jr conlin's ink stained banana

The neighbor kid came over for a bit today (the five year old), "JR! JR! i played baseball today!" (Ok, call me "old school", but it always bugs me a little that the neighbor kids call me by my first name.)

"That's great, Evan! Who won?", i ask.

"Both teams did!" he beamed.

i was a confused for a second. "Was it a tie?"

"A tie?"

"Did both teams have the same score?"

"Uhm, we didn't keep score."

"Then how do you know who won!"

"We Did!"

"Did the other team win too?"

"Yep!"

"Then you didn't win."

It was about then that i began arguing with a five year old. For what it's worth, i'm not a big believer in Communist based Athletics. i understand the rationale: It doesn't lower the child's esteem, It reduces overbearing parenting, It keeps the little boogers interested in the activities.

Screw that.

Losing sucks. It hurts. It makes you sad and angry. It's also how you give yourself an incentive to work harder, a more realistic view of your abilities and strengths and how and why it's important to gain an advantage.

And so, yeah, arguing with a five year old might seem like a petty thing to do, but it has it's own end. i want him to do better than other kids. i want him to recognize for himself how insane not keeping score is or how rewarding every kid the same and that he's not being compensated for any extra effort he may be putting in isn't anywhere near as "fair" as he's being told.

Next time i see him, i'm going to race him and tell him that the winners get a shiny dollar coin! When he wins, i'm giving him a penny.

Because i've got to be fair to the 99 other kids that didn't win, or even show up.

Because that's "fair".

Then i'll tell him to get off my lawn.

Ok, first off: i'm an idiot. To anyone who heard me rail about "Facebook hiding it's crawler"? No, they don't. In fact, they're very open about it and declare their user-agent as:"FacebookFeedParser/1.0 (UniversalFeedParser/4.1;) +http://facebook.com/"
The problem was, again, i was an idiot and was looking at the wrong log files.

Why was that important? Well, one thing that kind of bugged me was the fact that posts from here would show up there and look (for all intents and purposes) as having been created there. i understand Facebook wanting to provide consistency in appearance and i was the person that pointed them at my blog, plus the fact that they're kind of like a roach motel for content (everything goes in, but nothing comes out) kinda reminded me of the way that splogs operate.

i create my posts so that they look good here. Quite often, they don't look so good elsewhere (particularly when the additional formatting is stripped out.) Yeah, there's a small "View Original Post" link at the bottom, but hey, they're the ones tossing ads next to my stuff.

i figured the least i could do is add one of my own.

So i built a quick wordpress plugin called FB Credit to do that. You can install it either by copying the PHP or by unzipping the archive at the top of your WordPress install. You set the banner by going to the "FB Credit" link in the settings box (look left).

It fires whenever facebook crawls your RSS feed and prepends a "As seen on …" banner to the top of your articles. Facebook caches these to their personal CDN (which i suppose someone could use to host porn on should they ever figure out the "complicated" method they use to push those images) but more importantly, if you're using Facebook as a content distribution network like i am, it's a way to make sure folks know from whence said content came.

i'll probably expand this at some point to add this sort of branding to various other sites that may do the same thing (e.g. the aforementioned splogs), but honestly, Facebook was the only one that got on my nerves.

Perhaps i should duct tape a few ads onto the bottom too…

So, looks like wordpress changed how they do things. Previously, there was a hook for "the_content_rss" which you could use to format up elements specifically for RSS delivery. That doesn't exist anymore. Now, the method of choice is to populate the hook for "the_content" and check for "is_feed()".

In other news, i've finally returned the comment counters to the bottom of my RSS posts.

So, about that Integrate your Netflix Account with Facebook thing you may have heard about…

1. It currently only publishes your ratings (not queue adds, not reviews, not deliverys, just ratings). We want it to do more later, but we're feeling out how people react to this.
2. It's only available to the full Netflix account holder (sorry, sub accounts can't play.)
3. Yeah, folks are going a bit nuts rating things. They tend to do that. Eventually, they'll calm down and stop spamming your news feed.
4. The default setting for stories is "short". It's what we agreed upon before the latest redesign. You can change it to one line if you like by going to your Facebook Application Settings. (Personally, i like the "full story" setting.)
5. If you think this was brain dead simple to implement, you, obviously, have never tried to manage a three state machine across a combination of javascript and java REST calls.
6. There are still a few bugs. We're working with Facebook to hammer them out.
7. If you have a complaint, bug, or what-have-you, probably the best way is to leave a comment in the application discussion board. i can't promise i'll get a response to you right away, but i'll try to read it once a day.
8. Huge congrats to Hans and Anu for nearly killing themselves on getting this out; Mike for being the fearless leader; and of course Bubba, Wei, and Zhen over at Facebook for answering a lot of dumb questions and pulling some major miracles in getting this launched.

And if that's all, i'm off to bed.

i'd love to know when, we as a nation went chocolate crazy.

Ok, i keep a Yahoo candy dispenser on my desk loaded with Dark Chocolate M&Ms. i do this partly from tradition (one i picked up from my old Y!Travel Producer, Kristine Marshall), and partly because people like them.

i'll also admit that i've turned the crank on said candy machine a few times myself, so it's not like i'm morally opposed to the stuff.

Still, i really wish that folks weren't so damn addicted to chocolate. It seems like everywhere there's stuff loaded with chocolate. Hell, Trader Joe's offers a whole grain, fiber fortified box of twigs and sprigs with real dark chocolate shavings (trust me, it's not that appealing when you look at it). i swear that pretty soon some restaurant will offer roasted chicken hot-dipped in chocolate with mashed potatoes containing real Nestle chips. (And i'm not talking mole here..)

Me? i'm on a fruit kick. Dried, shredded into sheets or lumped into chewy bits. Sweetly sour citrus satisfies me in ways that the brown waxy sugary stuff just doesn't. Give me a lingering lemony lozenge to lick, or even a cherry chew to chomp.

Of course, none of that really helps when you're staring at the vending machine and it's full of nothing but chocolate.

Sigh.

Looks like i'll have to go for a can of Hawaiian punch.