GlitchNYC.com

I'm Hooked.

Today was officially one of the strangest days of my life. That's becase today I was the emergency room oddity, sitting in the waiting room of the Urgent Care Center with little kids hacking up lungs, worried moms with babies and people limping and otherwise hobbling in, and I was at the bottom of the triage totem pole.

I can't say that I blamed them. I was in very little pain, didn't have a serious injury, and wasn't going to get worse as they let time go by, so I happily played my new Game Boy SP as others filed in before me, sitting there with a fish hook sticking out of the very top of my scalp.

I felt much like one of the people in the waiting room at the end of Beetlejuice, each with some strange affliction such as a shrunken head or being chopped in half, calmly waiting their turn.

How did I get here you ask?

Let's begin not with my journey, but with the trip the hook took on it's way to being embedded in some poor schmucks head in a waiting room.

Imagine you're a fish hook, happy to finally be free of the tacklebox you've spent most of the summer in and finally be used. You get cast out a few times, but the fish aren't really biting today, and after a while, it's time for you to go back in as a different bait comes out. But wait! Instead of making it back into the box, you're separated from your friends and stuck to a pair of jeans, embedded in the denim.

That night, you find yourself tumbling around with the jeans in the wash and the finally, in the dryer, you're free!

Until, that is, you're smothered by a great white towel. Instantly, your barb catches, and you're impossibly tangled in the terrycloth fabric. Once the tumbling stops, you're folded a few times, and finally find yourself in the dark of the bathroom closet.

So now, we've followed our friend the fish hook into its lair, where it waits for some unsuspecting prey to carry it to freedom.

This morning, I was that prey.

As Sara so wonderfully put it, "Thank god you dry your head first!"

As soon as I began to vigorously towel my head off, the hook sank its barb into the top of my scalp, hoping to ride me to the great unknown. The towel, which had by now grown quite fond of the little hook tangled inside it decided it wanted to come along too.

My thought process, as this happened, went something like this.

Huh, the towel is stuck. Must be gum in it. Who puts gum in a towel? Wait a second, it's really not moving. Huh, it feels like one of mom's quilt needles, yup, i can feel the head, and there's where it goes into MY head. *YANK*

OW ow ow. bad idea, bad idea. I think the pin must be bent. Time to call mom up. Wait. I'm naked. Towel first.

From there, we realized that it was actually a fish hook and proceeded to try to extract the sucker, but in trying to remove it by myself I'd set it in quite firmly.

Our stroke of brilliance was to go to the local Urgent Care Center rather than the ER, because I only had to wait an hour with the hook sticking out of me like My Favorite Martian, rather than the 6-8 hours I probably would have sat in the ER at a hospital.

Medi-call's doctor was great, and we all had a sense of humor about it so it really wasn't that bad at all. Kate called right after I'd done it, and we were all in hysterics.

"Hi, it's Kate. Is it Ok if we get there around 4:30-5ish? We're leaving now"

"Umm, well, here's the thing. I've got a fish hook in my head"

"What? I'm sorry, I don't understand"

"I've gotten myself stuck with a fishhook! It was in a towel, and now it's sticking out of my scalp. It doesn't really hurt at all, but I'm going to have to go to the ER, so I might not be back by then. Who knew this would be my first piercing?"

"... ... Ahhhhhhh hahhahahaha! I'm sorry, I don't mean to laugh, but that's hilarious"

"No no, i know, I'm laughing too!"

"(Still laughing) Oh, my god, They caught a big one!"

When all was said and done, I got to keep the fishhook, we made it back before Kate and Doug even got there, and we all laughed so much it hurt. Worse things have certainly happened, and it's made this one holiday we'll never forget!

10:44 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Theme Park Nostalgia

BoingBoing ran a quick piece yesterday amid all the tsunami coverage highlighting a site that archives old maps from theme parks.

Of course I immediately honed in on the one from my neck of the woods and found a very nostalgic Great Escape map from the 1980s. For those of you that weren't raised in upstate NY, The Great Escape was the ultimate place to go when you were a kid. It had awesome coasters, decent theme areas, and great flume and rapids rides.

The park (which is now owned by Six Flags) is such a fixture that senior year physics classes from around the area go to the park and run around riding the rides while doing "experiments" like timing the pirate ship's rate of acceleration and the G forces exerted by the Steamin' Demon as their de facto class field trip for that year.

See if ThemeParkBrochures.com has a map from the Themepark of your childhood years

12:00 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 1 writebacks |

Follow up: Beastie Boys Photoshoot

Josh just sent me a quick email comparing the pictures I took of the Beastie Boys as they walked down 34th street back in October and their own blog. It's not one of the photos they were taking with the pro photographer, (still waiting for those to show up!) but it's cool to finally know what they were in town for.

The album where their clothes match is: 10.03.04: New York City, NY @ Hammerstein Ballroom, VH1 Hip-Hop Honors

2:13 am | permalink | /life/nyc | 1 writebacks |

Ardvark The Aardvark: The Teacher

Just a mini-update today to keep the Ardvark the Aardvark work going. I finished the first concept design for The Teacher today. He didn't come out exactly as I'd pictured him in my head, but after looking at the actual adult vervets for a while I decided to keep him a bit closer to their actual form rather than just super-sizing the babies.

It's amazing how different the young of this species look from the fully grown. I think it's the fact that the babies are virtually naked, allowing their skin to show through their peachfuzz. That, and the fact that their heads are pretty much fully formed at birth, making their bodies disproportionately small (and so cute!) when they're young.

• Download the editable SVG

3:40 pm | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Power Puff Girls / Dexter's Lab / Invader Zim / Amazing Fan Doujinshi

A while back I followed a link from Megatokyo to this incredible fan-produced manga (also known as doujinshi).

It's a clever mash-up of PowerPuff Girls, Dexter's Lab, Invader Zim, Samurai Jack, and many others. I don't know if I've ever seen fan work this professionally produced or drawn, and the story is actually quite engrossing.

I didn't post it at first because it just seemed like a novelty, but I've found myself going back to the site to check on the story a few times now and I figured it merited mentioning.

Cartoon network should hire this guy.

Bleedman's "PowerPuff Girls Doujinshi"

2:36 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Direct Line to Santa's Elves

Haven't had time to do a proper Christmas list to Santa yet this year? Here's your chance to speak directly to the elves and have them put in your requests right up at the North Pole.

Don't worry if you don't have a microphone, the flash technology they're using can 'listen' through your computer speakers, as long as you're loud enough. Give it a shot.




From Ze, the wonderfully demented mind that brought us Passive Aggressive Punctuation

12:42 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Firefox Ad Ran In Today's NY Times

So many people came out in support of the full page Firefox ad in the New York Times that they couldn't fit all of our names on one page. So today, the Spread Firefox team ran a mammoth 2 pager (pdf) featuring all of our names, a giant Firefox logo, and user testimonials.

Very cool. The press around the ad is worth it alone but the positive impression this will make on CIO's, business leaders, and "Joe user" when they see this ad is immeasurable. I'm proud to have been a part of this, and I've got the ad on my wall at work with my name highlighted. It's at once the coolest and geekiest thing I've ever had on my walls, and that's coming from a guy who's had anime murals and wall scrolls all over his room.

If by some chance you're still using Internet Explorer - Firefox 1.0 is here. It's time to see what you've been missing!

5:10 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Holiday Favorites!

Last year, my family tried a new project as part of the preparations for The Holidays: making "Chocolate Cherry Mice."

Basically, you coat a cherry with chocolate melted in the microwave, add a Hershey's Kiss as the face/nose, and stick on almond slivers as the ears. They're extremely cute and actually really tasty! You can add cake decoration gel as eyes if you're feeling really creative.

We had a ton of fun making them and I wanted to repeat the tradition this year, so I was looking for the recipe and other good ideas like that when I came across a great list, at mormonchic of all places!

6:11 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Missing the SingleWindow extension in FireFox?

If you're among the many people that have started using Firefox, you've probably noticed that links from other programs open over other pages that you already have open or open a new window entirely. This can be annoying if you didn't want to navigate away from the page that was open in Firefox, and middle clicking the link in your other programs doesn't open a new tab.

I've found it much more helpful to have links from all programs, as well as links that are programmed to open in "pop up" windows, open in new tabs. The SingleWindow extension filled this need until very recently, but mysteriously stopped working in 1.0

It turns out that Firefox 1.0 incorporates that functionality natively. Here's how to turn it on.

• In Firefox, open a new tab so you can keep this page open as well.
• In that new tab, enter about:config in your address bar
• change browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs to true (you can type part of the name of the configuration item in the Filter: box to quickly reduce the list)
• go to Tools -> Options -> Advanced
• Under Tabbed Browsing, check:
  • Open link from other applications in: a new tab in the most recent window
  • Force links that open new windows to open in a new tab

Firefox will now open a new tab for just about everything! You may also want to check "Warn when closing multiple tabs" so that you don't accidentally lose all the pages you had open by clicking the wrong thing. To avoid this, also try to get in the habit of middle-clicking the tabs to close them rather than clicking the red X.

Also, if you're running Firefox on Linux, Middle-clicking on tabs doesn't close them by default. To change this: In about:config set middlemouse.contentLoadURL to false. This is less "correct" on unix, but it will make Firefox behave more like it does on Windows.

4:38 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Cheap Stingy Bastard

I was looking to buy some Sketchers online, and googled for the name. One of the first things that came up was a link to a blog that tracks coupon codes and provides them online. I plugged in the code, and voila! 25% off my purchase and free shipping.

I got lucky and happened to pull up a valid sale (many expire within a few days) but the front page of the Cheap Stingy Bastard blog, http://cheap.typepad.com, always has fresh coupons. Check it out.

1:23 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Update: Ardvark's Got a Wiki

I've created a page at WikiMedia for Ardvark. If you haven't worked with a Wiki before, they're really pretty neat. Once you register (free and quick) with WikiMedia,No registration needed! Just click edit at the top of any page. you're able to change the text of any page there and submit your own new information and artwork.

This is how most of the web should just work. You log in to a page, see a mistake or missing info, and simply fix it right there. Wikis have been most effective in bringing together knowledge bases like the open encyclopedia WikiPedia and technical manuals, but I'm very interested to see how this collaborative medium lends itself to a purely creative project.

There is an implicit trust in letting others have full access to edit your pages, and I'm excited by the idea of easily letting others make what they will of Ardvark, much in the same way that CVS lets developers easily tweak, change, and even fork projects. Inkscape, the tool I use to draw these characters, is the product of one such fork, splitting off from the Sodipodi project and quickly surpassing its progenitor. For security, the Wiki also keeps a comprehensive version list allowing you to restore the page if someone, for example, spams the page with links to Chinese Viagra to boost their google rating.

Ardvark The Aardvark, once completed, will be a fully paginated children's book that you can download, print, edit, share, and expand upon. To get to that goal, I'm going to need help. I need editors, artists, and writers, anywhere from amateur to pro, to work with me on the project and add their input.

If you're interested in helping out, take a look at the Wiki and play around with it a bit. You can directly make changes to book one, start on book two (or another branch of the story not related to this linear plot) upload drawings easily.

To add a new page, simply go to the address where it would be. For example, book two has not yet been created, but you can create it yourself by going to http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ArdvarkTheAardvark_BookTwo. Just don't forget to update the main page to point to your newly created work! You can also leave notes on any existing page without disturbing the text itself by clicking the "discuss" link.

• Ardvark's Page at WikiMedia

4:56 pm | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Of the Two Famous Foucaults.

We went out to dinner with Arden tonight, and she mentioned that she'd read the rough draft of Ardvark the Aardvark and had a suggestion: If I was naming the little vervets in the Ardvark story after great philosophers and thinkers, I may want to reconsider including Foucault (pronounced "foocau"). Her reasoning was that it may bring up several questions with the youngsters when attempting to explain who he was. His writings on sexuality and his notoriety for promiscuity aren't exactly on the grade school curriculum.

I stopped for a moment and thought "Oh, so THATS who the other Foucault was!" I'd seen a book by him at Borders just a week or so ago with Ali, but really wasn't sure who he was, aside from the fact that he was famous in 1980 instead of 1890.

The only Foucault I know is the one I learned about in Physics and Astronomy, the inventor of the aptly named "Foucault Pendulum"

It seems fitting that I'm learning so much while attempting to write an educational story! I've found good resources for both Foucaults.

• Learn more about Foucault's Pendulum - one of the founding proofs that the earth rotated about its axis.
  • Great illustrations and animations make this is a very fun site! The work of Jean Bernard Leon Foucault is presented in a way which makes the concepts accessible and fun.
• Read more about Michael (pronounced "Michelle") Foucault, prominent philosopher of the late 20th century who sought to understand the nature and history of the fundamental concepts of society and the author of The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception and Madness and Civilization : A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, among many others

12:41 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Ardvark The Aardvark - Book One v0.5

I've completed the rough draft of the story for Ardvark the Aardvark With the Back Leg Named Bumpus - Book One. I'd welcome revisions, edits, and new stories or drawings from anyone that wants to take a crack at it!

I'll be getting a wiki set up to facilitate content creation, but for now, send submissions to "Ardvark" here at GlitchNYC.com.

As I wrote, a few themes began to emerge, and I think they're good places to start for anyone who wants to contribute.

• The book should be fun. First and foremost, it should be an interesting, whimsical, and even eccentric read.
• The book should be fun to read aloud, both for kids and parents.
• Onomatopoeia, new words, and new concepts make books fun to share and talk about
• The book should be educational
• This doesn't mean it has to be stodgy or include anything quite so obvious as the classroom scene in book one. Instead, education and exploration should be intrinsic part of the book. To quote Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire, "don't talk down to kids, just talk to them." Leave long words in, include advanced concepts of math, physics, astronomy, music, whatever - education begins with curiosity!

Ardvark the Aardvark With the Back Leg Named Bumpus - Book One

(Download the story as a .doc with some of the character designs embedded)

Ardvark was an aardvark who lived, as most aardvarks do, in the lush forests, great fields, and dry savanna of Kenya. Each day he would play in the dirt, happily romping from anthill to anthill in search of friends to play with and food to eat. Most days he found no friends, but kept himself company by having conversations with his back-left leg, which he had named Bumpus, for no good reason at all.

See more ...

3:31 pm | permalink | /life/art | 5 writebacks |

Google's Froogle, the "Any Store, Any Thing" Wishlist

Froogle is Google's massive search engine applied to shopping. You look for an item, and google turns up hundreds of stores and lets you compare prices.

I've done Amazon wishlists in the past, but I'm always thwarted by their lack of products outside of books, dvd's, and games.

So I give you my Froogle Wishlist, which is full of, well, books, dvd's, and games, ironically.

Want one of your own? Just go to Froogle, search for a few things from thousands of online merchants, and click 'Add to list' for any item you want to add to your Shopping List. You'll need to sign in to your Google account or create one if you haven't already (if you have a Gmail account or Groups 2 login, you already have a Google account). If you want to share items, just click the 'In Wish List' checkbox and whammo, you now have a web page of your holiday wish list to share with friends and family

Go make your own list! Be sure to click "show on wish list" for each item once you've put it on your personal shopping list.

Stolen from the Google Blog

3:43 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

A Link to the Past

I started work at Common Ground just over two years ago, and one of the first things I did was install a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) Intranet server running PostNuke. Until last week when I took the server down to put a new harddrive in, it had never been rebooted. It had run for 465 days without crashing. Hell, it had run for 465 days without being touched.

Logging into the desktop was strange. KDE looked ugly, Mozilla took forever to start, and the Redhat Package Manager desktop app crashed more than it ran. The fonts were jaggy and applications seemed boxy and mismatched, and it just generally looked like crap. I remembered, briefly, what Open Source used to look and feel like, just 2 years ago.

I'm an Open Source advocate. I say that freely and without hesitation, but that does not mean I am an Open Source zealot. As an IT professional, I've been keenly aware of what the problems are with Open Source applications and Linux, and what strides we needed to make.

When I first experimented with Linux back in 1999 (on this very machine serving Glitchnyc.com, no less) "Open Source" was synonymous with a web server, an OS for servers and supergeeks, and a clunky browser with too many parts. I remember when downloading an Open Source solution meant you probably had to put up with a crappy interface, half-there functionality, and lots of compiling and hand-tweaking.

In just the past 2 years, I've watched the open source software landscape mature so quickly it's almost unbelievable. The Gimp finally got GTK 2 support and went from a quirky, ugly tool to a slick, pro-level photo-editor, both on Windows and Linux. The two major Linux desktops, KDE and Gnome, went from interfaces that looked like windows 98 on a bad day to rivaling XP and even Mac OS X in sheer sexiness. Installing and upgrading programs has gone from has gone from ./configure && make && make install (and pray you've got the right libraries installed) or rpm dependency hell to point-n-click with apt and synaptic. Mozilla has completely reinvented itself and stripped the browser down to the 4 meg work of art that is Firefox, and Thunderbird, its solid mail counterpart.

The list of amazing applications continues to grow: Scribus gives desktop publishing apps such a run for their money that *someone* is quietly trying to squash work on the win32 version. Audacity handles audio like a pro, and is getting multi-track support the upcoming version. OpenOffice.org is pushing Microsoft out in more installations than anyone cares to talk about, and Inkscape is far and away the easiest vector drawing tool I've ever used.

Do I think Linux is ready for prime time? I don't know. I think there are a lot of hurdles there, but I do know this: Open Source software is ready for prime time. The Desktop application stack is here, and it's cross platform. I'm using the same programs on Windows at work and on Linux at home, and I love it.

Pretty soon, what OS you're running just isn't going to matter, because you'll know all the best applications in both places.

2:12 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Great Open Source Games

I've just completed a long article on the current state of open source software in general that will post tomorrow morning, but I wanted to split this small piece on games out into a separate post. Without further ado, I give you 4 great Open Source games which play on Windows and Linux.

• Battle for Wesnoth

• http://www.wesnoth.org
• The Battle For Wesnoth is a turn based strategy game. Aside from the default quest being quite entertaining and extremely challenging, there is also a lively community producing tons of downloadable quests and additional graphics.

  Game-play is straightforward and fun, and figuring out how many troops to recruit, how to use them, etc, has kept me up late quite a few nights recently.

• Liquid War

• http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/
• This one is the most original games I've played in years. You really just have to play it to understand it, but you control an army of tens of thousands of units, which move towards your cursor. Lead them in the right direction, and they'll surround the enemy and win. Leave their back or flank open, and you're in hot water. There's so many troops, they really do flow like liquid.
• JDuplicate
• http://jduplicate.sourceforge.net/
• JDupilcate, a Java-based scrabble clone. Would be great if more (any) people were on their server to play against.

• Neverball
• http://icculus.org/neverball/
• Neverball, which is a clone of Super Monkey Ball. If you've never played it, it's like Marble Madness + one of those wooden labyrinth games you had as a kid on speed. Very addictive. Be warned that this is 3D on SDL, which means you'll need either a modern graphics card or a really beefy CPU to make it run well

1:22 am | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

And Then There Were Three

I've finished the 3rd Vervet, Hypatia. She's named for the "earliest woman scientist whose works have been documented"

What stuck me funny as I came back to this drawing this morning after finishing it late last night was that I know these three characters. It was completely and utterly unintentional, but very obvious who they are when you look at the picture.

Does anyone else see it, or am I going crazy from too many hours of looking at monkeys and aardvarks? Leave your guesses in the comments

Download the editable SVG

9:57 pm | permalink | /life/art | 2 writebacks |

Aristotle and Galileo

Noticing a theme with the names yet? Ardvark meets these little guys as a class of little monkey scholars. There are about 8 of them in the pack, and then probably 30 in the class along with the fully grown Vervet teacher.

I want to complete at least 4 distinct designs for the babies before I start to place them on the page. Galileo here is number two, and I'm feeling a lot better about the process again. Now that I've worked out the basic design ideas for the Baby Vervets, it's a lot easier to turn them out without having to go through an endless draw-revise-redraw cycle.

I've got the first few pages of the book done in my head. I think i might try to put what I have into a fully laid out PDF "teaser" once I get the character designs I need done. The nice part about this project is that it's essentially a bunch of mini projects. SVG is completely modular, so I can use these exact designs in the fully composed page just by dragging and dropping. Each drawing I finish is another step closer to having a full book.

I can't wait to get Ardvark on the page with the baby Vervets - they're so tiny, they could ride on him like humans on an elephant!

Here's the Inkscape SVG: Aristotle and Galilelo

2:42 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Hold the Wine!

In my previous post, I mentioned firing up Wine to run old DOS games under Linux. Turns out that Wine is complete overkill. All you need is dos, (not the whole windows API,) so that's all you should emulate.

Enter Dosbox. This little program can run just about any old dos game with sound and "real mode" memory drivers, allowing you to run most of your old favorites in a window on Linux.

Best of all, it's a widely supported package, meaning that installing is as easy as doing quick

12:44 am | permalink | /technology/games | 0 writebacks |

Finding Some Old Favorites

Kel was asking me where she could find the DOS Classic Torus (OK, well maybe it wasn't a classic, but we played a lot of it) recently, and that sent me on a web-adventure of sorts. Along the way, I saw several things I wanted to blog about.

Of course, I have our official "Geoffrey Poole*" copy running around on my server somewhere, so I pointed her in its direction, (*ahem* /gamez/ *ahem*) but I was curious to see if the old game was online anywhere.

That led me to dosgamesonline.com where they host old games like torus, and a slew of others. They've got a rating system as well that lets the best games of old float to the top. Pushover sounds kind of neat. I might have to see if I can get wine running to try some of these out.

While I'm talking about great dos games, I have to mention Zelda Classic. It's a complete remake of the old NES/SNES game from the engine up. While you can play through the official quests, they've got different sprite-sets (skins) that you can apply to the games, and whole different maps and worlds in a user contributed quest database. Very cool.

Looking back at games from a few years ago is fun, but I'm amazed how many decent projects there were like this that have completely died out. Were they open sourced, many of these would have grown and morphed along with our operating systems and would still be available and easily playable today. Not to worry though! There are many great open source games today, and I've got a round-up of a few new ones coming soon.

8:22 pm | permalink | /technology/games | 1 writebacks |

Meet Aristotle, the Baby Vervet

I've finally completed the base drawing for the Baby Vervets, the first characters Ardvark meets on his little adventure.

All in all, the drawing wasn't that difficult once I'd worked out how to simplify the source photo down to match Ardvark's style, but I did have quite a bit of "artist's block" trying to get myself to sit down and work on him. I was afraid it wasn't going to come out, so I wasn't going ahead with it at all.

Now that I've gotten the first draft done, I'm pretty happy with it. I have to decide if I want to leave him with articulated hands and feet or if I want to simplify them down once more to "mitts" to facilitate drawing lots of these guys, but I think I'm going to leave them as is.

Meanwhile, for those of you interested in playing around with the source drawings, I've made a bunch of updates to the SVG's. Remember, you'll need the free and open Inkscape to open these properly. Here they are:

• All 3 Drawings of Ardvark laid out on one page.
• Aristotle, the Baby Vervet

11:57 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Everything Has a Personality

While working on the second character for the "Ardvark the Aardvark" book, I decided that I should look at some other methods of drawing eyes. In particular, with this character, I want to create that big eyed "cute" look that makes people go "awww." You know, like "Puss in boots" from Shrek 2.

So, being unable to think of a proper term for that look, I was googling for the phrase "googly eyes" (mmm... recursion) and came up with this site:

Everything has a personality! Just add eyes!

Not exactly what I was looking for, but pretty funny. This is why I love the web.

10:27 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Gulf War Syndrome Isn't All In Soldier's Heads

It appears that after 10 years of crack work, a congress mandated panel have finally put it together that an epidemic of multi-symptom illnesses in US soldiers returning from the original Gulf War might actually not all be in their minds.

I don't know which non-psychosomatic symptom tipped them off: the severe respiratory symptoms, the rashes, or the fact that they're all in a goddamn disease cluster, but it seems that the Army might finally be taking some of the responsibility for looking into their conditions. Exposure to Sarin gas (which only a few troops were potentially exposed to), anti-nerve gas agents (getting warmer), and pesticides (aha!) are all being named as possible causes. Left out in the article is the cocktail of vaccines, inoculations, and other crap we shoot our soldiers up with to protect them in the event the enemy uses chemical or biological weapons.

Potentially life-saving? Yes. Potentially the cause of 70,000 US Soldiers debilitating maladies and seriously degraded quality of life? Also yes.

Hmm. Wouldn't it have been helpful to figure this all out BEFORE we went back to the gulf? Somehow, even though Congress mandated this panel in 1998, it didn't even begin it's work until 2002 when it's members were finally appointed.

