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08.06.08 by Widge @ 11:21 pm  So I've started seeing the YouTube We're Sorry issue, but at first I didn't think anything of it. Thought maybe YouTube was under maintenance or just having issues. But unless I'm missing something, this is starting to be a big pain in the ass. You might have seen it on this site, even: a YouTube video comes up with the black nothing and "We're Sorry, This Video is No Longer Available" on it. But if you refresh the page here or even click through to YouTube, then it magically starts working. There are people who have Google Accelerator and it needs to be turned off to fix the problem. I'm not running it. There are people who can't read the full posts where it says that even on the YouTube site this is happening and think the videos have embedding turned off. That's not the case. It could also be a virus on my machine, a problem with my network setup, something with flash...no, no and no. This is happening with scads of people across multiple browsers across multiple platforms. All of this to say that if you are seeing the issue on Needcoffee, we apologize for the inconvenience. While we love the page views, we would never try to get you to refresh multiple times to see something. Just like this one website I went to that dimmed out the whole site and asked me to subscribe to its RSS feed, making me close out that window before I could read the article. Here's a tip: let me see your content before you start getting in my face about winding up on my RSS reader, bucko. So bear with this and either YouTube will get its shit together or it will die and we'll replace the videos as they appear on other sites. We're fine either way. (And incidentally, if you're seeing this and want to share any P.D. you've done, I'd love to hear about it.) Categorized as: Admin
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07.31.08 by Widge @ 3:30 am It's time again to pull back the curtain and take a mildly amusing look as to what you people are buying through the site on Amazon. And Amazingly, unlike last time (and lots of times before that) Richard Simmons drops to a distant second. A tremendous upset that Richard has suffered at the hands of...  Monty Python. I'm pleased to see so many of you took advantage of that $40 Python sale we pointed out to you. Because really, for $40--that was nuts. And as a result, Python takes the lead. (That being said, the 16-Ton Megaset is still 42% off even as we speak, which makes around $42 off. Handy. That puts it at $58.) Categorized as: Admin
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07.30.08 by Widge @ 6:51 am  Needcoffee.com was launched in 1998 as a joke. We spent so much time discussing various and sundry pop culture topics, it seemed like a natural thing to do to put it online somewhere where we could inflict this madness upon others. This was long before people decided to blog or to Twit or to do anything else where they would casually inflict their worldview upon the masses. So from the beginning, we were pioneers in wasting people's time online. Not content just to waste people's time through text, we pushed the envelope. We were doing podcasting before it was podcasting--posting RealAudio (shudder) files of the original Widge Goes Off before there was RSS to alert people that they were there. Again, we were on the bleeding edge of time wasting technology. At some point, we decided to move to the latest platform for wasting time: WordPress. A full-on blogging/content management system, it seemed the most efficient way to make people inefficient by giving them crazy stuff to mull over when they could otherwise be living out the life of a cubicle jockey that is, in some ways, less exciting than the day to day machinations of naked mole rats. Categorized as: Admin
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07.23.08 by Widge @ 5:45 pm  Hi. You might be wondering where the hell we've been for the last thirty-six hours. Well, yesterday we had a storm blow through here that managed to melt my cable modem, my router, my cordless phone base system and also knocked out some other wiring in the TechnoCave's attached compound. So I just now have internet back. It was an interesting exercise to sit in front of my keyboard last night and say, "What do I do that's not online? Hmmm." Anyway, normal service will resume shortly. Talk amongst yourselves. Categorized as: Admin
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06.09.08 by Widge @ 10:46 am Just a quick headsup. We realize that not everybody is a coffee drinker. Don't look shocked, different strokes for different sporks, as we all say. And just like our friend Elemental, many enjoy tea. So we've snagged an affiliation with Teavana, purveyor of all manner of fine teas. If you want some Teavana goodness, we urge you to visit our Needcoffee Affiliate Hub, where you can find it and many other businesses who will put some coin in our pocket for you putting coin in theirs. Many thanks. Happy sipping. Categorized as: Admin
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05.31.08 by Widge @ 10:43 pm  Categorized as: Admin
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05.19.08 by Widge @ 5:24 pm So I monitor all incoming links to the site. I do this because I'm an attention whore--and you know this, because I admit this to you freely. I saw one that appeared to be interesting: a blog called Worthless Stuff. They appear to live up to their namesake by slagging off things they consider to be bad. And we're their Worthless Blog of the Day! Here's the first part of their review: Imagine that guy in highschool that was really odd, and whenever things came out of his mouth, you couldn't really tell if they were serious or just really bizzare? Yeah, well that's this blog, with a little but of advertising around it. Oh wait, did I say little advertising? No there's a ton actually. And then there's a link to "Read More". So I can't wait to hear the rest of this, so I click it and...  Categorized as: Admin
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05.10.08 by Widge @ 4:09 pm  Well, not to share too much with you folks, but I was apparently the proud recipient of a kidney stone last night. So I had a hot date with about 18mg of morphine and a trip to the emergency room. Not, however, in that order. Posting for the next little bit while be a bit erratic as I have a bottle of percosets here to keep me from trying to claw my face off due to the pain. Men, they say it's the closest you can come to experiencing what women deal with during childbirth. If more men went through this fun, there would never be a need to remind people to adopt. There'd be a worldwide queue for when kids became available. I'd also like to apologize to any children who might have been in the emergency room at the time, as I'm sure you learned lots of fun words. So...talk amongst yourselves. This stuff may cause sedation. And this one of the only times you'll ever hear me welcome sleep. Categorized as: Admin
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04.30.08 by Widge @ 5:16 pm Here was mine: Direct link for the feedreaders. We think we might have nailed down that PITA problem with the server that's been causing us grief: a hard drive was having an I/O error. If you don't know what that means, imagine Flynn from Tron saying it and it won't matter. Many thanks to our server support team for sending in ninjas. We should be better1 now. If we're not, ping me. 1 "Better" in this context means the server, not our personalities, personal lives or levels of required medication. We are still well and truly fucked in those areas. Categorized as: Admin
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04.25.08 by Widge @ 9:36 pm Okay, the site translation is offline until I can figure out for certain one way or the other if that's causing our issue with making the site database barf all over itself. That was the cause of the not-brief-enough outage earlier today. I've also gone in and optimized our database tables in the hope that maybe that will make everything behave. But the translation stays off until I can figure out WTF is giving us these rather spectacular craters in our server uptime. Thanks to everybody for their help. Categorized as: Admin
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