May 2009 - Posts
Tight day today so I'm not sure I'll be able to post a longer list later but a few quick must-shares right now:
RunPee allows you to look up movies to find out when is a good time to get up and pee and also describes what you'll be missing while you're up.
Read Infinite Jest this summer! I'm on page 807 so I should be done soon but I'll still probably follow this group just to see what people are saying. Holding the bulk of the book in my left hand as I read instills a feeling akin to the week before graduation day.
Sorry I'm late - Another one of those shot-from-above stop action films. Cute.
New NY Times photoblog - "The New York Times introduces Lens, a photojournalism blog that intends to present some of the most interesting visual and multimedia reporting: in photographs, videos, audio slide shows and other formats."
From the above:
This scene of everyone rushing in to get their shot is familiar. The few times I've been in a photojournalistic situation with other photographers the energy has been very similar.
Tweeting too hard - I don't know how this algorythm works but the results are pretty amazingly consistently jerky.
Have you ever read "
This Recording "? I lost/spent a lot of time flipping through it. I'll probably spend even more listening to the mp3s
on this list .
PicFog is a TwitPic search engine . I don't really have an opinion on how well it works (yes, my searches get results) but as a stream of random images it's remarkably watchable. NOTE: Somewhere in here there's bound to be something objectionable. (If you're lucky you'll see it!)
I'm not sure I have the
emotional stamina for this . I'm exhausted just from watching the trailer.
It's not hard to make
your own Rumsfeld briefing cover sheet . They're offering blanks at the bottom there.
It's pretty exciting to see
Google Street View being done with a smaller vehicle . Not only will they get more side streets and alleys and stuff but I bet they can start doing trails and walking paths and other non-roads.
Danger Mouse:
Oh screw it , the music business part is too complicated. Just go download the music for free and buy something else to support us. Here, buy this book.
I finally read through
the FDA's angry letter to Cheerios for making health claims that qualify it as a cholesterol drug (or something like that). I don't see admonition that their claim is false, just that it's not properly reported according to FDA regulations. The whole thing reminds me of
those old Guinness ads that used to make all kinds of health claims. Nevermind the
old cigarette ads . (Which is not to equate Cheerios, which I eat almost daily with beer and cigarettes. I just mean commercial health claims in general.) ***I'm faced with two choices here: admit my missing comma mistake or begin consuming beer and cigarettes with my Cheerios and deny any mistake was made. Hmmm...
What does your refrigerator say about you? "What lies beneath the surface of New York Harbor? For starters, a 350-foot steamship, 1,600 bars of silver, a freight train, and four-foot-long cement-eating worms." This article mentions the erosion of dirt over the Lincoln Tunnel and the risks that poses. When MSNBC was in NJ and I took the Holland Tunnel to work every (non-inclement) day my most common mental terror vision was of collapse with resulting flood.
Launching in London today [actually a week ago], the
Espresso Book Machine can print any of 500,000 titles while you wait - The wait is 5 minutes. That's pretty close to a morning's podcast/kindle downloads. Can you imagine sending your morning reading to the corner print machine where you pick it up in book form to read on the way to work?
What it's like to watch a whale go by .
Did you read
the NYTimes Magazine piece by the guy facing foreclosure ? I'd generally thought of bailout recipients as people who'd maybe contracted an illness and were wiped out by medical expenses or something. This guy seems to have just flat-out lived a lifestyle he couldn't afford. I admit I had a bit of a teabagger moment after reading it.
Non-link item: Last week my wife was traveling, leaving my son and I to fend for ourselves. We did well enough but I have new respect for single parents. I was fully occupied from pillow to pillow and even did some sleep-parenting I think.
Bar tending game - This game features the worst side of bar tending, when the order-in machine is suffering ticket incontinence and the customers are stacking up at the bar while your arm hair turns the consistency of sticky steel wool and the ice cubes that fell into your apron pocket are making you wonder if you peed yourself. I only played once and had a riot by the end of the week. And they didn't even add blender drinks! (Thanks Matt)
Looks like the Wall Street Journal has
picked up on Boston.com's
Big Picture format.
Can you find the 12 faces? New Slate site for women is called
Double X . I don't want to cast aspersions and this is probably only because I see a lot of lesbian sites while working with Maddow's fan base, but this looks like a lesbian site to me. Or maybe it just looks like
After Ellen .
