Brandon Sallee

Archie, 1/26/12

I don’t know why, but Jughead’s statement that “a lot of famous people take naps” really bothers me. I mean, I guess strictly speaking it’s almost certainly true, as a nontrivial portion of the human race takes naps, and celebrities are humans, but is there anyone who’s actually famous for their napping? (Rip Van Winkle doesn’t count.)

I’m also unsettled by just how vigorously Jughead is laughing in the final panel. It reeks of desperation. “HA HA HA HA TRIGONOMETRY HA HA HA NAPPING HA HA HA but seriously I need to take a God-damned nap right God-damned now.”

Ziggy, 1/26/12

If you weren’t repulsed by Ziggy before when you thought he was just bald, are you repulsed by him now that you know that his smooth, pasty flesh is completely hairless? Do you think he scoops up big piles of dog hair and makes wigs and merkins for himself, of varying styles? Will you ever be able to stop thinking of it again?

Archie, 1/26/12

I don’t know why, but Jughead’s statement that “a lot of famous people take naps” really bothers me. I mean, I guess strictly speaking it’s almost certainly true, as a nontrivial portion of the human race takes naps, and celebrities are humans, but is there anyone who’s actually famous for their napping? (Rip Van Winkle doesn’t count.)

I’m also unsettled by just how vigorously Jughead is laughing in the final panel. It reeks of desperation. “HA HA HA HA TRIGONOMETRY HA HA HA NAPPING HA HA HA but seriously I need to take a God-damned nap right God-damned now.”

Ziggy, 1/26/12

If you weren’t repulsed by Ziggy before when you thought he was just bald, are you repulsed by him now that you know that his smooth, pasty flesh is completely hairless? Do you think he scoops up big piles of dog hair and makes wigs and merkins for himself, of varying styles? Will you ever be able to stop thinking of it again?

   
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By Waz.

In October, we made Google Webmaster Tools available to all users in Google Analytics, allowing everyone to surface Google search data in new Search Engine Optimization reports. Starting today, Webmaster Tools will update how they calculate data to make it better match expectations about what a search engine ranking really means.

Based on their research, the answer to the question “What is your rank in search results?” is the first position of a link to your site. Previously we reported the average position of all links to your site. Now your Google Analytics reports will be updated to reflect the first position.

An example calculation

We anticipate that this new method of calculation will more accurately match your expectations about how a link’s position in Google Search results should be reported.

How will this affect my Google Analytics data?
This change will affect your Search Engine Optimization reports, when your data in Google Analytics Search Engine Optimization reports will be calculated using the new method. Historical data will not change. Note that the change in calculation means that the Average Position metric will usually stay the same or decrease, corresponding to the same or improved search ranking.

We look forward to providing you a more representative picture of your Google Search data. Please let us know any feedback you have.

Posted by Chris Anderson, Google Analytics team

The Media Analysis Management Interface Incubator Group published its final report, Media Analysis Management Interface XG Final Report. The Media Analysis Management Interface (MAMI) enables the understanding of the real world at a low cost by using analysis engines such as video image processing engines, sensor data analysis engines, and so on. It also enables various services to be easily provided, such as physical security, environmental load reduction, and intelligent accessibility services. The MAMI Incubator Group described the requirements of the MAMI and six use cases in three fields: energy saving, video surveillance, and operational improvement. The Incubator Group expects to collaborate with other W3C working groups, in particular the Multimodal Interaction Working Group.

This publication is part of the Incubator Activity. This work is not on the W3C standards track.

Gil Thorp, 1/25/12

By the way, I’m still totally enjoying the Gil Thorp teen tattoo plot, I don’t care what you think! The latest development is the strange alliance between the transparently gay Lini (who’s against tattoos because, ugh, so tacky) and the assertively Christian Cortez Beecher (who’s against tattoos because Leviticus 19:28). Anyway, if we’re going to have the gay teen saying “Heavens!” and wearing bowties constantly, probably because someone saw it on Glee once or something, I’m pleased at panel three’s revelation that they’re real bowties, not some pre-tied clip-on nonsense. And also I’m going to assume that’s an ironic “Heavens!”

Another fun fact from panel three: Tim Summers thinks that voting, military service, and legal adulthood in general are all nothing but a big pile of garbage.

Family Circus, 1/25/12

Oh, thanks, Jeffy! I had barely noticed your little zipper problem, but now that you’ve called it a “mouth” I can’t stop staring at it, since it looks exactly like a monstrous lamprey-maw leading directly to the infinite blackness of some unspeakable hell-dimension.

Apartment 3-G, 1/25/12

In other news, Lu Ann just told Margo to eat shit! Watch it Lu Ann, you just learned about your real biological parentage, but that doesn’t give you superpowers.

The Google Analytics Team has always supported the promotion of analytics education and professional development. We’d like to share this guest post by Wendy Greco & Eric Peterson from Analysis Exchange – an initiative designed to provide hands-on training opportunities for aspiring web analytics professionals while providing free web data analysis to the entire nonprofit community.

