The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Update: Be sure to read the comments after reading the article, especially this one! — Joey

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Joan at FreakGirlSpew (the blog also known as Freak Girl’s Pew) got an ad in her snail mail from Bell Canada. The ad, shown below, showcases the parental content filtering for Bell’s DSL service:

(For the moment, let’s ignore the argument about whether it’s a good

idea to filter the internet to protect your kids.)

The text of the ad reads “You’ll do anything to protect your kids from

inappropriate content”, beside a photo showing a book with the

inappropriate content x-acto’d out. As you can see, the book isn’t

anything along the lines of The Hustler Anthology: Three Decades of Crotch or even Madonna’s Sex, but a biology

textbook.

Who’s Bell Canada’s ad agency, Ashcroft and Associates? Taliban Promotions?

If knowledge about the human body is to be considered “inappropriate”,

we’re all in deep trouble. If you’re a parent who freaks out over some

anatomy pictures in textbooks, I can say with reasonable certainty that

your kid will grow up to be one screwed-up puppy — I dated such people.

If you care to send Bell Canada an opinion, here are the email addresses to hit:

• complaints@adstandards.com
• bell.direct@bell.ca
• executive.office@bell.ca

Remember, you’re more likely to get some kind of response if you spellcheck and use good grammar and etiquette.

And now, some links to entries in the blogs I’m paid to write:

In IndieGameDev:

• Chicks and Joysticks: a white paper on women and gaming written by the Electronic and Leisure Software Producers’ Association.
• Valil.Chess: an implementation of chess using Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Beta.
• I Want NPCs in my Chili: How non-player characters add spice to a game.

In The Farm:

• XMLHttpRequest usability guidelines: a set of guidelines on the use of XMLHttpRequest that will help ensure that your users’ experiences are good ones.
• PHP Application Development, Part One — includes a bonus complaint about Dev Shed.
• Cocoa and the Emerging Software Market: The action, as far as Mac OS X development is concern — is where the small companies are.

[via Geeks, Guitars and Guinness] Metroblogging has added the city of my birth, Manila, to its roster. Go on and read about that wonderful, chaotic, glorious mess that is my hometown.

(A pity it’s not hosted on Blogware, but some other, lesser blogging tool.)

You can find more on Manila in its Wikipedia entry and the Philippines in its Wikipedia entry and its CIA World Factbook entry.

Happy 18th (you can buy beer in Quebec and Alberta now!) to Josiah “Si” Adam! Also, happy birthday to Richard “crysflame” Soderberg (who has forgotten more Perl than I will ever learn)!