Gammatron

PowerMate

$45 for a volume knob. But wait, its big, and brushed metal, and has blue LEDs. Sign me up!

10:45:19 PM  #  

Chris Woods

Interesting and fun pop culture art. The “Messiah of Doughnuts” [qv] (celebrating the Canadian debut of Krispy Kreme) is making me hungry. [more]

10:40:57 PM  #  

Unidisker

Undisker is a disk image utility that can open, create, and extract ISO files. Sounds functionally similar to mounting ISO files in linux using the loopback driver. It would be much cooler if you could actually modify the contents of the ISO on the fly, but hey, I’ll take what I can get.

12:49:18 PM  #  

Kentucky Legislature HR256

Oh, man, if this passes, I’m on the next train to Kentucky. The actual bill is provided in MSWord format.

Section 1. The House of Representatives does hereby encourage the formation of the Kentucky Navy and subsequently immediately encourages the purchase and armament of one particularly effective submarine, namely, the USS Louisville 688 VLS Class Submarine, to patrol the portion of the Ohio River under the jurisdiction of the Commonwealth to engage and destroy any casino riverboats that the submarine may encounter.

Section 2. The House of Representatives does hereby authorize the notification of the casino riverboat consulate of this Resolution and impending whoopin’ so that they may remove their casino vessels to friendlier waters.

2:17:13 AM  #  

Google Britney Spears Misspellings

I’m wondering how this ended up under the “jobs” subdirectory…

1:06:10 AM  #  

NeuHausPlatz (via larkfarm)

The first PC case mod with no case; everything is encased in foam.

12:30:09 AM  #  

J-List

This Japanese import merchant carries a wide selection of Hello Kitty toilet paper, pancake mix, and vibrators, as well as non-Hello Kitty stuff like REALLY BIG SOCKS and glue to keep the really big socks from sliding down your legs. Crappy navigation, and I sense some connection with The Onion.

12:23:53 AM  #  

Japanese 2005 World’s Fair Mascots [english version]
11:40:34 PM  #  

Mark Pilgrim - RealOne and application posture

…someone at Real.com saw my blurb yesterday where I mentioned offhand that there were lots of good reasons to avoid RealOne, and asked me to elaborate.

This is pathetic; it’s painfully obvious to anyone who has actually tried to use a recent version of any Real product that the comapny is run by losers. I think that Real should quit fucking around and just make their installer ask for my bank account number, format my drive, and install their own custom OS that just shows ads all day.

11:35:17 PM  #  

Space Shuttle Observations of Lightning

Lots of blurry photos; the blurry MPEG movies, however, are very impressive if you have the bandwidth. Don’t miss the movies of red sprites and blue jets, they’re both worth the wait even if you’re on dial-up (assuming you have any interest at all in weather).

10:12:32 PM  #  

Apollo-Soyuz Stamps (via plep)

7:55:43 PM  #  

Argh! M$ claims their bad-ass web accessories only work with IE 5.x, so I’ve been waiting patiently for a 6.x version. Today, I finally got fed up and just HAD to have the “image zoom in/out” and “view partial source” features, so I just downloaded and installed the stuff. Holy crap, it works!
6:41:34 PM  #  

Blasting down a deserted stretch of I-40 between Memphis and Little Rock (which is almost always packed with 18-wheelers) late at night with the only visible light coming from distant radio towers and the waxing gibbous moon poking in and out of the clouds, reflecting off of flooded rice fields while blaring the Pixies’ “Rock Music” is the most pleasurable driving experience I’ve ever had.
12:32:37 AM  #  

Everyone is ragging on AOL for ditching thier own email system for internal use, using the old “eat your own dogfood” excuse, but AOL mail was built with grandmothers in mind, not corporate users. The stupid thing isn’t them admitting they’re using the wrong tool for the job, it’s that they ever thought they could get any work done with it in the first place. Would you expect Cadillac to use an Escalade EXT [5 mar 02] to haul a trailer full of their cars from the factory to the dealer? No, they use the right tool for the job.
12:24:11 AM  #  