In the right hands, technologies like Google Analytics can do great things, but unfortunately not every organization is able to hire resources to dedicate to web analytics. What’s more, there are thousands of talented individuals out there who would love to work in this field but don’t have the hands-on experience required to get their first web analytics job.

Two years ago Web Analytics Demystified looked at this problem from both angles and decided to create a solution – The Analysis Exchange. The Analysis Exchange pairs a non-profit organization with pair of web analysts — one a student wanting the experience and the other a mentor with years of direct work in the field.  The trio work together to have the student learn to use Google Analytics to “tell a story” with the data about how the non-profit can better meet their business goals.

Thanks to the generosity of all of our sponsors and participants, Analysis Exchange projects are completely free. Google Analytics is the standard analytics tool for Analysis Exchange for a few key reasons:

• No cost means it is accessible to all non-profits
• Nearly 100% of the non-profits we work with already have it installed
• Our students find Google Analytics incredibly easy to learn
• Our mentors, even if they don’t use Google Analytics day-to-day, pick it up immediately

Most importantly, Google Analytics attention to ease-of-use dramatically improves our non-profits likelihood to continue to use web analytics after Analysis Exchange projects.  Our mentors and students teach them to fish, and Google Analytics becomes the fishing pole.

Most Analysis Exchange projects take less than a few hours for non-profits and mentors.  Students spend more time, but students have the most to gain as they develop the types of “Analyst Ninja” skills that are required to get a great job in this field. We’re looking for more partners to sign up to the The Analysis Exchange – who are interested in supporting this initiative.

You can learn more about our effort at www.analysis-exchange.com or write our Executive Director Wendy Greco directly at wendy.greco@analysis-exchange.com.

Posted on behalf of Wendy Greco & Eric Peterson

You may have already heard that Google is rolling out a new main privacy policy on March 1. With these changes, the privacy policy will be easier to read, and will help us create one beautifully simple, intuitive user experience across Google products and services. The new privacy policy makes it clear that if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services – helping us treat you as a single user across all our products. (To read more about the new privacy policy, check out the Official Google Blog post here.) We know you may have questions about how this affects you and your Google Analytics data, so want to take this opportunity to explain.

Most importantly, the privacy policies and controls you have over your website data will not change. Just as it was before, your website’s data is governed by the data sharing settings, which you control directly. You can still choose how much, if any, of your website’s data to share with Google to help us improve our products, provide anonymous, aggregate statistics, or make enhanced features like Conversion Optimizer available to you. Your website data will not be used for purposes other than those that you specify in your settings, which you may change at any time. You can find more information about data sharing settings here.

The way that we handle information about your website’s visitors is also unchanged. Their data will continue to be governed by your website’s privacy policies, and their actions will remain anonymous in Google Analytics to both websites and Google. The only change for Google Analytics users under the new privacy policy is that now, information about how you interact with the Google Analytics interface may be shared with our other products.

Helping you understand our privacy controls and giving you meaningful choices to determine how you want to share your data is very important to us, and we encourage you to take the time to read through the new privacy policy changes and our data sharing options.

Posted by Paul Muret, Director of Engineering, Google Analytics

The Multimodal Interaction Working Group has published a Group Note: MMI interoperability test report. This document describes an interoperability test, executed by various members of the Multimodal Interaction Working Group, to demonstrate interoperability of multimodal components which are implementing the “Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces” specification. Learn more about the Multimodal Interaction Activity.

The XML Processing Model Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of XML processor profiles. This specification defines several XML processor profiles, each of which defines how any given XML document should be processed, both operationally and in terms of what information must be made available to applications. It is intended as a resource for other specifications, which can by a single normative reference establish precisely what input processing they require as well as what information they require. Comments are welcome through 29 February. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity.

The XML Security Working Group invites implementation of three Candidate Recommendations: XML Signature Syntax and Processing Version 2.0, Canonical XML Version 2.0, and XML Signature Streaming Profile of XPath 1.0. XML Signatures provide integrity, message authentication, and/or signer authentication services for data of any type, whether located within the XML that includes the signature or elsewhere. The XML Security 2.0 specifications are designed to update the XML Signature and Canonical XML specifications to improve performance, streaming support, robustness, and reduced attack surface.

The Working Group has also published a W3C Note: XML Security RELAX NG Schemas, a document that provides RELAX NG schemas corresponding to the normative XSD schemas for XML Signature 1.1, XML Encryption 1.1, and related specifications.

To address patent disclosures related to the XML Signature 1.1 and XML Encryption 1.1 specifications, W3C has chartered a Patent Advisory Group. Concerns related to XML Signature 1.1 may also apply to XML Signature 2.0.

Learn more about the Security Activity.

Six Chix, 1/24/12

I’m totally in love with this drunken lump’s extreme level of dishevelment! I especially like the incredibly awkward position he’s passed out in, and the fact that he’s still clutching his precious, precious tallboy, even in unconsciousness. Also, that slice of pizza, just sitting on the couch with no plate or anything and almost certainly permanently grease-staining the cushion, is charming to me in its disgustingness.