Next time you see one of those stupid Taiwanese "support our troops" magnets on someone's car, rip the damn thing off. It means nothing to say that now while they're over there and we can do nothing.

Instead, put it in a drawer and bring it out 4 years from now when all of the kids in the desert now are sick as hell and the government has forgotten about them and denied them disability.

That's when it's time to support the damn troops.

1:30 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

He's Totally Excited

I've done some more drawings of Ardvark and tried to give him that excited cuteness that he exuded in the original drawings. I do really like the slick look of the SVG's but he's got to convey emotions well to connect with any of the readers.

Bringing him out of a straight side profile is a bit challenging too, especially because my art training is extremely limited. I always opted for photography and video work when taking art in school, and it shows in my difficulty with bring objects into 3D space. This revision is my best so far, but at first, Ardvark's little stumpy legs in the "quarter turned" picture at bottom here made him look like a hybrid pig-dog.

It's amazing how much creativity can spill out of you in a 5 minute doodle, and then how much you can struggle to fill in the missing bits and really bring it to life. I can feel myself burning out on this project, but I'm determined to see it through to completion. The first draft story is coming along and about 1/2 done, and then I need to begin deciding where illustrations should go. It's already too long, and I need to make some cuts to make it feasible.

At the moment my real challenge is to stay true to the deranged whimsy that Ardvark was born from and not hammer this into a complete beginning-middle-end tale. We'll see how it goes.

12:55 am | permalink | /life/art | 2 writebacks |

I'd Forgotten about Headphones

I've spent the last 2 years listening to music on my computer speakers at work which are, admittedly, pretty crappy. They do the job though, and I can listen to them without bothering anyone else in the office.

Sara's new ipod made me realize that I've been hearing only the "top layer" of music; the lead vocals and loudest instruments, for quite a while now.

Strapping on my headphones for a bit has made me appreciate some of the music that's been sitting in my collection unplayed for a while, and I'm currently digging heavily on VNV Nation as ambient "New York Commute" music and even more enthused about the Garden State Soundtrack.

3:20 pm | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 2 writebacks |

In Praise of the Tungsten E

News sites yesterday carried word that new models of the Palm wouldn't feature OS6 despite earlier promises that they would.

The major benefits of OS6 are supposed to be multitasking and multimedia support.

Right now, I'm listening to mp3's on my SD card and typing using my wireless keyboard. Meanwhile, my calendar application pops up a reminder to get fixings for dinner tonight. I'm doing all of this on OS5 with the economy model palm, the Tungsten E.

Don't listen to the hype. Unless you're one of the people who will actually use WiFi or bluetooth support for your palm, just get the tungsten E. It's more than enough machine for anything your need your PDA to do.

3:10 pm | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 0 writebacks |

This Is Ardvark

As with everything else on the site, Ardvark here is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 License.

That means that you can do anything you like with him as long as you include a credit and release your work under the same license.

Here's the Inkscape SVG file

I drew this piece in about an hour during my lunch today, using the successor to Sodipodi, "Inkscape".

It worked brilliantly and didn't crash once. The tools just work like they should and every time I thought "Hmm, I wonder if I can do this?" it turned out that there was a tool for exactly that in the menus.

Get Inkscape, the Free and Open Source SVG editor, here

3:11 pm | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Ardvark the Aardvark with the Back Leg Named Bumpus

I've just gotten an idea for a children's book while waiting for, of all things, windows XP SP2 to reinstall on a workstation at CG.

This, of course, warrants two separate blog posts, but as I've had a bit of blogging burnout (as just about my entire blogging community seems to have had the past 2 or 3 months), I'll just do a quick sum-up here.

First: SP2 is a serious pain in the ass. If the user has any problems at all, the rollout from software update services will completely bork the machine, and fixing it means about 4 hours in front of each terminal as you uninstall the hotfix, then uninstall the service pack, then reinstall it, then reinstall a bunch of apps.

Not fun. This should have been marketed as what it was: a full OS upgrade. I'm glad we didn't have to pay for it, but it should really be done on a PC by PC basis.

If you're thinking of installing it, be sure to clean your machine of spyware and disable your virus protection before you do. Don't forget to turn it back on once you're done.

So while I was waiting there in front of Arden's computer, I began to doodle.

I had written her a note explaining that it wouldn't be done until tomorrow morning, and had been to lazy to write out her whole name, just ending up with Ard.

Naturally, after staring at that note and her abbreviated name for another 30 minutes, I doodled an Aardvark. He was a cute little guy with a snout and a smile, and I drew a thought bubble up from him saying "Hee hee.... I'm an ARDvark."

Another 15 minutes passed, and I noticed that I'd misspelled Ardvark, and decided that that would be his proper name. The problem was, I'd already drawn a little arrow to him that said "This is Bumpus"

I amended the doodle to say "This is Bumpus. Not the whole aardvark, just his left leg. He likes eating celery with peanut butter on it, with little raisins on that. He's a vegan Aardvark. See, 2 a's on aardvark, but that's not how Ardvark spells it, that's his proper name. Ardvark the aardvark with the back leg named Bumpus. "

This medium, of course, does it no justice, but after 4 hours of watching progress bars, it was hilarious to me.

I'm picturing a whole book with little drawings of Ardvark the Aardvark, who is constantly talking to his back-left leg happily, even as other, angrier animals are teasing him for it. That, and for the fact that his name is spelled wrong.

"It's not misspelled, it's homonymic!"

Hmm... Maybe I'll merge it with my forthcoming SVG tutorial and make it a CC book. It'll be my nanowri-draw-mo.

3:13 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

SharpDevelop GNU .NET / Mono IDE

We're developing a small in-house database application again here at CG, and due to the fact that we're a nonprofit, we simply can't afford to migrate the whole organization to Office 2003 just to make my life a little easier while coding.

Working with Access 2000's "access project" link to mSQL is far superior to developing a straight access database, and as a quick and dirty Rapid Application Development platform it really does get the job done. The problem is that this is now a very old, VB6 based platform, and the rest of the world has moved on to vb.net. There were so many quirks and problems with the VB runtimes that the whole system was scrapped in favor of the .NET shared runtime and a new vb compiler.

Fed up with things simply not working the way they should, I went in search of an alternative to Microsoft's wildly expensive Visual Studio.net.

After a few minutes of googling for "Mono IDE" (mono is the GNU implementation of the .NET api) I came up with a few choices. For windows, which I use at work, the most mature seemed to be SharpDevelop, so I took the plunge.

I've worked with many IDEs over the past 7 years, and I don't think I've ever been as impressed with one as I am with SharpDevelop. It's quick, light, and smart, and the GUI development tools are right on the money. So far I've hit 0 bugs and effortlessly went from a little HelloWorld form to an MDI (Multi Document Interface) design complete with windows-style professional looking menus and functionality.

If you've been waiting to try out .NET because you don't have a copy of Visual Studio, download SharpDevelop now.

As a quick aside - VisualStudio comes on 4 CDs and loads your system with MSDN docs, the .net runtimes, and loads of other stuff you don't need.

SharpDevelop is 5 megs, most of us already have the .net runtimes (if you don't you can get them at WindowsUpdate) and google works a heck of a lot better for me than MSDN ever did.

3:57 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Please Let Me Be Wrong

I've had a surprising number of my ruminations about the direction of our country come true in the past 4 years, but this doesn't make me happy, it makes me scared. Among my predictions:

• We would go to war with Iraq (predicted at the onset of the offensive in Afghanistan)
• Abu Ghraib abuses were rooted in policy trailing all the way back to the White House
• The Democrats would nominate a lame duck to open the "Hillary" window in 2008 rather than 2012

For posterity, now that we are assured another 4 years of Bush, GOP dominated Government, and religious extremism, I am going to put my predictions for the next 4 years here. I hope more than anything that I am wrong.

On the war and terrorism

• Iraq will not only last 3+ more years, but we will also begin cold war style sanctions and non-military offensives against:
• Iran
• North Korea
• At least one other "terrorist center"
• One of these will blossom into a military confrontation
• The Draft will be reinstated.
• Here on the home-front, there will be another attack, this time with the terrorist cell claiming to be centered within the US itself.
• Patriot II will be pushed through, further limiting our Civil Liberties and permitting discretionary wiretaps on all citizens. Those who speak out will be on terrorist watch lists. Neighbors will be encouraged to report any suspicious activity.

On domestic policy

• Bush will appoint 2 more Conservative extremists to the Supreme Court.
• They will overturn Roe v. Wade
• And ban stem cell research
• Congress will uphold and expand the DMCA.

Get out your tinfoil hats - there's some doozys up there. Please, 4 years from now, let me look back at this post and say "Thank god I was a nutcase and none of that happened."

12:45 pm | permalink | /life | 3 writebacks |

Go Vote.

No matter who you choose tomorrow, no one can deny that the stakes are higher for this election than they have been in the past half-century. Some things to consider:

• Half of America did not vote in the 2000 elections
• Half of this year's "likely voters" polled are pro-Bush
• Citing a strong post 9/11 connection with Bush, these voters continue to convince themselves that certain things are true, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary:
• They believe there were weapons of mass destruction. There were not.
• They believe that Saddam Hussein was connected to Al Qaeda. He was not.
• Half of them believe you can win a military war on Terrorism, a thing you cannot see, find, or kill. You cannot.
• Bush himself has publicly admitted all of these things are untrue, yet continues to wage war, spread fear, and allow these untruths to spread throughout his campaign.

In 2000, I didn't know who to vote for. The Republican and Democratic parties looked almost identical.

This year, I know one thing. I know who I'm voting against.

11:28 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Another 15 Seconds

Well, We're on the cover of Newsday's Real Estate section today.

Josh sent me a link to a writer looking for people in Long Island City who had fixed up their own apartment, which fit our description perfectly. I thought "What the heck" and contacted the writer, and next thing we know, Sara and I are doing phone interviews, photo shoots, and our faces are plastered across the front of the section in full color.

See a Slide show of the photos by Jori Klein [archived here]

Read the article by Susan Kreimer

10:22 am | permalink | /life | 3 writebacks |

Wedding Photos are Up

Our Wedding Photos are finally posted! We just wanted to make sure it was OK with the photographer before we put them up.

Anyone who attended the wedding, feel free to make comments on the pictures, and/or tell stories about your experience at the wedding.

You can enter your comments in the box just below each picture.

9:39 am | permalink | /life | 1 writebacks |

Jersey's Saving Throw

Zach Braff has redeemed New Jersey for me.

Garden State is a moody, poignant homage to the inherent beauty of all of life's various landscapes, physical and emotional. Even New Jersey's.

Critics have been laying praise on the movie for months, and it continues to play in mainstream theaters, so I won't go into everything that made the movie amazing for me, but I will say that if you haven't seen it yet, you need to see it on the big screen. It's not for everyone, but if it resonates with you, it will impact you in a big way.

The soundtrack is also so perfectly paired with a movie's varying moods and the feelings it evokes. I would probably never listen to most of the songs on the album on my own, but as I listen to the soundtrack now on the way home, I can't help but be drawn back into the world of the movie.

2:42 pm | permalink | /technology/film | 2 writebacks |

Degrassi Askew

Kevin Smith + Jason Mewes are making an extended appearance on Degrassi! This is big enough, strange enough news to make it onto my blog already, especially considering we've seen every episode of Degrassi:TNG since we got The-N with our first digital cable package.

What's really mind-bending for me is that this news has made it all the way up to BoingBoing! I thought we were the only ones that even knew about the show!

"It's like When Worlds Collide, y'know? I'm a big fan of things like when Spider-Man and Daredevil meet. I go ape-(bleep) and bust a nut," said director Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy), who is finally getting his chance to take part in the cult series he idolizes [See, we're not crazy!] by starring in a three-episode arc on Degrassi: The Next Generation.

In a hilarious and profane press conference here yesterday with past and present Degrassi cast, creator Linda Schuyler and her creative team, Smith confirmed that he and pal Jason Mewes (aka "Jay" from Clerks and Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back) will start filming their parts next week through mid-November.

The episodes, which will air early next year, have Kevin Smith playing himself directing the next Jay and Silent Bob movie, "Jay And Silent Bob Go Canadian, Eh?" In the fictional film, the slacker duo come to Toronto because they need to get a high school diploma and no school in America will take them.

Read the article where Kevin talks about his long standing crush on Caitlin Ryan dating back to the first Degrassi (Caitlin has become a recurring character in the Adult cast of TNG)

Stolen from BoingBoing who got it from Amanda

1:34 pm | permalink | /technology/tv | 0 writebacks |

Honeycup Mustard

Back in college, I went pseudo-vegetarian/raw-foodist for a year while on Weight Watchers, and near the end of my college education, I was eating nothing but salads. This was aided in large part by the amazing spicy honey mustard that they had up in the "Hawks Nest."

After leaving school, I found that I couldn't put my hands on that mustard, or anything like it, anywhere.

For most people, this probably wouldn't have been that big of a deal, but for me, this had been the thing that had made salads edible. Most other dressings are either nasty tasting or ridiculously bad for you, defeating the whole purpose of eating a salad in the first place.

Finally this year I stumbled upon that same amazing mustard - at Cosi.

Of course, you can't buy it from them by the gallon or even by the bottle, so I talked to the manager and got the name of their supplier.

After a few phone calls, I'd tracked down a distributor and ordered myself a case of Honeycup Spicy Mustard.

It's not healthy to be this excited about a condiment. I bring and buy baby carrots to work all the time just be a vessel for the stuff, and I've had to ration it heavily to avoid going through the whole case in a month.

The only problem is that they only sell it in cases of six jars for $30 or GIANT 9lb buckets for $60. I'm seriously considering getting the bucket next time.

11:09 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Who Watches the Watchmen

***Okay - before I begin... How the heck did I get this book? I honestly don't remember ordering it, and I don't see it on my accounts anywhere. I threw away the packing thinking "huh, must have bought this," but really I have no recollection of doing so. Was it a gift? I may never know.***

I've just finished reading the Graphic Novel, "Watchmen" by Alan Moore.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the genre, a graphic novel is essentially a really long comic book, Most times, the novel is actually compiled of many traditional comic books sewn together with additional material and/or art.

Now, I'm not a particularly great fan of comics. I read a few as a teenager and I have a sort of knowledge by proxy from having some friends who are much more into them, but I was never a comic book geek. A computer geek, sure, a sci-fi geek, yup, but not a comic book geek. There were a few reasons behind this, some of them financial, but more stemming from the fact that I simply don't enjoy the storylines of most modern comics once the initial premise is used up.

I was a great fan of the "XMen (minus the uncanny)" which was introduced when I was about 13. They took a comic that was at that time nearing it's 300th issue, and restarted it from the beginning, building upon the existing mythology. For me, that was the pinnacle of comics. The process of discovery, the allegorical context for each story, the first 30 or so comics went together like a well written epic, and indeed those books have spawned two movies, and animated TV series, and the rebirth of the superhero genre.

With all of this in mind, I opened Watchmen with some hesitation. It was a comic from before the reissue of XMen, and it was drawn with the characteristic 80's style, which itself was sort of a busy, dark version of the 50's "superman" style. Each panel is crammed with stuff to look at, and it can initially be overwhelming. I was regretting my purchase(?) already before reading a word.

Secondly, this book was thick. I didn't even really want to carry it around in my bag every day as I read it.

With all of these things going against it, Watchmen was one of the best books - let alone being the best graphic novel - that I have ever read.

Watchmen is a cleverly crafted tale, told from numerous points of view, and simultaneously portraying the storylines of several of the "Has-been" masked adventurers that make up it's main cast.

Being that Watchmen itself was written over 20 years ago now, and that it deals with an alternate history from 1950 to 1983 anyway, the world in which it is set can feel very alien. For me, this actually lent to the story, as if it was set in present time (as it was when written) it may have been harder for me to suspend disbelief.

The winding plot looks at the morality of superheroes, and the humanity behind those who would put on ridiculous costumes to fight crime. The one true "superhero" of the story is trying to decide if he even cares what happens to earth while the rest of the cast, simply people who used to dress up and try to fight crime, wrestle with their own demons.

All in all, it's a very good read. Let me know if you want to borrow it, but I'm warning you, if the shipping is out of state, it might be a lot of money! This book is huge.

4:19 pm | permalink | /life | 1 writebacks |

Firefox Ad Support Miracle

Less than one day ago SpreadFireFox.com made the appeal I featured below. Their ambitious goal was to reach 2500 donations (each of $30 or more) in 10 days.

As of 10PM EST tonight, they're 3 people away from their goal. With 9 days left, we might be able to run the ads in the 10 most widely distributed papers in the US. The support is amazing. It makes you wonder how many other projects have armies of people waiting and wanting to help in any way they can, even if they can't program.

10:27 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

We're Taking Out A Full Page Ad!

The Open Source community is banding together around 1.0 the release of the first true mainstream desktop application to come from our combined efforts. I've watched Firefox grow from a fledgling project based off of the monolithic Mozilla Browser into the premier web browser for security, speed, standards compliance, and ease of use.

Even technophobes who try Firefox out are quickly won over by the tabbed browsing and pop-up and spyware protection. It really is a world class user application, and it's about to become the #1 browser in the world.

To help it along, we're taking out a full page ad in the New York Times. I say "we" because I've already made my pledge. Join me, and contribute to the biggest event in open source software uptake since apache won the server wars.

10:10 am | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

The Deer List

Remember that "funny" shirt from back in the 90's, the "Road Kill Grill?" Well, it seems like it's coming true.

A friend of ours from down in Ohio just passed on a story about the "Deer List," which is basically a queue for people who are looking to pick up roadkill. When your name comes up, you've got 24-48 hours to go out and clean up the mess.

As ridiculous as this sounds, it turns out that there actually might be some merit to the idea. Deer (and other wild animal) populations have exploded in recent years due to hunting restrictions, and their encounters with humans, both in vehicles and not, have been increasing as suburban sprawl turns ever more of their habitat into backyards, parking lots, and strip malls.

The Deer list is actually an attempt by law enforcement to distribute the work, and the spoils (har har), to willing contractors, much like snow-plowers. You put your name on the list, and when it comes up, you go out, clean up the mess, and bring it to the landfill. In exchange, the local authorities pay you a monetary fee.

The idea is being picked up by more and more townships, and in many it's accompanied by the idea of a "Car kill tag," where if a driver hits a deer and wants it, the officer that responds can declare the roadkill fair game and let the unlucky driver take it home. For some, the compensation in meat lessens the blow of having to knock out their bumper. The roads are really becoming "kill it and grill it" territory.

9:17 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

You Can't Go a Day In New York Without Bumping Into Someone You Know!

So here I am, sitting in Chipotle eating my Burrito Bowl, when I see a big bouncer guy come and kind of "clear the street." He's got a few production assistants, but generally, it's a very low-key event. They don't make everyone move, just basically securing the area.

I'm kind of used to this. Between the movie/TV show shoots which seemed to always be going on at Wagner to living in NYC where a camera crew comes through Times Square about once an hour, it's usually no big deal.

Next thing I know, three guys in colorful shirts just kind of appear on the scene. I don't know if they just got out of a car or came up out of the subway or what, but it was surreal. The photographer was a few feet ahead of them taking pictures, and they walked right by the window I was looking out. And to think I almost sat facing the wall!

I think I knew who they were from the moment I saw them, but it was tough to convince myself that I was really sitting there with a pane of glass separating me from the Beastie Boys. I kept thinking that maybe it was a spoof - I mean, where was the mob of people, the adoring fans? Had they really managed a guerrilla photo shoot on 34th street without attracting any attention but my own?

Long before I'd made up my mind if it was really them, I'd had my camera out and was snapping pics. I mean, what the hell, it's digital. If it's not them, I'll have a good laugh about it later!

After I finished my lunch, I went out side and did a discreet walk-by. I was going to snap a few better pics, but I decided I didn't want to intrude, as they seemed to be getting away with the covert shoot and having a pretty good time. Two of them were standing with their arms up at 45 degree angles, palm to palm, and the other one was beneath holding his hands like a gun. Very funny stuff, and I wish I'd been quicker on my camera, but I have a feeling you'll be able to see that picture on an album cover or promo shot soon anyway.

That, and the security guy was about 3 times my size. Never the less, I had to go back the way I came to get back to work, so I walked right by them again, and looked right at them. Definitely them. It's funny how they can seem so young and full of life yet look so old at the same time!

Check out the rest of the (limited, crappy) pictures I snapped from inside Chipotle BeastieBoys.com

12:25 pm | permalink | /life/nyc | 0 writebacks |

Distributed Comedy

Okay, so some of this humor is only relevant if you've spent time on IRC on in other Internet chat rooms, but bash.org has bits of conversations which people copy from the chatter and post. The snippets then get modded up and down based on how funny they are. The best rise to the top and you can check them out here. Not all are work safe, but they're all pretty funny.

Much of the humor is topical and witty, with setups and punchlines that require a "gullible party" to walk into the joke. Somehow I have a feeling that lots of writers and comedians are looking to bash.org for inspiration.

#9322

<tag> Ouroboros: lets play Pong
<Ouroboros> Ok.
<tag> |    .
<Ouroboros> .    |
<tag> |  .
<Ouroboros>    . |
<tag> | .
<Ouroboros>      | .
<Ouroboros> Whoops

#5259

<reuben> somebody keeps jiggling the doorknob on my front door, then running away
<reuben> i don't know if i should call the police, or hook up some electricity to the doorknob
<cristobal> why don't you put ice on the stairs
<cristobal> and heat up the door knob
<cristobal> and swing paint buckets down from your two story foyer
<cristobal> then a few years later, fade from the public eye.....

12:33 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Often Imitated, Never Dupli-dupli-dupli-duplicated...

Finally! Disney is releasing the DVD that I've been waiting for since they came out with DVDs. Aladdin is at last coming to DVD on October 5th, and it's about time.

This was THE breakout film for Disney in my opinion. Hot on the heels of The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, both of which were successful children's movies, came this pithy, endlessly funny film. It stuck close to the Disney formula but broke it in several very important ways.

Granted, I've been waiting for it on DVD for so long I don't even know if I'll like it anymore, but here's what I remember:

• This was the movie that made me love Robin Williams. He's brilliant, and they let him Ad-lib tons of dialog which made it a MUCH better movie. Eddie Murphy has tried to duplicate this phenomenon many times since (see Mulan and Shrek) with limited success.
• The story is engaging and not completely watered down.
• This movie had the best music of the second "Animated Musical" Renaissance. The songs rarely felt forced and worked well with the story, and aside from the obligatory "A Whole New World" ballad, many of the songs are up-tempo and funny.

When I was about 14, I had this movie on the same bootleg VHS as The Addams family and I fell asleep watching one or the other pretty much every night. I also, for no good reason at all, typed out the entire script on my computer (this was before the Internet was around for stuff like that).

Well, I'm embarrassed to tell this story for some reason, possibly for fear that people will find out that somewhere deep within me is a repressed Musial theatre dork, but I'd be remiss if I didn't relay it when talking about this movie.

Sometime around middle school I tried to put together a "Musical Youth Entertainment Group" of kids who went around performing in various venues. It was kind of a half-baked idea (mostly because we had no idea where we would actually do said performing) but it was something for me and my friend Brian to do. We were going to sing songs from Disney + other kids movies and distill the animated features down into stage productions.

I remember clearly working on the script for the stage version of "The Lion King" and Brian telling me it would never work. (Yeah, tell Julie Taymor that!)

We made flyers, got kids together and held rehearsals, and to think back on it, it was one of the first tastes of leadership that I ever had.

Of course, we all had the attention spans of gnats, so the idea came and went in a summer. We "grew up," and Brian started doing real High School musicals the next year. He'd gotten a role in Joseph as one of the "Chorus Kids," and watching it back on video, we were both hooked. It was like being part of a singing Hollywood, right in our own High School.

M.Y.E.G. became a memory, but a few things stuck with me.

The lessons I'd learned leading (and ultimately, failing to lead) that little group have served me endlessly as an RA, a newspaper editor, team leader, and in my job.

The memories of being 14 and all but uninhibited, belting out "Friend like me" over a crappy "You Sing..." Karaoke tape with my dad in the basement will be there forever. Sometimes the memories are bittersweet, as 10 years later, I look back and know that I may never be that completely uninhibited again... But hey, we're going to have kids of our own someday. I hope my dad hung on to a copy of that tape - somehow, I have a feeling he did.

6:05 pm | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

It's a crime that I haven't blogged this yet

I really can't believe I haven't found a free moment to blog about this yet but I blame pokerroom.com and their free, Linux friendly Java client and No Limit Hold 'em tables.

