September 2006

This is brilliant: KGh and my acronym of the day. Why don’t more people use this term? #

Hehe: sudo make me a sandwich

Update: I just started flipping through the archives of xkcd and it’s awesome. #

Something to do this weekend? 3rd Annual Brews on the Bay #

This was really the only news I heard last weekend: World mourns ‘Crocodile Hunter’ #

Configuration settings for Firefox’s network.http.sendRefererHeader (which you can get to from about:config) #

Very hard word to spell this morning: elevated (ellivated, elavated, elivated…) #

Wow. WOW. Help the Warmongers Help Themselves (Take back America, one prank at a time) #

Blog header of the day: joestump.net #

Why I rent: Even though respondants of the latest national Harris poll cited California as the nation’s top choice to live in, the California Association of Realtors has data showing the percentage of Bay Area buyers who could afford a median-price house in the region plunged from 20 percent in July 2003 to 14 percent by July 2004. #

Neat! CommonCensus Map Project the map of the US has been divided into different colored areas that correspond to the ‘sphere of influence’ of each city on a continental level #

Wikipedia non-sequitur of the day: After practicing born-again Christianity as a teenager, he got involved in alcohol. Huh? #

Hilarity! The Ultimate Blog Post #

Wikipedia articles of the day: Anamorphic widescreen, or how to squeeze a widescreen image onto 35 mm film (I especially like the zoom in view of the film that shows how the different sound formats are optically encoded onto the outside edges of the film) #

Neato: Print Calibration Chip #

Infographic of the day: Five Years of Consequence #

Wow, linked to from the website for Catherine Ratliff’s campaign for South Dakota State Senate because of a blog post I wrote in March about the South Dakota legislature’s decision to outlaw a woman’s right to have an abortion. It sounds like she stands in opposition to her opponent’s vote (against a woman’s right), so the very best of luck to her in the upcoming election. This is democracy! #

hehe: bad grammar makes me [sic] #

The greening of Wal-Mart? How Many Lightbulbs Does it Take to Change the World? One. And You’re Looking At It.

I have to admit, it makes me want to go out and buy fluorescent swirls as soon as possible. #

Boing boing post of the day: If you want a vision of the future, imagine a shoe stamping on a symbol of freedom – forever. (and that’s all I’m going to say about that) #

Quote of the day:

[Jimmy] Wales said censorship was ‘antithetical to the philosophy of Wikipedia. We occupy a position in the culture that I wish Google would take up, which is that we stand for the freedom for information, and for us to compromise I think would send very much the wrong signal: that there’s no one left on the planet who’s willing to say “You know what? We’re not going to give up.”‘

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Stick that in your pipe and smoke it: More Americans have now died In Iraq than died On 9/11 #

Neat! Map Symbols & Patterns for National Park Service Maps #

Depressing headline of the day: Stampede at Yemen election rally kills 51

At least 51 people were killed and more than 230 injured in a stampede yesterday in a Yemeni stadium where President Ali Abdullah Salih was holding a pre-election rally, a Yemeni official said. Most of the dead were believed to be schoolchildren and teenagers who had been bused to the stadium by the authorities.

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To read later: In search of the transcendent taqueria: Our critic puts 85 beloved Bay Area burrito joints to the test #

Very excited about: Two Gallants playing at Amoeba on Thursday night at 6 #

Book to check out: The Laws of Simplicity #

An iPod I might be able to get behind: The New iPod shuffle

Question: is there a way on Windows to copy mp3s to the iPod directly (as if it were an attached drive)?

Also, it’s funny how Apple forcefully embeds a phone number into their URL: http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE… #

Joy somehow manages to capture to my energy: Shakespeare in the Park #

Weird: Sheep Poo Paper, made out of, umm, sheep poo #

Captain obvious: Dancing and partying are important aspects of hyphy culture.

Btw, Hyphy is the wikipedia entry, musical style, and thing I didn’t know of the day.

