Zomgee

Enter the Peeps.

Peep #1: My name is Gladiator.
Peep #2: How dare you show your back to me! Slave, you will remove your helmet and tell me your name.
P#1: [removes helmet and turns around to face P#2] My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.

Fin.

It’s time to annouce the winner of the contest a mere two posts ago. ZePuKa best defined the word “in” without using a word that contained “in” and was, in fact, the only person to do so.

In recognition of her superb rule-following and adequate defining skills, she’s won a $15 gift certificate towards anything from woot.com, shirt.woot.com, sellout.woot.com, or jinx.com.

Remember the good old days? When you got AOL 4.0 cds? When you were psyched about finally getting a 56k connection? When this exciting new technology called V.92 seemed to be cutting edge?

One of my first exposures to the Internet as we know it today was actually from a commercial- NASCAR to be exact. NASCAR and thousands of other entities, it seemed, touted entering in their respective name as an “AOL Keyword”.

AOL never had a nice browser feature. It was just a reskinned IE, but there was a bar at the top of the window where you could type in keywords and in I’m-Feeling-Lucky fashion, be transported to a whole new world, which in my case was a sad looking (yet simplistically attractive) recap of (then) last week’s race.

Don’t worry though, this isn’t a trip down memory lane using the Wayback Machine as our vehicle (there’s plenty of blog posts about that). This is merely just a look back out how epic “AOL Keyword” was hyped to be.

You see… back then, people didn’t understand what the “.com” at the end of the nascar meant. They also didn’t know that sometimes you could only get to that site by typing “www.” in front of it. Nowadays, the browsers are smarter. Want to go to GMail? Simply type “g” into Firefox’s address bar and hit enter.

Sadly (perhaps not) “AOL Keyword” is used by only the older generation… the dot commers back before the dot com era. Nobody in their right mind uses this anymore, right?

So what brought on this journey into the recent past? Well, I ended up watching both Hackers and Antitrust over the past two days. In between thoughts of “hacking the Gibson”, insecure passwords, and Synapse, old, archiac memories slowly filtered into my mind. Multiplayer paintball via dialup, spending 12 minutes at a time downloading 1mb Need for Speed 3 cars, and a myriad of other things (EZNet anyone?)

Without looking at a dictionary or other definition-giving source, define the word “in” without using the word “in” or any other word that contains “in” (inside, within, etc).

So I just added some new categories to the site- Owned and Fail. I’m sure I’ll remove/combine those two later, but for the time being, they’re really the only thing to describe what happened today.

Recently, Pakistan announced that it would henceforth ban YouTube due to it harboring blasphemous videos, ideals, etc. Can you guess what PieNet, Pakistan’s quick-to-act ISP did? Instead of blocking traffic to and from YouTube within Pakistan, it instead rerouted the IP addresses to other sites.

Now in their limited intellect (apparently) they thought that making large scale DNS changes wouldn’t really do much. What they didn’t (or did they?) realize, was that the beauty (shortcoming) of DNS is that it propogates up, down, left, and right.

YouTube ceased to exist for an hour today.

The response? Well PCCW, an upper tier telecom provider, cut the cords to Pakistan.

So thankfully, I was able to see what the hubbub on Google Trends was about with Gary Busey kissing Jennifer Garner on the red carpet at the Oscars.