I must have made it big!

Well folks, Mongo's Musings has gotten so big and popular that I've gained the notice of anonymous spammers.

To quote Garfield the cat..."Yee haw, whoopie whee. I'm so excited I could just barf."

On my article on It's beginning to look a lot like "Fuck This"! where I ranted about the anonymous coward that decided to bash me for daring to try to remember the good about Christmas I have comments like...

I think everything posted made a great deal of sense.
However, what about this? what if you were to write a awesome headline?

I mean, I don't want to tell you how to run your website, however what if you added something to maybe grab people's attention?
I mean "It's beginning to look a lot like "Fuck This"!" is a little plain.

Really Captain Retard? Did you happen to miss the fact that I was creating a title that could be sung to the tune of "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas"? Ray Charles could have seen that you brain dead twat.

Good day! This post could not be written any better! Reading 
through this post reminds me of my good old room mate!

Really? You have a roommate who is as much of a cynical and sarcastic asshole as I am? Where did you bury the body or did you use acid and flush him down the bathtub drain?

What's up i am kavin, its my first time to commenting anyplace, when i read this article i thought i could also make comment due to this good piece of writing.

It's certainly better than your writing...and grammar...and capitalization...and punctuation  "Your English teacher must be proud." said the blogger, dripping with sarcasm.

I have been exploring for a bit for any high-quality articles 
or weblog posts in this sort of house . Exploring in Yahoo I finally stumbled 
upon this web site. Reading this information So i'm happy to show that I have a very just right uncanny feeling I came upon just what I needed. I such a lot surely will make certain to don?t disregard this site and provides it a look regularly.

This rant is considered to be a high quality one? Really? This one. Not the one where I discuss penis enlargement pills or the one where I explain how Pluto's demotion is a good thing as it paved the way for more than 9 named objects orbiting the Sun? This one?

As Malcolm Reynolds said when he discovered River Tam in the freezer box..."Huh."

WOW just what I was looking for. Came here by searching for absolutely free clipart

Seeing that I don't have clip art, that must mean that you needed someone who was sarcastic, cynical and damn cranky. I must make you cream your jeans when I get downright surly then.

So with the fact that my older posts are also peppered with trolls and spammers, turning on moderation on posts that are older than 7 days. It on average takes these spammers a couple of weeks to notice a new post so I'm going to start there and get more aggressive as time goes on.

Fear not Mr. Rob! I'm not blocking anyone. This is simply a blanket ward against idiots who want to use my blog to try and generate traffic to their blogs. This is not be stepping on their civil rights. I'm not saying that they can not do this. I am simply exercising my right to say "Not here on my blog." Anyone is and will remain free to post on my site. Even you.

Especially you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wippooDL6WE

The Evils of the Internet!

No, I'm not ranting about the 'net, in fact I'm defending it.

One of the more common complaints about the Internet is that people shout out against it. "No one learns anything on their own anymore! They run into a problem and they get on their computers and get what they need from the Web and that's the end of it."

That's partially true. In this day and age even my 70-something father-in-law will hop onto the web and look up something if he doesn't know where to begin on a project. But the rest of it? Hogwash.

First of all, there is little out there that we learn "on our own". Sure there are scientists that learn things that we never knew we were clueless about. And yes some of us learn the hard way that checking the bushes for electric fence wires before taking a whiz is a fantastic idea (trust me on this). But in the end, the vast majority of things we learn are things that are taught to us. That it is the passing along of someone else's acquired knowledge that comprises much of what we learn.

Before the internet came along and was widely available to the masses if someone were to have a car break down and need the starter replaced and they didn't know how to do it, what were their options for learning it? You could futz with it until you figured it out, but a lot of things are not all that intuitive with cars and engines and if this is your only car for getting to and from work, this is not a really good idea.

So what else can you do in the days before the 'net? You either called and asked a friend who was mechanically inclined to help you (and teach you while doing it) swap out the starter...or you picked up the Haynes manual for your car and followed the instructions. In my case it was my father-in-law who came over and helped and taught me what was needed to be done.