HSX must be in their final death throes; they now have a shoshkele [phase i 1 July 01] on their login screen that not only blocks the login form, but also has no “close” button; this leaves you with no way of logging in without clicking on the ad. Very clever, but not as clever as me PLONKing them!
12:16:06 AM  #  

Alphabet Synthesis Machine (via ark)

Flash applet takes a random glyph you draw and turns it into a primitive alphabet. It then gives you a few parameters to tweak, and “evolves” it. When you’re happy, you can download the result as a truetype font.

12:05:34 PM  #  

Ninja Lesson (214kb jpeg)

Seven easy steps from dork to ass-whoopin ninja. See also: Real Ultimate Power [12 Jan 02]

As a ninja, you obtain certain responsibilities such as kicking asses and looking cool and tough.

10:08:14 AM  #  

Swatch @ beat time for Radio

Neat. Too bad beats (and its ilk) are a totally lame idea[29 dec 99]. Impressive work, though.

The whole premise of these “internet time” standards seems to be that its hard to convert Hong Kong time to Kansas time or whatever. It only takes a second to figure out that it is about 4 zillion times easier to just add or subtract an integer number of hours than it is to figure out exactly when @423 is. I mean, if you’re going to replace an arbitrary standard with little bearing on reality with another arbitrary standard with little bearing on reality, at least make it easier on the user, duh.

12:11:11 AM  #  

magputt

Clever, but with minor delusions of revoltionizing energy supply and the inevitable accompanying paranoia (”PRINT THIS BEFORE IT IS DELETED FROM THE NET!”).

The engine I have invented is far more efficient than any other steam engine because the efficiency of the magnetron in turning water into steam. In fact, the water droplet ‘explodes’ very much like air/gasoline explodes in a conventional internal combustion engine.

11:12:55 PM  #  

Inxight Star Tree

Corporate intranet bot that turns your sitemap into an interactive star/tree. Interesting, but limited potential.

11:07:20 PM  #  

Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work
11:03:07 PM  #  

diveintomark: dissin’ on Radio [follow-up]

No one tool is perfect for everyone; Mark seems pretty happy with Movable Type [qv]. However, just to play Devil’s advocate:

• Radio is a server, so you can leave it running on one machine and contact it from anywhere else. This is, in fact, the way I most often use it. You can access the top 95% of the most-often-used features through the web interface. Security is a concern, but you should have a firewall appliance of some sort anyway. Just open port 5335, get a dyndns.org account, and you’re a full peer.
• Userland’s hosting is quite limited at 20MB, but you can use any machine (including your own desktop) instead. This probably means additional hosting fees (you could easily use cornerhost, as Mark suggests for blogger), but the upside (at least, compared to blogger/blog spot) is that you’re completely free of any dependence on Userland for your daily operations (obviously, you still rely on them for updates). Additionally, I don’t see any reason google can’t search any radio weblog, and there are plug-in tools for searching archives from the desktop website (and it should be possible to turn this into a web service [thread], which I’d like to work on if I get a free weekend).
• One other advantage Radio has over MT or Greymatter: Radio doesn’t need cgi capabilities on the public webserver, so you can use a super-lightweight server like dhttpd, etc. This isn’t really that big of a deal, since most 3rd party webhosts provide cgi access, but some don’t on their most basic plans.
• It’s trivial to write Radio callbacks to strip out signatures in mail-to-weblog posts [thread] or to route email to certain categories [thread] [specific post]. It would be nice, however, if these were included with radio by default and didn’t have to be dropped in by the user. Especially since there’s no way you’d know they existed unless you were specifically looking for them.

9:00:37 PM  #  

Hmm, I noticed some people had been cheating at progress quest, but they seem to have been wiped out. It’s probably trivial to sniff the data it sends to the server with your charcter’s stats for the Hall of Fame and stuff whatever you want in there (+50 Invisible Uzi of Hello Kitty Pr0n, anyone?).