When Jon was in town a few months back, he and I went exploring in the giant Toys R' Us in Times Square, the one that extends up AND down a full 3 stories in each direction from street level and has among other things, a Giant animatronic T-Rex and a Ferris Wheel inside. I have, of course,seen all these things before but it's always fun to poke around in there and see whats new, especially because Jon and I have visions of one day becoming DIY toy designers and making our fortunes.

While we were walking through the "Center display" where they feature the "latest mass marketing push" item we were stopped by a man dressed in a cross between a wizards robe and a "king" costume, deftly spinning the iTop. Of course I was impressed, mostly because the technology behind the thing had to be both pretty advanced and pretty cheap. They were selling the little device for $10.

I picked up the top and gave it a spin, and was immediately hooked. It was counting the number of times I spun it and displaying it in real time using the single row of 8 LEDS on the top. As the top whipped around, it flashed the lights in sequence, spelling out words and numbers.

Jon and I took several turns trying to beat the best score, but eventually we ran out of time and had to go.

A few months passed and I had all but forgotten about the iTop (I hadn't bought one since I was saving for the wedding) and I found myself needing to buy presents for my Groomsmen. I don't know about you, but I have no need for an engraved money clip. What I do have is an endless appetite for fun desk gadgets and challenging games.

When it came time, I bought one of the iTops for each of the Groomsmen and included them in a bag with The Open CD (which includes lots of open source tools we used to put the wedding together, like Scribus and Open Office) and a CD with all the mp3s we played at the wedding. I was worried what they would think about they toy, if they would like it as much as I had and if it was appropriate.

It turns out that I was worrying for nothing! By the end of the rehearsal dinner, we were all sitting around, trying to beat the best score and trying all sorts of surfaces to get the best spin. I think we'd just broken 900 when we finally went to bed.

The guys spent tons of their downtime playing with the tops, and by the time the wedding rolled around, they had figured out how to keep it going indefinitely by brushing their hand quickly along the edge, and had invented a new game where you spun it in the air to see how many times you could get it around before you caught it. The iTop was a hit!

The day after the wedding, we finally got home to Astoria to find a message on my cell phone. I listened to the panic inducing message nervously, as many friends were driving home that day, and with the tone of the message, I was worried that someone had been in a car accident.

"Ten" the voice on the message screamed. A chill ran down my back. I was confused by the message, but the voice was hard to read. Who was it from?

"Fourteen!" The message continued, again in that slightly panicked yell. I was sweating now. I didn't know if I was listening to a prank, if something horrible had happened, or what.

"Ten-Fourteen! 1014, new record on the iTop! Just had to call and tell you. We're up at college safe. Have a good trip."

Rye hadn't been up at school more than a few hours before they'd broken out the iTop and shattered the standing single-spin high score. He had called me out of excitement! I let out a sigh of relief and laughed. What a great little gift that had turned out to be.

Little did I know that in the week were on our honeymoon, Ryan's friends at college would make our standing records look paltry, inventing new ways to spin the top and spurring us to break the contest into separate events like the "Snap" method and the "Indian fire" method.

Meanwhile, back out in California, Jon was experimenting with different materials to spin on to try to get the best spin out of his and up in Rochester, Doug was showing his (slightly wonky one) off with his work buddies. I don't know, maybe we're all geeks in the same way, but for $10, that's one hell of a toy to me.

Way to go Irwin toys. Toys R' Us seems to be having trouble keeping them in stock in their NYC store, so I don't know if they're having trouble keeping up demand or they're just flying off the shelves. Either way, its good to see such a great product selling well, especially without a major advertising push or paying for a license to brand it with some kid-friendly logo.

If you buy an iTop:

• Beware that some of the tops are slightly off balance. So far, 2 out of 7 were just a bit wobbly. For $10, it's well worth the risk, and it's still a fun toy, but you might not beat the world record with it. Also, watch the packaging to make sure the "battery seal" is sill intact in back
• Check out the "secret modes". Switch to mode 1 and then hold both the play and mode buttons for 5-10 seconds. The flashing modes will do cool things like draw patterns and display a compass.

3:21 pm | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 0 writebacks |

Hitchhikers Guide Radio Shows for FREE!

Okay - I seriously love the BBC.

First of all, if you aren't watching Coupling already, it's one of if not the funniest show on TV. BBCAmerica runs it in syndication.

Second, they've just released audio streams of the new version of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy for free on the net. Each episode will apparently be available for 7 days after it airs.

I've actually never read the books. My only exposure to it was a game I played for the Commodore 64 (that's a link to a new version of the old game!) back in 1991 and some friends who were giant Douglas Adams fans. So far, I've listened to 8 minutes of this, on and off, and I've already laughed about 10 times as much as I did through the entire second episode of Father of the Pride. Not that that's any great bar to measure by, but that's apparently this season's best comedic offering.

I'm also amazed that they chose to do this as a radio play. As far as I'm concerned, the decision was a masterful one. My brain is filling in the effects just fine, and I don't have to worry about how crap the CG looks. I can just lose myself in the very funny story, and the production values of the audio are great. It's as if they took the money they would have spent shooting it for TV and poured it into creating cinema quality audio. Very nice.

• Audio feeds:
• Real or Windows Media
• And, good stuff from the Slashdot comments:
• Save the stream:
  mplayer -dumpstream mms://wm.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/h2g3_episode 1.asf
• Listen to "Primary and Secondary phase"
• Even though I don't know what that means, this series is apparently the Tertiary phase. So is this the third retelling, or does it pick up somewhere in the 3rd book? Or maybe it's just the third radio series? Whatever it is, it's fine to start listening right here as I did.

Ya, this was stolen from Slashdot, but it was too good to not mention again!

10:47 am | permalink | /life | 2 writebacks |

Like a Basket Full of Laundry

Thank you cards are the ultimate procrastinator-maker. If I'm not working on them, I can't bring myself to do anything else, (you know, like blog or post wedding pictures) because I should be doing thank-yous instead.

It's not that I don't want to write them, I've unexpectedly enjoyed writing them for the wedding as I've gotten to spend one last personal moment with each person through them and it's made that feeling of the wedding - the feeling of being surrounded by throngs of people you love - last just a bit longer.

The problem is, I can only write a few of them a night. I'm not just scribbling out a short "Thanks, love Eric + Sara" I'm having conversations with people here. To clarify the problem a bit - If I was writing thank you e-mails, I would be in a much better position.

You see, I can type like lightning when I know what I want to say (and have a spell checker to clean up after my typo's), but my handwriting has been downright awful since the first grade. I even changed to writing in all caps in 9th grade to try to clean it up a bit, but to little avail. I've settled for a script I like to call "stylized doctor scratch" and will only write with my easy-flowing Pilot G-2, but I rarely, if ever, engage in the actual art of putting pen to paper for anything other than doodling.

Beyond the embarrassing chicken scratch look of my handwriting and inevitable typo (write-o?), writing is actually physically excruciating for me. I just can't get my hand to move that way consistently. It's almost comical, seeing as nearly everything else I do in my life involves using my hands in some fashion, but for some reason the combination of deep thought, fine motor skills (the writing) and gross motor skills (the picking up of the arm to continue writing a line) has just always posed problems for me. I must either go so painfully slow that people have genuinely asked if I've had a stroke or have some other mental deficiency, or write like a third grader and throw in lots of big first letters and fancy strokes when possible to make it look like it's all supposed to look this way.

The funny thing is, about a year ago, my brother, father, and I all picked up pieces of paper and realized that our handwriting was all but identical, even thought my brother and I did not learn to write from my father. We all developed the "small-caps" style independently, and generally mix cursive and print in the same ways.

Weird. Maybe it's genetic? I've also found this specific pattern of writing to be an exclusively male trait. Anyone else an expert in "barely-legible-all-caps-big-T"?

12:55 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Missed Chuck Palahniuk, but Albany Folks Can Catch Him

I missed one of my favorite authors, Chuck Palahniuk, reading in NYC tonight because I was just too pooped, but anyone up in the Albany area can catch him tomorrow night.

His readings are famous for being raucous, with space monkeys or a local chapter of The Cacophony Society coming out to heckle him and/or faint as he reads, perhaps following an implied suggestion he probably now wishes he never made.

He's written seven books since Fight Club, but the lucid narrative and penchant for the fine details of the mundane and unusual alike is a theme throughout. Chuck is touring to promote his new book Diary, which I must now find and read. If you've still only seen Fight Club, make it a point to pick up the book. It's similar to but far superior to the movie, and the book Choke is even better.

If you go tomorrow, just a fair warning - he has a habit of throwing limbs at an unsuspecting audience.

11:15 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Artbots show in NYC this weekend!

I want to be these guys when I grow up.

I don't usually like to repost stories from BoingBoing but this crazy "build your own wacky robot and show it off" art show is going off in Harlem this weekend.

If you're an electronics geek and in or near New York this weekend, this is the place to be. With luck, I'll be there asking tons of questions about how they did stuff, as research for a new project I'm working on.

More details on the "project" after I clear it with my lawyers...

It.s an ArtBots invasion in Harlem! The Third Annual ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show will take place on September 17, 18, & 19 from noon to 6:00pm at The Mink Building on 126th Street & Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem. Featuring the work of 20 artists and groups from seven countries, the show celebrates the strange and wonderful collision of shifty artists, disgraced engineers, high/low/no tech hackers, rogue scientists, beauty school dropouts, backyard pyros, and industrial espionage that has come to define the emerging field of robotic art. Participants include robots that sketch, carve, float, wiggle, hum, ring, grow, wander, and sing, as well a number of works the form and function of which are not yet well understood.

2:01 pm | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 0 writebacks |

Interview with Ravi "The Scorpion Mystic"

During lunch a few weeks ago I got a chance to talk with Ravi, and he did a brief street performance in Times Square while I took some photos. He was fascinating to talk to, and I was struck by the similarities between Ravi and a professional artist or musician. Succeeding in the sideshow world takes talent but, even more so, it takes the courage to put the rest of your life on hold and take a gamble on making it to pseudo fame.

GlitchNYC: Okay, lets start at the beginning. How did you get into the business? Your bio on both your personal site and the Coney Island site has a story about being stung by a scorpion when you were young. A lot of the sideshow is about misdirection and theatrics. How much, if any, of your story is true, and how much is, well...

Ravi the Scorpion Mystic: Bullshit? (laughs) Well, a lot of it is true actually. The scorpion didn't give me my abilities, but I was stung at the age of 2, lying in a hammock in Trinidad. I was really sick growing up because of it, and I was on lots of antibiotics. I had vision and hearing problems, and really couldn't be physically active until I was around 10 years old.

While I was sick, I experimented with my fingers, and between the ages of 6 and 10, I started to get a reaction with what I could do with them. I loved the attention.

When I entered secondary school at 10, I took it upon myself to learn about physical anatomy, and I started experimenting with the flexibility of the rest of my body.

Generally, if you've seen one contortionist, you've seen them all, but I try to stay original by learning as much as I can about what you can really do with the human body.

gNYC: Are you double jointed, or is your flexibility all from training?

Ravi: Because I did most of my training before my skeletal structure solidified due to testosterone at the onset of puberty, I was able to train my body to be flexible right down to the joints themselves. If you look at my hands, my knees, you'll see I have extra large joints, and it's not just because I'm a skinny guy. The joints are actually over-sized to compensate for the increased range of motion.

I can push my joints to and past normal extent of their motion (which he demonstrates by folding his hand first down in the normal direction, with his palm facing his wrist 90 degrees, and then pushes his hand down until his palm is flat against the inside of his arm) and then back other way, (which he again illustrates by folding his hand back the other direction until the back of his hand rests against his arm.)

gNYC: Before you were part of the Coney Island troupe, you were picked up by Disgraceland Family Freakshow (which performs at Korova Milk Bar in NYC at 10:30 every other Tuesday) How did you get started there?

Ravi: I have a very close friend, EL-e, at a tattoo shop, who knows Spliff of Disgraceland. One day, we were all hanging out at the shop and it was a very slow afternoon, so I free-styled a set, showing off what I could do at that point.

EL-e was impressed and got me in touch with Spliff.

Now, Spliff and Evil [Elvis] must both agree to make a decision for Disgraceland, and when I went to meet with Spliff, he called Evil right up. He said right there on the phone "You know that other kid we were looking at, the contortionist? Forget him. I've got the real thing standing right in front of me."And that was that.

gNYC: So now you're in both shows, Disgraceland and Coney Island. How did you make that jump?

Ravi: I was working Disgraceland and taking a break from my college schooling, and actually went down and auditioned for Coney Island.

gNYC: What was auditioning like?

Ravi: Well, Mr Ziggin was the only one there. It wasn't an organized audition or an open call really, it was more going to show them what you could do and sell yourself. I ran quickly through everything I could do [as Ravi had done for me during our photo shoot, walking through his tricks with complete ease, without the theatrics of the show] and, Mr. Ziggin advised me to put together a full act with music.

gNYC: So is that when you really honed your act into the show it is now?

Ravi: Well, Disgraceland had to teach me a different way of being on stage before that. My first gig was as a wrestling contortionist, which is obviously a bit different than the show I have now.

I'm a huge fan of WWE.

gNYC: Wrestling is kind of a modern sideshow, theatrical performance to add drama to the physical action, and they do have actual skills

Ravi: Exactly. Step in the ring with me for 5 minutes and I'll show you wrestling isn't fake. It's not only athletic competition, it's also a theatrical performance, but the wrestling part of it, all the hits and falls and slams, everything is real.

As far as the drama, well, the truth is everyone loves drama. For my act, I have to show reactions. It's the drama that gets them, before the actual skill catches them off guard.

gNYC: So what's next for you?

Ravi: Once I finish school, I'll definitely maintain what I'm doing. What I'm doing in school (auto mechanics) will just be another road.

gNYC: Staying flexible.

Ravi: Right. I like to be diverse. Being diverse, skill-wise, makes you more flexible in life. It gives you more choices.

gNYC: I know for many professional performers such as dancers, being flexible and maintaining high level of performance can take a toll on their bodies. Does it ever hurt you?

Ravi: Only when I'm sick or incredibly cold. Most of the time I block it out, I do a lot of Shaolin kung fu training.

gNYC: Shaolin? (Ravi looks over my shoulder)

Ravi: (Laughs) I just wanted to make sure you were spelling it right. Yes, I'm a member of the USA Shaolin temple, under Siefu Shi Yan Ming. As his disciple, I am Shi Heng P'an. Shaolin is the birthplace of all kung fu and the birthplace of all martial arts.

gNYC: I don't know that much about it, but if I'm right, Shaolin is focused more on mind and spirituality rather than defense or fighting.

Ravi: Yes, that's how I've been able to block out how I'm physically feeling. It's taught me how to call upon my chi, or my spiritual energy and allowed me to apply that meditative state whenever I need to, whether training or not.

gNYC: Lets talk about Coney Island for a second. It's the oldest continuously running sideshow in the US. Is there still much of a draw?

Ravi: It's still commercially successful. Like everything, it has its ups and downs, but it will always be there. It's like the statue of liberty.

gNYC: Anything you'd like to plug before we finish up?

Ravi: Certainly, Disgraceland Family Freakshow, which runs just about every other Tuesday at Korova Milk Bar, which has been a wonderful host to Disgraceland.

Also, of course, the Coney Island Circus Sideshow.

gNYC: All-right, I think that wraps things up. Well, thank you so much for spending this time with me this afternoon.

Ravi: No problem, and Thank you!

• See all of the pictures
• Want to run away with the circus? Sideshow school starts November 1st at Coney Island.

12:09 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Eric Conveys An Emotion

"Emotion Eric" (not me!) has way too much time on his hands. He'll take a picture of himself conveying any emotion (or "reasonable facsimile" of one) that you ask him to.

Amazingly stupid as this concept is, you can't help but laugh after you flip through 10 or so of these. The faces the kid makes are just really funny sometimes. For example, try to look at fear without "hearing" him make a sort of "whaaaaugh!" sound.

Unemployed (shown at right) was pretty funny too.

EmotionEric.com

11:19 am | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Umm, what the hell is this?

I just saw the print ad for this on the phone booth outside our offices on 8th and 35th in NYC: Mattel is turning Barbie into a fashion line.

Am I the only one who finds this wretch-inducing? How many times have I heard the mantra of "Barbie is evil" and heard her name associated with such cultural ills as a racial stereotypes, negative body image, and the tendency of her spine to break under the weight of her own boobs if she were real.

All the while Mattel has been claiming that it's just a toy, that girls won't try to model themselves after her, and by the way, look at all the good things Barbie has done...

Meanwhile, they profit off the very concept of grown women modeling themselves after their shallow icon. Perfume and makeup lines are in the works as well, along with another line of clothing for - you guessed it - young girls.

Somewhere in a corporate corner office, Matthew Bousquette is cackling like a madman.

Anyone want to take bets on how long it is until we see "Hot Wheels" brand custom car mods at AutoZone?

UPDATE: I just saw another one of the NYC posters and snapped a photo (left). I think this poster captures the essence of what I was talking about a bit better. This girl is maybe 16 but probably younger, covered in makeup to smooth her features and make her resemble the doll, and maybe it was just the angle of the poster in my photo, but isn't her head a bit large for her body?

The Mattel site has absolutely nothing about this right now, so I can't tell if this is the "With love, Barbie" teen line, or the Adult fashion line. I'm not even sure which would be worse.

9:40 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Bedlam in the Subways

Travel in New York City ground to a halt during the rush hour commute today, due in large part to what's left of Tropical Depression Frances.

All during the night one arm of the storm, still spinning just off the Appalachians, Frances let loose on our metropolis, soaking us with 12 hours of steady rain, and 2 1/2 hours of torrential downpour.

This all added up to flooded tunnels, soaked tracks, and major delays on of the transportation systems in the city.

I got some pictures of the congestion at 42nd street between the 7 and the A C E after the N/R lines and the 1/9 lines were shut down for "water/signal problems." In particular, check out this movie of people going nowhere fast.

Seeing this many people all crunched together reminded me of the blackout, except replace the strange euphoria of that day with an angry "I'm late for work and my boss is an asshole" attitude.

That, and it was around 120 in the subway - so hot that my camera fogged up every 5 seconds. If you watch the movie closely, you can see the fog encroaching in from the corners even as I shoot.

5:59 pm | permalink | /life/nyc | 0 writebacks |

Jack and Bobby

The WB is airing a new series titled "Jack and Bobby" starting this Sunday at 9.

When I first saw the poster on a bus, my brain immediately played the word association game and shouted out "Kennedy" in my head. Upon seeing the tag-line "In 2041, one of them will be president," I was intrigued. Was it a show about the Kennedy's as young boys? How could it be if it was set in present day?

Here's the show's writeup from theWB.com:

If "greatness is thrust upon us," as Winston Churchill once said, then it's equally true that those who are destined for greatness are rarely aware of it. Take Jack and Bobby McCallister, for example: two bright young brothers growing up under the watchful eye of their eccentric single mother. Her personality is a force of nature destined to shape both of these young men's lives and secure one a place in the history books - as future President of the United States. Set in present day, with flash-forward interviews of future-President McCallister's White House staffers and first lady, it's a snapshot of a young man being molded to beat the odds and become the mid-century's greatest presidential leader.

Looks like it might be interesting.

10:09 pm | permalink | /technology/tv | 0 writebacks |

New Orleans Travel Stories: Haunted History

New Orleans Travel Stories: Our first night in New Orleans, we arrived around 2pm and immediately began our vacation.

After eating amazing Gumbo (which Sara really liked!) and a 3/4 of a giant turkey club, We ventured into the French Quarter and found ourselves on the Haunted History Tour.

Mortalis had recommended Haunted History by name after she returned from New Orleans, and I'm glad we followed her advice.

The tour was more historical than sensational, and the guide talked about hauntings with a tongue-in-cheek irreverence. One story is paraphrased below:

"One of the peculiar features of architecture you'll see here in the French Quarter is the galleries that are above you. These are different from balconies in that they extend over the entire sidewalk, and are supported by the iron columns that you're leaning against.

If you look up, you'll notice this gallery has spikes protruding all around near the top of the column. Now these are as much to keep out burglars as they are to protect what's inside, and if anyone here has a teenage daughter, you know exactly what I mean. Here in New Orleans, we have a special name for those spikes, Romeo-Catchers.

One night, at his very gallery, a man was to take out his family to dinner, but his daughter didn't feel up to it. She feigned illness, but insisted that the rest of the family go without her. You can already see where this is going, can't you?

Sure enough, as soon as the family is gone, her beau shows up, and they begin to do exactly what teenagers do when their parents aren't home... Talk politely in the study of course, or at least that's what the daughter would profess to later, because you see, as soon as the father got to the restaurant, he realized, "gawl dang it!" He forgot his wallet. So he starts on home to get it.

When you're a teenager, you know everything, don't you? There isn't anyone that can tell you anything. So the boy, in his brilliance, doesn't go out the back when he sees the father coming, no. He doesn't hide quietly downstairs no! He goes POUNDING up the stairs to the daughter's bedroom.

Well the father he comes in, and he knows something is up, he hears the noise going up the stairs, and he does what any good southern man would do in his situation... He grabs his shotgun.

His daughter wailed, and tried to stop him, she didn't want him to go upstairs and kill her boyfriend, but he simply moved her aside, and went on up the steps. Now later, the father would say that he didn't load that shotgun, or at least that's what he said in the official police report, which was in the paper, which you can find down at town hall. All of our papers were transferred onto uncatalogued microfiche, so you'll have to search, but it's there for you to find.

Now the boy had gotten a brilliant idea. He was going to slide down the gallery pole and let go just as he passed the Romeo-Catchers, and then grab back on. He was all set, and had just let go, everything was going well when BOOM! The father bursts in the door.

The boy sees that angry father, and he sees the shotgun, and he's so scared, he grabs right back on to that pole.

The Romeo-Catcher catches him in the leg, but it doesn't stop there, It tears up through his thigh, through his pelvis bone and up through his stomach, crack crack crack through his ribs, and finally breaks his collarbone, and the boy falls to the street below.

Now the head, they say it can survive 45 seconds without proper blood supply, and they say the boy looked back up at the Romeo-Catchers from where he lay and saw, streaming up from his stomach, the eviscerated bowel which had just been ripped from his body trailing back up to the iron spikes.

So if you're standing out here on a warm spring night, leaning on that very pole that you're leaning against, and feel something dripping on your shoulder, and go up to touch it, and realize that it's a bit sticky, you look at your hand. Suddenly, you begin to panic, because you realize that there's blood on your hand, dripping into your hair, and you look up and see the gore oozing down that pole, you're going to scream. You're going to run up and down this street, screaming that someone's been killed on the gallery, but no one's going to come out.

Nope, they've heard it before. Multiple reports of the same story are in our papers, dating back for ages. I've seen the papers down at the library, but I'll let you look for yourself and make up your own mind.

11:54 pm | permalink | /life/travel | 0 writebacks |

A First Taste of New Orleans

Everything is a bit muddled in New Orleans. The accents, the spices in the Gumbo, the waters of the Mississippi, even the history.

At first brush, the French Quarter seems a historical center-point spoiled by tourism. The bars that literally line the streets, separated only by Voo-Doo T-Shirt vending tourist traps, have great walls of rotating slurpee machines, all ready to dole out multi-flavored lightly alcoholic beverages at the pull of a lever.

As you get closer to the essence of New Orleans, though, you begin to realize that this isn't a seedy surface painted on by tourism - this is the continuance of a tradition that goes back almost 300 years.

At different times in its history, New Orleans has been controlled by the French, the Spanish (during the inquisition) and then finally, the American Government. Code Noir, or a set of laws which allowed but limited slavery, contributed to the large population of Free People of Color and that population helped further diversify New Orleans' history.

All of this history even predates the Civil War, and the well of history for each tour guide to draw from is rich and long.

If you make your way to New Orleans, expect to be surprised by the grit of the real industry driving this city: tourism. New Orleans is and always has been a "Service Oriented" city, and it's current status isn't a corruption of the history, it's a celebration of it. Once you embrace that, there are tales waiting to be woven by the expert guides in almost every square inch of soil here.

Photos of the trip

4:04 am | permalink | /life/travel | 0 writebacks |

MARRIED!

Well, it's been about a week and a half since anythings been posted here, and with good reason! Sara and I are now officially hitched, and we're just back from our Honeymoon in New Orleans.

The wedding was amazing - I really don't know if it could have gone any better, even in hindsight. It's almost statistically impossible for there to be no drama during the wedding itself with 150 of your closest relatives and friends with you, but amazingly we made it through the day completely crisis free, and it was beautiful.