The first tweet from space. The Universe in 2009 - Whoa! (and P.S. I think audio navigation is cool.)
6 Small Things You Can Do When You Lack Discipline - Who, me?
I've always been a fan of conspiracy theories - not buying into them but appreciating their creativity and the fantasy world they'd require to be true. The other day I got burned by my own hobby when I tried to share the
latest AF1 Photo-Op conspiracy theory with a 9/11 Truther sitting next to me at the coffee place. Uh jeeze. He was miles ahead of me, already convinced the fly-over was part of a mass distraction campaign on the day a major automaker declared bankruptcy. Anyway,
A Grand Conspiracy Theory From Pakistan .
The new
Times Wire feature from the NYTimes had everyone talking yesterday. It's basically a feed of everything on the site as its publish, updating every minute. This is one of those ideas I would usually write off to media narcissism (like sit-coms about the TV shows). Just because news producers use a news wire doesn't necessarily mean turning a news wire on to the end user is a good idea. At least, that would been my opinion pre-Twitter, which is essentially a user-assembled personal news wire. I wouldn't be surprised if some people had already turned the feeds from the NYTimes into a Twitter Times Wire.
Twitter porn name game was a trap - In case you missed it, you didn't miss much. It was one of those things where you pair your pet's name and your teacher's name and get your "porn name." Looking at the results yesterday I wondered what would make people want to bother sharing that. What I should have been wondering is how many people were being hacked as a result of sharing that. (I ranted on a similar point to my wife after seeing her complete one of those Facebook "20 things about me" quizzes that came dangerously close to mixing in those kinds of "mother's maiden name" security questions you're not supposed to share with strangers on the computer.)
Amazon reviews of milk Everyone is linking to
this report on happiness . Four pages plus video... maybe for the weekend.
Adding one more:
Wilco is streaming their new record on their site .
Today's links felt a little dry so I held out until something cool came up. Here it is . The only thing I'm trying to figure is how this guy learned to do this the very first time.
This emergency prop plane landing is pretty cool too.
NYTimes guide to TV season finales
Lots of links today pointing to
Stweet , a mash-up of Twitter
and Google Street View. Put in your city and see Tweets superimposed on the
street view of the tweet's location.
What those bicycle racing crashes that make you shrug your
shoulders and cover your face
look like from the inside .
Ten Twitter Mythconceptions - First of all, if you're not making a "tw-" Twitter pun fake
word, why on earth would you randomly make up a word like mythconceptions?
Anyway, good list. Regarding #7, Twitter is not a time suck when it comes to
posting but can be very distracting when you get to following enough good
people.
10 Online Photography Magazines We Love - Another winner from the folks at Photojojo
I'm not sure what to make of the fact that
TweetBook got
clobbered with traffic today. Do that many people want their old tweets turned into
e-books? I think I'm missing something.
This person is selling everything they own before a major
life change. That's fine and we've seen variations of that before. What's cool
is that the "everything"
is cataloged on one long page of thumbnail images . What would everything you own look like spread out down a
page item by item? I can't tell if this is a lot of stuff for someone to own. I
think it's actually not very much.
Holy moly this is amazing!
Death Star destroys the Enterprise . That's kind of a spoiler but even if you don't care about either of those things, this is pretty amazing.
Meanwhile, I don't know what Disney is doing with Star Wars but
the posters are really funny .
I didn't think I cared about photos of
famous folk musicians from the '60s but I ended up clicking almost every one of these individually.
Web growth peaked in 2007 but might be back with a vengeance in 2009 - or it might not be back with a vengeance indicating that this whole Web fad is ending and we can all go back outside to play.
Whoa, I totally forgot about the "
There are four lights! " episode. The torture of Jean-Luc Picard was one of the most powerful of the whole series.
Obama is Spock: It's quite logical - Do NOT miss that photo.
The latest wildfire Web meme is a keyboard playing cat. The idea is to attach the cat video to the end of another video so the cat plays the clip's characters off the stage. Here's
a tool that will attach the playing cat for you . And here's
a collection of them so you can see what I'm talking about. The third one is a pretty good use of the cat I think, but the whole thing is a little hard for me to understand.
In B flat - All the clips feature people playing in the key of B flat.