10:57:43 PM  #  

Warring Against Terrorism

Opinion piece on the events that could unfold if terrorists manage to detonate a nuke in a major US city. It’s really only noteworthy for this great line:

It strikes me as probable that Europe would recognize that the same could happen to it, and support the US. (Except for France, which presumably has a surrender document on the Internet, with blanks you can fill in.)

10:56:56 PM  #  

hell yeah
10:21:04 PM  #  

Even a Yale pedigree could leave one unemployed (via flangy)

I’ve got little sympathy for the Ivy League Entitlement syndrome. I had (still have) several very close friends from high school who went to Ivy League (or other “first tier”) schools, and thankfully none of them displayed this bratty syndrome when they got out. They all went out and continued to bust their asses.

On the other hand, the author has a degree in English, which is often regarded as a “useless” degree; however, if I were ever in a position to hire someone, I’d certainly be interested in anyone with an English degree. Getting this degree not only takes a lot of reading, but also takes a lot of writing. And practice makes perfect. So there’s a pretty good chance this person has a pretty good ability to communicate, both in writing and face-to-face. I’ve noticed that these skills are much harder to find out in the “real” business world than I ever would have imagined. That degree is nothing to be ashamed of; play it up!

Will someone please tell me where I went wrong?

Uh, the part about assuming you’d get a great job for free just because you got a measly 1400 on your SAT and conned a Yale admissions committe, probably. Or maybe she’s just shooting for jobs she isn’t qualified for (just because you’ve got some good skills doesn’t mean you can jump right into a VP position). Start small and develop. I did considerably better than that on my standardized tests, had a social life, and managed to graduate from a pretty prestigious high school with minimal effort, much to the chagrin of my teachers. I didn’t apply to any Ivy League school (though many of my classmates did), mostly because I didn’t want to go too far from home, but I did apply to (and was accepted by) several of the top schools in the southeast. I ended up going to a state university, mostly for the better football team (and financial reasons) and I don’t ever regret the decision. I skated (barely) through my Mathematics degree, but aced the GRE, and snagged a graduate research assistanceship. I dropped out before even finishing my first semester, since I quickly discovered I had no interest whatsoever in professional mathematics. I then got out into the “Real World” (not the one on MTV where someone else pays for you to live in a big fancy house so you can party all day); I didn’t need anyone to tell me to stop being a lazy sack of shit, I just instinctively started busting my ass. I found a decent job doing something I liked, busted my ass at it, then got a better job doing something I liked a little more, and so on. Now I make a shitload of money (I hope my boss isn’t reading that!) doing something I love, but guess what? I’m still busting my ass, probably harder than ever. I still find plenty of time, however, to dick around (witness this weblog) and have fun. Amazing.

9:29:09 PM  #  

Repair XP

Some quickie how-tos for repairing your XP machine if (when) it gets fucked up. Lots of superfluous screenshots of the XP boot screen.

11:28:33 PM  #  

The National Atlas (via larkfarm)

Yowza.. there’s a ton of stuff here. With the interactive map browser, you can layer all kinds of data over the maps, from mundane stuff like county boundaries and roads to more interesting stuff like acres of cotton planted per county to weird stuff like mortality rates from bladder cancer among white males and Avian Botulism rates.

11:00:26 PM  #  

Celebrity Phone Numbers

This was potentially so awesome, but it’s so fucking pathetic… let’s see… the Jennicam chyXX0r’s number from 2000, six numbers for David Coverdale (of Whitesnake), Art Bell, and what may or may not be Christina Applegate’s little sister’s roommate’s phone number.

10:50:37 PM  #  

This is so dull that it makes “Small Wonder” look like “Fight Club”.

