February 8th, 2010
The 2010 Make-Yer-Own Oscar Pool Page is live. Go nuts: http://www.defectiveyeti.com/oscars.
If you encounter any errors or oddities, please drop me a line. I fix most errors immediately so, if you discover a bug, don’t assume it’s already been reported: you’ll probably be the first.
February 2nd, 2010
The 2010 Make-Yer-Own Oscar Pool Page will be live next Monday, February 8th.
For a list of other projects I am currently working on, please check back tomorrow.
January 26th, 2009
The 2009 Create Your Own Oscar Pool Page is live.
If you notice anything amiss-bugs, broken links, wrong nominees, typos–mention it in the comments, or drop me a line at matthew@defectiveyeti.com.
January 29th, 2008
The 2008 Create Your Own Oscar Pool Page is live.
If you notice anything amiss-bugs, broken links, wrong nominees, typos–mention it in the comments, or drop me a line at matthew@defectiveyeti.com.
July 2nd, 2007
The editors of the American Heritage dictionary recently compiled a list of “100 words they recommend every high school graduate should know.”
I always like to check out lists like this, and see how many of the entries I am already familiar with. The answer is, invariably, “nearly all of them.” Not because I have a stellar vocabulary, but because I cheat.
Not on purpose, of course. But, when performing this exercise, I’m always struck with “well that’s what I meant” syndrome. You know how it goes. You see the word, you say to yourself “that means X,” you check the definition, and when it turns out that it actually meant Y, you say, “ah, well, that’s I meant. And, jeeze, X and Y are practically the same thing … so, I’m going to give myself this one.” By the time I’m done, I have magnanimously “given” myself all of them, and have no idea how many I actually knew before I started.
So this time I tried something new: I wrote down my definitions first, and then compared them to the actual definitions afterwards. You can see the results in the comments.
If you’d like to do the same, here’s a little tool I wrote. First, select how many words from the American Heritage list you’d like to get tested on. (I wouldn’t recommend 100–that took me forever–but 23 is good.) You will then be given the opportunity to provide your definitions for each. You can then grade yourself, in comparison to the actual meanings. Lastly, the script will print out a final report, which you can then put in the comments of this psot on your own site. (Apparently Movable Type strips tables from comments, so posting ‘em here ain’t gonna work after all.)
By providing your own definitions first, you should get a somewhat more accurate picture of how many of the words you could truly use correctly in a sentence. But if you just want to grade yourself without providing your own definitions first, you can do that instead. Whatever. We aim to please.
You can find my results here (but, if you intend to test yourself, don’t look until you have done so, as the definitions of the words appear on that page).
February 14th, 2007
… to throw together a last minute Oscar Pool.
January 27th, 2007
The 2007 Make-Yer-Own Oscar Pool Page is ready to go. A big thanks to everyone who helped test it out. And if anyone else notices further bugs or errors, be sure to drop me a line.
(Oh, and keep those cliches coming. Still haven’t decided what to do with them all, but I’ve been getting some great ones!)
February 3rd, 2006
The Make-Yer-Own Oscar Pool Page is up and running at http://www.defectiveyeti.com/oscars. I made some changes to the back-end, so let me know if you find any bugs, experience any bugs, or have any suggestions.
Update: Should be working fine, now. Let me know is that’s not the case.
April 27th, 2005
I want to drive a phenomenal amount of traffic to my site, but I don’t want to go through the bother of writing something funny or clever or thought provoking. So maybe I’ll try my hand at spawning a blogmeme instead.
These are my URL ABCs:
How to find your URL ABCs: Type the letter ‘a’ into your location bar, copy the first URL that your browser autosuggests as a completion, and paste it into the corresponding field below. Repeat for letters ‘b’ through ‘z’. You may add a comments as well, but they are not required. You can skip a letter if you’d like, or you can supply a comment for a letter even if you omit its URLs (to explain that nothing came up for that particular letter, for instance). When you are done, click ‘Format My URL ABCs’ and this script will return the HTML code you can paste in the comments of the URL ABCs post , use on your own site, or print it out and enclose it with your next Kelly Osbourne fan letter. Whatever.
Note: This may only be an interesting exercise with Firefox or Mozilla, both of which offer autosuggestions in descending order of last accessed (the sorting algorithm may also take the frequency of access into account as well). I don’t know what IE does. If it just cough up URLS in alphabetic order — and, after a little experimentation with my rarely used copy of IE, I think this might be the case — then picking the first one off the top doesn’t really reveal much about you.
Update: I just realized that my spam filter — which automatically blocks comments that contain > 20 hyperlinks — has been preventing people from posting their ABCs in the comments. Sorry about that — the filter has been temporarily disabled.