Feels like I've been clicking on more slow-motion/
time-lapse video lately.
This guy does a really helpful job explaining what he did including all of the camera settings. The bottom line is that with storage being so cheap and digital cameras being so accepting of automation and batch photo processing, it's easy to essentially shoot video one frame at a time.
Speaking of video one frame at a time, check out
YooouuuTuuube . I count 36 frames all the way across. I don't know if this corresponds to the actual frames in the video but it does work well in presenting a model for how many frames go into a video scene.
This is the second "death of RSS" piece I've read this week . It's not so much about RSS itself as it is about using RSS aggregators as a primary way to surf the Web. Early adopters who touted RSS readers as the future have found a new future in Twitter. I admit, I use Twitter more than I use my Google reader and if you're looking for a lesson to draw, it's that the best feature of Twitter is the following, not the tweeting. If you think of your follow list the way you think of your RSS subscriptions list, the whole thing makes a lot more sense than if you think of your Twitter follow list in the same way you think of your Facebook friends list. (It also makes me realize that whoever suggested earlier that I send a tweet when Clicked is updated. Maybe I should make an @Clicked.)
If you followed the top 100 people on Twitter,
this is what it'd look like .
Rachel tweeted that photo of the
kid licking the pig snout that was going around last week. Random story this photo makes think of: NBC is always organizing charity events and other helpful programs and that includes regular blood drives. One year I went outside to the RV "blood mobile" to do my part. The first step is to fill out a brief questionnaire; questions about where you've lived, your general health and whether you had sex with a monkey in the Dominican Republican between 1977 and 1979. I nodded to colleagues who were already being drained into plastic bags or who had moved on to recharging themselves with orange juice and cookies, and stepped into the small office to review my answers with the nurse. What I didn't know was that living in England from 1993 to 1994 put me in some kind of quarantine population for Mad Cow Disease so I was disqualified from giving blood. But now I had to walk past all the colleagues I'd just acknowledged without sitting down next to them. I disembarked from the blood mobile burning with the humiliation that they were surely all thinking I'd given the wrong answer to the Dominican monkey sex question. One day I imagine there will be a blood donor questionnaire asking, "Did you French kiss the snout of a pig in 2009" and that poor kid will be disqualified from blood donation and everyone in the blood mobile will suspect why.
Horizonless projection maps What's the matter with Kansas? trailer - I thought Alex Pelosi's documentary for HBO was well done. Hopefully this is more like that and less like a Michael Moore film.
Seven Must-Listen This American Life Episodes Too much Photoshop? Judge for yourself - This is an interesting variation on the Photoshopped model before/after pictures we often see. In case you're not familiar, RAW format is essentially the original file from your camera. I'm actually torn over these pictures. I agree that the photographers went overboard in how they rendered the images. To me they look like HDR or something. They almost cross the line into photo illustration. That said, I sympathize with the photographers in that what the camera sees is not necessarily what reality looked like when the picture was taken. Furthermore, the power of working with RAW format is that you can deliberately shoot a bad picture knowing that you have a lot more room in post production to make correction. So you might deliberately shoot a dark foreground in order to preserve the colors in the sky, knowing you can later add some fill light to the dark areas. So comparing the final with the RAW file is not really fair.
My company-issue Dell Latitude conked out on Friday leaving me mostly high and dry all weekend long. Got a lot of reading done anyway. I mention it because in the past I've had mostly positive things to say about this computer so I wanted to keep the record complete. I think it was the motherboard that gave up. Mike the ass-kicking IT fellow popped my hard drive into another company-issue Dell and I was good to go. I worked that machine pretty hard, I'll admit, but I'll also point out that the HP Satellite laptop I got in 2001 (Christmas-issue) was worked equally hard, if not harder and still works even though the screen hinges have gone floppy and the space bar doesn't register most of the time. The computing parts have held up.
The weird thing about putting the old brain in a new computer body is how much it feels like some kind of mad scientist zombie movie. It's still my machine; even the icons on the desktop are in the same places. But the keys all have letters instead of warn spots. The smooth patches where the heel of my hands rest and that scuff on the touch pad where my thumbnail had passed a million times is healed. I'm not complaining, of course, but I do feel a little like the suspicious but clueless victim right before his brains are eaten by the familiar but ultimately sinister zombie.
