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  • Get Up And Exercise

    McDonalds is starting a new ad compaign urging people to get some exercise.

    McDonald’s Says It’s Time to Exercise

    MCDONALD’S has a suggestion for Americans, who are becoming obese in alarming numbers: get some exercise.

    The company, under fire from those who say its food plays a role in the nation’s obesity problem, introduced a marketing campaign yesterday promoting physical activity as part of a balanced life. The theme: “It’s what I eat and what I do … I’m lovin’ it.”

    The campaign includes commercials that largely dispense with traditions like showing the product, the restaurants or people eating food. One spot even tells viewers, “Maybe you should spend less time with your TV.” [NYTimes]

  • Lazy Spammers

    Phil Ringnalda does some tests to see if spammers are smart enough to grab email addresses that have been escaped as numeric character references. I was surprised to find that spammers weren’t going this little extra mile.

    Spammers are lazy<

    Last July, wanting to prove that simplistic protection of email links by just escaping them as numeric character references (&#097;&#064;&#098;&#046;&#099;&#111;&#109; to produce a@b.com) was a lousy idea — and how could it not be? even without any economic incentive, it wouldn’t take me long to write the code needed to harvest them just fine — I put an encoded SpamMotel address in my sidebar, along with a fresh address in the unprotected part of my accessibly spamproofed address. I figured it wouldn’t take long before the encoded address was getting just as spammed as the other.

    This morning, when I got my third actual email through the encoded one (I guess the “Harvester Test” headline wasn’t quite clear enough), I finally remembered to turn it off and take it out. The final tally, for the encoded address: 46 spams, 3 actual emails; for the unencoded address: 2632 spams. Apparently, if you don’t have time to really harden an address, it’s worth taking the time to at least convert it to NCRs. Lazy spammers. [via phil ringnalda dot com]

    I’ve argued for ages that just escaping email addresses like this was an example of security through obscurity. Of course I’m sure spammers everywhere will now be looking to change this.

  • Edited Manga

    DC comics recently got into the manga biz with their CMX imprint. I’d been kind of excited as they were picking up two titles I was really interested in getting: GALs and Tenjou Tenge. TenTen was just released and already it sounds like a disaster.

    TenTen is a fighting manga. It tends to be quite violent and has quite a bit of fanservice. In japan I believe it had a Mature rating. CMX, which uses the slogan “Pure manga — 100% the way the original Japanese creators wanted you to see it,” chose to edit the series and release it as a teen title. Needless to say the manga community isn’t thrilled. Many bloggers and comics news sites have already posted about it. It will be interesting to see if DC has any response.

    I’m also posting about it because it hits one of my biggest peeves with some manga releases these days. The habit of tweaking art so that they remove things that might be inappropriate for whatever age group they are targeting. One of my favorites is Hikaru no Go. Where at the end of the first volume we have someone putting a blob of gum down on the center of a Go board. In the actual manga, it’s a cigarette. Of course this leads to the second volume where someone is upset about the character “putting out his dirty gum on the Go board.” Please, just translate, don’t start tweaking things like this. If there is content that isn’t appropriate for an age group, don’t market it to them.

  • Elk

    When my parents went to New Mexico on vacation last year they discovered elk. It is one of my mom’s favorite meats now. After their trip they ordered some elk and last night I got to try some of it. I have to say it was quite good. The taste was mild. I wouldn’t have guessed that it wasn’t beef.

    From what I understand that in comparison with other meats it is actually not that bad for you at all. Especially when you look at things like fat content. I hope mom gets some more soon.

  • Amazing Snow Sculptures

    Someone online mentioned a site with shots of the International Snow Sculpture Championships. The winning one is stunning. I’d love to see shots of it in the process of being sculpted.

  • Girls Bravo – Season Two

    Okay, so the first season was butchered by TokyoTV. While there was some fanservice, it was constantly obscured. Sometimes by darkening the images, other times adding steam. In both cases it was bad enough that you couldn’t even see who was in the scene. My theory is that the people producing the anime got so upset and frustrated by this that they decided to go completely overboard. There is much more skin than previously. It just seems a bit overdone.

    We’ll see how it progresses.

  • Reason #4 I Dig World of Warcraft

    One of the things I love best about World of Warcraft is its sense of humor and pop culture references. I started a new undead character today and while running through starting area ran across three zombies. Their names: Daniel Ulfman, Karrel Grayves, and Stephen Bhartec. Every once in a while Daniel says things like “You really couldn’t blame him…”, “No one lives forever…”, and “Where’s the rest of the guys?”

    I couldn’t stop chuckling about it the whole time I was playing. Brilliant.

    Edit: And I just had to kill Samual Fipps.

  • QOTD 03/06/2005

    Umberto Eco
    “I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.” [via Quotes of the Day]

  • Futakoi

    Just got around to watching the first episode of Futakoi. It looks as though its makers got together and said to each other, “Guys, guys, what’s the scariest possible harem show we could make?” “Ooh, ooh, I know, let’s have the guy not only have to choose between half a dozen beautiful girls, let’s have him choose between half a dozen pairs of twins!” “GENIUS!”

    That said, this was actually a pretty engaging little show. To their credit, they introduced an in-story reason for so many female twins showing up, and judging from the opening and ending credits, only (“only”) two sets of twins look like they will seriously compete for the hero’s affections. The protagonist is a nice enough kid, easily turned by a pretty face, but what boy that age isn’t? And I have to like the guy because he’s a stargazer and his dad is a professional astronomer. So I expect I’ll be watching more of this one.