August 2007

Whoa, took me a while to unpack (let alone pronounce) Tivoization (the root of the word is TiVo, if that’s any consolation) #

Photo of the day: Brian Valentine’s goldfish in a drop of water #

OMG Green Tea Partay (oh shit there’s an east coast rap too) #

Dear Geek Squad/Best Buy,

In order to make your marketing campaign go viral, it would help if you made some images from your strange Wireless Awareness parody more readily bloggable than the tiny image above that I had to crop from a screenshot of one of your banner ads.

Yours truly,
Justin of Justinsomnia

Update: paydirt!

#

I want to live somewhere that an Ape Calessino (by Piaggio) is a viable means of transportation #

Republican problems: “I get tired of people that are holier-than-thou because they’ve been prolife longer than I have” —Mitt Romney

Such utter foolishness. How sad that the most salient attribute distinguishing our political parties today is whether they value “fetal rights” at the expense of a woman’s rights, or vice versa.

More here. #

On Planetary Protection: “If I told the engineers that they had to put the entire MSL in the oven for two days, they would have a fit” (subtext: “So I don’t tell them, hehe.”) #

The NYT proves there is no such thing as anonymous blogging: The Trial of Fake Steve Jobs (I wonder how the EFF feels about this?) #

It turns out I should be supporting Kucinich: Pick Your Candidate (fun exercise)

Frankly what I’m looking for more than anything else is a someone who can transcend these issues and cut to the marrow of things. Someone with enough charisma and intelligence to bring people into agreement on the big issues rather than set everyone battling over petty red herrings. #

I’m not using Windows anymore, but I figured this might be useful to someone who is: How to enter Unicode characters in Microsoft Windows

Thought I just had: I wonder when I’ll use Windows again? #

Great article on the five-second rule (via ae):

The purpose of the five-second rule is not to protect you from bacteria but from ridicule. It’s shorthand for, “I know what I’m doing is gross, but citing this rule will allow me to eat this brownie and you to pretend there is justification for me eating this brownie.” When invoked for someone else, it’s an act of kindness: Go ahead. Eat it. I won’t judge you.

#

What a great freakin’ quote: “Every time you use Google, you’re using Linux.” #

Discovery of the day: “adult brownie” (non-scatological) #

New cool thing (from France): Buggy Rollin (full body rollerblading) More here. #

Telling: When President Bush’s staff contacted [Jeremy Hernandez] to request a photo opportunity, “He was just, like, ‘Nope,'” #

It is scary how insidious the Bush cult of personality is.

Monitors hired by AT&T through a vendor also cut two lines from a song to the tune of “Another Brick in the Wall” by Pink Floyd. One was “George Bush leave this world alone,” and the other was “George Bush find yourself another home,” according to the band’s Web site.

I support open and honest defiance of my elected representatives! #

At FM, we get paid in energy drinks (I’ve yet to try the pimpjuice) #

Without further ado: Kathleen & Abe: the wedding video (including their choreographed duet to “Crazy In Love”) #

HA! second life IRL #

I never thought the day would come, but I just replaced Google Site Search with Yahoo! Search Builder because at present, Google has dropped justinsomnia.org from their index. This means the search box in the upper right works again. One annoyance right off the bat: subsequent Yahoo site searches are not restricted by site. But at least I can find stuff again. #

Percussive noises in San Francisco? I heard an usually loud bang outside tonight, sounded like it came from somewhere north of us on Pine Street, twice around 10:30pm, and again at 10:43pm. #

Worth a read: Religion beat became a test of faith #

Coolness: Brush & Rinse Toothbrush #

Robots have rights! British study says androids may one day sue for rights and benefits (this made me giggle, yay for robots!) #

Quote of the day: Michael Vick has to stop physically hurting my feelings and dashing my hopes! #

Andre’s band Sweetie is the Chronicle’s Nightlife pick, playing Saturday night at Edinburgh Castle in the ‘loin #

This is effin’ brilliant: Macintosh’s Witnesses #

This is not a political headline: Hurricane Dean Gains Power in Caribbean #

To look into later: SSHMenu, for Gnome #

Linus Torvalds on the tension between open source and intellectual property:

First off, even if you’re the smartest man on Earth, and you write something really interesting, it will take you years to do. In other words, it will take you time before it’s really even worth stealing. So if you start making it public early on, don’t worry about people and companies trying to steal your work. They’ll probably not even know about your work, and they’ll certainly not think that it’s worth stealing. And by the time it is worth misusing, the project is already well enough known that people can’t really misuse it on a big scale without getting caught.