10:42:59 PM  #  

World Treasures of the Library of Congress: Beginnings

I didn’t find the navigation obvious, even though in hindsight it seemed like it should have been.

an exploration of how world cultures have dealt with the creation of the universe and explained the heavens and the earth.

11:12:18 PM  #  

I saw this ad on lwn.net; it’s so lame I don’t even know where to begin:

Yes, Penguin Computing, the company that’s so lame they had to rip off Tux for their logo, has l33t kernel h4XX0rz sitting by the phone waiting for your calls, while everyone else has a bunch of guys who just got fired from Blimpie.

And if windows support is an indicator of quality of linux support, well, you’re fucked if you pick them, because they have NO windows support. QED.

Sorry, but I know the guys who do Compaq’s Linux support personally, and they’re fucking geniuses. Most of them have been doing Linux support for years, and Unix support for years before that. And not just dinky stuff like installing RedHat on a PC, but the tough stuff like writing kernel drivers and building Alpha beowulf clusters. They’re professionals and experts, and certainly not some bunch of goobers reading a support script, as these assholes would like to imply. I’d certainly trust my Linux support to them before a company that uses .bmp images for their advertisements (I converted it to PNG to save over 100kb).

10:44:17 PM  #  

Google has added a new “querytime” parameter to searches from the Goolge toolbar. I’m wondering if this has any effect on the results or if they’re just tracking search results that get passed around… the following experiments may provide some clues over time (both produce the same results right now):

Hello Kitty Fanfic: [with querytime] [without querytime]

Britney Spears: [with querytime] [without querytime]

It’s a strange parameter… I’ve only seen it in searches from the Google toolbar (though it doesn’t always get added, I’ve seen a few without it), and sometimes the data in the field is only one letter; there can’t be too much encoded in that. Furthermore, it doesn’t seem to change even if I query from the toolbar at different times, and I often see values repeated (I’ve seen “wC” and “KQMXjB” several times now).

Hmm… I think the querytime may be related to the time required to perform the search… no, that’s not it… crap, nevermind.

6:48:48 PM  #  

Trenches on the Web (via plep)

Posters from World War I; mostly allied, but some german posters. They’re pretty small scans, though; I thought they were thumbnails at first. There are larger images available in the “Fractal Gallery” but they are in some .fif format that requires a plug-in or viewer that doesn’t seem to be available anymore. I can’t even tell who makes the stupid thing; it could be AltaMira, Iterated Systems, LizardTech, or MediaBin. I’d guess there was some sequence of companies buying up each other during the dot-com bust and some of the products just got lost in the shuffle.

6:37:19 PM  #  

Growing of Fungal Bioturbation Paths in a Compact Disk

Scientific study of the (now old-news) CD-eating fungus, with pictures. The pictures at the bottom from Pete Davis have a creepy fractal look to them.

12:25:24 PM  #  

Hello Kitty Iron Chef crossover fanfic would be much kewler than Deputy Dawg Iron Chef crossover fanfic, but it doesn’t produce a new googlewhack as there are already 42(!) hits for Hello Kitty Iron Chef crossover fanfic (though there are none if you search for it as a phrase… does that count?).

8:37:06 PM  #  

AdMuncher completely fucks with radio. Not only is it the cause of the rampant “400 Bad Request” errors I’ve been seeing, it sometimes leads to dropped posts, and completely screws with Radio’s ability to get weblogs.com updates and other behind-the-scenes communication. And I even have my localhost and public website explicitly listed in the “exclude” list. That sucks, because otherwise AdMuncher is awesome.
8:31:21 PM  #  

A Disagreeably Facetious Type Glossary
Concise typograhy primer, with very good explanations, plenty of examples, and good historical context.
2:47:06 PM  #  

