Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I was listening to "After the beep" (嗶一聲之後) from Faye Wong’s (王菲) album "Only love strangers" (只愛陌生人) today, which was surprisingly good.  Special thanks to Mike Golding’s ASCII converter that took my Chinese text and gave me back nice Unicode HTML entities. So, here is the translation, cleaned up a little: (source)

Leave a message, leave a message,
Please, sigh after the long music.
Leave a message, please leave a message,
Please cry after I’ve finished talking.

I’m not here: I’m not here.
Please leave your secrets after the beep,
Please boast into the speaker-after the beep,
Please moan and sigh to the empty air, after the beep.

I’m not here: my body is here, my mind has wandered.
Please talk about an interesting topic after the beep,
Please share your emotional problems after the beep,
Please do not mention a certain name after the beep.

The person you are looking for is not here,
Doesn’t want to be sought for by anyone

The person you are looking for is now having fun himself.

I’m sorry the person you are looking for does not want to say anything, but its too late

The person you are looking for now doesn’t need brothers and sisters.

It doesn’t matter if you want to search, its already too late

The person you are looking for is also seeking.

Who wants to Accompany Me? I’m Playing Hide and Seek.

And here’s the original Chinese lyrics:

留話 留話 請在長音之後嘆氣
留話 請留話 請在我說完後哭泣
我不在這裡 我不在那裡
請在嗶一聲之後留下自己的秘密
請在嗶一聲之後對話筒沾沾自喜
請在嗶一聲之後對空氣唉聲嘆氣

我不在這裡 我人在哪裡 我想到哪裡
請在嗶一聲之後留下有聲的話題
請在嗶一聲之後分擔感情的問題
請在嗶一聲之後某某名字別提
(你要找的人不在 不想給任何人尋覓)
你現在要找的人正在娛樂著自己
(抱歉你要找的人不在想說甚麼都來不及)
你現在要找的人不需要姊妹兄弟
(你要找我已經沒關係 已經來不柔)
你現在要找的人自己同樣在尋覓
(誰要陪我 我在玩尋人遊戲)

Seems to be more or less about a breakup incident, but it’s the relentless grind of industrial sounding guitars, the fuzzy lyrics, and the interlocking, rhyming lines that turn me on. The lyrics float down with sawblade-guitar, and then get additional parallelism with strings in later verses, leading to a chorus crescendo. Tasty!

American pop star Britney Spears and poetry's Scansion have obviously never met. Amid grinding synthesizers, overdubbed voices in two octaves, and ample distortion, the lyrics to Britney's "I've just begun (Having my fun)" are mostly good:

(9) Four years ago I had a party
(7) that was too much fun for me

But she runs into some serious trouble at 1 minute, 33 seconds:

(8) I thought at first I should go home
(8) But then fell asleep in the chair

The first line loses a syllable (which sounds alright), but the proportionate length between the first and second line has dropped to 0! Britney just rushes through that line in "I've just begun (Having my fun)," and it sounds off. Scansion, my dear.

Adminshop is selling a tool called "Reffy: The Referal Monster" to spam HTTP referrers. "Reffy is a Windows-based mass referrer spammer, which means that it will make a connection to a buttload of sites of your choosing with any referrer URL and User-Agent that you specify," they write, and then sell the software for $50. I know I could write a java application to do this in less than a day: unbelievable that they would try and sell it.  JoatBlog and Gagetopia both are complaining.

So, I whipped up a C# project that basically accomplishes the same task as a proof of concept. It only took a couple hours, but is has the same basic functionality. Binaries are not releasable, for security purposes, but here is the source code.

Disclaimer: Do not use this tool for illegal, unethical, or spam purposes. It is written as a proof of concept of the utter stupidity of referer spammers. By downloading this tool, you agree to these terms.