Put concisely, the best advice I can give to those planning a wedding is not to hold yourself to what tradition says you must do. Breaking out of a wedding hall/dance centric wedding gave everyone the ability to enjoy the night as they saw fit, and I think it made everyone just about as happy as can be. Sara and I are considering writing up our experiences for others in a wiki, since the forums on theKnot.com helped so much during our planning, but we'll see how much free time we have as Sara starts her new job.

I'm writing this from the deck of a riverboat as we ramble down the Mississippi towards the Audubon zoo in New Orleans, so I'll end it here. There's more to tell, but I'll be splitting it up into more specific vacation stories as we go.

Thank you to everyone who made the wedding possible, we couldn't have done it without you.

11:59 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Review: Nicola Griffith's Slow River

[* * * * 1/2] of 5

More than a year ago, Sara gave me her copy of Slow River by Nicola Griffith, and it sat on my bedside, unread.

Various excuses kept me from reading it: I wanted to be writing my own material on the subway instead of reading and, for plausible deniability, I didn't want to read a sexy, near-future cyberpunk work which was so similar to what I was working on. It's much easier to claim you haven't plagarized when you haven't read the work in question.

A year later, Lex has fallen by the wayside and I've been reading again so I finally dusted off her old paperback and started into it.

The book ranks up there with some of my favorite books of all time. Published in 1995, Griffith portrays a very familiar future, describing both the real and the unreal with an eye for detail that makes it believable. The book also seems almost pure in its ignorance (and untainted prediction) of the internet hype to come just a few years later. The systems of the future city are plausible and simple enough to be natural outgrowths of our current progress, and are intermingled with the things that invariably stay the same: nature, human emotion, and dimly lit pubs where people talk about sex and money.

The book is told in three fractured time lines, which admittedly makes it a very difficult read if you're not taking it all in a few sittings. It was hard enough remembering what was happening each time I picked the book back up on a subway ride without having to recall where we left off with each timeline, and each transition made me groan, like the season finale of your favorite show which you must wait all summer to see concluded.

Having finished the book, there's really no other way Nicola Griffith could have told the tale. The mystery unravels in each of the timelines (which all involve the main character, Lore) and you piece the story together as Lore does, drawing from each of the story arcs.

The fractured feel of the book also brings an added dimension to Lore's own feeling of being different people; not in the sense of multiple personalities, but in understanding her own human duality and coming to terms with all the various facets of herself. Only in the final chapter, when she begins to understand herself as one person do the storylines collide and conclude the novel.

Nicola Griffith's skill at weaving the story together overrides the annoyance at having to wrench yourself from one timeline to another, and the near future bio-punk epic is required reading... Both literally and figuratively. It was part of Sara's college curriculum, with good reason.

10:45 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

On Safety, Freedom, and Protest in 2004

Whether you're a "Liberal Weiner," or a "Right Wing Nutjob" there's one central theme most of our beliefs. Something that is central to most leftward leaning people, yet is also very traditionally a right wing, republican, feeling: the desire to uphold the constitution and the first 10 amendments.

The past 4 years have been trying for those working to uphold our personal liberties, and those of us traditionally on the left suddenly find ourselves on the flip side of an argument that was all too familiar just before 9/11.

The question is this: what risk, what cost, will you tolerate to cling to your constitutionally defined personal liberties?

When it came to the questions of gun control, many on the left were and are quick to say "sacrifice the liberty of the right to bear arms to protect the victims of abuse of that liberty." The right countered with the famous phrase "It's not about guns, it's about freedom," and we scoffed. We laughed at the idea of a government that would take it's power to limit constitutional freedoms and push further into our right to assemble, our right to free speech. This argument was about people dying at the hands of gun-toting criminals and kids (sometimes accidentally, and sometimes not) finding their way into their right-wing parents arsenal and killing themselves and each other. Republicans were were clinging to "freedom" as an excuse to keep their dangerous toys. Right?

4 years later, the tables have turned.

We're all suddenly understanding that maybe it wasn't just about guns. That maybe there was something to all of that rhetoric about limiting governmental control and the tendency of an empowered federal power to grant it self more and more control.

4 years later, our right to assemble has been deemed a terrorist-aiding activity. Our right to protest takes cops away from managing the already risky RNC here in New York.

Our right to bear arms, (or even protest signs longer than 2 feet, which are deemed weapons) to protect ourselves from a potentially abusive police power as they herd everyone over to the west side highway... Oh wait, we've already given that liberty up, haven't we?

4 years later, we're all suddenly willing to accept some risks to protect those freedoms. We're willing to accept the increased window for terrorist attack, the confusion and mayhem 250,000 people protesting in New York will cause.

The willingness to accept risk has just hit critical mass. The planners of the protests are powerless to corral their own people. The people have made their intent clear: they will protest where they can be heard, far from the fences and free speech zones. They will protest where they can be seen, and be arrested for it, teargassed for it, martyrs of "America as a free speech zone."

And protest has hit our our in-boxes, our cell phones.

Far from the West Side Highway, Smart Mobs will pop up in patterns, disrupting traffic in carefully orchestrated waves, keeping the police force thin and guessing, never able to stop a protesting crowd that uses text messages and cell-chatter to avoid the police and regroup around them.

The news has been brewing in the Internet underground, in emails, on IRC, on Usenet, for almost a year, and it's just now hitting the mainstream news outlets. It's blossoming into full fledged websites like www.xflashmobs.com and being passed from blog to blog, blanketing the Internet with an understanding of the gravity of this event.

This is not going to be an ordinary protest.

It's not about the Republicans, It's about Freedom.

References:

Tyranny in the Name of Freedom, The New York Times

http://www.smartmobs.com/

High-TechLevels Protest Field, The Washington Times

TXTmobs take on the GOP, The Village Voice

http://www.appliedautonomy.com/

http://www.txtmob.com/

http://www.xflashmobs.com/

RNC preps include protest restrictions, CNN.com

2:31 pm | permalink | /life | 2 writebacks |

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

I first heard about Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow at the con we went to a few months ago. At that point, all it was was a picture of Angelina Jolie in front of a retro-futuristic backdrop on a freebie poster.

The buzz around the movie was that originally, the director had created a 5 minute 'pilot' which was completely generated on his Macintosh, which had then been picked up by a major motion picture house and was being given a full budget to realize it's potential, once again completely generated on computers. 100% bluescreen + actors.

Various interviews confirmed the buzz at the con, adding the detail that it was Jude Law, (Gigolo Joe from AI) who had discovered the director and 5 minute pilot. Apparently, both the stunning effects and stylistic vision based "future" of the early 1900s was enough to get him on-board and he recruited other producers (read: money) and big name talent like Gwyneth Paltrow to join him on the film.

The extended trailer is online now. I've usually got a really decent sense for how a movie will do when it's released, and I wish I could say that I thought this was going to be a great smash hit. I feel roughly the same about it now as I did about "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" before it came out. I'm going to see it and probably love it simply for the Geek Factor, but I don't know if America will bite without at least a familiar retro character or premise to help justify the stylistic theme of the film.

Here's hoping the movie proves me wrong.

5:44 pm | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

In 16 Days We'll be Married

I've been lax at posting here the past few weeks mostly because I feel that I can't do justice to the amazing events that have transpired in that time, so in an effort to purge my writer's block, I've decided to simply do my best to convey the feeling of the many fun nights of the past 14 days.

New York is an amazing city.

Jersey is NOT an amazing state.

It takes a lot to get me to leave my favorite island for the J-State. Someday I'll relate the story of 3 cars breaking down, the sky's opening up, and being stuck in a gas station parking lot for 14 hours in Jersey here on the blog, but for know, just know that my hatred isn't unfounded.

Only the Lure of going to Medieval Times for the first time could get me back in Jersey's clutches, and I was afraid that once again the fates would conspire to keep me trapped in Jersey forever.

Somehow, though, the ominous backdrop of Jersey was a fitting setting for the weird and wonderful cheesiness that is Medieval Times. If you've ever seen The Cable Guy, the actual experience of going to MT is much the same as it is depicted in the movie, but with both more and less glitz at times.

Unlike Ren-Faires, MT freely breaks the illusion, taking you from flashing LED colors in a "commemorative mug" to the actors talking in (thankfully well practiced) accents and decently engrossing plot, back to glow-necklaces and Pepsi, and back again to the show.

The juxtaposition of MT being smack in the middle of Jersey, next to a hotel and a bank, seems to fit remarkably well in light of the dual worlds that MT itself maintains. Once your brain adjusts and suspends disbelief, you're both in the middle of the action and at your table eating, drinking, and buying knick-knacks at once.

Remarkably, the food itself was excellent, and eating with your fingers does satisfy some voracious need you didn't know you had until you start doing it. Meg + Co had gotten me a one size fits all "groom" hat, which, not surprisingly, didn't fit on my massive noggin, so I'm sure i got some chicken grease on the brim as I shifted it up and down to keep the blood from pooling in my brain.

Two things stuck with me as I thought about the night later. First - the show was remarkable. I've been part of and seen my share of stage combat, and these guys broke all the rules, swinging full force withing "strike range" of each others heads and bodies. If the block wasn't there, I don't believe they could have stopped any of the hits, and some of them could have been crippling, dulled sword or not. Either they're really really good, or really careless. Seeing as no one got hurt and they're doing this 7 nights a week, I think they might just be awesome.

The second thing comes from the other "world" of MT, as I walked back from the bathroom complete with plastic ball and chain around my ankle, groom hat, and goofy grin, and two of the waitresses asked me what was going on.

"I'm here for my bachelor's party"

"You're HERE?" one of the girls replied, rolling her eyes at the other girl. They were lost in the business world of MT, unable to see the show, the fun. This was the placed where they worked, decidedly not cool.

"Yeah, it's great" I said, smiling at them. I was proud of it. I loved the cheesiness - I loved that my friends had all gone to such lengths to put it together and to be there - I loved everything about the night. To me, this was 1000 times cooler than being at some seedy strip joint.

One of the girls stopped with her tray and smiled back. I think she saw a little bit of what I saw, and that maybe, just a little bit, her job was once again as cool as I thought it was.

The weeks that followed have been a blur of goodbye celebrations for Christin and other festivities, and then my upstate bachelor's party with my brother and best friend.

The upstate party was wonderful in its own way, giving me time to kick back and just enjoy the company as we played hours of poker and playstation 2. Rye and I have made a tradition of returning to our roots rather than trying to go out and find stuff to do in suburbia, and it has yet to fail us. We played SSX tricky until we couldn't stay awake any longer, and damn near beat the game in a weekend.

2:32 pm | permalink | /life | 3 writebacks |

New Batman Prequel Sports Dark Mood, All Star Cast

There's a new Batman Prequel on the horizon, and it looks like it's going to be good.

The first Batman movie was, almost by definition, cool. They had distilled the concept of Batman down enough to be palatable to movie audiences, but retained his conflicted nature, brooding introspection, and almost guilty enjoyment at dealing out his brand of vigilante justice. The sardonic twist that he'd created his own greatest super villain was not lost on the screenwriters, and Jack Nicholson's Joker was the perfect foil to the Dark Knight.

The movie also gave Gotham the real grit and grime of a city desperate enough to allow and even call on a vigilante for protection, and the Gotham of that era was a very plausible "what if" reflection of the then deteriorating pre-Disney New York City.

The sequels came and went as many sequels of the 80's and 90's did, riding simply on laurels of the title and built-in audience, while forgetting everything the original movie and concept were about. Batman became, once again, as two dimensional as the comics he was derived from.

Finally, Hollywood has woken up to the real worth of franchise films. Bringing familiar characters and stories back to a willing audience and then doing them justice will not only pull in your original audience, it will also boost DVD sales of the original and grow a bigger core fan-base.

X-Men, LOTR, and Spiderman are but three recent franchises built on this premise, and it seems all the major studios are finally beginning to take notice. The idea of bringing true fans of the original work in and giving them some control over the project is also taking hold in the wake of Peter Jacksons lucrative devotion to the spirit (if not the letter) of Tolkien's work.

Batman Begins has, so far, differentiated itself from the Batman sequels by returning to the humanity of the characters, and making the casting (and budgetary) decisions to back that up. Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes, and Michael Caine are among the A-List cast. Each (including even Holmes) has an impressive string of dramatic roles under their belt and they all stand poised to bring the Batman story back to life, resurrecting it from the POW, BANG, and ZOOM that it had been reduced to by the recent sequels.

Of course, casting isn't everything, but the mood of the piece already seems suited to the story. Take a look at the teaser trailer and see for yourself.

2:31 pm | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

What the Hell (hell being the operative word) is Going on in Sicily?

All sorts of things are apparently bursting into flame with a surprising regularity over in Italy, and the best explanation anyone can come up with so far is that the Earth's electromagnetic nucleus has may have spikes, much like sunspots, that reach all the way up to the surface.

Either that, or as the Catholics there are claiming, it's really, truly, hell on Earth.

Whatever it is, scientists and other experts in the pseudo sciences have descended upon the town, as the incidents have apparently started back up again.

Crazy.

Stolen from LVX23

Check out the full article at Seed Magazine

1:45 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Hotmail Misses Its Own Deadline.

Years ago, Hotmail was awesome. You could sign up for a free email account that didn't change with your ISP, and access it from anywhere. You could even link your Hotmail account to other pop3 accounts and read them all in one web enabled spot! One of the survivors of the dot-com bust, Hotmail stayed afloat by offering great service and and using it's first rate status to bring in advertisers and eventually get bought by Microsoft.

After the bubble burst, Microsoft, to its credit, did not shutter the free email service and switch completely to paid accounts. However, over the years it has severely limited the space and functionality of its free accounts, finally squeezing free users down to 2 megabytes of space. At that small a threshold, everyone has to clean out their account regularly and keep signing in to make sure they don't get cut off and miss important emails.

It was time for a successor to the free email throne to appear, and Microsoft's able rival in the "search engine wars," Google, stepped up to the plate with an audacious offer: virtually unlimited storage for free, keep your email forever and search it quickly and effectively.

Not willing to be trumped by Google's new free email offering, Gmail, which is now in the process of a slow and steady roll out to new users via "invites" to join the beta test, Hotmail has announced that they are making storage a "non-issue" by allowing their free customers 250 megabytes of space. The announcement comes with promises of better spam and virus filtering and other upgrades to the service.

250 megabytes isn't great, but to be honest, it's enough to get me to keep my account. If they come through with it before Gmail comes online, that is.

Two weeks ago, on July 8th, Hotmail Staff sent out a message to all users detailing the changes. It also promised more communication "within two weeks." Today, two weeks later, I eagerly opened my email and was excited to find another message from Hotmail.

Dear MSN Hotmail Member, Your MSN Hotmail account is approaching the 2 MB storage limit. You need to take immediate action to avoid losing messages!

If your e-mail account reaches the 2 MB limit, you.ll be sent a second notification. You must then reduce the size of your e-mail account within five days. If you do not, some of your messages will be automatically deleted and cannot be recovered.

Increasing user storage space by nearly a factor of 8 is no small feat, and I understand that it will take time for Microsoft to upgrade its underlying systems appropriately, but they themselves promised communication within a certain time frame, and then failed to deliver.

In the meantime, they've successfully rolled out the new 2gb storage limit to at least some of their paid users.

Although I'm excited for my Hotmail account to be useful once again, Microsoft has a history of making the service subtly more and more annoying to use, and then offering to "fix" those problems if I just pony up the cash.

Although that may make for a viable business model when you're the only real player in the market, when there's other choices, annoying people isn't going to get them to buy a real account, it's going to get them to leave.

3:19 pm | permalink | /technology/microsoft | 2 writebacks |

Ravi The Scorpion Mystic

This past weekend, I was down at the Siren Festival at Coney Island.

I've wanted to go for the past few years, but I've never been able to get out there and the one day event always came and went as one of those great "things I wish I'd gotten to do."Finally, I was able to find my way out to the far southern reaches of Brooklyn this year for the event, and I was to meet friends a few hours into the event.

The morning started out rather ominously, and rather than heed the warning in the sky, I simply packed my umbrella and started out on the 2 hour journey. Along the way, I finished reading Just a Geek, and started to pour over the latest issue of Linux Journal, and still found time to be bored during the 2 hours of stop and go on the subway.

While in transit, I'd found out that a few of my friends were already on their way back out of Brooklyn. Apparently, beer and coasters don't mix (a lesson I'd learned at 10 years old with chili-dogs and the Gravitron, but not everyone gets to grow up a few miles from Great Escape.) I'd also never tried the experiment with an intoxicant, and apparently, it works quite the same way as funnel cakes and fried meats on a stick.

After meeting up with a few other friends and trying to see a band or two, we all agreed that it was too hot, stressful, and crowded to stick around for the rest of the bands and they decided to head home. I was now stuck with a dilemma, as I didn't live anywhere near as close as the rest of them did to Coney Island. I'd spent two hours getting there, and I was going to get my travel's worth, dammit!

I'd been very good about spending money so far, and I continued being frugal, catching free bands and letting my stomach slowly digest the wonderful and huge sausage hero I'd had around 2:00 over the course of the 6 or 7 hours I was there.

I tried very hard to like Blond-Redhead and They Will Know Us by the Trail Of The Dead, but both bands were fairly weak, and Trail of the Dead's "rockstar" on-stage drunkenness made for a crappy show on top of what would have only been mediocre music.

At some point during the night I realized I'd covered the boardwalk and the whole of Coney Island a total of 5 times, and I was beginning to recognize people as I passed them. Afraid that one particular group would think I was stalking them after the 10th time I walked by, I decided to take a detour into the famous Coney Island Circus Sideshow.

The show itself was interesting not so much for the amazing acts, but for the traditional showmanship of the event. Between the Barker standing outside, the comedic Penn and Teller pairings of mute "act" with vivacious announcer, and the brilliant ways they got you to "see inside the box for just a donation of 1 dollar more," I felt like I was in a very different decade, and was amazed to see how well the show still ran even in our culture of cable re-runs of fear factor and Ripley's Believe It Or Not. As for myself, I had a great time watching them put on the show even though I could figure out most of the tricks.

Many of the acts were shim-sham, such as "electro-girl" who, although differently dressed, also happened to be the pretty young 'contortionist' in the box you had to pay to see inside. She sat on what was obviously a low-voltage static electricity generator, and then passed that electricity over her skin to light up a fluorescent light bulb, and ignite flaming sticks with her tongue. She squirmed convincingly to make you feel as though she was really taking a good dose of electricity to perform the feats, but you got the sense that you could simply sit in the chair and do the act yourself. Fun, but not amazing.

The one act that really stood out for me was the real contortionist, Ravi "The Scorpion Mystic".

For all the showmanship and trickery of the other acts, there's no substitute for the real thing. Ravi is the real life equivalent of a character from X-Men. He can bend, twist, and compress his body in ways that hurt if you even attempt, and the only showmanship involved in his act is making it look like it's not the easiest thing in the world for him.

Strangely, I caught him again late last night at the "Disgraceland Family Freak Show" at Korova Milk Bar, and he performed his Coney Island act with a few added twists and props. I was floored again by his performance, and he made the others acts (some of which were more of the extreme nature than Coney Island's) again pale by comparison as he did things with his body that shouldn't be possible.

After his act, I shook his hand to congratulate him on his show both in Coney Island and at Disgraceland that night, and his skin felt like rubber; like if i squeezed his hand hard enough, his fingers would simply swell and squeeze out the front of my grip. It was a strange sensation, and it made me acutely aware of the fact that he's the real deal.

I'm dying to know more about how he got into the business, if he trained his body or was born that way, and how he got picked up by Coney Island. It's such a different life than many of us lead, like a twisted Olympics where you have to be the best to succeed. Fascinating.

2:49 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

The Legacy of Alexey Pajitnov

While visiting Aeriesstars for her wedding shower up in Rochester, we were treated to several hours of "Tetris Worlds" on the XBox. We all sat transfixed, each racing to complete the level we were on before the other players completed theirs. Smartly, the game only advanced the winner to the next level, but you all continued playing. In essence, you were competing against yourself, but it's fun to play together since only the first player to finish will advance.

In order to understand my appreciation for this game, you have to know that I'm no stranger to multiplayer Tetris. Years ago, my friends from back home and I squeezed 4 of us in front of a single PC keyboard, each reaching an arm in to claim our keys and battle it out in tristix. Later, my college buddies and I transformed the 3 PCs of the Wagnerian Newspaper office into tetrinet terminals, and dueled online, shouting late night obscenities back and forth as we sent weapons like "block bombs" back and forth at each other.

While both of these iterations were fun diversions, playing via the keyboard isn't quite as satisfying as utilizing the years of hand-eye training we all have with the NES gamepad and similar controllers. Tetris Worlds is available for all modern gaming consoles, so now you can play with the controller of your choosing, and the game is retailing for about $20, or cheaper if you find a used copy on ebay.

The update of the classic puzzle game is excellent not only for its brilliantly engineered multiplayer modes, but also for its subtle fixes for some of the great problems of the original. Dropping a piece in the wrong "column" is no longer as frequent, thanks to a "ghost" image of the piece you're about to slam down. The "hard drop" is also a part of the official game now, meaning that you can hit "up" to put the piece down in place instantly, or hit "down" to slide it down and then sideways if you choose. New game modes add extra fun to the game, and I recommend it to anyone who uses their gaming system to entertain. Everybody knows how to play Tetris, and of all the versions I've tried my hand at over the years, this is the best for casual gaming fun.

The game, which is officially licensed and written by Alexey Pajitnov, the original Russian creator of the game, also includes a 4 page long "History of Tetris." I had always wondered about the legality of the thousands of "clone" games and there's a apparently a long and sordid tale behind the mess. At the heart of it, the rights to the game were improperly licensed by a British company for years, and even when "Elorg" established official rights and licensed the game to Nintendo (and forced Tengen to pull it's arguably superior but unlicensed version) Alexey waited behind the Iron Curtain of Communism while the Russian government absorbed whatever profits he would have acquired.

Since then, the USSR has fallen, the venerable Mr Pajitnov has moved to Seattle and started working for Microsoft, and he still has yet to see the wealth creating the world's most popular video game should have garnered him. Surprisingly, Alexey himself says he's content to have created a piece of our culture. It's an interesting story and worth a read.

I wonder if there will be a movie or book deal some day. Imagine "Tetris: The Russian Puzzle" with Robin Williams as Alexey and Matt Damon as Vadim Gerasimov, his young hacker friend who ports it to the PC. Throw in Tom Hanks as the hard edge KGB agent who keeps them from getting their money while evil villain Mirrorsoft sells licenses worldwide without owning them itself!

UPDATE: Wow - I just did some research, and it turns out the BBC just ran a documentary on all this. I'll have to try to get my hands on it! Anyone around here get BBCAmerica?

1:22 am | permalink | /technology/games | 0 writebacks |

Hunting a MythTV Bug

For MythTV users having trouble recording:

See more ...

6:22 pm | permalink | /technology/linux | 0 writebacks |

One Night In Geeksville.

Last night I think I threw the best party I've ever thrown.

I'd gotten the idea for holding a "Geeksville" party in my head a few months ago, but had never had the courage to put it together.

Here's the idea: get a group of people together and then do nothing but hang out and do stuff we all did as 14 year old geeks. For some it would be a nostalgic throwback and for others it would be a chance to see what we were all doing while they were off being cool. Basically, playing video and board games, drinking soda, and watching Star Trek: TNG.

Told ya it was "Geeksville."

I'd declared it a booze free event ("like before you could drink!", the invite read) unless people wanted to bring their own, and everyone played along. Lots of friends surprised me and came out for the party, and I was suddenly very glad that I'd gotten food that scaled well for a large group.

I was worried that the things that entertained me as a kid wouldn't hold up to adult scrutiny especially by friends who may not have come from the same geeky roots that I did. My worries doubled due to the fact that I'd nixed alcohol and we wouldn't have shared inebriation to help lower inhibitions and release the inner geek. I'd found myself fussing over food, preparing and perfecting so much that I imagined the Fab 5 watching me on a monitor somewhere going "Ooooh, he put a dash of paprika on the hummus, I did not tell him to do that!" The fact that I'd stolen the idea for the "Personal Pita Pizza's" we were serving from the episode where they make little pizza squares on flatbread wasn't helping matters.

In retrospect, I think it was people's expressions as each of their favorite old games materialized before them that completely vindicated the party for me. The beauty of having emulators and great game collections is that you get to grant people's video game wishes for a night.