Typographic Terminology
2:36:35 PM  #  

OK, I’m sick of google-(whatever)ing. Dave is so proud of himself that he invented some awkward-ass phrase nobody else had ever used and linked it to himself and claims a googlewhack (but he hasn’t even read the instructions - “BigCos” isn’t a dictionary word, so it doesn’t count) about three months after everyone else stopped caring about them [further discussion]. Now he’s moaning again that free yahoo groups mail lists are down all weekend. He’s got a fat pipe to his office and plenty of technical know-how, but he’d rather rely on some lame-ass, ad-laden yahoo bullshit that’s got a reputation for dodgyness than setup his own fucking mailman server. Shutthefuckup, already! I’d plonk him if I hadn’t already shelled out $40 for Radio…

Anyway, back to google-(fadoftheweek)ing… Deputy Dawg Iron Chef crossover fanfic [credit]

2:10:39 PM  #  

Evil Goatees (via antiquark)

Don’t miss the parallel-universe evil versions of Britney Spears and Martha Stewart. Evil Tinky-Winky will give you nightmares!

1:58:31 PM  #  

Weather as a Force Multiplier

US Air Force study of potential for militarizing weather patterns.

1:52:25 PM  #  

Beef Chart (pdf, via mr pants)

A 1200 pound steer yields 500 pounds of retail cuts from a 750 pound carcass.

BTW, the text selection tool in Acrobat5 sux, and has no concept of columns or page layout.

8:07:11 PM  #  

Discovery of a Scientific Proof of God

Don’t miss the open letter to Stephen Hawking. His stuff sounds vaguely similar to the timecube guy, but without the rambling stream-of-consciousness insults on the front page in 48pt red italic.

7:39:22 PM  #  

Crazy Jet-Powered Vehicles

Wake me up when they get a segway on here.

7:26:37 PM  #  

Nokia 7210

Nice, Nokia gets a color screen, and I dig the 7xxx series’ bigger screen and more granular signal-strength and battery-life indicators, and bonus points for keeping the existing power connector so I don’t have to go buy a new cigarette lighter adapter.

However, most of the new features [qv] seem to be aimed at trendy consumers rather than serious phone users (the previous 71xx series was almost exclusively aimed at business people).

Side note: I pretty much live on the cell phone during business hours (currently using about 2,000 minutes per month), as I don’t have a well-defined office, so features like longer battery life and easier conferencing/call-waiting operation mean a lot to me. Especially more battery life; I can drain two 8260 batteries in a day without blinking.

Finally getting GPRS is nice, but MMS seems like a pretty lame corporate attempt to slap some turd-chrome onto a “mobile instant messaging platform” (my term). The pop-port sounds vaguely interesting but overhyped.

Big, BIG point deduction on the “radical new” keyboard layout that “breaks all the rules” (including my ability to dial without hunt-n-pecking (it shouldn’t take long for third-party faceplates with sane keypads to appear, though)) and polyphonic MIDI ringtones. A bunch of people I work with have sprint phones that use the polyphonic ringtones, and even when they’re cranked all the way up, you can’t hear them in even a moderately noisy enviroment; the shrill tones of the default “ordinary buzzer” carry much better. Hopefully there will be an option to fall back to the old-tech ringer.

Not that it really matters, it will be about seven years before the phone shows up in the US, and by then I’ll probably be long-since dead from brain-cooking by my 8260. My next upgrade will probably (assuming I stick with nokia) be to a crippled US version of the 83xx [comparison].

8:36:00 PM  #  

Six months, and all Tom “Ruby” Ridge can come up with is National Guard goons running around the airport playing cops and robbers and a fucking Captain Kirk “Yellow Alert” system? I need that fucking job. I could go on, but Mike Donellan has already done it better.

Terror Threat Warning Alert TV (bottom of page)

20% Chance of Terror Today…

Think how Tom has suffered for us: six months of studying mood ring science… six months of thinking about which color ‘elevated’ should be… six months of arguing with Colin Powell about whether ‘black’ is a color or not…

8:21:45 PM  #  

Combined Utilities for Beowulf (cub)

cf Compaq Cluster Management Utility.