But still, ladies! Do not fear that any man you meet on the Internet will be gross! My wife found me online, and I have rarely left any kind of mark on the upholstery in her house in the eight years or so since I moved into it.

Mary Worth, 1/24/12

Well, if against all odds and good taste Mary’s victory lap is going to be extended for another week, I guess having Emily and her family do the worshipping is marginally OK, considering. “It’s good to see you too Ms. Worth! We are so very grateful! And we thought to ourselves, what gift could possibly be adequate to show our gratitude to the God-woman who rescued our daughter? So we now present you the dismembered torso of Emily’s kidnapper, wrapped in a plastic bag for your convenience. A blood sacrifice for you, O divine being!”

Archie, 1/24/12

If you need proof that the current run of Archie strips are repeats from a pre-Internet era, consider this: can you imagine any news event so horrible that would reduce a seasoned TV anchor, cynical to the core and used to smiling his way through whatever words the teleprompter spit out at him, to tears, that you wouldn’t learn about until the six o’clock news? Anything worth ol’ Dan Brenon’s anxiety here — nuclear holocaust, one or more coastal states falling into the sea, a mass outbreak of zombie plague, what have you — would surely have been chatted up on Twitter or something hours ago.

Spider-Man, 1/24/12

Having realized that he’s far too incompetent to defeat or even find Thor, Spidey has decided to seek help from the Avengers, just in time to be four months ahead of the Avengers movie! Anyway, they’ll probably rescue MJ for him, but they’re gonna smack him around a bit first, just for fun.

I made some Valentine’s Day cards.

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Mark Trail, 1/23/12

OK, here’s a thing that has been persistently confusing to me about the current Mark Trail storyline: Tommy keeps insisting that he runs a “dog training business,” which, to an effete urban dweller such as myself, summons up an image of an obedience school where a Cesar Millan disciple explains to you how to establish an inter-creature dynamic within your household that prevents your adorable little Pomeranian from urinating on your newly restored hardwood floors. But Tommy only talks about Butch the blind dog and the rest of his business in terms of hunting, so I guess out in Real American “dog training businesses” are all about training your dog as a hunting companion, seriously, why would you even own a dog if you weren’t going to hunt with it? And so obviously a blind dog would be useless in such a context … unless Mark can prove that Butch has what it takes after all. Of course, the fact that Tommy is so transparently eager to get a 10-minute segment about Butch onto Animal Planet or the Outdoors Channel or Pointing The Camera At Nature or whatever basic cable channel Mark’s friend works for just goes to show that even Real America is desperately in thrall to the coastal media elites.

Hi and Lois, 1/23/12

It’s really quite sad that this is what Hi and Lois think a “quickie” is. And Lois isn’t even fully committed to it! You can’t drink tea at a coffee quickie, Lois.

Apartment 3-G, 1/23/12

Ha ha, Tommie is so boring that Lu Ann is going to call her “Margo” as she waves the MapQuest page she printed out all by herself at her. In the background, the actual Margo sees where this conversation is going and quickly decides to be anywhere else.

Cyclelicious and the Kickstand Cyclery have teamed up for a winter race: The Kickstand Cyclery Virtual Alleycat. When the race begins on January 30th, you’ll race other participants from Internet checkpoint to checkpoint as you visit various bicycle websites. Prizes will be awarded for speed, agility, and creative comments left at each checkpoint. Register now and get a chance to win an Onda bicycle trailer, Bicycle Times magazine subscriptions and merchandise, Walz Caps merchandise, Commute By Bike t-shirts, cycling books, Yehuda Moon merchandise and memberships, and more.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 1/22/12

Wow, how hardcore is Slick Smitty about committing petty, pointless crimes, constantly? Hardcore enough to sneak out of his own hospital room and steal flowers and chocolates from a heavily sedated goat, for no good reason. One imagines that he had to cradle the the things in his tender and heavily bandaged hands, trying not to grunt in pain at the pressure on his still-healing flesh, all the while leaving an incriminating trail of toeprints behind him. And how do you think he burned his hands in the first place? Probably from trying to steal a hot frying pan from a duck or something. It’s a sickness, Smitty, get help!

When I first read the puzzle question, the detail my mind settled on was that Smitty claimed the flowers and candy were from his girlfriend. I half expected Slylock’s solution to be “Wrong! Slick Smitty doesn’t have a girlfriend. He only stole these gifts to fool the world — and maybe, in the process, to fool himself — into believing that someone, somewhere might love him.”

Panels from Hi and Lois, 1/22/12

Hey kids! You might have heard a lot of socialist talk about how corporate media consolidation is bad! But without it, you wouldn’t be able to enjoy seamless cross-platform entertainment experiences like these, where you can check out the adventures of your favorite licensed characters in multiple media simultaneously. (Just remember, don’t download movies illegally off the Internet, the Internet is full of child molesters and demons.)