Julie wanted to play Asteroids - it wasn't on NesterDC (because it predated the NES itself by 8 years) but sure enough, there it was under 1978 in M.A.M.E. and she sat cross legged for ages in front of it. Alexis' eyes lit up as Arkanoid came on the screen. Rick lost himself in Mike Tyson's Punch Out for hours, and even relived that pre-teen angst of not being able to beat the game and had to restrain himself from throwing the controller when Piston Honda II thwarted him for the 20th time.

It was like being back in 1993, and it was great.

We played some Cranium, and an attempt was made to play the horribly stereotyped 1970's "Bride Game," only to have Beth close it back up and remind herself to put a sticky note on it that said "Only open if extremely intoxicated."

Near the end of the night, people wondered aloud where the promised episodes of Star Trek: TNG were, and I fired up MythTV and put on "Deja Q," an episode that had taped recently featuring everyone's favorite omniscient mischief maker.

We all settled onto the couch and into our chairs, and before I knew it, the show was over and it was nearly midnight and people were leaving. We all jokingly commiserated about the (nonexistent) hangovers we would have in the morning, and I promised copies of NesterDC to anyone who wanted to buy a dreamcast.

All in all, it was a pretty great night in Geeksville. I can't wait to go back.

11:13 pm | permalink | /life | 1 writebacks |

That was Amaz(on)ing!

At noon yesterday, I clicked through the link to buy Just a Geek at wilwheaton.net

At noon today, it was on my desk.

I'm so impressed right now I can hardly express it. I didn't rush the order, and they expected it to get here between the 17th and the 20th. 24 hours is an INCREDIBLE turn around time. Kudos to Amazon!

I haven't had a chance to crack the book yet, but with an introduction by my favorite author on the back, it's looking very good already.

"Here's the gimmick: Wil isn't *just* a geek. He's a geek who's come from nerdvana - the Paramount lot where they dropped the first Trekbomb and forever changed the world - to tell us that it's not all that it's cracked up to be. He's also a geek who can *write*. Finally, he's a geek who's unafraid to sit and the keyboard and open a vein. There's a lot of scorching honesty mixed in with these convusively funny memoirs."

-Cory Doctorow, Author of Eastern Standard Tribe and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom; co-editor of boingboing.net

2:35 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

What Ever Happened to Predictability?

Here's a little mind-boggler for you.

First, recall the theme to Full House:

"What ever happened to predictability, the milk man, the paperboy, evening TV..."

Now, try to recall the theme to Family Matters.

This one had us stumped for hours the other day. See if you can do it without cheating - I'll give the answer here in a few hours.

1:34 pm | permalink | /life | 2 writebacks |

How to be a successful blogger in 60 steps

I just read through a very funny "60 Steps" list courtesy of Frank of dreamwill.net

A few of these made me feel like Ned Ryerson at the end of Groundhog's Day:

Ned: Where are we going?

Rita: Ohhh.. Let's not spoil it!

Ned: Oh.. Let's not.. I got that! Rrrreeoww! (listen [mp3])

1:27 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

The Difference Between Writing and Blogging

I've been blogging in this format for almost a year now, sticking to punditry and rants and backing off the personal stuff, for one main reason: I've always wanted to be a writer.

Not a writer just in the sense that I write this blog, but a writer in the sense that I weave stories, fictional or not, that people are interested in. In the world of nonfiction, this means finding the angle - finding the people behind the story or the undercurrent that led to the events you're reporting on. In the nonfictional world, it means telling a tale in a way that keeps the reader wanting more while painting your imaginary world for them in vivid imagery..

The problem with blogging is that I'm not doing this full time, and even saying that is an understatement. I'm doing it in stolen moments in the doctors office, on trains.

If I were a full time writer, I would have taken that Merck/Singular thread and followed it out, called people involved, gotten interviews and found out what it was really like to work on that project, what challenges they've faced.

Instead, it's hurriedly typed into the perfect little portable palm/keyboard pair I've gotten for myself, and slapped on the blog with barely enough time to run aspell -c on it.

At times, I've considered slowing down the pace of my blogs and really working on them like stories, releasing one or two well written pieces a month. The prospect of writing articles that are more fleshed out and interesting to read is appealing, but I'd have to give up the story-nugget/link format and the nice readership growth curve I've been nurturing with timely articles.

I'm interested to hear other blogger's takes on this. Which is better, lots of really fresh content bits, or a few well written pieces here and there?

3:21 am | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 1 writebacks |

Wil Wheaton's Just a Geek is Available

I wanted to hate Wil Wheaton.

Almost a year ago now, I couldn't understand why I was hearing the name of the guy who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation on my friend's blogs. I assumed, of course, that Wil was now out of work and in his 30's and looking to cash in on all the girls that used to have a crush on him.

Turns out I was partly right.

Wil is out of work - out of acting that is. These days, he's a writer, and a damn good one at that. His site is full of cleverly written anecdotes, musings about his life (with his wife and 2 step-children), and just about every topic I write about on this site, from politics to Linux.

Just a geek picks up Wil's story right at the "What?" that you just had reading the paragraph above. How does a young actor go from potential to passed over? What's it like both being a geek AND being on the other side of the "signing table" at conventions? How do you balance dreams with reality, and eventually, let them go.

Chapter 9 of his book is available from O'Reilly (of the computer safari book fame). It'll only take you about 20 minutes to read through it, and it really gives you the flavor of the book. Either you'll like it or you won't, but just from the reading a few things are clear: This is not a Star Trek book, this is not a sci-fi novel, and that is not self aggrandizing promotion.

Just a Geek is just a book about a guy trying to define himself, with healthy doses of introspection, self deprecation, and humor sprinkled in. The fact that he has a really interesting past and possible future just helps to fill in the gaps.

It just started shipping today, and I've already ordered my copy.

Stolen Right from Wil

3:14 am | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Singulair Asthma Medication Marketed as Allergy Med

I've been on Singulair for mild asthma for a few years now, and although it does control my asthma, its real power lies in the fact that it's more effective at controlling my allergies than any of my actual allergy meds, and combined with them, I am almost invulnerable to the dog dander, pollen, dust, mold, and cat sheddings that each alone have the power to make me miserable.

I spent a summer hanging out at a friends house which combined all of those elements before I was on Singulair, and literally had to wear a painters mask the whole time or suffer sneezing wheezing runny eyed allergy attacks.

I spoke with my doctor about Singulair's miraculous ability to make me allergy free back 2 or 3 years ago, and he confirmed that other patients were feeling the same positive side effect of the little squarish pill.

Now, as I sit in a D.O.C.S. Clinic to get my script filled, the little video-TV is playing health news blurbs and prescription drug commercials. Singulair came up first, not marketed as an asthma med, but pushed as a panacea for all allergy suffers.

Imagine having a hit asthma drug, nearly dominating that market, and then finding out that the drug your research team has come up with has a second positive effect! I bet there's a few very happy people at Merck.

7:13 pm | permalink | /life | 1 writebacks |

Creative Commons Novel "Lysergically Yours"

I just read the excerpt from Lysergically Yours, a novel By Frank Duff that's available under a Creative Commons License, meaning you can do a whole bunch of stuff with it including download it for free. It's licensed under the Attribution - NonCommercial - ShareAlike 1.0 license, so you can creative derivative works and distribute them so long as you let people know where the original came from and you release your work under the same terms.

Just reading the excerpt had me sucked into the novel, and I can't wait to read the rest of it. If you've got a palm, you can use Plucker to pull the book down and read it from this link, or you can just save it and read it on your screen.

Frank Duff's Site.

Stolen from LVX23

8:04 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 2 writebacks |

FireFox Usage Spikes to 23% and Keeps Climbing!

I hate when people present statistics without backing up the information, so before I show you this chart - here's the arguments against it:

The content of my site is aimed at and attracts a number of web-savvy early adopters as well as other bloggers and googlers.

I browse my own site with FireFox from 2 computers, accounding for around 2% of these hits.

My site has repeatedly advocated for Firefox, which may have affected the usage by its own readership

The sample is way too small, only covering 250 unique users so far in July.

With all that said, the preliminary results are in, and due in large part to the recommendations from CERT, M$'s own Slate, and others, Firefox is the new darling of the web.

Statistics courtesy of the Free and Open Source Web Statistics Package, AWStats

10:49 am | permalink | /technology/web | 1 writebacks |

Moore, Lion's Gate OK F9/11 Filesharing

I've actually yet to see this film, as I have certain issues with Michael Moore's presentation style, but I can't deny the inherent sense in his stance on filesharing, as reported by boingboing

So for all of you that want to take a closer look at certain parts of Fahrenheit 9/11, or don't have the $10.50 to shell out, you've got the official OK to get to the downloading.

Here's the link to the BitTorrent Tracker on Suprnova.org

3:24 pm | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

Jews For Jesus

A few days ago, someone was handing out funny yellow pamphlets.

Now, you have to understand, I HATE preachers, pushers, and the like who hand crap out. You don't get to know what it is before you take it, and you're faced with a horrible choice each time you pass by - either take it and be stuck with what is inevitably a piece of crap, or snub the person, and walk on by (risking a shoulder check as they try to shove it in your hand.) After everyone gets sick of having it in their hand and they don't see a garbage, they just chuck it on the ground, and of course, these people on a "mission" don't consider it part of their mission to clean up the mess they made.

So the fact that I was intrigued by this little yellow pamphlet means it's cleverly disguised. I can normally tell what I'm looking at with cursory glance, and will just leave it where it is.

Each of these little pamphlets is a story or instructional brochure that has basically nothing to do with it's premise.

Catching a Cab

Ever get the feeling that when you don't need a cab they are everywhere waiting to swoop down on you?

You may be waving goodbye to a friend across the street and a cab stops. ... (3 more paragraphs like this)

Then there are those times when you really need a cab and you can't get one.

Either they've already got customers in them already, (cute, funny picture of people hanging out of cabs here) or they're off duty.... or its' raining and everybody else wants one too.

Here are some tips for getting cabs on rainy days:

(3 real/funny tips for catching a cab)... then: or you could PRAY

Cabs may be hard to get when you need them, but GOD is always available to hear your prayers... (more here)... His Son, Y'SHUA (Jesus) said, "...."

So there's a few things that strike me as weird about this.

First of all, it's a sneaky little thing. It tries to reel you in with something that affects your life, and then totally switches the subject at the end.

Let's try it another way:

"Ever have trouble with your iPod? Many people experience problems with their battery after extended use. To troubleshoot, please check your model number to see if your battery is under warranty, ensure your headphone cord is intact, or eat some diamonds."

"Diamond eating is a new crazy started by the prophet Y'EASISH (Steve Jobs) which will bring you great happiness and wealth..."

At which point you should go "WHAT?!?!"

Yet somehow, Jews For Jesus (which in itself seems to be a contradiction, but maybe that's just me) feels that bits like these are effective pieces of propaganda.

The Gallery at their site is a hoot too. The X-Files image above is more of their strange mix of pop-culture and and Jews for Jesus "bend your mind (to get around all that "logic")" preaching.

Want to know more about haling cabs or hailing Y'SHUA, call or write:

Moishe Rosen
Jews For Jesus
yshua4u@aol.com
Please Do Not Litter! (even though I've just shoved this piece of crap in your hand and you can't find a garbage!)

5:47 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

The Economics of Free Comic Book Day

I'd made myself a note in my palm to go and get my Free Comic today as part of the nation-wide "Free Comic Book Day" promotion, and just did exactly that.

Having worked a few "Free Cone Days" at Ben & Jerry's (They've donated several PartnerShop franchises to Common Ground), I know the pros and cons of events like this.

The idea is as simple as the corner crack dealer's sales philosophy, AKA: "The first one's free, kid." Once they've tried it, they remember how good it was later, and they don't want to wait for next year to come around, so they come back again, and again, and so forth.

Free Comic Book Day is the same idea, except there's one crucial flaw.

When we're giving away ice cream, there's certain rules you've got to follow. The ultimate goal is to make the consumer so happy on Free Cone Day that they want that feeling again, so you really work to make it a good experience. You keep lots of people on staff to keep the line short and entertained. You hold giveaways to promote your catering. You keep your best flavors on stock, and plenty of them. You let them go through the line as many times as they have time for. You promote the event in your local neighborhood to up your awareness, and the free event works as amazing viral marketing, with friends telling friends.

All this adds up to a great experience for all, and great marketing for you as a business. Sure, you lose a bunch of money that day, but compared to a nationwide TV spot or equivalent print ad campaign, it's really not that big an expense.

Imagine now, the crucial failure of logic it would be for B&J to skimp on the ice cream they used that day to keep the costs down.

Sure, you cut your losses on that one day, but you don't get people to come back who may have been enticed by that freebie and you also dilute your brand in a major way and may even scare off loyal customers who think "wow, their ice cream has really gone downhill - maybe I'll start going to Cold Stone, etc..."

Only in it's third year, the Free Comic Book Day organizers have already questioned the logic of the event, but rather than cancel it completely, they've tried to cut their losses. Just like the hypothetical situation above, they've ended up with a lack luster event that stores resent, and speaking as someone who was looking to be enticed into reading again, an offering that scared me off rather than drew me in. It's been years since I've picked up a paper comic book, although I will admit to reading most of Ultimate X-Men online. Looks like it'll be a few more years.

Speaking with the local comic book store employee (who might also be the owner, I'm not really sure,) my feelings were confirmed. This years free books suck by all accounts. The major labels put out very few titles, paling in comparison to the Ultimate Spiderman and Ultimate Xmen releases of the past 2 years, and there were many more independent books out there. Normally this is a good thing, as I enjoy indie art, but the ones that were left by the middle of the afternoon were pure stinkbombs, like the pictured "Ballad of Sleeping Beauty" here.

The clerk at the store lamented the number of people who come in for the freebie each year and then don't come back, but I can hardly blame them. This isn't the type of product that gets you hooked, it's the type of thing that reminds you why you don't read comics any more.

Too bad.

4:24 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Subway on the Water?

This weekend, a bunch of us ventured out to Far Rockaway for "Rey's Annual Way Out Beach Party." The event is always, well, eventful, and part of the charm of the event is the payoff of the party after the incredible journey it is to get there, lugging beach stuff, food, and drinks.

The trip took roughly 3.5 hours for me, taking me from Astoria, down through Manhattan, through Brooklyn, and finally into Far Rockaway, where the scenery suddenly changes to that of a run down amusement park complete with rusty railings, fake looking buildings on stilts, and waterways.

Amazingly, the subway not only becomes a transway (superway?), riding above the ground, it then drops down to ground level, running like an Amtrak train.

The final, and most mind boggling change of scenery comes when riding across the shallow bridges of Rockaway, as the subway car seemingly skims across the surface of the water. It was surreal.

4:15 pm | permalink | /life/travel | 0 writebacks |

Flash Forward Film Festival Comes to the New Yorker

I just found out that the Flash Forward Film Festival will be happening less than 100 feet from my office in the New Yorker Hotel! Who knew? I'll try to get some coverage if possible - It'd be cool to stop up in on lunch if nothing else. Perhaps a little clever espionage to get in? He he, now I'm picturing myself whomping a bellboy over the head, dragging him into the alley, and emerging in a way too small uniform. Outstanding.

In the meantime, check out the past winners, and the people choice finalist video that's getting passed around our office now, Lullaby. (be sure to click the movie to get it to start, otherwise it's just three people in hammocks for a really long time! Don't be afraid to mess with the movie with your mouse too, that's part of the fun! There's lot's of little fun touches in this animation.)

Stolen from Rey

3:49 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Cool New Car-Radio-Like LCD Case

Ryan just sent me a link to http://www.colorcase.com which has this awesome LCD readout. I've always wondered why we waste screen real-estate for information that's so readily translated into LCD-friendly numbers and symbols

Rye:

i think i got it. aside from this one particular one.. the whole site is full of fun toys...

control 4 diff fans?

Scour that site. It's awesome.

10:02 pm | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 0 writebacks |

Meg Hutchinson's "The Crossing" Released

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that I've been waiting for this album for over 2 years.

I first became a Meg Hutchinson fan about 5 years ago now when handed a CD of hers by a friend from back home, where she'd seen her play. I was immediately taken by Meg's high, sweet, smile-tainted voice and evocative and image-heavy lyrics. It was a very solid independent album, and Meg found herself on the cover of the metro, the Time Warner Cable Access music show "Sounding Board" and the winner of 4 "New Folk" and songwriter awards in 2000.

Against the Grey stayed in my playlist for over 3 years, even outlasting most of my Ani Collection and various other flavors of the moment. When I finally got a chance to see her live around 6 months ago, I was thrilled, and somewhat star struck.

The thing that floored me - still floors me, in fact - is the amazing different between Meg live and on CD. Her music on CD is catchy, sweet, and nice. Her music in person is emotional if not religious, and her soft voice draws you so far in that watching her perform is like watching a powerful movie. You don't mean to be so involved, and you have occasional moments of clarity where you realize where you are, but for the rest of the time, you're completely lost in the world of the performance.

Meg performed various songs from her live album which I bought the next day and alluded to the imminent release of her new CD, the crossing, which made up the rest of the music she played that evening.

I got the CD in the mail today, after many studio delays and the time it took to ship, and it's nothing short of awesome.

This isn't just a good folk CD - this is a good folk CD with two or three radio-worthy singles on it. I'm half excited and half terrified that this could be Meg's breakout album, propelling her to folk stardom in the next few months.

The first three tracks on the album alone have definite grooves, I really feel that the titular single could climb the charts.

8:34 pm | permalink | /life/music | 1 writebacks |

Pretty Girls Make Graves

And pretty good music apparently

This is why I love bittorrent.

I've been surfing around Suprnova.org (leave out the e for.. umm... extraneous lawsuits?) looking for some new music for a few days, and not only have I been finding lots of bands that I've always meant to listen to, but I've been finding complete albums and discographies.

Getting the whole album - not just popular songs, or mislabeled mp3's or bad live recordings - is freaking awesome. This was the reason that I converted my CD collection to MP3 back in '96. I wanted an easy way to play the music that I liked, and had already paid for. Because most of my collection is legit, I've got everything organized by Artists and then full albums, so having random downloaded singles in there is a pain.

We saw Pretty Girls Make Graves open for The Atari's a while back and I found myself liking them but hadn't gotten a chance to listen to their stuff. Listening to it now, I can say that I like the whole album, and I'll both look for more PGMG shows now and will probably buy CD's and merch there to support them.

I thought Napster and other programs were neat, but because my collection is generally of complete albums I already owned, I really never used them to download gobs of music.

The "bandwidth is free" culture of Bittorrent where people are encouraged to make complete collections and link them all together as a torrent has finally peaked my interest as a downloader, and I feel does a lot more for the artists involved because it gets people to listen to their whole body of work and become fans, rather than just grabbing the single and forgetting who sings it.

The "no central server" principals of Bittorrent should also keep it going against the efforts of the RIAA, so long as sites like suprnova don't become too central. There's also an implied safety to downloading with BitTorrent - It's not encrypted or secret, you can still be sued, but with BT, you're going in and making surgical downloading strikes. You get what you want, share it back while you're downloading it and a little bit after, and then get out.

BT is also the first filesharing system to really have a case as a legitimate file sharing tool - I've used it to download the last few versions of Knoppix and Fedora Core, and it's just flown along. Keep your eyes on it, I feel like things are about to get really interesting.

3:44 pm | permalink | /life/music | 0 writebacks |

Rumsfeld OK.d harsh treatment of suspects in U.S. war on terror

Yet more proof that my crazy theory was spot on.

Rumsfeld OK.d harsh treatment of suspects in U.S. war on terror (USA today)

Looking back at my conspiracy theory story now, it doesn't look crazy at all.

10:03 am | permalink | /life/politics | 0 writebacks |

Microsoft Quietly Unveils Brilliant Wiki-enabled Blogs

For quite a while now, blogs.msdn.com has been populated with Microsofties, independent developers, and interested third parties like IT admins.

Somehow, this seems to have slipped under the radar of the mainstream press, and has gone without a major press release from Microsoft.

Part of me understands the move. You don't exactly want to tell the world that you're giving every employee at your company the ability to talk about whatever they want, sometimes making mistakes as they go.

You also don't want to make public announcements that you'll be allowing your customers to write your documentation because you often leave holes in it.

In the meantime, they've gone and done both those things, and it's brilliant.

http://blogs.msdn.com/exchange/archive/2004/05/12/130556.aspx just saved my butt at work. It's not official Exchange documentation, but someone at MS saw that a whole bunch of people were calling in with the same trouble, and grouped all the resources into one spot so that you don't have to pull your hair out while every user calls you to tell you that the email is down.

Once the poster had written the initial article, it was then open for Wiki-style editing. Anyone who comes to the page can add to the bottom of it! If I have something to say that adds to the recovery procedure, I just comment right on the page, and hopefully others will benefit from it.

I first saw the brilliance of the Wiki enabled manual at MySQL.com. Their technical documentation was lacking at the time, but the comments at the bottom saved me time and time again as other users wrote in with the fixes to their problems (and to mine.)

Is Microsoft quietly learning a lot of the right lessons from Open Source? Lesson 1 - "Your users are your army, let them help themselves and each other." - learned.

I hate to say it, but score one for Redmond.

7:08 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 1 writebacks |

Crow, Dark City Director at "I, Robot" Helm

Until a few minutes ago, I had absolutely no intention of seeing I, Robot in theaters. Taking Asimov's forward thinking, intellectual stories which have already seen 2 Hollywood adaptations (A.I.* and Bicentennial man) and giving them the "T2/Matrix" plot didn't really appeal to me.

There's a new variable in the equation that has my curiosity peaked though. The director of The Crow and Dark City, two movies which at least evoke special feelings for me even if they aren't technically superb, is behind this new mega-budget behemoth.

I'm very curious to see the direction the film takes now. Alex Proyas (The Director) has a very distinct comic-booky style, and I can see a great portion of this movie being devoted to discussion of sentience and what makes something "alive," where as before I had assumed it would just be a robot/murder/chase movie.

I don't know if I'll go opening night, but between Proya's cool visual style and the possibility of a *smart* sci-fi movie, my hopes are certainly a bit higher now than they were after seeing the ads around NYC.

*AI was not directly based on an Asimov tale, but was heavily influenced by his stories and echos many of Asimov's themes.

Stolen from Wired, boingboing, and Cory Doctorow, who wrote the article.

6:36 pm | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

Cockamamie Gadget Ideas

Every once in a while I see something and think how marketable it could be if just tweaked a little bit and put in a bevy other other devices.

I believe Nokia has hit on just such a goldmine with their "Light Writing" phone for midair messaging. A small row of LED's and a cheap accelerometer allow you to "write" in the air by flashing the diodes in sequence.

The technology is nothing new - LED signs work on the same principal, scrolling the words across many rows rather than moving one row along.

Two ideas came to immediately after seeing this. First, why not make the display bigger. Imagine a jump-rope full of LEDs drawing 6' pictures in the air at raves and flashing messages at protests as the owner spun it around.

Second, with all the blue LED's on the highway already, why not use this same technology to write in the air as you pass bystanders and other vehicles. It'd certainly be at least a somewhat better use of the technology than just lighting up blue and going back and forth like night rider.

Come on, if you're already taunting the cops with your pimp-mobile mods and blue lights, why not go the whole distance and be able to key in "eat my dust" as you fly by at 120mph, "Out of my way" as you pass those slowpokes doing the speed limit, and then "Ouch!" as you slam into the guardrail.

Ridiculous as it seems, I bet this is on Pepboys shelves by this time next year.

2:30 pm | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 2 writebacks |

Bachelor's Party Solutions

Thanks to everyone who gave ideas for Bachelor's Party Fun, both upstate and down.

Some things are starting to come together, and I just came a across a great site, saying many of the same things that I've been saying.

http://www.foreverwed1.com/articles/bachelor/45982g.html

Not a last gasp

Christopher Robbins, the owner and founder of the Hickory Group, a marketing company in New York, held his bachelor party a few weeks ago at his family's country house in Bondville, Vt.

His father and best man, Ken Robbins, organized the party, bringing about a dozen friends together for three days of practically nonstop canoing, biking, golf, billiards, darts, Frisbee and volleyball.

"My dad titled it a last gasp, but a bachelor party for me is an amazing beginning," Robbins said. "The experience of the whole weekend solidified my friendships for the future. It wasn't like `This guy is going to be lost to the winds of marriage.' It was not a goodbye. It was a rekindled hello."

That sounds just about right.

5:03 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Organic-Tribal Kaleidoscope Art

I've been doodling organic tribal designs for years now, using the activity to occupy my brain when I need to keep engaged through any long period of focus. Although it seems antithetical to paying attention, I am actually much more able to concentrate when my visual brain is active. Doodling provides exactly that stimulus while I'm in meetings, listening to lectures, or brainstorming.