7:45:41 PM  #  

OMFG! Telemarketers are completely fucking out of control! I just got a call from a mortgage shuckster that started out “My name is Doug from Fuckhead Mortgage Assholes, Inc…” even though it was actually a recording. At the end it says “if you want more information, press 1 or simply hang up. If you want to be removed from our calling list, press 9 (click).” The fuckers hang up on you before you can push a button! I guess I can look forward to months of junk mail and more robot calls.
7:27:15 PM  #  

Self-proclaimed “Wilford Brimley on ‘ludes” [cite] lookalike Doc Searls discovers that if you remove all power sources from your TiBook, it stops working (scroll down a bit). Fucking genius. And this guy is supposed to be some sort of technical authority? I pray that he isn’t allowed to drive.

I give Doc a hard time, and I’ve plonked him a couple of times, but I keep coming back to his site for some demented reason. Who else is going to selflessly go to SXSW and give me constant real-time updates on who is real-time-blogging various panels? And he’s not a raving egomaniac who prints up t-shirts for his website and “gives” them away for “free” (just send $10 via paypal) but doesn’t bother to provide a picture of what the hell they look like [qv]. BTW, that link to cam’s site is completely fucked up; the actual info I want to point to in from 7 March, but the anchor for that day’s entry is named “03″, just like the entry from 3 March. And Cam does this shit for a living; I know where I’d start shopping if I needed a professional web designer, err, sorry, I mean Design Technologist.

7:20:06 PM  #  

OK, lame… not only did my Radio server on my home machine go tits up sometime over the weekend, but my fucking laptop display decided to go completely apeshit. Fuck, I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.
7:00:18 PM  #  

testing, 1 2 3… is this thing on?

I’m on “vacation” and I can’t get to my radio server for some reason. I’m not sure if my dyndns client got screwed up or if the power at home went out. Without the monitor on, the UPS should last about 25 minutes. Hopefully it’s just some random network screwup and mail-to-blog functionality still works.

12:41:19 AM  #  

Chrissy Lecreme

Uhh….

This website deals with crossdressing and transgendered issues. Plus It deals with slapstick and pie in the face issues as well

Chrissy also has some opinions on the Weather Channel’s female meteorologists and some fantasies of being a weather channel hottie, with pie, of course.

11:55:43 PM  #  

weatherbabes · Weather Channels Sexiest Divas (sic)

Lots of screen captures of various weather channel hotties. Is this fair use? Let the courts sort it out.

11:50:35 PM  #  

You can’t change the Weather Channel

Lame $2.00 archived story about obsessive fans of female Weather Channel meterologists. Well, the story probably isn’t lame, but I can’t tell since I don’t have $2.

11:42:32 PM  #  

Columbia Dawn

I’ve been waiting for a big version of this picture of the March 1st lauch of STS Columbia since a tiny version showed up on Yahoo news a week ago.

9:54:52 PM  #  

Compaq Integrated Keyboard and Monitor (TFT5600RKM) (decent picture in the pdf datasheet)

I’ve seen plenty of rackmount TFT displays and drawers for little keyboards and trackballs for use as graphics consoles, but most of them are 2U each. This puts the whole deal into 1U; it’s basically the business ends (i.e. input and output) of a laptop with rackmount rails. Very nice, but I would prefer a touchpad to the trackball (the bigger IBM equivelents of this have the little eraser pointer, of course). It’s listed as an option for proliant rackmount servers, but I just got one in attached to a 1GHz Wildfire GS80 along with what’s probably the first production HSV110 storage controller in the world (my client has had seed units for months now, and is usually hesitant to roll out new stuff, but after beating it up for a while they decided to go with it. Disclaimer: I work for Compaq as a Unix systems engineer.

8:54:06 PM  #  

Don’t try this at home

Longish, detailed account of the now-infamous Tugboat incident [14 Feb 02].

7:38:48 PM  #  

Emacs Religion

Ugh, another emacs weenie. Is this a PLONKable offense?

