SpectateSwamp

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SpectateSwamp, or Douglas Pederson, is a mysterious Canadian lifeform.




Contents

These days, we call it...

SpectateSwamp likes to "rile up" people. Ordinary logic would say that the guy is a troll, but since the documentation of his antics goes back for decades, it'd be better to come up with some better definitions. SpectateSwamp: The Everlasting Trolling Experience? SpectateSwamp: The Guy Who Spent 10 Years Building Something For His 15 Minutes of Lulz? Hell if we know.

Some argue that SpectateSwamp is just someone who knows the real Doug Pederson and just uses his persona on the web, as there apparently has been some quotes where mr. Pederson shows some lucidity that you can't quite find in his recent posts. However, heaps of more evidence points toward the fact that the guy who spews garbage online and the personality from oddball news is one and same.

Whatever the truth is, the guy seems to have taken the "any publicity is good publicity" mantra to the heart. He's stirring trouble, getting people annoyed, and hopes this will make people interested in his shoddy ideas, and when they tell him to sod off, he thinks it's a giant conspiracy and everyone is just "plants" or "bots" trying to keep his ideas down.

The Shack

Apparently, SpectateSwamp has the habit of inviting people to his "SwampShack" to be educated on how his desktop search works, and other things.

The SwampShack also is the legendary hunting ground of the WhiteCrow. It is actually a hooded crow; hooded crows aren't native to Canada, so when Spectate found out he has a very rare bird in his backyard, something snapped in his head and now he has to call it the WhiteCrow for some reason. Go figure. Hooded crows aren't even white.

Stone Dancer

Folks on The Daily WTF were a bit amused by the address of Spectate's home page: Ho ho ho, "stonedan", is that "Stone Dan" or "Stoned An"? Apparently, that wasn't that far from truth. In 1970s, mr. Swamp found some holes with stones around them, figured out that they were ancient mystical Indian medicine stones, and called them "Tokin Stones" and went on a crazy marijuana-induced rampage of dancing across the seven seas and d00ding across a couple of continents. Few people were amused.

Master Politician

Ostensibly, mr. Swamp ran for some sort of political post in Yellowhead, Canada.

And painted his head yellow.

Not kidding. Apparently, people voted for him. You can get very far by painting your head yellow and saying no one needs more than grade 8 education.

Oscar-Winning Video Editor

SpectateSwamp has the habit of making a bunch of videos. Apparently, he really really likes that video camera of his. He goes out and videotapes the sky for a moment. He goes to the political meetings and town-hall gatherings and disturbs people by videoing them (and disturbs females in attendance by randomly focusing on their breasts - you don't want to know why the camera seems to jerk even more when he does this). He has the habit of mumbling like a madman when he narrates these videos.

The immediate reaction to Spectate's video skills is that he can't edit worth a damn. On the contrary, he can edit just fine, it's just that he even says it could be illegal to edit video. Who knows, in certain places you'd be in deep trouble if you accidentally videoed a crime and then edited it out. So hell no, of course he won't edit the videos. He posts the whole things online!

When Spectate started making screencasts of his Desktop Search application, he began videoing in the screen with his camera - no tripod, of course. People pointed out that the picture quality was shit, and told him to use CamStudio. Obviously, Spectate had no idea how the hell to choose screen areas to record, and his attempts to produce good quality video for Google Video were a little bit futile. He then came up with even more masterful solution: Reshooting the CamStudio video with his video camera when the video is playing in his screen.

Abridged Filmography

SpectateSwamp's videos are plentiful and vary in their content. He often shoots nature scenes, films of large round rocks (which he calls Flatten'em Stones), political hearings, the sky,

  • The largest Flatten'em stone 16+ tons 
 The entirety of this short film is of SpectateSwamp giving its audience a closeup of the largest "Flatten'em stone" he has ever seen. He is apparently fascinated by the stone, as he mumbles incoherantly about it, ending the film with some superb commentary ("It's pretty round.")
  • Spruce Grouse Rooster struts for the Girls 
 SpectateSwamp finds a wild rooster and decides to film it. It represents some of his most interesting work.
  • Brownie has mouse - it's a battle royal 
 SpectateSwamp's labrador finds a mouse and ineptly tries to kill it. SpectateSwamp and his friend watch in great excitement and amusement, as if they were watching NASCAR at home.
  • Strange video artifacts - What spooks this sparrow 
 SpectateSwamp films a sparrow on a power line, which does what pretty much any other bird does: spins its head around observing its surroundings for prey and/or predators. SpectateSwamp believes something more sinister is spooking the bird, evidenced by the speck of something that flies around it. SpectateSwamp apparently believes flying insects are a hoax perpetuated by the government and other authorities.

Spectate Swamp Desktop Search

Spectate Swamp Desktop Search is a program that SpectateSwamp has been writing since 1998. In Visual Basic 5, if you can call it that. This is merely an extension of his highly amazing programming career, since he has been in the IT industry since 1970s. Again, the conventional logic says that if you've programmed for decades, you'll be able to write some shit hot code on new programming environments, but apparently, it's entirely possible that Spectate Swamp began as an awful programmer (in FØRTRAN and CØBØL) and will die an awful programmer (gotten stuck in Visual Basic 5, which is already ancient history by now).

So what the hell does the program do? Apparently, Spectate is extremely excited about his "Desktop Search" program, and has been relentlessly spamming IT forums, blogs, random wikis, and like, to promote this program. It is so much better than Google Desktop Search, Windows search, Copernic, etc... and it doesn't even use evil "indexing"! You can search complete files in it, while GDS limits you to searching only beginnings of the files.

Of course, this ignores a couple of rather important things:

  • SSDS only searches one file. (You have to combine all .txt .frm .cls .htm ... and other files into 1 using the merge option)
  • The user interface blows. It's an unholy love-child of worst aspects of command lines and worst aspects of GUIs. But it is blazingly fast. From startup to seeing the last page of notes to complete close in under 3 seconds.

Spectate tried to get an "open source" project going, but people aren't exactly enthusiastic about looking at a program that's built on an obsolete platform without any semblance of rational thoughts behind it. Anyone with a clue will probably get a seizure when they look at the source code. Naturally, SpectateSwamp managed to mess up the management side too: He set up a SourceForge.net project and then assumed people will magically appear there and work on the code. Apparently, choosing to be a project administrator was a bit too much for him. It would have involved actual effort.

Dinosaur Hunter and Alien Uncovering Expert

In addition to being an accomplished cinematographer and programmer who titillated programmers and video people, he's also an accomplished paleonto- and UFOlogist.

He has been skulking around the woods, and apparently found "dino mummies" and "dinosaur skin". Now, finding any of those would be pretty remarkable indeed. Finding ordinary dinosaur fossils not necessarily so.

SpectateSwamp has also the curious habit of filming skies. He claims that objects that can be momentarily seen in these videos are actually UFOs, while they're clearly just trash, insects, or compression artifacts. Even some folks at conspiracy forums thought so. It's official, mr. Swamp's arguments aren't very convincing.

He also has the curious habit of making stills of his videos, then circling the objects in red in Paint, and posting the images. Sometimes he just circles something red and posts it anyway, without telling what the hell these markings mean. What is wrong with this guy?

External links



Image:Little Troll.gif SpectateSwamp is part of a series on Trolls.



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