Recently, I've become really happy with the way the little drawings have been coming out, and I've started scanning them to clean them up on the computer.

The resulting art was a bit bland, and I wanted a way to join my doodles into a more cohesive design, incorporating symmetry and geometric patterns into the organic flow of the inked art.

Today I stumbled upon the wonderful kaleidoscope filter in PSP 7, and these little drawings are the result. the resulting patterns are very neat and incorporate my doodles well - I may finally have something to fill the boatload of frames that the previous tenant of our apartment left behind.

Beware that if you click on the full image, (it goes thumbnail -> small image -> full image) you'll be waiting for a while as these are very high resolution images for printing.

5:33 pm | permalink | /life/art | 2 writebacks |

The Modern Bachelor's Party

Here's a open question for anyone reading today. What the heck do you do at a "clean" bachelor's party.

Here's the problems - I'm not a big fan of the objectification of women, and strip joints have always seemed sleazy and unappealing to me. We've also got a semi-limited budget, so running out to Vegas or something isn't really an option. By the same token, I'm not exactly an outdoors-man either.

What do you do for a geeky bachelors party?!?!

I can't be the first guy with the same aversions - so I'm taking suggestions - What would you do?

5:44 pm | permalink | /life | 6 writebacks |

Honda VS Harley in Two Markets?

Looks like one of the big bike makers is finally stepping up to the plate to take on Harley-Davidson.

At least as far as the general population knows, Honda has almost exclusively made bikes known as "crotch rockets," road speedsters more likely to attracted racers rather than the archetypal "biker."

Meanwhile, Harley-Davidson has spent decades carefully managing and cultivating it's "bad" image, which has earned them a fanatically dedicated consumer base and the ability to charge obscene amounts for the privilege of owning a "hog." It will be interesting to see if the squeaky clean Honda can compete in the same market by making good looking cruisers that cost a whole lot less.

Conversely, and perhaps, not coincidentally, Harley is now looking to expand into the Asian market where the burgeoning economy is just beginning to afford it's population the luxury of owning bikes like Harleys. A partnership with Zongshen, China's leading bike maker, is reportedly in the works to make this happen.

5:36 pm | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 0 writebacks |

Matsushita's "Sleep Room" for Insomniacs

Boing boing is running a piece about Matsushita's new and pricey "Sleep Room" for Insomniacs.

Essentially, it's a really comfortable flat surface in a room that lulls you to sleep.

Yeah, I've already got one of those. It's called a BED. My problem isn't that I can't sleep when I'm there, it's actually getting in it!

In all honesty, although this thing sounds pretty nice, I'd be interested to hear how many insomniacs think it would change anything about their habits, or if their sleep-dep routines would keep them away from their "Sleep room" just as it does their "Bed room."

5:11 pm | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 0 writebacks |

Speed and Bill

Last night, I ended up hanging out with a few of Miriam's friends. While this is normally an experience in and of itself as Miriam's friends are often colorful and intelligent, last night, we would be hanging out with Speed.

To Preface:

When you get Roadrunner, they can't help but give you 40 or so cable channels even if you don't pay for them. I don't really understand the glitch that makes it possible, but for some reason, when we just had internet for a few months at the apartment, we got the basic channels and a few odd ones like the Independent Film Channel. Because it was our only source of movies and anything that wasn't a crappy sitcom or a rerun, we watched a whole lot of it, and caught a movie called "The Cruise."

IMDB sums it up as an "Affectionate portrait of Tim "Speed" Levitch, a tour guide for Manhattan's Gray Line double-decker buses..." More than just a portrait, the movie is a platform for Speed's ruminations on living life, really "seeing" the world, the city, the things around you, and everything in between. When he's talking, you often feel that he lives in a world completely apart from ours, looking at everything from a very different perspective. At the core of it, you really don't know if he's brilliant, or crazy, or both.

Check out this interview over at citypaper.net to really get a feel for what Speed is about.

So hanging out with him was a lot of fun, but I realized we were neglecting the person who's apartment it actually was, and struck up conversations with Bill.

Turns out that Speed's friend Bill Brunner is actually really awesome too. He at first seemed shy and maybe a bit apprehensive at having a gaggle of young 20 somethings overrun his apartment, but once I got talking to him, he had a lot to say and was a lot of fun. I didn't probe him too much for info, but I did get out of him that he travels the world working as an architect, and most recently worked on two houses on the incredibly impressive Managua Cathedral (Catedral de Managua) with Legorreta Architects. He was very cool to talk to, and I wish that Tate, our resident up-and-coming architect at Common Ground had been there to chat as well.

1:10 pm | permalink | /life | 2 writebacks |

Sometimes No News Isn't Good News

There's nothing going on in the nation right now. No bombings, no terrorism, no real change in Iraq.

I know this, not because the news hacks at CNN + elsewhere actually come out and say it, but because they've spent the last 5 days covering Ronald Reagan's funeral.

Yes, it's sad that he died. Yes, he was a president. The problem is, these are the only to facts that have been full and accurate truths in all of the "over and over" coverage. I only watched for 5 minutes here a nd there while I was trapped in an office or store where it was on the tube.

Jimmy Breslin's article over at NY Newsday sums it up beautifully.

1:37 am | permalink | /life/politics | 0 writebacks |

Green Roofs Come to NYC

New York is starting to push the concept of "Green Buildings," offering incentives to designers and builders to include environmentally friendly concepts into their structures. The "Green Roof" is a main feature of this movement, providing a landscaped park on the top of the building as a community space and also to help regulate water runoff and heat.

On the large scale, if enough buildings were to change their massive black-tar rooftops to "Green Roofs." it would both lower the temperature in the city by 2-3 degrees and significantly reduce the amount of rainwater runoff the sewage system needs to handle. Check out the article in Natural Health's July Issue for more information.

O C V Architects are one of the main proponents of the Green Building initiative in New York, and they're designing Common Ground's Christopher Nels Larson Residence. Presumably, once phase 2 of construction is complete, the rooftop will be refashioned into into a landscaped park. I can't wait to hang out up there and eat lunch, all while helping the environment. Mmm... Tasty activism.

1:09 am | permalink | /life/nyc | 0 writebacks |

Speaking of Will Ferrell

Speaking of Will Ferrell, while googling for the correct spelling of his name (I tried Farrell first, and had a feeling I was off base), I found this little nugget:

Will Ferrell's Apple Switch ad/spoofs

Stolen from: TechnoJunkie.org, who's name is WAY catchier than GlitchNYC.

10:48 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Pimping the Comedy

During his visit, Jon brought us out to Comic Strip Live to catch Jim Gaffigan, and we ended up getting roped into the entire three and a half hour show. Aside from my butt being incredibly sore from the unforgiving chairs, the comedy was quite decent. There were a couple of real gems, including Mr. Gaffigan himself. Check out his stuff if you're a fan of Brian Regan or Will Ferrell.

The night ran long and the audience was thin and cranky by the end which brought out both the best and the worst of the comics in the latter half of the evening. Some of those that get a mention here came up against us late nighters and still gave a great set, even though there weren't many of us left to laugh.

See more ...

8:46 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

GIJoe Public Service Announcement Redux

I'm a little late to the game here, but I had to add the link now that I've watched them. Fensler Films has redone the "And knowing is half the battle!" shorts from the end of G. I. Joe, added wacky dialog, and put them up on the net. The result is zany and hilarious in a way that only half-assed uncensored Internet media can be.

They're worth the download, check out at least 3 of them before you write them off, as they get funnier as you catch on, much like Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

Now, the big question is, will these get stale after watching 16 of them, the same way that Aqua Teen is starting to for me? You'll have to watch them an find out.

Stolen from Arden & EBaumsWorld

7:56 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Seth MacFarlane, Creator of Family Guy, Hosting Adult Swim

Seth MacFarlane, Creator of Family Guy and also the voice of Peter Griffin / Stewie Griffin / Brian Griffin / Glen Quagmire / Tom Tucker / Various Voices, will be hosting Adult swim July 11-15th, with possible clips from the new episodes.

For those that don't know, Family Guy will be returning to the airwaves Summer 2005 as a direct result of it's success on Cartoon Network and on DVD.

Sidebar: I Ripped this story from TvTome - the IMDB of TV. It's amazing how quick this site has become an invaluable resource, even surpassing IMDB at times as it provides complete episode breakdowns, anecdotal information, and news feeds about tons of shows.

11:00 am | permalink | /technology/tv | 0 writebacks |

JustWearBlack.com - New York Nightlife

If you're in New York and looking for something to do, check out JustWearBlack.com. I agree with almost all of their picks, and will have to check out a few of the other places they mention. Looks like we've finally got some new happy hour spots!

The story of how I got to that page is a funny if risque aside

See more ...

12:10 am | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Early Game Over for UPN's Aptly Titled CG Animated Show

Walking in Times Square last night, I noticed a billboard for a new computer animated prime-time show called "Game Over." I'd never heard of it before, and I was kind of excited by the idea of CG animation breaking into prime-time.

The premise seemed a bit like a reboot ripoff but the characters looked like they might be interesting enough, and if it had as much madcap humor as it was touting it might have done well.

Amazingly, the Times Square billboard seems to have outlasted the series by a couple of months. Imagine the advertising cost of getting that thing up there, and then the face they're losing for every person who goes looking for the show only to find it gone. Case in point, I was going to blog here about the "New show" and instead I'm highlighting UPN's idiocy.

It seems that if you're going to put something like a TV show on your network, you have two choices. Either decide that it is brilliant and then stand by it, waiting through the inevitable low ratings until people warm up to the show, or decide that it is crap and can it. Somehow the network exec's are missing this entirely, canceling good shows and endlessly plying new crap on us each season to see if we miraculously like some of the drek.

11:33 pm | permalink | /technology/tv | 0 writebacks |

Covet

I'm generally not one to let my technolust drive my purchases.

I've got a 1.4ghz PC, and that's just fine.

Ancient ATI 128 Graphics board? Works for me.

15" 1024x768 monitor...Hang on a minute.

I've been working on an LCD generously bartered from my old place of work, since we live on the 3rd floor, right next to the power lines, and their 60Hz magnetic interference, which screws up all CRTs. The problem is, this thing is such a postage stamp that I'm limited to working in 1024, where I can't see anything but the window I'm working on, and forget doing anything like art or video editing on it. I can't see the images under my tools!

Now I find myself drooling over this:
The Ultimate LCD : Samsung's 240T 24 Inch Wide-screen Display

24 inches of 1900 x 1200 wide-screen bliss. Wow.

I'm going to need to get myself a "decent but fairly cheap" flatpanel pretty soon, or I might do something rash... Hmm... Maybe just another 15" for dual monitor.

1:23 pm | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 2 writebacks |

Who's the Girl in the Beagle.24 Virus Messages

Beagle.24 (aka WORM_BAGLE.X) is still running rampant on a few systems, and has spammed our directors account with some very heavily socially engineered emails designed to lure lonely computer geeks into clicking.

The address is also forged to look like it's coming from inside our machine, and with no SPF (or Microsoft CallerID) patch from M$, we're stuck getting these. We're going to have to check out the open source spf exchange plugin soon if this gets any worse.

Check out how creepy these emails are. I know quite a few people who might click on something like this if they thought for a minute it was real.

My big question: who are these poor girls that have ended up all over the internet, in a virus email no less! How bad would that suck to have someone you know get this thing if it was you?

12:22 pm | permalink | /technology/microsoft | 0 writebacks |

Harry Potter 3 Game is Out Today

The Prisoner of Azkaban PS2 game is out today, and we'll either be renting it or buying it soon. Sara and I both thoroughly enjoyed playing through Harry Potter 2 on the PS2; the puzzles were interesting and fun, and the action thankfully errs on the side of being too easy, giving you just enough challenge while not burning you out because you're stuck for hours. Sara rarely hands me the controller in exasperation while playing this series.

The games steal a lot from other 3rd person titles like Tomb Raider, Tenchu, and Metal Gear, but in doing so mix up the game play enough that you're entertained throughout, whereas you can tire easily of just creeping around all the time, or just blasting stuff while you run.

The new installment is getting decent reviews, and seems to be similar in play to the first two, although you can play as Ron and Hermione in this one, and there are more side games. New to this edition are 2 player mini-games like dueling club and "Flying Seahorse Fishing." For owners of the Eye-toy, there's also a set of HP themed games which you can play with up to 4 friends.

9:56 am | permalink | /technology/games | 0 writebacks |

You've got Degrassi and Rosco at 8 - The N Has Got It.

The N is starting up it's summer schedule this week, with new episodes of many shows, including "Degrassi - The Next Generation." Nearly everyone who knows us has heard us sing the praises of this cheesy little TV show as being the new "My So Called Life," the holy grail of Teen Dramas. Ironically, The N has also started running My So Called Life, you can compare and contrast the two.

They're running "every episode ever" all week, with season four starting this friday at 8, 10, and 12.

Unfortunately most of America won't get to see the show as it's running on Canadian TV and exclusively on The N here in the states which is generally only included in Digital Cable lineups. Known as "Noggin'" during the day, The N (the-n.com) is a new breed of cable station, pulling in a highly specialized programming schedule to appeal to a very tight demographic. Amazingly, they have yet to (and hopefully never will) leverage that marketing pull, choosing instead to only show station-branding commercials and fun little in-betweeners. We originally started watching for the Daria reruns, and got pulled in by their other shows.

If you're not up to date on the show and have some time to kill, watch the marathon this week, and then tune in for the new episode. Call me a dork, but I've been waiting all winter! Bring it on!

1:56 pm | permalink | /technology/tv | 0 writebacks |

The HP3 Buzz Picks Up

Well, it looks like the general critics (not just the J. K. Rowling fans) are getting behind the new Harry Potter movie.

I've long been a extoller of the fact that the Potter books aren't simply about magic and mystery. These are books about dealing with all the human feelings and tendencies we wrestle with - loneliness, anger, selfishness, and power - while trying to become a good and just person in spite of the not-so-good things you're feeling. Magic in Rowling's world is in many ways a tangible expression of those internal battles each of us face.

Harry's eventual acceptance of all aspects of his personality, good and bad, is the one over-arching theme of her books from the sorting-hat scene in book 1 on. It seems that the new director, Alfonso Cuaron, has zeroed in on the human story within the magic, and his movie may put the Potter films on the map for audiences well outside of Rowling's devoted readership.

Check out the first (NDA breaking?) review online here or check out The Leaky Cauldron for lots more daily news updates.

1:39 am | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

HowTo: Close Tabs in Firefox with a Middle Click on Linux

This simple little fix saved me a lot of headaches on Linux.

When using Firefox on windows, you open an close tabs with a simple middle click. Once you try it, you'll never go back to regular browsing again.

On Linux, Firefox inherits the default "middleclick" action from the desktop environment for all actions. When you middle-click on the tabs, instead of closing, the "contentLoadURL" action is invoked, causing mild chaos.

To make Firefox behave like it does on Win32, simply go to the advanced options page by entering "about:config" in the URL bar in Firefox.

You'll see more options than you know what to do with. Don't panic. Simply type "middle" in the "Filter" bar under your tabs. Now change middleclick.contentLoadURL to false.

That's it. The tabs should now work just as they do on Windows, closing when you middle click on them, and making your life easy!.

12:36 am | permalink | /technology/linux | 0 writebacks |

Fedora Core 2: Works for me

Many people are bashing Fedora Core 2 (the newest bastard stepchild of Red Hat 9) for having some pretty grievous errors for a full release.

As was the case with Windows ME (hey, it worked great when it didn't break! In fact, it's still running perfectly on some older machines under my watch) I'm going to go against the majority here and sing the praises of this little "community" effort.

See more ...

12:22 am | permalink | /technology/linux | 0 writebacks |

Incoming From Google! Angry Water Slide Owners.

Over the last week, my logs have shown an influx of hundreds of people from google.com researching the Six Flags Banzai Falls Water Slide and coming across my pithy article. It appears the oversized inflatable Slip N' Slide is showing signs of suckage, and random net-dwellers are flocking here to see what I had to say about it.

Poster Lisa Cox writes:

I have had to replace the Banzai waterslide twice now. The 1st time was for a minor hole. The 2nd was a dangerous blowout that my 9 yr. old had when she went down the slide and hit the bottom of the slide. The whole bottom blew out and deflated the slide while my 4 yr. old was waiting at the top! This slide needs to be 3-4 ft. longer at the bottom and needs to be put together a little better than a string of single line stictches. The force that you come down the slide with can only withstand so much! Now I have very upset children and no slide!

Not quite the "older kids with pointy sticks" I predicted, but it appears that this overpriced fun-nugget is causing quite a stir. Any other googlers have similar problems? Perhaps the slide is due for a recall.

12:52 am | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 4 writebacks |

Setting Up a Staging Site for Blosxom

I use the Blosxom blog-engine here at GlitchNYC both for its simplicity and its flexibilty.

The core system is super-simple: just put a file in a directory (say for example ~/blog/politics/) and it will show up on your front page. Eventually, it will get pushed down the page by newer articles, but is still accessible by topic (in the example above, the article was in the politics directory - that also becomes its category online). You can also access old articles by month or year, going back through the archives using the calendar plugin which you can see on my site.

In the wake of the recent Movable Type price hikes, I'm glad to be using an open source system, and I love being able to tweak the innards of blosxom myself.

Recently, I was griping about the fact that I will often post an article filled with typos, broken links, and missing images, simply because I can't see the article until I make it live. It turns out that Blosxom is so simple I only had to make a few minor changes to set up a little staging site.

See more ...

12:08 am | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 0 writebacks |

Support FireFox

My inner geek is screaming out the need to buy this shirt. My love for FireFox is multifaceted.

First, I love the fact that it's open source.

Second, I love the fact that it kicks the Microsoft equivalent, Internet Explorer's, ass. How did I ever live without tabbed browsing?

Finally, I think the artwork, both in the default theme for FireFox and in this logo, are both slick and superb.

If only the logo was just a tad smaller, I would already own this shirt, and I'd be showing my support all over Manhattan.

Watch as my sensible self and inner-geek do battle! Will I buy the shirt out of support, or will I make a donation and spare my wardrobe.

11:37 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Ten Kay Commotion

Lots to write about as I've largely taken the last week off due to Jon's visit from California but work beckons so it will have to wait. In the mean time, feast your eyes on this (no so) little webcomic The 10k Commotion.com

I started reading this back when it was just starting up, and decided to check on it today - it's moving along quite nicely. The art is slick enough to be very readable, and the original watercolor style is as easy on the eyes as it is practical.

The comic itself follows various teams of DDR players as they posture, play mind games, and eventually compete for $10,000 in an all out DDR championship.

It's funny to see how this game is finally taking the US by storm as it did in Hong Kong years ago when Kurosh brought us over the first set of pads and the HK Silver of DDR1 for playstaion. I spent a few years of my life with seriously over-developed calves due to that game!

1:07 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Double Posted

Arg - my site is syndicated on LiveJournal through a "feed" and gets picked up roughly once an our. This generally leaves me a window to throw a piece up, edit it, and have the edited, complete version be the one that gets aggregated.

Tonight, I got smited by the gods of fate, and my Mame piece went out to the Friends lists without pictures, with typos, and will now be double posted when the aggregator hits my site again. Grrr. I need to set up a "Staging" site where I test out articles before they go live.

10:11 pm | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 1 writebacks |

Nostalgia Gaming

Joust - Donkey Kong - Pac Man - Centipede - Galaga - Bad Dudes - Street Figher. These were the games that defined our youth, played endlessly in arcades and pizza shops while we waited for the adults to do whatever it was they did, on our Colecovisions and our Atari twenty-six and fifty-two hundreds.

I've grown out of videogames. In all honestly, I haven't sat down and played an entire game by myself since beating the crap out of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night over 6 years ago. Sure, I've had little affairs with games since, but they're always been too fast and un-centered, for lack of a better word, for me to enjoy. Games with a 3D camera make me alternately frustrated and dizzy, and it's near to impossible to find a game without one anymore. I don't really care how realistic the lighting or the bump-mapping looks, beyond a geeky curiosity, and I don't need a Hollywood budget or plot. To me, the best games are the ones that, in the words of my "Othello" box, take a minute to learn, and a lifetime to master.

To find the games that I really enjoyed playing for any amount of time, it was time to stop waiting for the next great first person shooter, and start looking backward.

See more ...

9:59 pm | permalink | /technology/games | 1 writebacks |

Conspiracy Proof 2: Report: Rumsfeld approved operation that led to Iraqi prisoner abuse

Two major indications in one day point to the now all-too-real possibility that my conspiracy theory was anything but crackpot.

I just saw this on the front of google news - Report: Rumsfeld approved operation that led to Iraqi prisoner abuse

The New Yorker will run this story MONDAY - two days from now.

Read the theory. It's suddenly not that off the wall.

10:53 pm | permalink | /life/politics | 0 writebacks |

Conspiracy Proof 1: Powell: If asked, U.S. will leave Iraq

Well, 3 days after posting my conspiracy theory, history has taken a MAJOR step in the direction I suggested in the piece.

From the Washington Post: Colin Powell "said yesterday that if the incoming Iraqi interim government ordered the departure of foreign troops after June 30, they would pack up without protest, but emphasized he doubted such a request would be made"

Read the rest of the article here

If you haven't read my theory/story yet, give it a look. This gets creepier by the day. What do you think - am I off my rocker, or is it more likely than it seems?

12:28 pm | permalink | /life/politics | 0 writebacks |

Pathetic Geek Stories

I just read through a funny and poignant webcomic chronicling the trouble with growing up as a geek. The cartoonist draws from her own experiences as a basis for the tone of the comics, but each individual comic is taken from a story submitted by the readers. She's been doing it for over 10 years. Some of these ring really true.

PatheticGeekStories.com

Stolen from 8bitJoystick.com, another site which has made my daily-read list.

11:59 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 1 writebacks |

(Alternate?) Bush Reality

I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but I've been watching this one brew for almost a year and a half, and it's time to put pen to paper and get it down so that when it comes to pass (as keeps continuing to do) I can say "see, I'm not crazy" and have proof.

Well, maybe not proof, but at least other people will have shared my crazy notions with me.

What follows is, as far as I know, an entirely fictional work based upon current events and the possible actions which led up to them. Let's hope I'm wrong and it stays that way.

July 25, 2003

XXXXXXXXXX Golf Course, XXXXXXX, FL

"So, you're telling me..." The President begins, as he lines up his shot. He's deep in the rough of the 3rd hole. "What you're saying to me is that..." SssshWHACK! The President hacks down a chunk of grass and sends his ball popping back up onto the fairway. "Is that there's absolutely no way out." The President hands his club to his man, taking a towel. He looks towards the high sun, and wipes his sweat covered brow. "I tell ya, I don't know how Jeb does it. Too damn humid for me... 4 Iron" He says, taking the club as it is offered by his assistant and walking towards his ball, away from a very severe looking Donald Rumsfeld.

"What I'm saying, Mr. President, is that we have a problem"

"Well no shit we have a problem - that's what this whole mess is about." The President says, stopping his game for a moment and leaning his weight on the top of his 4 iron. He looks Rumsfeld straight in the eye. "Let's go through this again, piece by piece. We've got to be missing something."

See more ...

2:45 am | permalink | /life/politics | 0 writebacks |

Troubleshooting Linux: Don't forget the obvious

Well I've been pulling my hair out for the past week or so trying to figure out what the heck was wrong with my little MythTV DVR box. I've been getting more and more crashes lately, which I assumed was due to some package incompatibility caused by my incessant "apt-get dist-upgrade" commands that I've been throwing at it in an attempt to keep current. I'd also had the misfortune of allowing my primary HD to fill up while installing packages, which may have corrupted my RPM database.

Last weekend, I did a full fsck (file system check) to make sure the HD was good. Everything checked out OK. Preparing for the worst, I dumped my mysql database out to the HD as an SQL file - or at least, I tried to.

Segmentation fault

See more ...

12:16 am | permalink | /technology/linux | 0 writebacks |

Super Size Me

What would make a grown, intelligent New Yorker with a vegan girlfriend eat McDonalds 3 meals a day, every day, for a month?

A great movie concept, that's what.

Morgan Spurlock, the producer, director, and star of the new independent film, Super Size Me went through that exact ordeal to make a point, and boy, And by the end of the movie, with three doctors and a nutritionist who were originally optimistic about the project telling him to cut it the hell out, does he ever make one.

What seems at first to be nothing more than a documentary based on ideas like those at TheSpark.com turns out to be a poignant, funny epic that makes some very good points.

See more ...

