About

 
 

About the Site

 

What they're saying....

 

"Best. Website. Ever." - Empire Online

"An existential donkey-punch to our readers' collective pineal gland." - Defamer.com

"Combat boredom at work! Educate yourself! Dazzle your peers at cocktail parties!" - ESPN.com

"Wasting time celebrity-scouring on the Internet has rarely been so hilarious." - Long Island Press

"Norris 'facts' are a real kick." - New York Post

A "pop-culture phenomenon." - The Brown Daily Herald

"Amazing!" - The St. Petersburg Times

 

We've also been mentioned on

 

If you've seen the site mentioned somewhere else, let us know.

 

 

In the beginning...

 

It all started out with Vin Diesel. In March of 2005, The Pacifier (or Der Babynator for those of you who speak German) was released in theatres and Vin Diesel's bizarre performance in it was a hot topic of discussion. One of the online communities Ian frequents is the SomethingAwful forums, where the juxtaposition of Diesel playing a Navy SEAL-turned-babysitter opened the floodgates to a rather ludicrous discussion entitled "Post Facts About Vin Diesel." After several pages of these facts, Ian took it upon himself to create a website where anybody could view or submit these (mostly) hilarious facts. The rest, as they say, is history. On its first day in operation, the generator received in excess of 20,000 hits. On May 1st, 2005, the site received its ten millionth hit. You can check our stats of the site at any time here.

 

And now for the tech gurus....

 

The site first launched as a shoddy little text-file-based random generator. As the site became popular overnight (literally), this type of script was hell for my server. Something had to be done. With the help of some volunteers, the contents of the text file were added into a mySQL database, and a new script was written. The counter on the old page never made it past the 4 million mark, since it was also too resource-intensive (it was cgi-based) and was converted to run off of mySQL as well. The current build of the runs off of ColdFusion.

 

Two's Company

 

Well, let's see. First the earth cooled. And then the dinosaurs came, but they got too big and fat, so they all died and turned into oil. Suddenly it was the middle of June, 2005. Mike, soon to be the impetus behind the creation of the Chuck Norris generator was working on a script for his own fact generator which ripped off of the Vin Diesel Generator in nearly every aspect. It dubbed it the Marcel Laverdet Fact Generator.

Don't know who Marcel Laverdet is? I don't blame you. Since he's the administrator of a members-only website, the fact generator didn't get to grow that much. After peaking at about 2,000 hits a day, which still wasn't too bad, Mike realized it wasn't going to work. He needed to make a fact generator for a celebrity; somebody that most of the world knew.

After several missed throws at the dart board, a dart finally stuck and Bob Saget won. (Don't worry, Chuck Norris fits into this later.) Mike later edited his script and even added an easy to manage globals file. After that he was awesome enough to package it and released the script for everybody to use. (If you want to try it, you can find it here.) At the same time, Ian had conducted a survey to see who the next fact generator should be about, and Chuck Norris won by a landslide.

 

Movin' on up...

 

On July 14, 2005, Mike sent Ian an email saying how much his fact generator script rocked and sent him a link to his Bob Saget site. Apparently, Ian was impressed. He replied with this to say:

The similarity is very disturbing. What If I told you that I'd host it on my own server but let you run it?

An hour later (Ian had to update PHP), the site was up and running. In about an hour, it received ten thousand hits. A big success.
 

From Saget to Norris

At the time, Ian said was getting a lot of emails about people complaining about how the quality of the facts on the Bob Generator were much lower than the ones on the Vin Diesel one. Sadly, it was true. It might have been people not liking the fact that the new site totally ripped off the Vin Diesel Fact Generator or people weren't seeing one of the two links on the Vin Diesel page. But Ian and Mike both agreed it was probably people pissed off that they didn't get the Chuck Norris Fact Generator they were originally promised. After modifying the facts from the Bob site, the Chuck Norris Fact Generator was put online.

 

I pity the what?

 

On October 24th, 2005, Ian received an email from - of all organizations - NASA. That's right, the same people who help put people into outer space contacted him. Not only that, but they wanted to start up a new fact generator... for Mr. T.

 

Within two days, the site was up and running.  The guys who run it, Tom and Greg are really good about coding, and they as well as Mike have helped out in optimizing all three sites. Ian still foots the bill, handles the media and the servers, and makes sure everything is as funny as possible.


So who runs all this?

 

Ian

Creator, Head Honcho, Quality Control, Media Rep

 

Ian is currently a freshman at Brown University where he intends to concentrate in Computational Biology. In addition to his interest in the sciences, he has been operating a web hosting company, QubeFactor Technologies since 2003. Ian also knows what a quail looks like, and what to put there. Take that, Mark Zuckerberg.

 

Email: ian@qubefactor.com

AIM: qube42
 

Mike

Lead Coder

 

Mike's full name is Michael, but he usually goes by his Internet alias "Toad King". ("Toad" as in the little mushroom-like people in Mario games, not the amphibian.) He is a regular poster on GameFAQs and another site which doesn't exist. He is also smart enough to not submit a picture for this page.

 

Email: toadking@lueshi.com
AIM: TKEscapee
 

Tom

 

Tom, the co-admin of the Mr. T page, is a heathen hacker whose first computer was a TI-994A,  when he was 14. He enjoys an eclectic mix of movies (The Seven Samurai to Serenity), music (classical to Evanescence) and games (Warcraft to Warcraft III). He is also a serial entrepreneur and student. Tom has no known sense of humor which makes it all the more ironic that he is involved with a website dedicated to it.

Tom is currently an MBA candidate at The College of William & Mary and manages networks and servers for NASA in his spare time. [Insert joke about tax dollars going to waste here.]

 

Email: t.g.flake@larc.nasa.gov

 

Greg

 

A co-admin of the Mr. T page, Greg Ackerson is a born-again, spirit-filled hacker. He got his first computer, an Atari 800, when he was 9. He has upgraded since then. He enjoys reading comics, watching anime, LotR, stock market simulation, and maintaining his 4.5 computers. His low-fat, homemade pizza is way better than you think it is, and unlike your pizza, doesn't have orange pools of grease on it. He listens to Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, KLOVE.com, and you.

 

Email: greg@supersilly.com


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This website and its creators are not affiliated with Vin Diesel, Chuck Norris, Mr. T, any motion picture corporation, any television corporation, parent, or affiliate corporation. All motion pictures, products, and brands mentioned on this website are the respective trademarks and copyrights of their owners. All material on this website is intended for humorous entertainment purposes only. The above content on this website is not necessarily true and should not be regarded as truth. By submitting content to us, you agree that you are at least eighteen (18) years of age. Additionally, your submission becomes the intellectual property of the owner of this domain name (4q.cc). We respect your privacy, and will not release any of your contact information unless it is requested by the proper authorities. We also reserve the right to add, edit, or remove your contribution to our database at any time.

 

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