genre. They include real content, not just a blog name, and all-in-all they are a hot piece of networking kit! Don't be shy, install one, or refresh a widget you already have or send a link to be included in one of them. I Eat Snowman Poop has a Humor Blogs widget hard at work in her sidebar.
These are the full details on the free and snazzy widgets and buttons from The Pisstakers.
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| "Your name" is a Kiva lender | "Your site's screenshot" SmartLink Widget | Funny HQ humor store |
The rain falls on the plain, and not only in Spain
Filed in: Ed's blog spot
Ed the Editor's personal blog corner
It sounds as though the UK is underwater, more accurately, the rain has drained to the bottom end of the island and it is filling up fast, especially in the South West. I am not surprised though, because 5 out of 20 million homes are built on flood plains, the land has been compressed by heavy agricultural machinery, and the town planners have ignored the non-drainage effect of acres of concrete and tarmac. All in all, even without climate change, the UK has been turning into a big bucket for years.
They say the safest place to be is on a hillside. Logically you would need a biblical storm to be flooded out at 500 feet elevation, but there have been loads of incidents where villages have been swept away by water racing down the hill. No fun waking up in bed, bobbing around the bay.
In Spain they say, What belongs to the river, stays with the river. This is a useful thing to remember in arid regions where they go through several years of drought before the pressure drops and back comes the rain. Again, a lot of people have pitched up at a spanky new home built by unscrupulous and immensely dim developers. They aren't told the garden is a dried up riverbed and the dimbo builders are praying that it is safe because the river hasn't had water in it for years. No new home should be handed over without a canoe.
In the Sahara you should never camp in a wadi. These dried up waterholes and riverbeds can turn into raging torrents in minutes, and you never even realise it is coming, because the rain has fallen miles away and accumulated into a huge river out of earshot. Even not quite in the desert, 30 Sudanese died recently from drowning in Khartoum. Tragic, and you can bet that if the waters continue to rise the Blue Nile will mix with the White Nile and we will have to rename the mighty river, Pale Blue Nile 1 and 2.
Ultimately, Mankind doesn't have too much say about the weather, seeing as the sun is the main influence on our spinning rock, but we do seem to have influence on what happens in our locality. The Russians claimed they had a machine that would blow away the clouds to assure magnificent May Day parades, and now the Chinese are predicting zero bad weather at the next Olympics, thanks to a few well placed rockets! This level of control must be a commie thing? In the West, you have insurance, and a prayer that they pay out.
Got any flood stories?
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| "Your name" is a Kiva lender | "Your site's screenshot" SmartLink Widget | Funny HQ humor store |
How to make sidebar improvements
Filed in: Ed's blog spot
Which ever way you spin it, someone somewhere will say your sidebar is too wide, too busy, too understated, too overstated, too many scripts, too slick, too tacky, too little styling, too little too late. Knowing you cannot win is the first step to nearly winning!
The Pisstakers sidebar
Anyway, in an effort to improve on The Pisstakers right sidebar, I have developed a widget-based system. (Quite by accident, I must add) I seem to have found a more consistent look than before, and far more flexible.
Basically, the boxes expand to the content and because the widgets are stored on a server, rather than coded in the page itself, I can easily update the content. This means the ability to easily create and maintain lots of links to humor blogs, cool blogs, tech blogs and other good friends of the Pisstakers.
Is it a blogroll?
I suppose that I have developed a sort of blogroll, categorised into different blog styles. But before I am asked to hang myself on my own anti-blogroll hypocrisy, suffice to say, every link to a blog will be included in proper text!
Widgets will be made public
I will shortly be making the simple copy-and-paste code available for all widgets, but for now you can add the Cool Blogs widget, plus Humor blogs widget and the tried-and-tested Funny Quotes widget to your sidebar. (They are a fit-and-forget dynamic link to cool blogs in each genre).
To add your blog to a widget
If you want your blog to be highlighted in one of these widgets, feel free to send Ed a link to an interesting / praiseworthy post on your blog. I will add it to the relevant widget with a few introductory words. The more people install the widget, the more people are likely to click through to your site.
In return, please post a short article on your site that includes a link to The Pisstakers.