Emacs
Makes
A

Computer
Slow

End of discussion. QED (that’s French for “I’m right and you’re wrong” [cite]).

9:36:04 PM  #  

ManBeef

(insert obligatory “it’s what’s for dinner” joke here)

NOTE: As per the request of Interpol, the FBI, and the FDA Department of Criminal Investigations, we now publicly state that ManBeef.com does not actually sell human flesh.

11:06:42 PM  #  

Caddy’s Big & Tall (via flangy)

Best car review ever. This Escalade EXT is possibly the most decadent vehicle ever built. It’s got flying buttresses, for cryin out loud!

This Cadillac includes an “Ultrasonic Rear Parking Assist” (URPA), so that you don’t back over a runaway bison or a Humvee belonging to the military police. Cadillac says the device “now incorporates a new snow, ice, and mud algorithm in its software.” What it does is this: It works to tell you when it’s not working.

BTW, Car and Driver’s website is totally fascist. The “printable” version of their story pops up in a tiny non-resisable window that’s useless for reading on your screen, so you pretty much have to look at the multi-page, ad-laden, fixed-font-size version.

10:44:55 PM  #  

I get awesome email. The following is a translation of the Hi-Ho [2 mar 02] song, with interpretation:

Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2002 14:46:23 -0500
To: novarese
Subject: HIHO!

Forwarded to me by a friend, from one of his friends who speaks Japanese:

Intaanetto ,HiHo!
HiHo, Hiho!
Meiru ga tonda
Hai!
Purobaida
Hiho!
Yume no intanetto
Fufufu Sono namae ha

Hiho HiHo
Satto tsunagaru
Ichi kara sapouto
Tonari no obasan mo
debyuu shita
Chatto Chatto
Chotto charanto
charirarirariran
HiHo~!

In English:
Internet. Hi Ho~!
Hi Ho, HiHo~
The mail just flies
- yeah! -
On that provider
Hiho!

That dream internet
::chuckle:: Its name is
Hiho
Speedy connections
Support from step one
Even the lady next door
has made her debut!Chat! Chat!
(Jibberish)
Yeahyeahyeahyeahyeah

Hiho~!

From my understanding, the kid is speeding around town, and even Pink Disjointed Arm Bear (TM) is famous, and he’s jealous, and that bear’s a star because of this Internet.

He thinks of that faboo HiHo, as visions of being a “star” pop in his head. He’s amazed that even the lady with gouged out eyes is famous, and then, for some unknown reason, craps on a dog, and the dog tries to kill him.

10:01:28 PM  #  

marlboro.jpg

8:44:51 PM  #  

P2P Network Diagram
8:43:48 PM  #  

TiVo’s Data Collection and Privacy Practices

Longish report on exactly what TiVo sends back to the mothership during its nightly chat.

9:36:05 PM  #  

Haunted by Grief

Story of a father and son who drowned while communicating via cell phone with rescuers less than 100 yards away.

11:35:28 AM  #  

I’m about this close to plonking Dave. It’s just too frustrating to read Scripting News now; I have to hover over each link and check the status bar so I don’t end up at dictionary.com fighting off pop-ups just because Dave isn’t sure if I know what “crackhead” means.

10:04:36 PM  #  

Google Compute

Every weblogger who has commented on this so far has fawned all over it, but it seems fishy to me. The documentation implies that the feature will be on by default in upcoming versions of the toolbar, which smacks of opt-out underhandedness (though I suspect the first hint of pushback could cause them to reverse this setting).

It seems harmless enough, given that they are using a highly-regarded project [folding@home] to kick the project off, but what’s to stop them from plugging Bayer/Pfizer/Glaxo@home in and brokering your cycles off to develop the next wonder drug that will be sold back to you for $7/pill? How do I get my cut? Even if they just use it to improve their own search engine, you’re still donating your resources to someone else’s business venture.

