Anatomy of a Wikipedia HOAX….

A couple months ago, I introduced you to the Wikipedia article (now yanked) on Orange Julius namesake Julius Freed, which is full of all kinds of crazy trivia, like the fact that he invented a shower stall for pigeons. I was mostly interested in the article because (a) it had sat unchanged on Wikipedia for five years, and (b) it all seemed transparently phony to the trained eye.

I got two things wrong in the original piece: first, I said that only a mental_flossblogger had been fooled by the post. I totally missed the funniest development in this story: Dairy Queen, which now owns Orange Julius, inadvertently used the hoax material as the basis for a 2007 ad campaign! The ad firm space150 createda viral video on Julius Freed’s life, using all the amazing-but-true facts from the Wikipedia article.

Read the Full article at Ken Jennings – Blog.

(Yes, it’s that Ken Jennings, yes…  For those 4 of your that don’t know, the 74 time winner on Jeopardy!)

Time Machine Stalls?

So far, so good…  I had an issue with a Western Digital External Firewire 400 Mybook 500Gb drive…  After a few days, it would seemingly “go to sleep” and not always wake up properly for a Time Machine Backup…

Time Machine would start processing, but continue on indefinitely, and would get “stuck” in the backup…  Cancelling would not stop it, I would have to manually remove the drive from the FW chain, causing the system to abort the backup….

That drive has now been moved to the END of the Firewire chain, and so far this issue has not yet re-appeared….  And it’s been roughly a week….

So, if you have Firewire issues, try moving devices around in the chain…

Portal, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One and Half-Life 2: Episode Two Updates Released

More Valve / Steam updates :

I really have to give it to Valve, they are running whole heartily with the SteamPlay initiative…  I am very impressed, and they are certainly getting some of my money…  But of course, I would never argue too much, if they sped up the Time Line….

Portal, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One and Half-Life 2: Episode Two Updates Released: “Updates to Portal, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One and Half-Life 2: Episode Two have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Engine

  • Fixed fonts sometimes not displaying when the game is loaded (Mac)
  • Fixed crash on launch in rendering subsystem (Mac)

Portal

  • Optimized particle rendering for lowend GPU’s
  • made acid pits more performant (Mac)

(View the rest of the article at Portal, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One and Half-Life 2: Episode Two Updates Released)