Caveat: … the vast Libyan dessert

… or, catching the internet with its pants down. 

It's pretty hard to capture the ephemerality of hilarious spelling mistakes and typos on well-maintained websites.  But I did it.  And with only a little bit of guilt, I post the result here.  I mean no disrespect to Max Fisher of The Atlantic, where I found the error – in this age of automatic spell checking, errors of this sort are easily made and missed – I'm guilty of much worse ones, myself. But I do find a delicious irony in the specific error made, given that he used to be a food writer.

So having said that, the absolute best part of his article about last year's secret nuclear standoff between the US, Russia and Libya was the serendiptous typo that allowed him to write, "U.S. officials worried about the security of the casks. It would have been easy for anyone with a gun and a truck to drive up, overpower the guard, use the crane to load the casks onto the truck, and drive off into the vast Libyan dessert."

I so enjoyed the poetic image of a gang of terrorists driving truckloads of enriched uranium around a Candylandified Sahara.

Sadly, the error was very rapidly corrected.  In the time I took to write this post, the delightful dessert was Orwellianly transmogrified into a workaday desert.  But I had the amazing fortuity to have done the page "refresh" in a different window, and hadn't closed the original.  Consequently, I am able to present, with great pride, exceedingly rare "before and after" screenshots of the error in question, below.  [Click thru images to view original full size]

Before:

[broken link! FIXME] Beforeafter_html_4539d42

After:

[broken link! FIXME] Beforeafter_html_2de050b8

Caveat: “Sorry, we can not accept your idea”

I opened a help-desk ticket with my blog host (TypePad) just now.  Normally, I wouldn't publicize it, but the specific problem is intriguingly humorous.  It's exactly the sort of computer error that an itinerant epistemologist such as myself deserves.  Here's the ticket as currently stands (slightly redacted).  I'll post updates on this blog post – I'm betting something vaguely Kafkaesque will unfold – but who knows?

On Nov 28, 2010 10:37 AM, you (caveatdumptruck) said:

A friend of mine tried to post a comment to my blog, and says he received the error message "Sorry, we can not accept your idea". This is a pretty weird error message. Is Typepad doing semantic analysis of comments to determine philosophical viability? I hope not.

I trust that my friend isn't making this up.

Can you please tell me if your code, somewhere, is programmed to output such an error message? If so, could you please explain what sort of context such an uninformative error message might be acceptable? Or alternately, recognize some kind of easter egg or deny the existence of such program code?

Thank you
~jared

NOTA
Here is a copy, pasted after the "======", of my facebook conversation with my friend, in which he told me about the error. It also summarizes some steps I took to try to replicate the problem.

=======
Tony – hi Jared, tried to post a response on your blog and received the message, "Sorry, we can not accept your idea". Sadly, I wasted a half hour on it 🙁

o
Jared Way –
Damn! I hate that kind of thing. I will try to investigate: my best guess – the blog host has some kind of length-limitation on comments, and doesn't have a very user-friendly response to overly long ones.

I will also post your comment to… my blog host's help forum. That's a very strange wording for an error message – did it really say "cannot accept your idea"? How does it know what your idea was? Definitely weird.

o
Tony – Yes, that was the message. Sorry to be the bringer of bad news

o
Jared Way –
Argh. Well, I think I ruled out the "length-limitation" idea – I posted a cut-n-paste of a 20 page article as a test comment and it went thru fine.

I tried making mistakes with the "captcha" and that didn't give that error, either.

I will see if my blog host has anything to say. Not optimistic, however.

o
Jared Way – One more error test: I pasted a vast document of nonsense and URLs (simulated spam) into a comment box. No complaint – with the correct catcha, it didn't error out. The blog host simply ignored the whole thing. Typical "black hole" database consistency error.

 

Caveat: The Glass Brain

I have adopted the term "glass brain" for the increasingly common phenomenon of living one's life quite publicly on the internet.  Perhaps this is parallel to the idea of living in a glass house, but without the house – just a brain that anyone can look into. See also, "el licenciado vidriera" – one of my favorite of Cervantes' short stories, which deals with a man who came to believe he was made of glass.

Actually, one can manage one's transparency fairly effectively, for the most part.  If one is careful, which I try to be.  Thus, a great deal of "me" is "out there" in the online world, but it's a pretty-carefully-managed "me" (seasoned with equal doses of sly circumspection and passive-aggressive snarkiness).  I can hide a great deal behind a façade of abstruse vocabulary and sheer volume of apparently random, pseudo-academic, semi-autobiographical blather.

Nevertheless, I've taken what feels like a big step further in the direction of this "managed transparency," recently:  I've submitted this blog to a list called the Korean Blog List.  Apparently the link "went live" sometime in the last 24 hours, because already I've noticed several incoming links.

…And so, behold, after blogging for 5 years (and intensively – daily – for 3 years), I've suddenly made a move which may render this blog much less of a "just for friends and family" than it has been, to date.  We'll see.

Regardless… To my friends and family:  I still view you as my primary audience.  If others are "listening in" that's great.  Perhaps they'll derive some entertainment or insight.  To those listening in:  this is not an effort at journalism.  It's only journaling.  I reserve the right to make stuff up and leave stuff out.  I exist at the center of my own subjectivity, fully aware of that limitation.

Caveat lector:  read at your own risk.   Remember the line at the top:  "재미없으면 보상해드립니다!" ("If it's not fun, we give a refund!") – this is clearly meant ironically, since there's no charge to read this.  Guaranteed refunds on free blogs consist solely in the readers' ability to deftly navigate away from said blogs.  If it's not fun, stop looking.

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