Another example was my father-in-law teaching me how to clean and rebuild the carburetor on a lawnmower. Never did it before, never knew how to do it before. He showed me and that knowledge has proven invaluable. His knowledge...passed on to me.

In both examples, I relied on someone else's knowledge to further my own. I didn't learn anything on my own.

A step further and my whole scholastic career was one of someone taking someone else's knowledge of Math, Science, History, Literature, etc and pouring it into my head.

So what's the problem with using someone else's knowledge gleaned off of the internet? It's the same process of taking something that someone else learned and shared and incorporating it into my own experience. It's no different from grabbing a book from a library, it's no different from calling a friend and asking them what I should do next. What's the grief?

Apart from it being from "That that newfangled intar-wab thingie" I can't think of one.

Last week my LP gas tank ran out and the stove was dead. Got fuel finally yesterday and since I was asleep and the missus was out on errands, they filled the tank and closed the valve leaving me to restore the pilot lights.

Now for a while the stove pilots were clogged. No gas came out of them at all. None. Oven worked just fine, but the burners needed to be lit with a BBQ Lighter. Not a problem but damned inconvenient. Especially when you have pyromanical children who love playing with the goddamned things and losing them because they were hiding them from each other.

Mom? Mom? You can stop laughing now. Really. I am aware of the humorous levels of poetic justice of the situation.

So when I went outside to open the valve and lit the pilot on the oven, I lifted the stove top and looked at the burners and the pilots. First thing I noticed was the burners themselves come out rather like the burners in a gas BBQ Grill. So the burners come out and I get a look at the pilot system. I'm thinking that they're clogged and are in need of cleaning. If I can only remove them. So I look it up and find out that the nozzles can be removed but that I really ought to concentrate on the screw on the side of the nozzle. Why? It's a valve control screw and it can set how much flame you have. So I open one of the two valves and sure enough I hear gas. So I light the pilot and have a foot-tall jet of flame.

Too much methinks so I set it down to the suggested height of just tall enough that there is a small spot of yellow in the flame. Groovy. Quick test and both burners on the left side now come on. Do the same thing on the other side. open till I hear gas, reduce the more modest 4-inch flame into a small blue flame with a spot of yellow and now both burners on the right work as they should.

No idea why they were off in the first place but hey! It's working.

Now I didn't have a car so going to the library was right out. We're looking at an hour and a half walk there and another hour and a half back. Can't use the bus because with the schedules we're looking at the same times both ways. Granted I wouldn't be walking and could read a book but the library is only 10 minutes up the damn road by car.

Fuck that with an agave cactus! (for you Rob...enjoy!)

And I can't ask anyone because anyone who would know about such is at work or out doing things that are more important than helping an appliance newb sort out a pilot light.

So what's left? Where can I tap into the knowledge of others and incorporate it into my own? The interwebs! Google.com is my guru!

And the last bit. "No one learns anything anymore" is pure bullshit. I now know what to do the next time I'm confronted with a pilot that won't come on. Try the set valve screw and failing that cut the gas, remove the nozzle and whack it with a pin until the clog is gone then reseat it and check the valve. No I didn't re-invent the wheel but why should I have to? Knowledge is knowledge and it make not one bit of difference where it comes from. Books, Internet, knowledgeable friends/family...If it's there I'm a damned fool for not using it.

That said one needs to take the internet with a grain of salt since anyone can post anything and may be a complete twat when it comes to whatever the topic is, but that's where common sense comes in. If it comes from a gas company's website (as mine did) then the odds are that their answer is going to be 1,000% better than someone saying to pour chemicals on the nozzle and pray for the best.

Yahoo Answers

Now I hang out a lot on Yahoo! Answers. It's a great way to kill a little time and lets me help others by sharing what I've learned in my time on this planet. I'm awesome with freshwater aquariums and with computers and have a jack-of-all-trades level of knowledge in most other things.

Y!A has a feature where you can report a question or an answer if it fails to fall within the community guidelines. If it's insulting, if it's illegal, if it's spam, etc...you can report it.

