The Story of Stuff

I found this great movie at http://www.storyofstuff.com. It's about our consumer culture, which I despise so much. A great movie, easy to watch.

Next blog greasemonkey script

I've been working on a Blogger Next Blog Greasemonkey script. It's pretty rudimentary since I'm not a super programmer, but it does make the Blogger Next Blog button a lot less problematic for me. And I feel pretty proud of myself for creating it.

The way it works is it will do an XMLHTTP request on the Next Blog button URL. Then it will evaluate the responseText to determine if it meets a number of conditions that I have found bad blogs to have, such as:

• Hidden Blogger navbar
• Nasty words
• Annoying used-car-salesman-like shopping-related words
• Words related to drugs
• Words related to cell phones

As I go along I'll add more and fine-tune the terms if it turns out too many nasty blogs get through. But to help in case some bad blogs slip through (or in case some good ones get flagged inappropriately), I also display the blogspot domain name next to the next blog button so I can visually evaluate whether or not it's worth a click. If not, then I have provided a reload button to fetch a new next blog and the process starts all over again.

To ensure the next blog is the one I evaluated, I change the link on the next blog button to the actual blogspot URL.

Other features are I display what bad-blog criteria the next blog met so I can compare domain names to how they match my bad blog terms. And I turn the next blog button red and make it say "Caution! Nasty blog coming up!" or something like that for added fun.

This seems to be quite helpful so far.

International No Shopping Day

Apparently today is International No Shopping Day. Perhaps I will go downtown to see if there are any people not shopping.

I might actually do my shopping today. As I mentioned in a previous post, I will be shopping at Heifer International. This would seem appropriate to go along with the alternative theme of No Shopping Day, which is What Would Jesus Buy?

Well, Jesus believed it was the end of the world and probably wouldn't even have bought sheep for the poor, but if pressed by a culture of consumption, I think he'd err on the side of sheep over HDTVs or other such crap.

Anyway, it's a lovely day. My stomach still hurts a little from our eating spree last night. We had a surprise invitation for dinner with our neighbors. They had the full Thanksgiving spread. It was delicious. How fortunate we were! We weren't even going to have a turkey of our own. I was going to make tuna steaks.