1:38 pm | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

If A. N. Roquelaure Re-Wrote the Wizard of Oz

If A. N. Roquelaure had chosen Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz," which is itself a rather dark tale in its original (non-movie) form, rather than Sleeping Beauty, one imagines it would look something like this.

McFarlane's Twisted Land of Oz - a relatively new toy line with accompanying mini-books is obviously NOT your average toy, and is a direct result of The OZ tales falling into the public domain. It almost makes you understand why Disney's lawyers and lobbyists are fighing so hard to keep the mouse from going down the same dark path. Can you imagine Mickey and Minnie McFarlane style? Ew.

I just happened to be reading Baum's original The Wizard of Oz at the moment, and let me tell you, this depiction, while differing in some obvious ways with its overt sexuality, is no darker than the version Baum penned. In Baum's version, the Tinman begins as a man, and is slowly replaced piece by piece as his axe, which was cursed by the Wicked Witch, cuts of each of his limbs in a series of "accidents."

Dorthy and the Cowardly lion are captured and kept as slaves by the Wicked witch while the Tinman and Scarecrow are dashed to pieces by the Flying Monkeys, and the upon entering the Emerald City, green spectacles are locked onto your head, which you cannot remove.

This was some twisted stuff for 1900. I'd actually wager that Baum's writing was more controversial then than these toys are now. The only thing I wish was that I could get my hands on the new Twisted Oz story without buying the toys. Anyone know if it's available online anywhere?

In the meantime, you can read all the original Baum books over at Project Gutenberg

2:31 am | permalink | /life | 3 writebacks |

How to Force an Fsck on the Next Reboot

Continuing on my current run of Linux Tech pieces:

I recently needed to do a full filesystem check on my MythTV DVR box, as it was behaving strangely. Doing this from the command line is fairly hard, as you have to switch runlevels and then unmount your drives.

It's also almost impossible to do remotely, as SSH will shutdown when you switch to single user mode.

As a solution, you can reboot and force the check as it comes back online. to do this, run the following:

When it comes back up, it should be clean! That is, of course, unless it finds problems and needs user interaction. Then you're SOL. There's got to be a better way to do this.

Stolen from perturb.org

1:22 pm | permalink | /technology/linux | 0 writebacks |

Messenger Spam is Evil

Wow, I'm out of touch with every day users. I've been running on properly firewalled network now since the summer of 98' and on Linux for over a year now. Consequently, I completely missed one of the nastyest side effects of having your computer plugged straight into the Internet.

If you've got a WinNT/2k/XP machine and aren't behind a firewall, you'll be barraged by so called "Messenger Spam" which pops up real looking windows message boxes as if they were coming from a system administrator. This is because they use the same exact interface as admins would use inside a private network. Yes, I know this is old news, but I'm just catching now as I work on a friend's PC which is, *gasp*, out on the net without a firewall. (Yes I'll be fixing that too, don't worry.)

The idea is simple, I just can't believe Microsoft left this glaring a hole in their product. You should at least have to be authenticated to the same domain to send a message like this. Ug.

Anyway, the fix is easy - just disable the "messenger" service. (not to be confused with Windows Messenger, which is another ball of wax entirely with it's own bugs and spam). To disable the service, just go into the services console in "Administrative tools" and change the messenger service from "Automatic" to "Disable" and then right click and stop the service.

Oh yeah, while you're at it, you'll probably want to update to keep out nasties like the new sasser worm.

1:52 pm | permalink | /technology/microsoft | 0 writebacks |

Using the screen Command with SSH

I've been using SSH for years to connect to various Linux boxes; first just this web server, now also my home PC and MythTV DVR box.

If you don't have any Linux experience, think of it like this: the Linux command line is much like the DOS box in windows.

You can run all sorts of programs from it, edit files, administer your system, and so on, but it can seem a bit clunky if you don't know what the commands are.

4 years after starting with Linux I'm still learning them because there are literally thousands.

The cool thing is, using SSH I can connect to that command prompt from anywhere on the net. I use Putty on windows (free!), and there's tons of other cool tricks you can do like tunneling ports through firewalls and more, but I won't get into that here.

The only problem is that often when you close that SSH window your session ends and the programs you were running die. If I'm running a long or complicated update, a bittorrent download, or even serving DCC files on IRC using bitchx, I needed a way to connect, start a program and then "disconnect" without shutting my session down.

I could of course use VNC to connect to the GUI on the machine, but this often fires up another session of KDE and I'm still locked out of my main desktop. It's also a bit bandwidth heavy. X0rfb is beginning to fill this gap by allowing you to connect to your desktop "Remote Desktop" style, but it's not really standard and a bit complicated to get working.

Enter screen.

See more ...

1:32 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 3 writebacks |

DangerDame.com Mixes Fantastic Photography with 50's "bad girl" Fashion

Well, they don't make guy's clothes so I'm out of luck, but holy crap if these aren't some of the better designs I've seen mixed with some really awesome photography on a lot of levels.

I know a lot of girls who would kill for some of these duds.

At the moment, the real roots of the site are a bit murky, but from what I can work out, Veronica Varlow is making the designs, appears in most of the artwork, and ships the damn stuff herself, e-bay style.

She also seems to be in the NYC Metro area somewhere, with a 718 number on the site. So here lies the mystery: Who is Veronica Varlow?

It seems she is also involved in the movie Revolver - another project shrouded in secrecy.

Starving artist or the next Bettie Page, just waiting to hit the limelight at the right time? Any thoughts?

UPDATE: Arden caught the earlier error where Bettie Page was misplelled "Betty Paige," saying quite humourosly (and correctly) "You, of ALL people, should know that one." That's what I get for trusting google results when looking up spelling!

She also points to the site Bettiepage.com ...for additional insights into the original "Queen of Kink."

1:17 pm | permalink | /life/freak/garb | 0 writebacks |

The Revenge of Joust

In "researching and implementing" (read: goofing off with) Mame for an upcoming article, I discovered Karl Farh's Ridiculously Complete Joust Strategy Page It's a brilliant read and pretty much sums up everything I could say.

It was only later that I realized just how bizarre the world of Joust is. Player 1 is riding a giant ostrich, and player 2 is mounted on a great stork. The enemy jousters are all sitting pretty on big green buzzards. Stone islands appear and disappear in the sky, acting as obstacles one second and cover in the next. Opponents turn into eggs when defeated, which hatch into even more lethal opponents unless picked up. Inspiration? or madness?

Check out Karl's page and relive the old-school glory!

12:23 am | permalink | /technology/games | 1 writebacks |

The Inflatable Future

Mass producers are realizing that you don't have to use conventional construction everywhere you would expect. Suddenly inflatable pools are all the rage and the Slip N' Slide, deemed too dangerous (after the grisly grass shredding of too many Slip N' Slider's nipples), has been replaced by this:

The Six Flags Banzai Falls Water Slide. Why the crap is everything cooler nowadays. This thing just looks awesome - imagine playing on that when you were 10. Your house would be the coolest one on the street. Until that older kid who's family was too poor (or sensible) to shell out the $250 for one started whacking at it with a pointed stick.

11:39 pm | permalink | /life | 10 writebacks |

Pinging Technorati from Your Blosxom Blog

Technorati is quickly becoming one of the best ways to track what blogs are linking to eachother, which news items are being talked about the most, and who is linking to your blog.

Telling Technorati that you've updated your blog is fairly simple, and there's a multitude of ways to do it, from filling out a simple web form each time you update to using the XML-RPC API they provide to automatically "ping" the site.

This is already set up for users of LiveJournal and other popular blogging havens, but the "blosxom setup" section has been woefully empty since technorati came back online a few weeks ago. I finally decided it was time to "put up or shut up" and figured it out myself.

See more ...

1:52 am | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 0 writebacks |

Lex - Chapter 2

This is the rewrite of Chapter 2 of "Lex" - bound together from the vignettes I posted here while writing with some significant clarifications, additions and subtractions.

Once again, fair warning - depending on your definition, these may not be work-safe. Don't read if you or your boss is made squeamish by R->NC17 rated material. This story is going to be as gritty, vulgar, sexy, and real as I can make my twisted version the 25th century come across.

Chapter 1 (pdf)

Chapter 2

I awoke cradled in my new stripwear, comfortably nestled in its many arms, just outside the gigantic shining surface of the outside of a city node.

It's amazing how wakings can be so symbolic of change. I'd awoken twice now in unfamiliar settings in the outcity - both times in situations so far different from the staid life I'd lived until so recently. First inside the sleek, silver mobile doctor, feeling rebellious and anxious, and now here, in the waving grass and sun and wind of the wild, feeling calmer than I'd ever remembered feeling.

I began to rise, and the stripwear languidly gathered itself back around me, matching my slow, sleepy movements. I rubbed my eyes, and then my naked scalp, wondering idly when I'd dosed off. The last thing I really remembered was my guide taking me over the edge, and then... It was a blank to me. I chalked it up to my exhaustion, and the relief at the completion of my task. Both my guide and I were free of the Citiverse. Free, and permanently self-exiled.

See more ...

11:09 pm | permalink | /fiction/lex | 0 writebacks |

Yup, this about sums it up.

http://www.JohnKerryIsADoucheBagButImVotingForHimAnyway.com

Stolen from lvx23

5:44 pm | permalink | /life/politics | 0 writebacks |

Bush on Broadband

G.W. was all over the news declaring his new initiative to bring "Broadband to The People" today.

This is my reaction.

Download this image as SVG line art

Like everything else on my site, this is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, so feel free to distribute, modify, and use this image as you see fit, provided you link back to the site and that your own work is released under the same license.

Think it could use a little tweaking? Want to use the image of Bush for a zinger you've got in your head?

Go for it.

Sodipodi is a great, free tool for manipulating SVG files (just save often!)

I'd love to see a collaborative effort to create open licensed political cartooning come together. Political cartoons encourage thought and spark debate - it'd be wonderful if the tools to create them were one step closer to the politically, but not necessarily artistically, inclined.

12:32 am | permalink | /life/politics | 0 writebacks |

A Different Theory on Why People Stop Sharing Music

The net is teeming tonight with articles about a new survey that seems to indicate that the RIAA's "shock and awe" lawsuit campaign worked - one in seven Adults say that they are no longer sharing music now that individual file sharers are being prosecuted.

While this seems like a victory to some, I want to offer an alternate theory as to why many have given up the online music sharing addiction.

They've already got the music.

File sharing is game. In the first week, you accumulate 99 percent of the music you already own and want to listen to in mp3 format, easily accessible on your computer, IPod, or what-have-you. Beyond that, you probably pick up a few more artists that you have heard of and give them a listen.

Week two hits, and you're stuck. You have this NEED to horde more music, but you don't know what to get, so you're downloading whole genres and serving it back up, searching for long lost tunes, and downloading other sharer's whole collections.

This turns into a compulsion and before you know it you've filled your hard drive with gobs of music you'll never have the time to sort, let alone listen to.

Sure, RIAA ran some of these people off, but they didn't scare them away from the tunes, they gave them an excuse to step away from their compulsion.

Besides, they already had the music.

9:12 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Super Metroid Remix

I got a strange musical craving last Friday and never really expected to find what I was looking for: I wanted to hear the theme from Metroid, but done right.

OCRemix to the rescue! After about 5 minutes, I was eardrum-deep in an ambient techno, beat-driven remix of the Super Metroid soundtrack, collaboratively composed as both standalone tracks and as a whole, cohesive album.

I've listened to the album through a few times now, and I'll be damned if this isn't a pro-quality composition in an of itself besides being an homage to one of the best games of all time. When the new John Woo Metroid Movie comes out, they damn well better take come lessons from this crew.

Download the full album as .ogg (Like mp3, but more free. Don't worry: you can listen to them in Winamp.)

10:48 am | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Booted Up

Okay - My last pair of boots didn't go so well. Compared to the glowing accounts of most Doc Martens, my pair was flimsy, soft leathered, and slippery. I beat the hell out of them in about 6 months, and wore them for a total of 9.

I've just gotten a new pair, complete with extra stiff thick leather, steel toes, a thicker black sole, and more eyes. Lets see if I can ruin these.

8:22 am | permalink | /life/freak/garb | 0 writebacks |

Netting Kristen Orlando Bloom

Christin was posting today about how she could get her friend Kristen married to Orland Bloom. It occurred to me that she would need direct access to at least one celebrity, which she has!

So, in light of the fact that Christin has access to Whoopi, I did some creative "six degrees" work and crafted a plan which could actually work.

(Ripped from my comments on Christin's blog)

Remember that invitation to a Whoopi party you got on your cell phone twice before? Here is how it will work!

C goes to a Whoopi Goldberg Party, cleverly disguised as Christin (Hey, they did ask for Christin when they called didn't they? It wouldn't even be a lie!) At said party, she meets Demi Moore, who was in Ghost with Whoopi Goldberg

Hearing her funny "Christin but not Christin" tale, Demi Invites C to an LA party, where she meets Viggo Mortensen who was in GI Jane with Demi.

Viggo, who loves to play vaguely homo-erotic pranks on Orlando after 2 years of hanging out in New Zealand playing make-believe together agrees to stage a kidnapping on the set of Pirates of the Caribbean 2, which is shooting off the coast of Florida.

C, K, + Viggo sneak onto the set, kidnap Orlando, tie him up, put him in the trunk (for all of which he seems strangely willing, and keeps laughing) and the rest, as they say, is history.

What? It could work!

3:01 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Life's Minutia Through Sci-Fi Lenses

While out on my run tonight, I was struck by some incredible imagery, and this short story began to weave itself in my head. This is a work of non-fiction, but it's written in the style of my Sci-Fi prose.

Taking the daily details of 2004 and putting them to text would give any vision of the future from the seventies or eighties a serious run for its money. It's amazing what comes down the pike without any of us really seeing it coming.

See more ...

1:35 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

The First Real Hurdle

I haven't run in 10 days.

I ran for 4 weeks solid - perfectly, not missing a day. I felt great, I kept doing it, and everything was going perfectly. Week 5 hit, and I got sick. Really, down and out, nastily sick. Knowing you're not supposed to run like that, I decided to take some time off. That time turned into a week.

See more ...

11:09 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Crazy Bush Quote Poem

Dear god I hate forwards, but I appreciated this one enough to post here, and it's relevant to my earlier post about G.W.B. This poem is made up entirely of quotes from our President, completely verified by Snopes.com

MAKE THE PIE HIGHER

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
And potential mental losses.

Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the Internet become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?

They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
I know that the human being and the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope, where our wings take dream.

Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher!

4:34 pm | permalink | /life/politics | 0 writebacks |

I've Figured out How Bush is Surviving all the Bad Press

Well, it seems G.W.'s poll numbers have held steady and are maybe even climbing, and everyone at this point is screaming "how in the hell?"

It seems pretty simple to me - if you already hated him, well, this just confirms it. If you were one of those people who was saying "He's not that dumb" back when he was still working on how to pronounce Afghanistan, this whole "Plotting the Iraq War" has you saying "You see? We told ya he knew how to plan!"

10:59 am | permalink | /life/politics | 0 writebacks |

Now I have to change my password

Well, I guess I have to change my password on my server at home. Crap.

Due to the ease of cracking passwords based on dictionary words, I have taken lately to finding easy-to-remember things from movies, novels, and the like and incorporating them into my passwords. Okay, so maybe I also got a kick out of using roughly the same password scheme as Dumbledore while maintaining decent security.

I kind of thought this was a good one, as it was just an obscure candy from the J.K.Rowling's world and "whizbee" certainly met the "not in dictionary" requirements. Now it's all over a nationally marketed candy.

Ahh well - I'll just have to dig through my memory and see if I can come up with another good one. I'm loathe to use some sort of generated password like K309s~lsOK# or some such nonsense. I'll never be able to remember it.

2:11 am | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

recommend to me...

1) a movie

2) a book or magazine or something else to read

3) a musical artist, song, or album

4) a LiveJournal user not on my friends list

5) a website

6) a comic

7) a game

8) a gadget or toy

9) a food, concoction, or cooked dish

10) a pretty or a shiny

Post your replies as a comment, then put this in your own journal.

Stolen from Christin

See more ...

12:14 am | permalink | /technology/web | 5 writebacks |

The Sunday Stew Is Back.

MTV is bringing back the Sunday Stew.

Wildboyz - Viva La Bam - Punk'd - Needless to say, we're excited.

11:02 pm | permalink | /technology/tv | 0 writebacks |

Note to Self:

There's no undelete in linux.

10:43 pm | permalink | /technology/linux | 1 writebacks |

Misused Word of the Day

I define 99% of the words I know through context.

You see, I have this horrible, swiss cheese memory for details, but abstract concepts, definitions, and the like tend to stick like glue. This came in very handy on the SATs - even though I couldn't write you out a proper definition of each vocab word, I could think of a sentence or situation where it could be used and infer the context well enough to make an educated guess.

Unfortunately, this can lead to trouble, as words don't often mean exactly what you expect them to given the context. I will, sometimes, hear a word used, assume the meaning from the context, and then store it away. The word gets pulled out later, for better or worse, using that same context-inferred definition.

The resulting malapropisms are occasionally hilarious (and, you know, mortally embarrassing.)

Well, one of my good friends called me out on this one the other day, and I have to admit, I was caught completely unaware.

See more ...

1:13 am | permalink | /life | 1 writebacks |

Business Unusual

As the bomb scare finished and traffic began to flow back up 8th ave, there was a general feeling of "it never happened." The city went back to working as it does, traffic resumed its frantic, honking pace, and we all slowly returned to work.

Just then, an announcement came over the loudspeaker from the building super, in some sort of eastern european accent.

"This is building managment! All clear, business unusual..." (ruffling, mumbling heard in the background) "... Uh, umm. Normal business is resumed"

I've put up some more pictures from Rey, and cropped up some of Tate's gigantic 5 megapixel ones, including some of the one-man bomb-squad.

4:37 pm | permalink | /life/nyc | 0 writebacks |

Pictures uploading - bomb scare just a scare?

Well, it seems they're letting people through.

Funniest moment: they start letting people through, and Tate, hanging out my window taking these pictures, goes "oh boo! Boooooohhhh!"

1:54 pm | permalink | /life/nyc | 1 writebacks |

Live From the Bomb Scare

Well, my friend Josh is late for his interview here at Common Ground, and we know why! You can't get in or out of our building right now due to a bomb scare right across the street!

I was just out there getting pizza while they were closing the block. Weird.

Right now, 8th is closed from 34th to 36th, and there's a bag by a white van in the center of the 2 block police barricade. I'll post pictures and more news as it occurs.

1:36 pm | permalink | /life/nyc | 0 writebacks |

A Note to the Many Friends in Limbo.

Hey there - Welcome to your quarter-life crisis; my name is William, I'll be your guide.

"Who the hell is William?"

"I don't know, seems like a name he's just made up - just shut up and roll with it."

"Oh,... okey... But it's obviously Eric."

"OH Great. Ruin the surprise for everybody, will you just shut yer yap?!?"

"ak.... srry."

As I was saying, my name is William, and I will be your tour-guide through this personal hell known as the quarter-life crisis.

The lesser known, bitchy little sister of the mid-life crisis, the quarter-life crisis has become something of a phenomenon in the last decade as the baby boom-let (babies of the baby boomers) have finished school rife with world changing ideas, massive potential, and then found themselves doing..., well, just about fuck-all.

See more ...

10:00 am | permalink | /life | 1 writebacks |

The New Instant Messaging Battlefront

Anyone who was played a MMORPG while being online (which is, you know, the whole freaking point), knows that it's often a pain to IM while you're in the game. Either you have to relentlessly alt-tab, or you have to just live in the game-world or the real(online)-world.

The new Matrix MMORPG seems to be addressing this by embedding a mechanism for interfacing with AOL IM right in the game. This is brilliant, and a master move for AOL. The more games they can get to "License" their technology, the more users they will get to switch to their platform.

The sticking point is this - If Microsoft were to pull this with PC versions of their X-Box live titles, every anti-trust watchdog would be crying foul, saying that their monopoly was allowing them to leverage games to drive users to their Messenger service. AOL can get away with it because they're just giving the game makers a way to build it in, not doing it themselves.

Genius

1:26 am | permalink | /technology/games | 0 writebacks |

Windtunnel meme and 23 Skidoo

There's a bit of a meme going around discussing the windtunnel effect that skyscrapers create and the debris which flew off one of the buildings under construction in NYC this week. Brian W, posting in the comments on Gothamist brought up this little bit of history which I thought was facinating, seeing as the Prince George, one of Common Ground's buildings, is right near the Flatiron Building, mentioned below.

See more ...

12:37 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Anyone Else Notice The Doc Ock / Elton John Link?

I think Elton should have done the new movie. The big question is who stole who's look. Too bad there wasn't an internet back when Doc Ock first appeared for me to search. Anyway, decide for yourself.

3:31 pm | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

It's going to be a good summer for movies

Wow. Just watched the trailer for Spiderman 2, and it's going to be freaking awesome.

The trailer is subject to some of the problems that the Hulk's trailer was - you can tell that they haven't put the final touches on the CG yet and it sometimes looks cartoonish. The good news is that they did the first Spiderman incredibly well, and they've still got till June 30th to tighten down the lighting, compositing, and other final details before the actual release.

Seems like they're picking up right where they left off rather than just going with a new "Doc Ock" plot and ignoring the tension between Harry Osborne and Peter. I'm already excited.

Thankfully, they're only making us wait a few months this time. I think I saw the first Spiderman 1 trailer, the one with the WTC in it, a full year before the film came out.

As an aside, I'd just like to note the fact that it's classy of sony to allow downloading of the trailer rather than making you watch it in a plugin. Media players on Linux are awesome, but Firefox versions of those plugins have yet work for me. If I can download and play, awesome.

3:17 pm | permalink | /technology/film | 1 writebacks |

So if you play "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" with yourself, which does that make you?

Well, in the past few days I've given myself a new haircut, manscaped the sasquatch-ness that was my body, and thown away a full third of my wardrobe. I've basically played both roles in the "Queer Eye For The Straight Guy" show, and I don't really know what to make of that at the moment.

It's weird to throw out some of the old clothes - not really at this point because i'm going to miss them or even that there's any great sentimental connection. Tonight is more of a "holy crap... I wore that?" feeling.

On the bright side, there will be a very happy size 36 goth/freak kid at salvation army sometime next week. Some of these clothes I lived in for years, some of them I wore once or twice, but they're all in pretty passable condition, so I don't feel bad passing them off on the SA. I'm pretty comfortable that I'll never be pushing size 38 again, so it's time to let these go. I also feel pretty safe saying at this point that I don't know if I'll ever find myself in a black bowling shirt with leopard print faux fur stripe down the left panel again either.

Watch, 10 years from now, swing will be back *again* and that look will be hot. Too bad I don't have a gigantar closet.

Wait. I just pictured myself at 33 in said bowling shirt. The clothing purge tonight was a good thing.

8:11 am | permalink | /life | 3 writebacks |

Awesome Java Speedreader for Eastern Standard Tribe

I was checking my server logs, (as I sometimes obsessively do,) and noticed that my article about Remy and the growing impact of blogs on job-hunting had been picked up for its relevance to Eastern Standard Tribe. Of course, I surfed on over to see what all the hooplah was about, and noticed that my typo was intact in the excerpt! Ahh well, maybe people will really start referring to it as "the meatspace" now instead of just "meatspace" which is far more common. It had originally been "the real world" and I missed the "the" when going through for my final edit and adding the meatspace reference partially as a nod to C.D..

While there, I finally got to check out the Java Speedreader of EST. Holy crap if that thing doesn't kick some serious ass. This is the way I'd want to read just about every book if I could. I'm going to have to put together something like this for my daily use. I powered through his first chapter again in about 5 minutes using this thing. I've been a big fan of this concept ever since hearing about it as a speed-reading method, and had a feeling I'd be really comfortable with it as I spent several years of my adolescent life "reading" the TV by keeping closed captions on all the time. I figured it was more educational than just watching!

Anyway, we'll see how my little server handles being proxy-boingboinged. Thank god I didn't get linked from the main site, my poor box would have just fallen over!

6:27 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

The Trouble with Mohawks.

In retrospect, I think that the mohawk as a hairstyle in general works much better from the side and back than it does head on. I can't think of a better way to write this, so I'll let the image speak for itself.

In related news, I now am the proud owner of THE worst ID card ever. It's awesome. Depending on whether I can get to a scanner tomorrow, I may unleash its combination glory/horror on the world. We'll see...

1:48 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Me != Cool.

So, I was getting all excited about my 908 unique visitors last month and the fact that blogging in general, my job, my life, etc, were all going well.