User feedback requested
Let me know if this new system is working for you - ie does the site load any slower than before? Does the sidebar add to or detract from your enjoyment of the main content? Thanks.
(I am off now to work out the easiest way to add annoying background music!)
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| "Your name" is a Kiva lender | "Your site's screenshot" SmartLink Widget | Funny HQ humor store |
Vinokourov fails Tour de France dope test
Ed the Editor's personal blog corner
Yet again, a pro cyclist has been caught breaking the rules. In this case Vinokourov, the Astana Albino, was caught with two types of blood in his system. The obvious conclusion is that he is a vampire and was feasting on the race leader, Rasmussen, the night before the Saturday Time trial.
Deflecting attention away from the vampire accusations, Vinokourov, who already has the ear of the Kazakhstan President, made a wild suggestion. After his bad crash at the start of the Tour, which left him with 60 stitiches, Vino's legs had abnormal amounts of blood in them, and that is what has confused the doctors' tests. Nice try AV. A bit like chopping your hand off after stealing something and then blaming it all on the severed hand?
Of course, he is innocent until the B-sample proves he is guilty and lying through his albino teeth, but you have to hold judgement until the definitive results come through. Let's just say Vinokourov is so confident of the results, that his impressive Astana team-mates have all graciously accepted the Tour de France's casual invitation to pack up their bags and piss off back to their barren mountain laboratories.
Victims of team work
It may not look like it, when the only cyclist you know is Lance Armstrong, but the Tour de France is the ultimate team competition, and all the racing you see revolves around 9 team members sacrificing themselves to ensure their leader wins the yellow jersey. All very noble, and at times it is quite moving to see a guy who has been pulling his leader through the mountains, to suddenly reach his limit, blow up and almost fall off his bike in utter exhaustion. But building this team spirit has a bad side.
Cycling is all about money and sponsorship. Sponsors finance teams and the manager is expected to mold a team that can create major publicity for sponsors. In effect, cyclists are human billboard machines whose life is totally controlled by their managers. They eat, sleep and train as per the regimen, and they don't get to choose the regimen. Follow or leave the team - there is no option for athletes who have dedicated their lives to being pros. They follow.
Sometimes, these monks on two wheels have managers who are more unscrupulous than even Vinokourov. The cyclits eat and drink what they are given, unaware of what it is they are taking, trusting their managers to abide by the rules and not kill them. Unfortunately, it is the cyclist who bears the brunt of cheating scoundrels and the mightiest fall in the name of pleasing the sponsors.
The jury is still out on Floyd the alcoholic Landis, last year's TDF winner. Surely his blood sample has dried up by now, along with his wage packet? Going back in time, the jury banned former Tour Winner, Marco the Pirate Pantani and he continued the rest of his short life of destitution and cocaine-clouded days without a bike, before killing himself. Good to be a hero, innit.
I don't know either of those guys, but I do know a bloke called Roberto Heras, (Lance Armstrong's pace maker in the mountain stages in the Tour de France) and it is very sad to see a decent guy banned from earning a living because he was caught with substances in his body that his manager said would be OK.
Cononclusion
At the end of the day, Vinokourov only had a blood transfusion in order to gain an advantage over the opposition, much better than pumping himself full of unnatural substances, like adrenalin. He was caught and it looks like an isolated case and surely most teams have curbed their drug-pushing ways? but I don't think the authorities will ever drive cheating totally out of sport. The bottom line is, if you couple the commitment of athletes programed to win at all costs, with doctors pushing the envelope to get over regulations, and sponsors looking for value, the chemical boundaries will be in flux for ever. And the Vinos and Landises and Herases will bear the brunt.
The fun is over now and the TDF is back on the flat, but if you want to get high, go out on your bike for 20 minutes, pedal as hard as you can, then slump in front of the TV and keep an eye on the TDF riders' speed. Awesome, dude. Of course you could get in shape without drugs and emulate them - once - but you would need other help to perform like that, day after day.
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| "Your name" is a Kiva lender | "Your site's screenshot" SmartLink Widget | Funny HQ humor store |
Chilly Jilly, why didn't I think of that?