Speaking of name brands of tech stuff, I've been pretty excited to follow the rumors of release dates for the Palm Pre phone. Early reviews are good (it made a lot of noise at CES this year) and as a Sprint customer (actually the second number on my wife's account) an iPhone is not in my likely future. In case you pay attention to such things, I currently have a Treo 700wx. I read the Web on it for about an hour every day and use the Google maps app and a lot of texting. The bigger screen is what I'm most looking forward to.
Speaking of bigger screened gadgets, did you see the big screen Kindle ? Doesn't look quite as portable but it definitely looks nicer to read and it even looks a little more plausible as a replacement for the shaggy cornered tabloids down at the end of the bar where I get my coffee every morning.
Not only is The Khronos Projector fun to play with, it's fun to get your head around. That's time you're playing with. The sunset one is cool too. (Requires Java)
300 Ritz/Wolf Camera stores closing across the US. 30-60% off everything . I never manage to take advantage of stuff like this but maybe you can.
WikiPaths is a hyperlink scavenger hunt game played on Wikipedia.org in which players try to find the shortest path between two, seemingly unconnected articles. Like the Kevin Bacon game only Wikipedia entries.
Have you ever seen those surveys that show a certain (significant) percentage of people getting all of their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert? I'm always skeptical about those polls. How could anyone feel confident reverse-engineering the news from a joke about the news. Today I realized I had done something similar with the Jonas Brothers. The only thing I know about that band is from the South Park episode making fun of their chastity rings and general boy-band-ness. Then, reading this bit of rage about the not-very-subtle sexuality of Disney's "tween" targeting I shared the writer's shock that the Jonas Brothers really do spray their fans down with phallic foam. The exaggeration coefficient I was using to reverse engineer the joke into reality made the whole phenomenon more normal than it really is.
This is probably all over the place online for a quick easy search but today I ran across what appears to be the complete "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman " for free.
When you think about it, The Apples is a pretty cool name for a band - particularly if they're Israeli so you can reasonably conclude the name refers to the downfall of humanity. I'd never heard of them until I clicked this fun cover .
Fashion flu masks -
Not just a Web joke .
India's air bike? (Cue flatulent whoopie cushion exhaust note.)
Journalist loses job, but
wins journalism award . At the award ceremony, the employer who fired her tries to accept the award on her behalf even though she's there trying to accept her award herself. Contemptuous digital chortles ripple across the journo-sphere.
The name in this story made me sure it was a hoax but it doesn't appear to be. But then
when I saw this one well, that was just too much.
Did you see the story of the
kid who punched the racist bully in the nose and the whole school supported him in opposition to the school administration's inclination to punish him? I'm wondering how much the Internet helps something like that get organized. We read all the time about online bullying but there's something to be said for the Web's ability to undermine the tyranny of RL bullies.
Online resources for tracking swine flu Pretty much useless as a URL shortener for, like, Twitter,
Dickens URL is at least a much cooler way to link to something.
Create your own Air Force 1 flyover photo Reading a list of
slang words from the '20s does an amazing job of changing your mental perspective and inner dialogue.
On
Kickstarter , you pitch an idea and people give you money to help make it happen. It's not an investment though, which means you have to find other ways to tempt investors. Also: "They're pledges because money is collected only if a project reaches or exceeds its funding goal before time expires. If a project's funding goal is $5,000 and only $4,999 is pledged when time expires, no money is collected."
Remember a while ago we looked at those crowdsource loan sites? (Ah! Found it. "
Crowdfunding .") I'm surprised we haven't heard more about them with the recession. The idea was that you present your story and why you need a loan and people say how much they're willing to loan you and at what rate. Anyway, that's what Kickstarter reminds me of.
Julie & Julia trailer - I know I was grump the other day about concept blogs scoring book deals but seeing the success of Julie & Julia is genuinely heartwarming - though this may be because I remember when it was just a new blog and Julie sent me a thank you note for linking to her when I was writing the Blogspotting blog (such was the ettiquette in those days). Then I drove my dinosaur home.
(Doctor appointment (non-emergency) yesterday afternoon. Planned to catch up after Maddow show but then the Souter thing broke and I spent the night wrangling with breaking news. [Kind of gross how close transparency and excuse making are. Not sure I'm keen on it.].)
