a resource for the ages

Sister Mary MartiniThe internet is alive with resources; indeed, it is riddled with them. It’s positively writhing with ripe and ready resources.

Now, we don’t know how you live your life, but if you’re anything like we are, you look upon most of these resources as, quite frankly, irrelevant crap. Amazon? Don’t you need money for that? Paypal? You need a credit card for that. Travelocity? Ah, to own a passport…what’s that like?

But at last, the internet has finally put out for us here at the ol’ raincoaster blog!

Buy Your Friend a Drink.com via Will Work for Food, who deserves a drink, him/herself.

The concept is you can literally buy your friend a drink via their website, which then sends a text message to your friend telling them they have X number of dollars to spend at a certain bar. Your friend then flashes their phone to the bartender who enters the code that was sent to you, and that’s it. Free drink.

I guess next you’ll be able to take your friend to lunch without actually being there.

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Virginia Tech cellcam shooting video

Not the world’s clearest picture, but probably a better representation of the experience than any other you’ll see. This is Jamal Albarghouti‘s cellcam footage of the Virginia Tech shooting event of earlier today, just a few seconds, taken at 3:15pm. It depicts the police shooting the gunman, and don’t watch it if you don’t care to see violence. Don’t watch it if you LIKE to see violence; go get your head examined instead.

At first you can’t figure out what’s going on, and then suddenly you realize that’s exactly what it was like for Jamal in that moment…he probably wasn’t sure exactly what was going on either.

I got this video from JoshintheCity here, and Disembedded has the definitive roundup of news coverage and images on his blog here. Police say they’ve made a tentative ID, but aren’t saying who. Rumour has it that it’s a 24-year-old Chinese man apparently from Shanghai who had broken up with his girlfriend: he went first to her dorm and the rumors differ on whether he shot her and a student advisor who tried to intervene, or whether he didn’t find her at all and shot people who tried to calm him, then he went to Norris Hall the engineering building (where he may have expected her to be). Some are saying he got frustrated at not finding her because he didn’t know what rooms she’d be in, and that’s when he began lining people up to execute them.

UPDATE: and thanks to the comments section and FFE, we now know:

It is now confirmed the shooter was a 23-year old South Korean National name Cho Seung-Hui who resided in Centreville, VA.

Hui was a senior English major at VT

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Sandy Belle, the Desert Tokyo Rose

Country crooner and proud American Sandy Belle has a message for the troops.

Stolen from Seattle’s SLOG, the Stranger Blog, who were kind enough to compare it to the Donnie Davies video we have here at the ol’ raincoaster blog. Then they hosed my comment, the fuckers!

Nonetheless, we Vancouverites shall rise above it and, like Sandy herself, direct a welcoming wave of the hand down South.

“Now boys, I know you have a job to do and you’re far away from home,
but my girlie parts are turning into deserts of their own.”

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quiz: which famous movie kiss are you?

What can I say? It’s Springtime even in my wizened little ovaries.


Your Famous Movie Kiss is from Gone With The Wind


“Great balls of fire. Don’t bother me anymore, and don’t call me sugar.”

What Famous Movie Kiss Are You?

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Fame, Glory, Sex and Money through Blogging: what it takes to beat the squirrel babies

Jedi Squirrels unite! 

Fame. Glory. Sex. Money. You want it all. You want it now.

And you want to get it by blogging.

I hear you, baby. I know how you feel. I’m one of you.

I’m about to give you some bad news

The Fame? That comes fast, as long as you define “fame” as “slightly known, in that they can kindasorta recognize my header but have no idea what I look like way, to people who already read blogs.” This is a smaller group than you currently imagine, and even your late-night entreaties of the retired longshoremen on the rail at your local watering hole are not likely to change it on a measurable scale.

If you want to be famous to politicians’ research staffers, WoW-playing slackers, or sysadmins, however, you’ve got it made.

The Glory? See above, plus your mother will be proud of you once you spend three consecutive holidays explaining to her what blogging is and showing her how to put YOUR blog in HER email signature. Unless you’re a porn blogger, and then we don’t want to know about your relationship with your mother.

The Sex? You mean with other people? What would I know about that? Ask the porn bloggers if you must.

The Money?Ah, the money. Now we come to it; you figured that if you stuck Adsense on your cat blog that you could just sit back and watch the millions roll in, didn’t you? You’ve taken a couple of overpriced SEO seminars and can’t understand why you aren’t able to quit your day job just yet.

In point of fact, there are three ways to earn six figures from blogging.

  1. Be Robert Scoble.
  2. The engtech method
  3. The Manolo method

Of these three, we at the ol’ raincoaster blog favour #3, for lo, we are in truth and in fact not Robert Scoble and yea verily we can hardly understand what engtech says half the time (and could only get a six-figure job if you left out the decimal entirely), so that leaves only one option.

Fortunately, the Magnanimous Manolo has laid out a simple yet superfantastic planenabling you to scale the heights of the six-figure-blogo-strato-sphere. Or, as he puts it, “to beat the squirrel babies.”

You may think, Mr. Arturo G. Bloggerman, that your grand mission is to enlighten the unwashed masses, to whom you declaim the unpleasant truth from your exalted perch at declaimingloudly.blogspot.com. But in the point of fact, if the unwashed masses do not find your loud declamations entertaining they will quickly move down the street to the Cuteoverload to look at the pictures of the squirrel babies.

So, what must you do to compete with the squirrel babies?

Read the rest of the articleto learn the superfantastic surefire secret to six-figure success!
(sorry, been reading a lot of marketing faff lately)

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