Complete! (ish)

Well, there's still bugs and stuff to flesh out, and our about page isn't up yet, and It's likely that I'll be shifting the colors around some more (since now we look like google fanboys), but for the most part, This is the new look of The Tartar Sauce! Let me know if/how you like it please, as I will actually listen.

You may notice a few - well a lot of new things, including that twitter link on the top, which is likey to change into something else, since Twitter is pretty lame. But as of now I have no idea of what to link there.

Our title is actually an image - once again done in MS paint. This is also likely to change. We need a logo, banner, or something there. If anyone with skill wants to send something in for us to use, then I'll probably use it, as it can't be worse than what's there now, that being Courier new bold. The image is 425x120 pixels, for reference. The Twitter link is an image too, 280x50 pixels, and that needs something too.

The one big drawback of this template (which I've already had to completely hack apart) is that it only shows the author on the post page, not the home page. So to see who wrote the post you'll have to click on the article link. I'm trying to fix it. Though I may just add a tag for each author. We'll see. I dunno, I should probably stop pointing out every flaw of the site, it's a good template, simple and clean, though not overly journalistic. There's comment rss feeds now, as well as more rss links.

I dunno, we'll see how it turns out.

Wiki of the Week: A million Penguins

This weeks wiki is an interesting perspective on the anyone-can-edit philosophy. "A Million Penguins" was a collaborative attempt by Penguin books to write a novel using a wiki.

Unfortunately, it turned out to be a really difficult task. There were major simultaneous issues with people making too many edits, and not enough people editing. Eventually the project stopped, with what was, at best, a novella. You can read it in a half hour or so, and it doesn't make much sense. Some view it as a sucess, most as a failure.

Either way, it certaintly changed the way a lot of people thought about collaboration and the internet.

A Million Penguins

and "A Million Penguins" from Wikipedia

The Tartar Sauce: Stretch Armstrong Edition

Yea, just letting everyone know I'm doing some layout editing to combat our authors tendencies to write "laboriously" long posts. As blogger does not allow post pages (hint hint google), I've decided to now use text that will stretch to the width of the page. There may also be coming changes to our sidebar, and maybe some color changes. Let me know if you love or loathe anything.

Geeky/Random Web Clippings (of the week?)

So I might make this sort of thing a habit, provided I actually find enough stuff in these here internets.

An animated image showing the definition of pi.

Space is fun. Oh, yes it is.

A bootable CD that cracks windows passwords using rainbow tables.

An awesome guide to speed reading.

Images that use the text of Obama's victory speech.

John Stewart's famous Crossfire pwnage.

Blogger Is A Piece Of Shit.

No really, it is. I promise. You might notice a few style changes happening around here. Most of them will be buggy. Some just plain won't work. Please excuse the shitty presentation while I sort things out. Why is blogger a piece of shit? Well among other things, what I've been trying to do for a bit is add post previews (aka "continue reading" links) to these wonderful, but longer posts we've been getting here lately. Unfortunately, blogger in all it's infinite wisdom, still doesn't have this simple feature, even though it's been requested over and over again for years now. If this were a wordpress blog it would be as simple as pressing a button, but nooooooo I had to mindlessly follow google and get a blogspot blog instead. So now I have to edit the template by hand and try to figure out what to do. My coding skills are mediocre at best, so bear with me during this construction time. In the meantime, if you're thinking of starting a blog of your own, might I suggest wordpress.com. It's got way more features than blogger. And the developers actually care about what features the bloggers want. Update: So as it turns out there is no way to add post previews in blogger without adding "continue reading" links to every single post, regardless of whether or not it actually has more content. Bull. Fucking. Shit. I may have to resort to more drastic measures and we're still doing some switch arounds with the interface, but just wanted to get that out there. Thanks again.

So, The Beach and Stuff Like That

Actually, no stuff like that. So I was at the beach the other day, as you do. It was McCorrie point. Its a little dinky beach. Your typical Portsmouth beach full of shells and rocks and seaweed and weeds and shit. It's shit for swimming but it's great for finding stuff or just hangin' out thinking. So I was thinking while picking up various pretty rocks for my grandmother searching for an epiphany of some kind when the question hit me: Why the fuck are there so many bricks on the beach? Seriously, I finds them all the time on the beaches I go to and they're nice, all smoothed out by the ocean and shit. But why are there so many of them? One or two every once in a while I can understand, like seaglass, but there's way more of them all over the place if you look. so where did they come from? Is there a natural explanation? Are they just red rocks that look like bricks? Cuz I took Earth Science freshman year of high school and the only thing I learned (from crazy talks-to-walls-no-really-he-does Mr. Rutkewitz) was how to tell brick or cement from a real rock. Was there some giant Titanic-sized tanker full of bricks that sank a hundred tears ago? and the bricks were just washed ashore now because they were all defective and floated a bit or something? I did some reasearch and it turnes out that already happened in the little island of St Maarten. but that looks very different from our beaches. I mean, what the fuck! Where did all these fucking bricks come from! Did there used to be some epic fort or something by the New England beaches but some secret government-covered-up-war happened and it got owned? So as soon as I got back, I asked, and... not even Google knew why. NOT EVEN FUCKING GOOGLE KNEW!!! That's when I realized I had uncovered a true mystery of the universe. I'm trying to make peace with the fact that I may never know why the bricks are there, but it's something I'll wonder about for the rest of my life. I have a feeling it's going to come back to haunt me one day. Like I'll be kidnaped or tortured and all they'll want to know is why, and I won't know, and I'll die strapped to a chair in a basement somewhere all because I didn't know where the bricks came from. Or some government agency will come to me and tell me there's a nuke in Amherst and the only way to stop it is to tell them where the bricks came from, and I won't know and thousands of people will die, because I lacked the curiosity to find out why. But what If I dedicate my life to finding out why? And it turns out to be some part of a secret experiment that went horribly wrong and I'm killed for knowing to much? Or what if it's some mundane answer and I realize I've wasted my life for nothing? Those goddamned bricks. Another one of the universe's unsolvable mysteries.

Never Really Cought On Did It? Convinceme.net

Anyone know Convinceme.net? It opened about a year ago as a place for people to argue on the internet, as if there wasn't enough of that already. It does bring some fun and interesting things to the table though. The format is brilliant and allows you to clearly see both sides of the issue. There's different modes that include open debates, 1-on-1, and king of the hill style where you may only add one argument, so it'd better be good. There's even a news section where debaters post articles and subsequent debates can be made about them. So with a cohesive and organized place for all the internetz pplz to go and spew opinion to thier heartz content, you'd think the site would be filled. but with only around 5,850 registered members, counting inactive accounts that's not nearly as much as expected. That's not even that much at all. You still get a bigger debate on any given front page digg story or gawker post. When I originally saw it I thought it could be used as a way to, "take the flamewar outside," leaving the other sites and forums with some peace and quiet. But that never happened. The upside is, with the small commuty and even smaller active community it has, most debates are fairly cohesive and non-flamey. You actually get some interesting stuff reading it. Of course the most popular debate after over a year is still Ninjas versus Pirates. I like following this guy, he's always interesting. So why did it never catch on? Are people afraid of change? Is the Post format more easy to debate with than this two-column approach? I have no idea, but why sounds like a good debate topic to me. Anyway here's ConvinceMe. Have fun.