This morning, I got up and began perusing some of the various sites I Like to visit on at least a semi-daily basis. One of those sites is SLAM! (Canoe.ca’s sports section). I usually don’t read mainstream media sources; in this case, however, I do like to check sports standings and I missed the Toronto Raptors playoff game last night so I wanted to find out if they won or lost.

For some reason, I saw a header that said “Bear signs with Saints”. I thought it might have something to do with the New Orleans Saints signing one of the Chicago Bears, so I decided to read it.

I was half right. The article was about the New Orleans Saints, but it was also about the University of Alberta Golden Bears and one of their star players being signed. What’s really interesting is the painfully obvious logical flaw in the article that either the journalist missed completely or that the player never said in the first place. So I’ve decided to make a game of it. Read the article, and then return to this page once you think you’ve spotted the logical error (or click “Read the rest of this entry” if you’re seeing this through a feed, category page, or index page).

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Google Blog Search is in beta mode at the present time, but as a Google service has the potential to attract a great deal of traffic to a blog site. At the present time, the instructions for adding a blog or updating a blog in the “About Google Blog Search Pinging” section are rather vague, with the implication that automatic updating of a blog is next to impossible.

But fear not, good WordPress citizen. Updating a WordPress blog is a lot easier than it would appear! In just two simple steps, you can ping Google Blog Search automagically and let it take care of the rest.

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The New England Patriots have acquired NFL bad boy and unofficial spokesperson for marijuana Randy Moss from the Oakland Raiders for a fourth-round pick. (Source: NFL.com).

It is very rare that a deal looks bad from both sides of the equation, but this is one of those cases. On the one hand, the New England Patriots acquired a locker room cancer and one of the most notorious bad boys in the NFL. Does anyone remember when Moss walked off the field with two seconds left in a loss to the Redskins? Or when he pushed a city traffic agent in Minneapolis with his car? This is the type of person that has no business playing football anywhere for any reason. The only difference between this Randy Moss and Maurice Clarett is that Randy Moss hasn’t found himself sentenced to prison….yet. There is no question in my mind that Randy Moss will be a distraction in New England and cost them a shot at another Super Bowl at some point.

This deal looks just as bad from the Oakland side of the fence. Oakland acquired Moss for in this 2005 deal for Napoleon Harris, the 2005 #7 overall pick (who the Vikings used to draft Troy Williamson) and a late-round pick. All the Raiders have to show for it are two years of whining and less than all-star production, including career lows in catches and yards for Moss last year, and a fourth-round pick.

John Bowie (whom the Raiders drafted with the pick) had better be a damn good cornerback, or Oakland will have some serious egg on its face.

Yep, it’s Sunday. That means it’s time for Search Query Info!

As this site grows in size, so too do the number of search queries and more importantly the number and strangeness of search queries with which people find this site. This week is no exception to the rule; people have searched for some weird things this week, and I’m going to hopefully provide those of you who have searched for weird things some answers. From information on bowling to fake resumes to Steve Maich to the Toronto Raptors and their playoff run, this post contains something for…a whole lot of people!

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One of the most common “unsolicited commercial emailer” character flaws is that those who practice the black art of UCE quite often don’t have the ability to read the sites that they’re on and choose to send generic messages to their intended targets rather than customizing their message.

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Those of you who use Internet Explorer 7 may have come across a message in the Information Bar similar to the one posted below (with screen capture) whenever you visit a site or page that makes use of a Javascript dialog box (or scripted window as IE likes to call it). I’m using Google Adsense as an example, since the behaviour occurs whenever a user attempts to add an ad channel into their list of ad channels:

The full text reads: “This website is using a scripted window to ask you for information. If you trust this website, click here to allow for scripted windows…” If you click on the information bar, you will be given the option to “Temporarily Allow Scripted Windows”, as per the screen capture below:

This will provide a temporary fix, and will allow access to any scripted windows on the site in question. The temporary period, from what I can gather, lasts the duration of a browser session (or a login session in the case of Google Adsense). However, there is a very simple means of allowing scripted windows to show up for a particular website, and this tutorial will outline the steps for you.

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This week’s Cool Site is one that most of you would probably never come across unless someone like me posted it somewhere. The site in question is a blog that is owned by a man who probably hasn’t given a damn what anyone thinks in the past 40 years; he just comes out and tells it like it is, with little to no regard for the other person’s feelings or the consequences of his statements. He also took the time to post to this blog and come up with the most intelligent argument to date that I’ve seen, and I’ll always respect an intelligent argument even if I don’t always agree with it.

With all that said, here’s this week’s Cool Site: IncrediBILL’s Random Rants, brought to you by Red Kool-Aid, suicide sauce, a lot of offensive language (warning: not necessarily safe for work) and at least two major organ transplants necessitated by alcohol and spicy food consumption.

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That’s right. Check out this results page from ask.com (formerly askjeeves.com):

http://www.ask.com/web?q=cool+blogs&o=0&l=dir&qsrc=0&page=2

Wait till they see the post I pretimed for later on this evening.

For those of you who wish to join the I-Follow Movement and have WordPress blogs on your own domains, good news is forthcoming; the rel=”nofollow” attribute can easily be removed without the need for additional plugins or software. In fact, it only takes about 5 minutes and one line of code!

Spam Warning

Removing the rel=’external nofollow’ attribute can result in increased spam attempts and, in order to protect yourself, I recommend signing up with a WordPress.com Account, even though your blog resides on your own domain; by doing so, you will acquire the WordPress API key required to activate the Akismet plugin. So please do this first.

What You Will Need

1. A text editor; ideally, one that will allow you to go to a particular line number in your code. Notepad++ has this functionality, and it’s a free editor.
2. About 5 minutes’ worth of time.

Have you taken care of both of your needs? Great. Let’s go!

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I promised that I’d explain more about why I came up with the new layout and a couple of the new features, so here goes:

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