Google has an overwhelmingly positive image, and for good reason, but its scary how many people are willing to assume anything that comes out of there is 100% Good Stuff(tm).

9:56:33 PM  #  

Grammy viewership hits six year low (time-bombed yahoo news link), but the industry blames technology for declining sales, most recently through lapdog Michael Greene’s speech during the Grammys. How can this guy say with a straight face that the RIAA wants to ensure that artists get paid when new information surfaces every day revealing that artists get next to nothing (if that much) from “legitimate” music download programs. Greene, on the other hand, set his own salary as Head Toad of the Grammy organization at $2 million (not including extra millions in perks such as fully paid membership to the Beverly Hills Country Club) which comes out of funds specifically earmarked for artist programs.

Obviously people are just not as interested in the crap the major labels are turning out, and why should they be? I didn’t even know U2 had a new album out; the excerpts I heard for their Record of the Year winner were about as bland as I could possibly imagine. If that’s the best stuff the industry could manage to put out this year, its amazing they sold anything at all.

3:10:12 PM  #  

TomFolio

Search engine for independent used book dealers.

3:02:28 PM  #  

Attack on a Taliban BMP

Interesting sequence of photos supposedly documenting an attack on a Taliban armored vehicle by F-14 fighters with GBU-16 laser-guided bombs. Update: unsurprisingly, it’s probably a hoax. Kareem of Boundary Layer pointed me to a rotten.com page that claims that the images are of Chechen rebels but then contradicts itself and implies that the pictures are indeed from Afghanistan, but during the 80’s conflict with the Soviets.

3:01:17 PM  #  

Cluetrain Thesis #95:

We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.

The only sites linked to from the cluetrain.com home page are other cluetrain.com pages, translations of their 95 whack-job theses, and some shameless self-promotion (thinly disguised as third-party praise) of a “gonzo marketing” story written by Locke for CNN. Eat your own fucking dogfood, dickheads.

2:43:58 PM  #  

Tractors, Satellites, and Pickup Trucks

Primer for high-tech “precision farming.”

Precision farmers use data from satellites and high-flying aircraft to pinpoint problems with drainage, insects and weeds. They learn where fertilizers are needed — and where they’re not needed. They discover pests — and spray only the infested areas. It’s a remarkably “green” approach to farming that is both friendly to the environment and profitable to the farmer.

1:02:40 PM  #  

Hi-Ho (via bifurcated rivets) [more]

Bizzare flash ad for what I think is a Japanese ADSL service or device. Whatever it is, if you don’t get it, you’ll be insanely jealous of huge pink bears and a rock will hit you in the butt.

10:30:22 AM  #  

Dear Paypal,

You fucking suck. I tried to send the following to the “spam” category of your lame customer support system (which is obviously engineered specifically to make it as difficult as possible for me to contact you), but your fascist interface won’t allow messages longer than a measly 700 characters. Please fuck off and die.

Hi,

I’m being spammed… BY PAYPAL.

Several days ago, I got an unsolicited message from announcements-pppauctions@paypal.com regarding various paypal services I have no interest in. At the bottom was the following bogus note:

—-
This PayPal notification was sent to (email withheld) because you chose to receive Auction Seller Tips. To modify your notification preferences, go to https://www.paypal.com/PREFS-NOTI and log in to your account. Changes may take several days to be reflected in our mailings. Replies to this email will not be processed.

—-

I *never* chose to receive this garbage; your system somehow automaticly signed me up. In any case, I logged in and changed my preferences; I was amazed to see that the few things I *did* want to receive notices about (policy changes, requests and receipts of money) had be deselected for me.

This all was frustrating enough, but today, I got yet another unwanted spam email. After logging in, I see that my preferences still indicate that I do NOT wish to get these “auction seller tips” but your system chose to disregard my request and spam me anyway.

Please fix your broken system as soon as possible.

Thanks,

Paul Victor Novarese

1:15:42 PM  #