They are about 13 years late, but my two work friends Keith and Brent came up with the best prank idea ever. Everyone knows about Ironic by Alanis Morissette, right? After telling me their idea, the three of us decided to set up a website, asking for donations of spoons from anyone on the internet. If you don't feel like sending us a spoon, you can give us a quick paypal donation that will go towards the purchase of a spoon. If you haven't caught onto what we're planning yet, once we collect 10,000 spoons, we're gonna stick them all into a box labeled "knives" and ship them to Alanis herself.

It will be the greatest prank. I am telling you.

We figure that sending the package of spoons to her publicly available fanmail address will be good enough, seeing that she probably doesn't get a whole lot of fan mail these days except from maybe a few obsessed fans. We also hope that receiving a box mysteriously labeled "knives" in the mail doesn't strike anyone as overly alarming. HERE'S HOPING.

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Just over a week ago I mentioned Jerktowne, a website that you can send people to if they are being jerks. I've been working on it a little, and just as I promised, I've developed an API that will let anybody with a website running PHP to connect to my database of jerks. This will allow you to do a quick background check on all of your visitors, giving you the power to restrict your content as you please. Nobody wants jerks reading their website.

Every time a user visits Jerktowne, their Jerk Rank is increased by one. This is limited to a one-time increase every 24 hours. For example, if somebody gets sent to Jerktowne 50 times in a day, their Jerk Rank will only increase by one. However, if they are consistently sent to Jerktowne every day of the week, they would gain a significantly higher Jerk Rank than others. This means you could optionally restrict your website from jerks who have a Jerk Rank higher than five, or ten, or even just one.

You can download the API here. It comes with an example file to get you started.

Also, I know the Jerktowne website isn't very pretty yet. It will be, one day.

Jan 17, 2010 Update: Links removed because Jerktowne is no more :(

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In an attempt to justify all of the stupid domain names that I buy, I've forwarded two of my more recent purchases to my blog. So if you are really sick of typing iamthejeff.com, or you don't have it in your favorites by now, you can also visit my site by using jeffgordon.name, or if that isn't 1337 enough for you, j3ffg0rd0n.com. I only recently switched over the DNS entries, so if you are getting a parked page, just give it a few more hours.

In related news, I sometimes google my domain names after buying them to see if they appear anywhere on the web prior to me owning them. While doing so for jeffgordon.name, I came across an auction where somebody is trying to sell it with a buy-it-now price of $5000. I emailed GoDaddy about it, so now I am forced to play the waiting game. Update: GoDaddy has realized the mistake and closed the auction!

Also, I don't think anybody noticed, but since I switched to a new webhost, I had to transfer over Totallies as well. As a result, it was offline for a couple days. Everything is back online as of this morning, however. Thank goodness.

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Ever since 1995 when Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls was released, I went around saying "bumblebee tuna" under the impression it was an original part of the script. I couldn't have been more wrong.

This startling fact was brought to my attention by Taylor at work, after his mom gave him a can of Bumble Bee brand tuna (as seen to the right). Further investigation showed that the brand has been in existence since 1899. They also sell Bumble Bee chicken, salmon, crab, oysters, clams, and sardines.

Youtube is full of Bumble Bee tuna related advertisements, including this vintage one, and all sorts of other theme songs. My girlfriend and I use "Bumblebee Tuna" as our guild name in WoW, but I had no idea it was such a huge phenomenon.

My life will never be the same.

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My previous hosting company (1&1) was giving me grief, so I was forced to switch to a new one. My sites would go offline almost daily, for hours at a time, for no good reason. So, by recommendation, I switched to Media Temple, and so far everything is great. How does this affect you? Well, my site will (hopefully) have less downtime and it should be a heck of a lot faster.

My friend Ryan has a couple sites on 1&1 as well, and he has been having the exact same problems as me. I wrote 1&1 to inquire about the recent downtime, and they basically told me "Hey, it works on our end, check your ISP".

THANKS GUYS. -1 CUSTOMER. FOR YOU.

After looking around on google for any possibly reason why my ISP would be preventing me from viewing my own website, I came across a whole bunch of not-so-good customer reviews of 1&1's services.

I am not alone.

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