Filed in: Ed's blog spot
Ed the Editor's personal blog corner
In this techno age of ultra convenience and mod cons, if you still hear yourself saying, There has to be a better way than this, stop right there and think how. And when you have worked out how, don't tell anyone and write out a patent to protect your idea.
This isn't Ed Entrepreneurials 101, this is the advice from Big idea Donny, who seems to unearth and catapault new businesses to great heights with monotonous regularity. Two products caught my lecherous eye.
Jilly used to work in an office. In the summer she would sweat outside but freeze inside in the air-con cold. Rather than lug a big woolly sweater around with her, in part to keep warm, in part to cover the evidence of a chilled torso, she applied her mind to the problem. The entrepreneuse produced a useful accessory to carry with you everywhere in summer - the Chilly Jilly.
The Chilly Jilly is a glorified thermal scarf that is so simple it makes you think, Why didn't anyone else think of that? And that is the reaction you want to hear from others, when they see your product, not what you say when you see a product you thought about doing yourself years earlier!
Having said that, from my male point of view, I wonder, Why would anyone buy that. What is wrong with a big woolly or just suffering in silence with your arms crossed, hugging yourself to keep warm?
Go commando
Someone else spent months pondering the phenomenon of VPL (That is visible panty lines for the tech heads who thought it stood for Virtual Photo Links) The student of all things undie was not a perv in a basement, but a dynamic lady. She thought there had to be a better way to keep your elasticated undies invisible from prying eyes, and sure enough, needs must, she came out with the Commando range of non VPL knickers.
Looking around me, (from behind a newspaper and sunglasses) she has quite a large market, methinks.
Got any why didn't I think of that moments?
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| "Your name" is a Kiva lender | "Your site's screenshot" SmartLink Widget | Funny HQ humor store |
Humor blogs widget
Filed in: Ed's blog spot
It works and it is live on a backwater page until I have a few more posts to link to - hint hint! Take a look.
To read: Scroll bottom right on this page, and click on the headline. It changes with each page refresh.
To install and forget it: copy and paste the code into your blog. It's F-REE and adapts to your theme.
To submit a funny post of your own for the Humor Blogs widget, contact Ed with a URL and sit back. I will add the teaser headline and the rest is auto-magic.
Any thoughts or submissions, please let me have them!
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| "Your name" is a Kiva lender | "Your site's screenshot" SmartLink Widget | Funny HQ humor store |
Low tech in hi-tech
Filed in: Ed's blog spot
Ed the Editor's personal blog corner
If you ever see any Tour de France coverage, you will see that the professional cyclists have access to the highest tech equipment and training facilities imaginable. For instance, a front wheel is worth over $1000 alone, the frame can cost tens of thousands, helmets are worth hundreds, the wind tunnels at their disposal when preparing for races are state of the art multi millions, they travel in luxury coaches and... when they descend from the summit of the highest mountain passes, many of the racers stuff a newspaper down the front of their shirts to protect them from windchill!
F1 lumber
A few years ago, Formula One started to get really silly on technology. The power of the engines was getting into rocket territory, research budgets were in the stratosphere and the drivers had so many technical aids, they seemed almost superfluous. How ironic that when faced with some draconian out-of-the-blue aerodynamic regulations, the racing teams were stumped for a slick solution and had to resort to bolting a plank of wood to the underside of the chassis.
Who needs coach wheel nuts?
When I was trucking around Africa we came across a coach that had broken down by the track side, listing badly to one side. As usual, the responsibility for getting the vehicle back on the road fell on the shoulders of the resourceful truck boys. While the driver sheltered under a tree and the passengers sought shade wherever else they could find it, two young lads set to work with supreme confidence. They tied the sheared-off wheel back onto the axle with string! No exaggeration, we were laughing our heads off at the ludicrous solution, but you know what, it worked.
Got any more examples of low tech solutions to high tech problems?
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| "Your name" is a Kiva lender | "Your site's screenshot" SmartLink Widget | Funny HQ humor store |
MyBlogLog Sunday 16
Filed in: MBL sunday
To claim a mini review, all you have to do now is leave a comment below and include a link to the best post you wrote this week.
You have till about 6pm and then I will get to work.
Permalink is permanent
All mini reviews from today are instantly added to the archives, so you can get a permanent back link to your mini review when it appears later today.
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Be back later.
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