Slang of the day: Ghostride the whip (apparently there are videos on YouTube and apparently I totally missed this when it showed up on Boing Boing almost a month ago!) #

Robin’s in a band: Violet Vector and the Lovely Lovelies (and they have a song and a myspace page) #

Seriously! Can you imagine if a chick heard me talkin’ about RAID arrays? Seriously! #

A few weeks ago I posed the question: I wonder if the German Jews made fun of those crazy Nazis the way we make fun of our government?

Apparently the answer is yes:

A German screenwriter has written a history of anti-Nazi humor in Germany during WWII — “Heil Hitler, Das Schwein is Tot!” (Hail Hitler, the Pig is Dead!) tells the story of the grim humor told by Germans during the Third Reich, including the gallows humor of the Jews facing the concentration camps

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Only in Second Life: The girl with error-message eyes #

Fact of the day: Downed redwood logs take as long as 500 years to decompose. #

Lessig lays the smackdown: Mr. Ross needs some educating at least about decency, and perhaps about copyright law (this is what happens when people online have a better understanding about issues of copyright than “mainstream” media) #

Petition of the day: This week, the Senate is planning to quietly hold a vote that would pardon President Bush for breaking the law by illegally wiretapping innocent Americans. So far, Democrats and some Republicans are holding strong against the bill, and there are good chances to stop it if enough of us speak up. (via Brian R) #

If you like maps and blogging, check out: GeoPress (a plugin for WordPress) #

File this under STOOOPID! Google ordered by Belgian court to remove all Belgian news and photographs #

World news: Thailand’s PM ousted in military coup #

HA! Joel Spolsky rips Sprint a new one:

The phone they sent me, an LG Fusic, is really quite awful, and the service, Power Vision, is tremendously misconceived and full of dumb features that don’t work right and cost way too much. So I’m going to review the dang phone anyway, even though if anybody from Sprint is paying attention they’re going to lose their lunch and some executive bonehead over there is going to go nuts and I sincerely hope that this doesn’t put an end to the entire free-phones-for-bloggers boondoggle, because I’d hate to get beaten up at Etech next year by all the other bloggers who would hate me for spoiling all the fun.

Let’s hope someone at Sprint is actually listening. #

One thing that’s unsettling about living in a city is that people die (or are killed) it seems almost every day: Fatal stabbing over parking #

Listening to: The Spinto Band – Oh Mandy! #

I’ve been linked to from an article by Jan Perry in the Cincinnati Post:

One final photo site. This one offers a hiker’s eye-view of the canyon taken by Justin Watt. Be sure to click on the thumbnails to see the great detail and true color captured in some of his shots.

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Thank goodness that I already live there: Soon, we’ll all be living on Nob Hill #

This may be THE BEST thing I’ve ever read: The Recording Industry will destroy you #

Thing I didn’t know: Stendhal syndrome

Stendhal syndrome is a psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art, usually when the art is particularly ‘beautiful’ or a large amount of art is in a single place. The term can also be used to describe a similar reaction to a surfeit of choice in other circumstances, e.g. when shopping.

I usually just call this Walmart Overload. #

Acronym of the day: OMGWTFBBQ #

News: Four openly gay college students wouldn’t take no for an answer Thursday morning when they were refused enlistment into the Army. The students conducted a sit-in at the Greensboro Army Recruitment Center. Three of the four were arrested and charged with second-degree trespassing. #

To watch later: Ben Folds cover of Such Great Heights #

Neat! The DIY CanFrame: Transform a Tin Can into a Simple Photo Frame in 15 Minutes #

To do on Saturday? On Sept. 30, Rogue Wave is having a benefit concert for [their drummer] Pat [who needs a kidney] in San Francisco, featuring Ben Gibbard [of Death Cab for Cutie], Nada Surf, and John Vanderslice, and MC’ed by Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket. #

Political protest of the week: George Bush Butt Plug #

eboy is Chuck Close 2.0 #

Whoa: Chicken in a Cone? and double whoa: Pancakes and Sausage on a Stick #

For the geeks: the Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License (WTFPL) is a free software license #

I’ve updated my Copy as HTML Link plugin for the upcoming version of Firefox 2.0 #