Now since Y!A is huge and has hundreds of questions asked every hour...there is no way you can have people checking out each and every report out there. So they have it set that anyone who has a history of righteous reports of people who are really naughty can report and the reported question or answer will be removed then and there. Without human intervention. If you are the one that was pulled and you think it's unfair you can appeal it and someone will look it over. However if you appeal and you're still in the wrong...you get even more points deducted.

This is great for pulling the people who ask things like "Is it OK to feed kittens to my Pit Bull?" and other obnoxious questions like that. But there is a darker side. Someone with the good karma can say "I think this guy is an idiot" and report their answer and it'll vanish faster than a fart in a hurricane. This is what happened to me.

Someone asked about how long would it take to download something through the BitTorrent protocol. A game in fact. So I answered and explained how it works, what can influence download speed (giving a nice link to an animated GIF that explains it) and pointing out that getting a game like that is piracy at best and at worst can be filled with tons of malware and/or viruses and that it would be in their best interest to buy a legal copy of the game.

Someone did not like that and reported me. Answer and 10 points vanished.

So I appealed and explained all the points of my answer and why I didn't think that it was fair that it was removed. Funny thing? 5 hours later someone looked at the appeal and said "Whoops! That answer is not against the Community Guidelines" and restored it and my points.

Even funnier was the fact that the person who reported me sent me an e-mail and gloated. So I reported him for harassment. Funny thing? I checked just now and his account is listed as being suspended.

As Mark Hamil once said in his role of Cock-Knocker in "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back"...

"Don't fuck with the Jedi Master, son."

Pluto

I'm really wishing that people would grow the hell up about Pluto.

Yes it was a planet and now it's been demoted. But for pity's sake it's not like scientists have said "We don't need it anymore" and found a way to chuck it out of the solar system. It's still there people and scientists still have an interest in it.

They're even an ongoing mission called "New Horizions" which is a probe that was launched in 2006 and at this time halfway to Pluto.

When Pluto got demoted, we had no real definition as to what a planet was apart from the original definition of "Wanderer".

planet (n.) 

late Old English planete, from Old French planete (Modern French planète), from Late Latin planeta, from Greek planetes, from (asteres) planetai "wandering (stars)," from planasthai "to wander," of unknown origin, possibly from PIE *pele- (2) "flat, to spread" on notion of "spread out." So called because they have apparent motion, unlike the "fixed" stars. Originally including also the moon and sun; modern scientific sense of "world that orbits a star" is from 1630s.

Please note that last bit..."Originally including also the moon and sun". Meaning that anything in the sky orbiting around was at one point considered a planet or a wanderer.

So scientists got together and decided to define what a planet means scientifically. A planet is now considered to be an astronomical object orbiting a star or stellar remnant that is massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity, is not massive enough to cause thermonuclear fusion, and has cleared its neighboring region of planetesimals.

Pluto only manages two of the three. It has not cleared its orbital path. 

But that's not the end of poor Pluto as an object of interest. Yes it was demoted, but it was the first of a new class of orbital objects floating around out there. It became the first Dwarf Planet. And more to the point, it pioneered the way for four more objects to be classified. Ceres which is the big honking asteroid in the belt between Mars and Jupiter is large enough to have rounded itself and so is a dwarf planet as well. And out near Pluto are three others. Haumea, Makemake, and Eris. 

So we lost a planet. So poor Pluto was demoted. Four more objects were promoted from interesting and named rocks to planets. Dwarf planets perhaps...but yet another class of planet. So we went from nine to thirteen critters out there.

You would think that would be a scientifically interesting thing.

And there is talk about changing the definition of planet once again. After all, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune have little in common with planets like Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Hell we have more in common with the Dwarf Planets than we do with the gas giants. So we may end up with three classes of planet. Dwarf, Rocky, and Gaseous. None of which changes the fact that we have thirteen named, Sun-orbiting objects out there. 

So give it up people. Neil DeGrasse Tyson didn't "kill" Pluto and scientists aren't going "Well it's not a planet so fuck it." and are losing all interest in it. Pluto is here to stay and it's still an interesting and important part of our Solar family.