Type for your life
Posted: Saturday, November 11, 2006 10:25 PM by Will Femia
Awesome game - I got the 23 (57560) spot on medium and the 40 spot (15780) on impossible. But that's on the laptop and already I see new players pushing my scores off the list. When I get back to work on my nice big keyboard I'll school the scoreboard. Can you imagine having this in school typing class instead copying "quick brown fox" passages from those old books?
OK, back to business...
I definitely remember reading a lot of criticism of Howard Dean as head of the DNC, but this is the first piece I've read that gives him significant credit for Tuesday's Democratic wins. Remember the scandal he caused when he referred to southern voters with Confederate flags in their pick-ups? That wasn't just a slip of the tongue, that was the idea behind a plan to expand the reach of the party. A plan which, according to this article, is working. (As I read, Tucker Carlson was on TV talking about whether Dean's days are numbered as DNC chair.)
An interesting perspective on the election that I haven't seen covered elsewhere: "The hundreds of Republican staffers — not to mention more than a few Members — who will lose their jobs in the next few weeks are going to face a hostile marketplace on K Street as unemployed Republicans flood the market."
What the Democrats' win means for tech -"On a wealth of topics--Net neutrality, digital copyright, merger approval, data retention, Internet censorship--a Capitol Hill controlled by Democrats should yield a shift in priorities on technology-related legislation."
It turns out all the bad things said about the Democrats during the campaign were true. Here's the real list of what they're going to do now that they're in power. (Tsk, don't get angry until you click it, it's a joke.)
Speaking of satire, you may have seen the Onion satire titled "Bush: 'Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over'" from after the 2000 election. Now it's been annotated.
Boxbe: Get a Cut of Your Email Spam - This is a great idea. If you're like me, you already keep at least one e-mail address that is only for things like site registrations and creating logins that you suspect will get you on junkmail lists. You keep that address so your personal address that you only use for stuff you care about doesn't get cluttered. Boxbe wants to charge marketers to send stuff to that junk mail address you keep, and they'll split the money with you. At least, that's my interpretation. Check it out yourself.
Speaking of making money online, ReviewMe pays bloggers to write reviews of sites and products. It makes sense that if you get enough bloggers to write about a product at the same time, it could show up in online buzz metrics. That said, this part sounds unlikely: "You will be paid $20.00 to $200.00 for each completed review that you post on your site." I guess the catch is that your blog needs to already have a certain amount of traffic and popularity so they can guarantee that the reviews are getting some readership. They're not going to pay for a review on a dead end site.
Your mom is rated E - That's hysterical and the legal threat is ridiculous.
Innocent girl held in jail for a week. Reminds me a little of the character with the split personality on Heroes.
Why Poor Countries Are Poor - As you know, a Commuter Click is an article I'd rather print up and read on my commute than squint myself blind reading off the screen. On the weekends I've learned there's a similar designation for when the baby demands more attention than a long article allows. The Baby Bookmark. I'll get to this as I'm able, but so far it's interesting.
New battery holds promise as cheaper, cleaner alternative.
This week's "Cancer Cured" headline is stem cells making an effective vaccine against lung cancer (in mice). Raises the interesting possibility of the tobacco lobby fighting the anti-embryonic stem cell lobby. A lung cancer vaccine would mean a smoking renaissance.
A giant photo of a cat's tongue. This isn't even very magnified and it's pretty amazing.
What's the deal with people blaming their racism on drunkenness? (In this case, some frat guys in the new Borat movie.)
How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic - A more correct title would be "Answers to skepticism about global warming." This is not about "how to talk."
In case you missed it the other night, the Spider Man 3 trailer. Is this series going to get better with each one? Sure looks that way.
Speaking of trailers, they made a Reno 911 movie and set it in Miami. I'm not sure why they needed to do that except maybe to add more bikini girls. Meanwhile, I only recently realized that the guy who always wears the short shorts is Napoleon Dynamite's brother. Totally wrong. See the comments.
Speaking of movie trailers, here's Office Space recut as a thriller.
How do you teach kids the value of money - This relays an interesting strategy of putting the kid in charge of a regular budget. After he blows the budget a few times he learns how money works. Two things stand out to me. I feel like I keep seeing the phrase "entitlement mentality." It describes the challenge faced by the successful (companies as well as parents) in dealing with subordinates. The second thing that stayed with me after reading this entry was the highlighted phrase, "by thinking and acting differently than everybody else, he can have much more than anybody else." More than anybody else? I thought the lesson was the value of money? Isn't the point of wealth to afford what you want? It's a pretty sick greed that cites "more than anybody else" as a goal in itself.
Speaking of the value of money, this girl gets out of debt and learns valuable anti-materialism lesson along the way. (It is the follow-up to this entry about the awkward financial transition from college to real life and generally living beyond our means.)
Speaking of the value of money, if someone produced a movie with a plot that involved flying six planes containing 2 billion dollars each in shrink wrapped hundred dollar bills into a war torn country, I'd scoff at the lack of realism. If you needed that much money to rebuild a country, there's no way anyone would fly it out manually in blocks that large.
I'm not sure if it's funnier to see the Flying Spaghetti Monster on top of a building or hearing His name spoken in German. Schpaghettimonster.
A cognitive neuroscientist explains his strategy for success on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Includes such gems as, "The pressure of the hot seat caused my amygdala to rage and blaze, preventing me, in the moment, from being able to recall the final two words of the acronym."
And, "My neurohormones whipped from black misery to shining ebullience, saturating my brain in a boiling cauldron of epinephrine and endorphins."
