I’m trying to figure out the best way to showcase my twitter wisdom here on the blog. I’m no fan of redundancy, but sometimes my tweets are so golden they need to be shared as far and wide as possible. (See how humble I am?! Amazing!)

I’ve looked at a few WordPress plugins, but haven’t found what I’m looking for just yet.

In the mean time, here’s some twitter gold from the last few days:

Humor:

@trint99 I almost installed instagram on my phone for the sole purpose of making a snide comment on a friend’s pic. Emphasis on “almost.”

RT: @TheRealSheldonC Back when Batman was a 12 year old girl. pic.twitter.com/YeagZj8V

@trint99 I have a mirror so I can see when someone comes into my cubicle. NOT just so I can make silly faces at myself. Honest!! pic.twitter.com/TOfPRNb

@trint99 Only 342 shopping days until Christmas. http://t.co/bzzK3SY

Politics:

@trint99 In Texas, even angels carry guns. http://goo.gl/vjswV #LegalGunsStopCrime

@trint99 Obama can’t preach protecting children from guns given his views on protecting them from abortion. http://goo.gl/IIQz0 #DeathOfInnocents

Both:

@trint99 Wife: Maybe with the new gun laws, we should start collecting swords! I get Sting! It will light up when the Obama Orcs come! #BestWifeEver

In 2004, when SYNS was a tender young blog, only three months old and still living in the shelter of a hosted blog site, I wrote this post (clicky clicky) about gun control, the whacky Left, and the “Clinton Gun Ban.”

And now, as if going out of their way to prove King Solomon right, they’re back. The Left is chomping at the bit to bring back the Clinton ban and more. Leftist news papers are outing law abiding gun owners. Leftist politicians are pounding podiums and promising to confiscate Americans’ guns.

But, as with every Liberal banner issue, if you scratch the fresh paint off, if you look past the sound bites and head lines, underneath there’s nothing but hot air and the facts contradict the vitriol.

What might surprise most people (but no those of us who… you know… read) is that the very same Liberal fear mongers don’t even believe their own words.

Enter Project Veritas. These guys know, and probably quite enjoy exposing, that Liberal talking heads almost never really believe their own policies. They printed up some yard signs declaring “This house is proudly gun free” and visited the houses of some of the loudest and meanest anti-gun folks. Turns out (*gasp!*) they don’t want the signs because it would invite crime! No!! That CAN’T BE!

Make sure you stay with it to the end to see the most radical anti-gun columnist DEFEND THE 2ND AMENDMENT! No really! You won’t believe it until you see it.

The new year is two weeks old today. Historically speaking, today is the day New Year’s Resolutions die. How are yours?

Now, you know I don’t buy into the whole resolutions thing (mostly because I’ve failed at them so long I don’t even try anymore). But I do take some small measure of pride in the fact that I’m posting to my blog, I’ve put out a YouTube video, and Tammy and I are still going to the new city rec center twice a week to work out.

Come to think of it, I might need to hold off on that last claim until next week, huh?

All that, just to introduce this week’s white board quip (#232):

Hey there, failure puppet!
– Dilbert

Hello, World! I’m back!! (Surely you’re not serious! I AM serious, and don’t call me Shirley!!)

It’s a new year and I just can’t keep my opinions to myself (or under 140 characters) any more. I can’t begin to express how hard it was to go through an election year, crazy political and social news events, and even a few personal life changes, without sharing my thoughts with my blog buddies.

Speaking of blog buddies, it was really interesting, after I announced I was shutting down SYNS, to see how many people were trolling the site (I seriously thought my readership was down to about 3 people, including me.) and expressed their chagrin when the lights went out. I found it oddly satisfying. Maybe I really am a sociopath!

It’s going to take me a while to be back into the swing of blogging. And my old-time readers know I have a knack for lazy non-posting. Which reminds me, I think there’s no better way to reinvigorate this blog than with a brand new White Board Quip of the Week! (I’m fairly confident that this is WBQotW #231.)

Behold the power of laziness.
-Wally

Well, I think we all know this day has been coming. Sadly, it’s finally arrived. I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley.

I started this blog with a joke. Back in 2004, I thought blogs were stupid. Why would anyone want to read someone else’s diary. I don’t care what you had for lunch or what the doctor said about the growth on your butt. But, as it turned out, blogging was a great creative outlet for me. And it helped my family and friends keep up with me since I am notorious for not staying in touch.

But now, with the advent of social media, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, I’ve got more creative outlets than I can keep up with! Surely You’re Not Serious has become the low hanging fruit at a time when I need to trim. I just don’t have time to maintain it. And it’s purpose has been largely replaced.

I’m not going to delete anything. Lordy! There’s way too much comedy gold here to throw anything away. But, I will not be updating for the foreseeable future. Let’s call it an indefinite hiatus. But, if you have a fever and the only cure is more Trint, just follow me on Twitter and YouTube. (I’m pretty stingy with my Facebook friend list. So, let’s just pretend that doesn’t exist and avoid all the tears and feelings of rejection.)

http://Twitter.com/trint99
http://YouTube.com/trint99

It’s been a great run, and I’ve had a blast. And who knows?! Maybe Twitter make me mad enough to quit and come back here! Yeah… I know. You’re right.