#

Ouch:

I’ve been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system — it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes. —Joel Spolsky

#

For my friends who like books (and read my blog): Library! #

Carl Malamud works at O’Reilly?

I wasn’t surprised to see him at Carl’s offices (now on the O’Reilly campus in Sebastopol)

#

Wow you’d think they could’ve come up with a better name: National White Collar Crime Center (acronym is hot though: NW3C) #

News:

Trillium Asset Management Corporation (Trillium) is a leading socially responsible investment firm with over $1 billion in assets under management, including over 200,000 shares of AT&T Inc. common stock. We are writing as citizens and as shareholders concerned about claims of political censorship during AT&T’s webcast of an August 5th live performance by the band Pearl Jam.

#

Sentence of the day: if making available is found to be the same as distributing, it could have broader implications than just sharing files over a P2P network #

This is so rad: The sexual decision-making process according to the penitentials (more on penitential) #

Word, my post made Digg: Blogger tracks down the guy who hacked him, publishes his name and photo #

Ack! My post hits the top of Digg just as Dreamhost melts, sheesh. How embarrassing. (things seem a little snappier now though—translation: page requests are actually returning) #

This is totally rad: The Zipcar Marijuana Prank (via Andre) #

Woman shoots at her baby in a bulletproof stroller, with machine gun: Bullet Proof Baby. This can’t be for real. (via Jason) #

This is totally amazing: Content Aware Image Resizing (via Corey) #

Maybe the best comment on Digg ever: “In Soviet Russia, blog hacks you”

Update: I just made this into a t-shirt #

OMFG this is amazing: Man survives record tumor surgery #

This looks cool: Lars and the Real Girl (since when did Ryan Gosling become such hip actor?) #

Whoa, crazy video too: China Airlines Repaints Its Toasted 737 #

Lot’s of gems in Paul Graham’s Holding a Program in One’s Head

Good programmers manage to get a lot done anyway. But often it requires practically an act of rebellion against the organizations that employ them.

#

Oh yeah! knitted boobs #

Hardy har har: someecards, wedding #

Totally work-related, but after reading it I felt like I learned something: Is there still life in the banner ad? #

OMFG, I have never seen anything like this before: video of The Lizardman’s split tongue #

Amazing, my hacking story got coverage in Germany’s TecChannel (and Macwelt): Blogger jagt erfolgreich den Hacker seiner Seite und stellt ihn bloß, translation: Blogger successfully hunts the hacker of his site and exposes him (thanks Buschido!) #

This is too great for words: Hipster Olympics #

Hopefully this should help me keep WordPress more up to date: Installing/Updating WordPress with Subversion (without manually maintaining my minor modifications) #

Heh, Stephanie did indeed cut my hair. #

It’s true, Boing Boing was being redesigned 10 feet away from me over the last few weeks. And that’s about the extent of my involvement in it. Kudos to Jonathan, Ivan, and Ken:

Federated Media’s Jonathan Schreiber and Ivan Kanevski did an amazing job of dealing with the technical aspects of the redesign. Our beloved system administrator Ken Snider worked his magic on the server side and made sure all changes to the site wouldn’t impact the speed of page reloads or clobber us with high bandwidth costs.

#

Thing I did not know: Thirty Mile Zone (but I wonder if my SoCal friends do?) #

Human hair in art makes me gag: Jessica Lagunas’ “Forever Young” Series #

Awesome pictures of ocean foam in Australia: Cappuccino Coast: The day the Pacific was whipped up into an ocean of froth (via Corey) #

Best name for a band ever? HIJK (listening to Elly and Iffy) #

Quote of the fucking century:

Marriage as an institution seems to have a traditionalizing effect on couples—even couples who see men and women as equal

Could not have said it better myself. In one sentence that pretty much sums up my opinion of marriage. #

I totally want one: Squat toilet (do they even exist in the US?) #

New Google+Microsoft lobbying org: Defend Fair Use #

Best rebranding of the Iraq quagmire: Operation Iraqi Insurgent Riling and Oil Liberation #

I had no idea there was a .int TLD: www.nato.int and www.interpol.int #

Valleywag’s dissing aside, this is pretty much the best thing ever: this is where i work

Update: one detail I totally missed after the first viewing: ghostriding the whip (a BMW no less) in Yahoo’s parking lot. #

I don’t drink coffee (except in France), but I found this illuminating: Coffee Drinks Illustrated (nice blog design too) #

I love this shit: Drillbit Taylor #

URL of the CENTURY! offalgood.com (can you tell I’m into hyperbole lately?) #

I loves me some indie movie trailers: Great World of Sound #