In the news this week is that Microsoft is offering to buy Yahoo for $44.6 Billion. If this deal goes through, two things will happen. 1. It totally won’t matter. 2. Microsoft will have just bought their own defeat to Google in the “online wars” (for the sake of the argument, please just pretend there is an online war). Here’s the bare-bones story…

Yahoo limps along and stays afloat because they have folks over there making pretty good decisions on what to do. They have their bases covered: search; mail; chat; news; calendar; groups; etc…. Yahoo’s problem is they totally suck at execution. Everything they’ve built or revamped in the last few years has sucked big time. They are fragile and teetering on their own demise.

Now along comes Microsoft with their secret-bunkers full of cash, looking to buy themselves some online big-boy pants. Luckily (and by luckily, I mean unfortunately), they suck at both decisions and execution, and they have proven they understand the internets about as well as George Bush understands… well… seemingly anything. Slightly long story, slightly longer… when Microsoft starts making and executing decisions for Yahoo, Yahoo will die.

Of course everyone gets it… this deal makes a TON of sense for Microsoft, especially if they were competent. Which they are not. So while we’ll have a ton of marginally interesting stories, detailing the changes (and ensuing failures) Microsoft will be making to Yahoo. And allowing folks the opportunity to pick apart each decision ad nauseum. We will all yawn and click for the sports page.

Final score, Google: Win; Microsoft: Not-Win.

It’s funny ’cause it’s true… and funny. This is the first comedy sketch I’ve seen written around an application (Photoshop). It’s very well done, very funny, and absolutely perfect for a web series. Now all they need is for some jackass in advertising or marketing to totally fuck it up…

Bluegrass is known for it’s hot pickers, playing faster than ears can hear. It can make learning tunes a bit difficult. Luckily, we no longer have to ruin our records and needles, or stretch out our cassette tapes with endless rewinds. If you have iTunes on your computer, then you already have a great tool for slowing down music… AND video! It’s a little known fact… but Apple’s free QuickTime Player (installed along with iTunes) is great for slowing down your favorite audio and/or video clips. It even allows you to change the pitch so you don’t have to retune your instrument! Here’s how to do it:

1. Choose an audio or video file and open it in QuickTime Player (mp3s, wav, aif, mov, mp4, etc…)
2. In QuickTime, choose cmd-k (Mac) or ctrl-k (PC) to open the A/V Controls (or from the Windows menu)
3. Adjust the speed and/or pitch to your liking

If you don’t already have QuickTime, you can download it for free for your Mac or PC from Apple’s website. In addition, QuickTime Pro ($30 upgrade) allows you to easily set in and out points, loop edit files and more.

From the it’s funny ’cause it’s true department comes one of the best explanations of the software development I’ve ever come across… and it’s in cartoon form with small words so even your boss will understand it…

The iPhone is gonna be huge… so get over it. Also, this is damn funny…

If you’re trying to view an image in Firefox and are seeing this error “ cannot be displayed, because it contains errors”, it’s very likely you’re experiencing the same problem I just solved. I post the solution here because none of the other folks I found reporting the problem posted the correct solution. Firefox (and probably Internet Explorer) cannot display CYMK images… oddly, Safari can (so many of us Mac users won’t have this problem).

To fix this, download the file, open it in a respectable graphic program (eg. Graphic Converter) and change modes from CYMK to RGB. Save the file, upload and you should be home free.

Comment spam is a fun thing. See, a spammer uses a script to harvest the posts on your blog and then attempts to add comments to your posts that contain ads and links for their viagra and insurance and stuff. Neat! Dasspunk.com is currently enjoying the attentions of just such a spammer… So I figured I should help discourage such behavior by explaining how you might go about stopping it…

Now if you allow anyone to comment on you blog without being registered, you are clearly desperate for friends and should welcome these spammers with open arms (because you already are). If not and you’re still getting spam, then you need to turn off Trackbacks (Pings). Trackbacks are a nice little invention that was meant to enable communication between blogs. The premise is nice but the only folks that use it are spammers… so turn ‘em off. Here’s a little checklist:

1. Log into your WordPress Admin
2. Under Options/General check the box Users must be registered and logged in to comment
3. Under Options/Discussion, uncheck the option Allow link notifications from other Weblogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)

Okay, unfortunately, this will only protect your future posts… any existing post with pings enabled will still be targets. So you’ll need to either edit each post by hand and uncheck the “Allow Pings” (under Discussion section) or, if you’ve got access to your database, you can change them all with a single command. Now, before you do this or any edit on your database, make a backup of it! That said, here’s the command you’ll need to run (probably in phpmyadmin) to turn off pings on all of your posts:

UPDATE `posts` SET `ping_status` = ‘closed’;

Hope this helps and good luck.

A few weeks back, I was driving home with a fellow bandmate, who, as it turns out, is as bad with direction as I am. While we were turning a 4 hour drive into a 4 and a half hour drive–lost… again–I decided it was time to get proactive about my directional deficiencies. So when I woke the following morning (actually much closer to afternoon), I hopped online and bought a GPS.

The Garmin i5 might be the best $340 I’ve ever spent… It came set up and ready to go right out of the box. I’ve since used it to navigate just about everywhere, actually going out of my way to stump it… and every time, it gets me home. The little lady clearly and eloquently reveals the correct route, in a lovely British accent (hell yeah… on purpose ;) ), just in the nick of time… seemingly every time. She’s very understanding and patient with me. She never yells or tires of coming up with an alternate route when I wander… no, she seems to understand me and like me… just the way I am.

I can’t tell you how liberating this is! So to all my directionally dysfunctional brethren, I implore you… buy one of these and be lost no more!

Apple’s iPod and iTunes Music Store are the kings of the hill and as such, their critics, competitors and even partners regularly take feeble swings at them both.

For example, in an apparent attempt to mitigate any dissimilarities between the writing quality of mainstream journalists and that of your average teenage blogger, a recent BusinessWeek “article” quoted Chris Gorog, CEO of Napster Inc. and disingenuous corporate whore as saying:

“The villain in the story is the iPod,” “You have this device consumers love, but they’re being restricted from buying anything other than downloads from Apple. People are bored with that.”

Yes Chris, people have been bored with that over 300 billion times. Swing and a miss!

Up until very recently, we’ve been forced to endure history from the perspective of a very small minority know as “the Victors”. These lucky son’ bitches have, thankfully, been given notice. Thanks to Wikipedia, victory is no longer a requirement for posterity’s pen.

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that is written by… well… you and me. Anyone with a connection to the internets and the inclination can make contributions. But, keep this in mind… democracy is a bitch and Wikipedia has been the center of some controversies lately. For every person that volunteers to help police the articles there’s another person who will happily deface them. This is the price we pay for a history of the people, by the people.

Personally, I can’t stop myself from using the Random Article feature… but I’m a geek that way.