So, it’s only fitting to end my run with one final White Board Quip of the Week (#230):

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

That’s all I have to say about that.

I get a lot of spam. I mean a lot! But it’s not so bad because I know how to handle it. My personal advice for anyone who connects to the interwebs ever is to create a spam email account. I use HotMail. HotMail has a feature that sends all emails to a junk folder unless I know and have allowed the sender. Then, whenever a website (even a website I trust) asks for my email address, I use darkmanwork@hotmail.com. See?! I’m so confident that I’ll put my email address right here in the blog post!! Because I know if a spammer gets hold of it, they can do me no harm. Their scams and junk mail will end up harmlessly sitting in my junk folder. Because I do, on rare occasion get valid emails to that address, every couple of days, I scan through the junk folder. Some phishing emails I report to the owners of the site being phished (like when a get a fake email from PayPal or eBay). But most of it just gets deleted.

I get a lot of these Nigerian style scams. I scan through a few of them to chuckle at the grammar. But this one was so bad, it was too good to just toss in the trash. I present “Urgent!”

I suppose me posting a link on my blog to an article about internet addiction is a bit like one drunk hobo passing a half empty bottle of hootch to another drunk hobo. But it is an interesting read.

So… ‘ere ya go, buddy. *hic* Drink up. (Clicky clicky.)

Ok, so right after I posted that link dump (Total coincidence that it posted at 1:11 on 11/11/11, I swear!), I realized that I had missed 11:11:11 11/11/11! I was so mad at myself! I immediately started on a post deriding myself for this horrible failure, when my laptop complete pooed all over itself. Massive operating system failures cascading across my screen. Looks like somehow, somewhere I contracted a horrible virus that disabled most of my system files, masked my hard drive, etc., etc., etc.

Now, 10 hours later, I think (emphasis on “think”) that I’ve got it all straight. Only time will tell if I really got all the critters out. Man, what a day.

Notsome! (In case you don’t know what that means, clicky clicky.)

A symptom of my blog neglect is the large collection of news links stacked on my desktop. Rather than try and write a post for each one, I’m just going to have to do a link dump. So, hold on to your bloomers. Here we go!

Dirty space news: Mysterious explosion on Uranus!! (Clicky clicky.)

Siberians share DNA with Neanderthals… OR maybe Neanderthal were actually humans… Duh. Read Genesis! (Clicky clicky.)

Insult to injury: Netflix customers (former and current) cut deep into earnings. Stock collapses. (Clicky clicky.)

Shamed ultra Liberal (and likely criminal) “community organization” ACORN is the driving force behind the “Occupy” movement. (Clicky clicky.)

After exposure, ACORN scrambles (but fails) to cover up “Occupy” involvement. (Clicky clicky.)

Hilarious: Mass of McDonald’s job applications dumped on “Occupy” protesters. (Clicky clicky.)

The parasites have parasites: Lice outbreak at Occupy Portland. (Clicky clicky.)

Walmart for rats: “Occupy” encampments are breeding grounds for dangerous disease including drug-resistant TB and truth-resistant socialism. (Clicky clicky and clicky clicky.)

Obama’s agriculture dept introduced Christmas Tree Tax to promote Christmas trees. Seriously?! (Clicky clicky.)

U.S. military kicked out of Iraq likely because Obama admin completely ignored the Iraqi gov’t for nearly a year! Turns out the “silent treatment” is not good foreign policy! (Clicky clicky.)

Don’t you love new software?! Don’t you love all the great new features?! Don’t you love when the developers come up with some change that no one really wanted or had any reason to care about until they changed it and made life all the more difficult for you?!?! Yaaaay!!

Ok, so if you’ve been on the interwebs for any amount of time, you’ve see that odd little thing in front of the web address: “http://” This is what we in the bidnis call the “protocol.” 99% of the time, you’ll either see http or https (which means it’s using a SSL secured connection).

Firefox 7, just for grins and giggles, hides the protocol in the address bar. So, you don’t see “https://mybank.com/login”. You just see “mybank.com/login”. Gah! er… I mean… Yaaaay!

But why, you might ask, do I care what protocol is being used?

Well, I would say in a patronizing tone, you might need to see for certain that your connection is secure (https) before you put your username and password into your bank’s website (else someone would be able to intercept your request and steal your login) or put your credit card number on a web form (or someone might steal your number), or maybe your employer blocks http://facebook.com, but you’ve discovered that they don’t block https://facebook.com. There are many reasons why you might want to see and change the protocol.

In my line of work (I’m a web developer), the protocol is very important. I need to be sure that certain pages of the site I maintain are secure and that others aren’t. (https is slower, so only use it if you need it!) So I really really need to be able to see the protocol.

Thankfully, Google had the answer for me. (Google knows everything.) There is a config setting in Firefox to stop it from trimming the URL. Thanks Google! And thank you, Firefox 7 developer who thought this would be a neat feature, for wasting an hour of my life.