Arr! Really? Arr!

This week one of those coincidences happened that makes your head spin. I've been preparing weekly material for my Drupal course, and last week I prepped a class on creating a new user and providing him with the power to create and edit certain kinds of content. I classified him as a user type named "article editor" because that made sense, then I had to come up with a username, password etc. Out of the ether, the name "Captain Jack" appeared in my brain: I pictured him as a pirate, so I gave him the password "treasure" and the email address captain@pira.cy (making sure .cy was a valid Internet country code of course—it's Cyprus in case you're interested). Since I needed a profile image too, a quick Google image search turned up a doozy from the new Aardman feature:

I finished the notes off by having him create an article titled "Arr!!" (what else?), and then ran some Justin Bieber song lyrics through a website that translated them into piratese, and made those the body copy of the article. It came together as the basis for a pretty good class if I do say so myself.

Then yesterday I delivered the class, and the students were following along, working on their own Drupal installations, when one of the students said, "Hey Matt? Did you do a pirate user because today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day?"

I was stunned for a second, then yelled, "What!? No!!" I mean, I yelled it with a crack in my voice, I was so gobsmacked. Then I yelled, "No, it's not today!! You're yanking my chain!" They had to be yanking my chain. But no, folks. Yesterday was in fact International Talk Like a Pirate Day. I mean, what the hell!

Hey, It's On YouTube...!

I'm always interested to discover a new kind of spam. Check out this screenshot of an email I got from Yann Gloannic :

Below the link to "youtube.com," you can see the real URL that the link points to. When I go there with my browser, it redirects me to healthcareprescription.com, an address where there's no actual website. Hey, spammers, here's a thought: maybe it would have been useful to build a website before sending people to it with your stupid spam? I'm no spammer myself, so I'm not an expert, but it seems reasonable.