By the time I stopped talking with my old friend Jason, I felt like I had some serious catching up to do! Holy crap has this kid been busy.

Just since I've talked to him last, he's done 3 things that are on my "must do before I die" checklist:

• Perform at Carnegie Hall
• Get Published in a Serious Tech Mag (online)
• Get Slashdotted for yet another article

He's always had an awesome edge by maintaining his status as a great MS beta tester, and it's certainly paying off now! Kudos to him!

12:48 am | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 0 writebacks |

The Clever Little Secret of Blogging

Something just occured to me while I was in the bathroom, much in the way that the flux capacitor came to Doc Brown, although I was spared the head injury and was allowed by the fates to substitue a massive bowel movement instead.

Bathroom humor aside, many times, blogs seem counter-intuitive to the the best interests of the blogger. Sure, they're fun to read for friends and family, and can sometimes build communities around them, but in general, employers frown upon the practice (especially if done during work hours), and they can be very personal yet are very much out in the open.

This is especially true when vying for employment. I can't think of any blogger I know that would willingly give out the address of their online journal to their potential boss. There's just too much real life in them - they aren't exactly putting your best foot forward. Imagine a conservative, critical hiring manager reading your recent hotheaded rant about the future of AI or going off on why you can't get any. It seems that anyone who HAS the jobs isn't going to be too keen about learning that type of information about a potential hire.

This is where the twist comes in.

See more ...

10:53 pm | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 4 writebacks |

The Geekout

I've just stumbled upon a little webcomic with a weird rhythm to it. It's not particularly 'funny' at the end of every strip, but it does have a certain something. I don't really know how to describe it - I guess it's kinda like a comic-blog. Anyway, take a look for yourself.

12:16 am | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Skipping a Week

Well, it's been a bit light on posts here at Glitchnyc.com and in my general corner of the blogosphere overall. I think quite a few of us have Icon at least partly to blame for this - who would have thought standing and sitting still in costumes could take so much out of you? I have a newfound respect for screen actors. There also seems to be a bit of "dead spring drag" which everyone is just sort of plodding through until it actually warms up and begins to act like pre-summer.

See more ...

12:03 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Funny New York Phrases

Gothamist linked to this page today when using the word metrotard to describe someone who can get their metrocard to work yet insists on trying, over and over, while you wait.

Big Mama'd is hillarious too: Big Mama'd (adjective): Being slowed on your exit from the subway by a large woman in front of you having trouble on the stairs.

Check out the rest of the terms here

12:26 am | permalink | /life/nyc | 0 writebacks |

Shot by Shot Comparison of Full HP3 Trailer

I decided to split this into a separate post because it's just so dang cool. The Leaky Cauldron has broken down the new trailer into 16 pages of frame-by-frame analysis, discussing the elements of the book each scene is drawn from. Fun stuff.

See a shot-by-shot comparison of trailer to book at the leaky cauldron.

1:32 am | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

Harry Potter's Time Has Come

I don't really recall the last time I was this excited about a movie before it came out. I know that I felt something like this while sitting in the theater watching X-Men, my heart beating fast, a feeling of excitement and apprehension in my chest.

As an almost rabid fan of the main X-Men characters and plot, I was very nervous what they would do to my beloved story. Would they cheez-ify it or water it down to make it more mass-audience palatable, or would they be true to the coming-of-age allegory of the X-Men? Would they make the discovery of each mutants powers something that you felt with them, or would it be stupid CG eyecandy? Most of all, would the characters be human, flawed and intricate and REAL?

If you've seen the first (and second, for that matter) X-Men, you know the answer to that question already. The movie was an incredible triumph, both for those of us that argued for the literate nature of the story, and for hollywood.

In contrast, the first Harry Potter movie was, I'll admit, dissapointing.

See more ...

12:58 am | permalink | /technology/film | 1 writebacks |

Petition to Save "Home Movies"

Sign the petition to save cartoon network's "Home Movies"

Sara and I have been recording "Home Movies" with MythTV since I finished the system around Christmas, and we both love the show. It's subtle and funny in a fantastically tongue-in-cheek way, and I'd put it up there, as many others have said, as one of the best shows on TV right now.

Anyway, online sentiment is increasingly becoming a potential sales barometer for corporate execs, and can sometimes make a difference, so this can't hurt.

1:12 am | permalink | /technology/tv | 1 writebacks |

Lex - Chapter 1

I've completed a re-write and edit of the beginning of the Lex vignettes series and bound it together as "chapter 1." Hopefully this is the start of a trend for me, as I have more than enough material for chapter 2 ready if I can just get my butt in the chair long enough to edit it together. I'm pretty happy with this re-write as I feel it gets many of the pieces of the plot which were obscure across much more clearly.

Once again, fair warning - depending on your definition, these may not be 'work safe.' Don't read if you or your boss is made squeamish by R->NC17 rated material. This story is going to be as gritty, vulgar, sexy, and real as I can make it.

My eyes opened to pure feedback.

Bright, stark, white.

It was that blinding type of white which washes out everything else. I brought my hand to my face, pure porcelain, as if the contrast on the world was up too high. I moved my slender fingers in front of my groggy eyes until I was able to make out the edges of my hand, slowly coming into focus before me.

Instinctively, I reached up to run my hands through my long black hair. The amplified sensation of my hand on my bare scalp woke me from the remaining haze of the quicksed which had put me out.

Read the rest here

11:59 pm | permalink | /fiction/lex | 0 writebacks |

Not to jump on the Friendster bashing bandwagon, but

This is just creepy

You have 29 1st degree friends, 666 2nd degree friends, and 22,553 3rd degree friends in your Personal Network.

Maybe Friendster IS really the work of satan afterall... Hmmmm.

Am I the only one that still thinks Friendster and YASNSes are neat? I'm getting back in touch with all sorts of people who I had lost the contact info for.

2:53 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

The Icon Experience: Final Fantasy

My Dad, of all people, is a Final Fantasy Nut.

Starting back with FF1 on the NES (anyone else remember the rainbow bridge off the first continent?), he's played most of the series, (and the Dragon Warrior Series before that,) but didn't really get addicted until FF7 came out.

He spent untold hours playing that game, and had the characters maxed out well before beating the end boss.

FF8 came out, and I barely played it, but he ate it up, spending almost a year playing through all of it's mini games and again maxing the characters out. 9 was a bit of a bust, with its drop back to the original settings and characters - it just didn't engage him as well, but 10... Ohhhh 10

Final Fantasy X has lead to several things: 1, I had to wrestle my PS2 back from my dad after loaning it to him "over spring break." 2, my Mom broke down and bought my dad his own PS2, and 3, my Dad has been playing Final Fantasy X-2 almost non-stop since christmas.

With that in mind, I give you the following picture set: Final Fantasy in Person!

See more ...

1:18 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

The 16 Weeks: 25% Done

Well, I've just completed 4 weeks of my 16-week running program. I don't really know when or how it happened, but my body has suddenly jumped enormously in the amount of physical exertion it can handle. I was scheduled to do my first 1 hour jog without walking yesterday, and really expected it to kick my butt - amazingly, rather than being dog-tired when I reached my door, I felt, for the first time, that running an actual marathon might be within my reach.

The scale is finally cooperating a bit as well; up until now, my increased appetite from the exertion has kept me either at the same weight or going up slightly. Now it seems that it may finally take a bit of a turn in the right direction. That would be nice after hitting the plateau of my current weight and being 'stuck' there for 1 1/2 years. I may finally meet my orig. WW goal of 165.

See more ...

12:05 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

The iCon Experience - Summary & First Thoughts

Well, I've got enough material to be blogging all week about this, but I wanted to jot down my first thoughts about ICON.

This was the first convention of any kind for me, so I was both excited and nervous about whether Sara and I would enjoy it, if it would be interesting, if people would be nice, etc...

3 Days later, I can safely say that we both had a blast, I've got a lot of great pictures and we're most certainly going back next year!

CAPTION: Joker & Rogue - both one of the first costumed couples we saw and also certainly one of the best. I pestered these two for pictures all weekend, and they were wonderful sports about it (they returned as Gambit & Rogue on sunday - Erik's Gambit was just as accurate as Lilith's Rogue) They were also, weirdly, in the hotel room right next to us. I felt really bad - they were locked out by a faulty door RIGHT before the masquerade ball, and it looked like they didn't get a chance to change into their Rogue & Gambit outfits for the actual contest. I'll talk more about the contest and the rest of the con in the coming posts this week.

2:03 am | permalink | /life | 1 writebacks |

Icon SF

Well, we're off to ICON

It's my first con, so I'm sure I'll have some unique experience. I don't know if I ever would have gotten the mojo to go on my own, so its cool that nepthys and mortalis are coming out for it. We get to see them AND do something fun and new.

I'll let you know how it all goes.

4:29 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

We Saw This Guy!

A few weeks ago, when visiting upstate, we saw a Mercedes driving around playing a video on FOUR SCREENS of his car while driving with no passengers.

I didn't see the video, but Sara was like "Was that what I think I just saw?" and my Dad just said "Yeah." Apparently, they booked him for doing it!

From CNN.com

A driver in Schenectady, New York, was arrested last month after rolling past police with a DVD titled "Chocolate Foam" playing on the passenger-side sun visor in his Mercedes-Benz, authorities said. The movie also was rolling on screens set into the car's headrests.

The driver was accused of breaking state laws prohibiting watching TV while driving, as well as another law making it illegal to exhibit sexually explicit material in a public place.

Umm... Yeah.

1:53 pm | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

The Gimp for Windows

The Gnu Image Manipulation Program for Windows 2.0 is stable and released today, (following the source code release a few days back) along with a fresh version of GTK+ 2. It's free and the installers are super-simple, so all of you still running on Microsoft OSes get downloading! You'll be glad you did!

If you're installing on Win95/98/ME, please uncheck the WIMP theme option in the Gimp installer options to save yourself some headaches. Also, be sure to install the version of GTK+ 2 that's on that page as well.

My little logo guy at the top right of glitchnyc.com was done on an early beta using paths and selection masks, which allow you to do some basic beizer curves and point-to-point selection. Very cool.

1:36 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Doggles? Hahahahha.... Eh... Whoo...I mean. Ahem.

What are these? I mean really, what purpose do they serve? I've never seen a dog squinting at the sun as we do - hell, they ride down the highway at 70mph with their eyes and mouth open and seem to love it. These just seem silly.

Ahh well, I couldn't resist the cute.

12:35 pm | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 0 writebacks |

What a Beautiful Night for a Run

Well, after suffering through a week of asthma inducing cold, tonight was a freaking gorgeous night to run. It must have been 45 degrees, no wind, and the streets were all but empty.

See more ...

3:02 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Why Adobe Should be Worried

The Gimp hit 2.0 today. I've been using the betas on both Win32 and Linux for months, and they're awesome. The main problem with The Gimp was its use of the archaic GTK tooklit, and Gimp2 finally makes the switch to GTK2.

The result is a cleaner, more consistent look and UI which finally ditches the "Lefty mouse cursor" that drove me nuts.

Gimp 2 is still lacking when put up next to Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro simply because vector layers are absent where they have been integrated into the professional products.

The slashdot discussion of this brought up the fact that if you need vector imaging, there's many Open Source options. Following one of the links, I discovered the popular sodipodi, and I think I'm in love.

This is what Corel Draw used to be for me - a simple, page oriented, vector design system. Node editing, beautiful text rendering, beizer curves.

As near as I can tell, Sodipodi is everything Illustrator SHOULD be without all the crap. Gimp is getting very close to rivalling photoshop, and is already better for certain applications.

They're both written on GTK 2 and are cross platform across Win32, Linux, and OSX, so are developing quite a fan-base of people who run one desktop at home and another at work.

All it would take is for an enterprising group of developers to sew together Gimp and Sodipodi (perhaps switching interfaces when working on raster or vector layers?) and we would have an open source tool that took the graphics design world by storm.

Mark my words, in 3 years Adobe will be screaming the same sort of "Foul Play" junk that SCO and Microsoft are now.

2:53 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 2 writebacks |

Hot Topic Unveils Awesome Harry Potter Merch

Okay, this is just geeky enough to be fun, just obscure enough to sell. Well done.

Harry Potter Sirius Black Prison Work Shirt

This charcoal work shirt features three Harry Potter inspired screens: "Sirius Black" on the left front, "Azkaban Prison" on the right front, and "Azkaban" on the back. 65% polyester. 35% cotton. Wash cold. Dry low. Imported.

$39.00

Here's the rest of the HP Merch at HotTopic

4:28 am | permalink | /life/freak/garb | 0 writebacks |

Urban Dictionary Rocks My Face

They didn't have scratchiti, but they will by tomorrow. I just submitted my definition to the site, and it should be approved within 24 hours.

While there, I weeded through a bunch of other crappy submissions, like people submitting eachothers names and then being like "mike drucker" AKA total fag.

Luckily, after submitting my definition for scratchiti, I got to mark about 100 of these for deletion and contribute to the beauty that is UD's user contributed, edited, and rated online reference. Ahh insomnia.

4:17 am | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

The Almost-Too-Obvious Scratchiti Zamboni

The word Scratchiti, which I mentioned previously in reference to the MTA just passing it off as a common phrase on it's most recent "rules and regulations" flyer, has roots farther back than I expected. Examples of Scratchiti date back to the 70's in "Urban Art" circles, although the practice is generally viewed with disdain even by aerosol artists. Repetitively scratching straight lines into a hard surface doesn't really leave much room for art. It's also unclear exactly when and where the phrase scratchiti describing scratchings on hard surfaces was coined

While tooling around the net looking for the word's origins, I found a novel solution, at least for glass surfaces. I wonder if the MTA is using this already.

The Scratchiti Zamboni

3:36 am | permalink | /life/nyc | 0 writebacks |

Game Review: SSX3 for PS2

As I don't often play games, these reccomendations have been a bit sparse, but I can't go without throwing in my hat for SSX3 from "EA Sports Big". Fitting that 20 years ago EA released the first sports game I ever played on computer, "Dr J. vs Larry Bird," beginning my long history of excelling at athletics in the virtual world, while sucking at them in meatspace.

We played the hell out of the original SSX back in 2000-2001, but you can only play the same 7 tracks so many times before you're just sick of them.

See more ...

1:36 am | permalink | /technology/games | 0 writebacks |

The 16 Weeks: 3 Down

Whelp, I was almost flawless in my running schedule, but at least I'm not that far off track.

See more ...

12:52 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Teenage Regression

Well, the lack of updates here was due to a few things, including a trip upstate to do nothing but drink tons of diet pepsi, play video games, recite old one-liners and in-jokes, and make new ones:

RYE: "do you have the tickets?"

VIN: "Yeah, you're going to want to pull a u-turn"

RYE: "Ha ha, very funny. Sorry, I just had to be 'that guy.'"

::uncomfortable silence::

VIN: "No... really, you're going to want to turn around"

I'd almost forgotten how much fun it was just to hang out and do nothin' with the guys. Had an awesome time, and normal blogging will now resume.

Ironically, Remy also dropped off the face of the net this week for nearly the same reason.

12:41 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

New Virus Exploits MHTML Dumbness

We've just encountered a new virus that I can't seem to find anything about. It exploits one of the weaknesses of Mail-HTML, namely using a link to run an executable.

For Example, this mail body reads:

Received message is available at:

www.cg.org/inbox/nprotected/read.php?sessionid-3140

But the link goes to:

mhtml:mid://00005642/!cid:031401Mfdab4$3f3dL780$73387018@57W81fa70Re

displayed in source as

When you click on it, it runs the attachment, even on my fully patched install of outlook.

Thank god the server doesn't let through executable attachments, but I have a feeling home users are in for a doozy.

Most techs I know only advise users not to click on attachments; links, until this point, have been fair-game. If this virus propogates as quickly as I think it might, we won't have time to warn the users.

After a wonderfully successful install of Mozilla Thunderbird at my parents house, I don't see any reason to keep home users on Outlook Express while it's being targeted so heavily.

4:12 pm | permalink | /technology/microsoft | 0 writebacks |

The World Still Still Says No to War

Peace Rally Numero Tres. They're really getting their use out of that graphic!

At some point, they're going to get slapped for sticking these all over the place - this was on the 42nd Street sign.

11:59 am | permalink | /life/nyc | 0 writebacks |

Found Art - Spring + Broadway

11:54 am | permalink | /life/nyc | 0 writebacks |

NYC MTA Coins New Word: Scratchiti

The fine purveyors of subterranian transit here in New York have decided to ban the practice of scratching letters and words into the metal and glass of their subway cars.

This is nothing new or exciting. The weirdness is that they seem to have coined a new word to deal with the problem, rather than just lump the practice in with Graffiti and other vandalisim. At first, this poster was seemingly alone at the 28th Street stop. Now, it's showing up everywhere.

It's fun how the word defines itself simply by the context it is used in. Someone in communications and marketing at the MTA is having a good time with this, I suspect. Nothing like coining your own word, and then forcing it into the lexicon by posting it legally everywhere.

11:48 am | permalink | /life/nyc | 1 writebacks |

What the F#@$ is Wrong With The Post?!?!?!

Okay, I'll put it in the best way I can think to put it, since I know I tend to get ranty with this subject.

If there was some scandalous sex act in the news, no self respecting (or FCC fearing) publication, TV show, or presidential campaign ad would run footage or photos of the act itself.

Yet, when something so shocking, so soul-shattering as someone throwing themselves to their death happens, they run images of it happening with no concern for the outcome, the feelings of those involved, or the collateral damage.

Inside your pages, maybe. On historical footage, ok. ON YOUR GODDAMN FRONT PAGE? I don't want to see it. I know I don't want to see it, so I won't buy your filthy rag, yet you keep pushing this garbage in our face.

That was a real girl. She's really dead. I didn't want to see her mid-air, you scumbags. Neither did the little girl sitting next to me on the subway while 5 people read the paper across from us, holding the paper up at her like so many posters.

The Post now officially joins the list of my boycotted media, along with Fox news for running footage of the WTC jumpers in a commercial for their "Year after" special during American Idol (read: kids watching.) I'd avoided seeing that footage through the whole ordeal, another year and a half later, it's still burned on my retina.

I'm all for freedom of choice. Anyone else can watch anything they want - but in both cases, most watchers didn't know what was coming until they saw it and had no choice.

UPDATE: I'm not alone.

Arrg. I'm also venting at Gothamist where I actually saw the thing. Not big fans of theirs for running the photo on their front page as well. The comment thread (no picture) is here

3:34 am | permalink | /life/politics | 0 writebacks |

Old Favories: Lunch Money 2

I just stumbled on something from a few years ago in the photos section that made me laugh!

Back in HS, we used to play this game called Lunch Money by Atlas Games. It was pretty fun, and we had some really good times sitting around the "freak" table in the little cafeteria bashing eachothers brains out playing the game.

I'd always thought I should take pictures of all of us and put them on our own deck, but never got around to it / didn't know how to do it.

Of course, by the time I was a senior in college, i had a bit more time on my hands and a lot more skills, so I put together my own deck. It's turning out to be the funniest photo album I have. It should be fun looking back at these in 20 years.

4:58 pm | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Great Independent Artists - Edie Carey

Over the course of the past few years, I have managed to find a couple great independent artits, and I'm going to start profiling them a bit here to share them with others and hopefully promote good, non-RIAA art.

I stumbled opon Edie Carey on CDbaby.com while buying another indie CD, and really liked her stuff. Little did I know that Sara had also found Edie on MP3.com years ago when she burned me a custom "indie artists" cd for christmas.

I listened to her free sample playlist, really liked it, and got the full cd. Turns out, it's even better than the little snippits CDbaby gives you listen to. Very nice stuff.

See more ...

4:51 pm | permalink | /life/music | 1 writebacks |

No More Stingy RSS!

I've just made a minor hack to the "Seemore" plugin I'm running to allow RSS feeds to be the full text of the article, rather than resorting to the "see more" link that the rest of my site uses.

"See more" is useful for keeping the index clean and letting casual browsers see the headlines, but for those reading via aggregators, having to click for the full text sorta defeats the purpose.

Let me know if my rambles are too long for your aggregators and/or friends pages, and I'll consider turning the seemore links back on.

2:19 pm | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 0 writebacks |

Since When Does LJ Syndicate?

Awesome - you can now add me as an LiveJournal friend:

Add glitchnyc.com to your friends list on LiveJournal.

Looks like they picked up my RSS feed somehow. Cool. Thanks to whomever did the grunt work!

3:53 am | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 3 writebacks |

Invader Zim Goodies of DOOM!

Ok - I swear this is the last link for tonight. While looking for the Zim quote in the last article (deja vu?), I found this awesome site, which has this neato mini-comic by Jhonen himself, and announces that the Invader Zim DVD is out on May 11th. Whoo!!!

I love the moose on the first page, with the arrow pointing to it that just says "FLOATIN'!!".

3:29 am | permalink | /technology/tv | 0 writebacks |

Temporal Anomalies in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey

As seems to be the pattern lately, I've stumbled upon one of the diamonds in the rough of the net while searching for something completely different. All I wanted was the correct quote for my last article, and ended at a site which, apparently, takes apart every sci-fi movie dealing with time travel and discusses the temporal implications of it's characters.

The fact that it tackles Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey is simply awesome. This is one of the movies that's so far out of whack that it's obviously meant to be tongue in cheek, but I certainly spent many an adolescent night giving myself headaches thinking about the infinite time loop represented by Rufus coming back to make sure they succeed in the first movie.

Gir, from Invader Zim wraps it up pretty nicely:

"Wait, if you destroyed Dib in the past, then he won't ever be your enemy, then you won't have to send a robot back to destroy him, and then he will be your enemy so you will have to send a robot back-" *GIR's head explodes*

2:06 am | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

The 16 Weeks: One Down.

If there's one thing most people can agree upon, it's the general perception that time speeds up as you grow older. When you're 15 and have 2 years left of high school, that feels like an eternity; like something insurmountable. 8 years later, you're out of college, settled into your job, and it feels like the blink of an eye.

Aside from finding this accelerating spiral of time terrifying due to my irrationally intense fear of being old and out of touch, I have, occasionally, found the time-acceleration trick very useful. It's like that final scene in "Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey," where they don't yet know how to play guitar. I'll explain.

See more ...

1:29 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Creepy Picture, or Foreshadowing of Headlines to Come?

Gothamist has a crazy, "what the hell is this?" captioning contest going on for this oddball snapshot of the the dueling baby michelles. Some of the write-ins are pretty hillarious.

Link to picture + captions


Gothamist.com

1:00 am | permalink | /technology/tv | 0 writebacks |

Admitting Where it Sucks

Like anything, in order for Linux to improve, especially on the desktop, I think we need to look at the areas where it NEEDS to grow in order to be better, not just everything random that's "wrong" with it.

On the desktop, Firefox is well on it's way to rivaling and even beating IE. This is especially true on windows. On Linux, it's flagging for two main reasons.

1) Fonts

I know this has been beaten to death, and you can control the font size within mozilla, but for the life of me, I can't understand why you can't change the "proportional" font. It's The main, default font that firefox uses, and all you can select is "Serif" (aka times) or "Sans-Serif" (aka arial).

See more ...

12:45 am | permalink | /technology/linux | 1 writebacks |

One Step Further

Well, both viruses in cyber and meat- space have gone one step further than I would have liked.

The Bagle virus has just gotten really nasty, spoofing mail to our users to make it look like it came from "administrator" and also signing it "The $domainname Team" where $domainname is the current suffix on your email addresses - in my case, commonground.org.

Meanwhile, it seems the real-world-need-to-go-to-a-doctor type of virus or infection that has me may have shrugged off the 10 doses of levaquin I just dutifully took. The last one is still in my system, and I'm already waking up with green-sleepy eyes and may yet have a sinus infection.

In both cases, I'm rebelling against extreme measures - in cyberspace, I have yet to filter and block all mail from the outside with our domain name in the from, for fear of screwing up all internal email. In meatspace, I refuse to go and demand a "bigger gun" like cipro until I know I really still have this cold and can't kick it myself.

Come on Immune System! Do your thing.

3:17 am | permalink | /technology/microsoft | 0 writebacks |

EBay Auction for Personal Stalker

Remy is auctioning off 2 years of "hate mail" and/or other forms of creepy stalking via whatever methods you give him.

Seems to be a case of "if you're good at something, run with it." The guy seriously needs a job.

It'll be interesting to see who bids on this. Has he discovered a hidden market for the attentionally deprived?

4:38 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

What's My Mug Doing on a Website? A British Website No Less?

So a while back, we had some people from BBC taping a bit about Common Ground to background our replication efforts there with CRISIS. They were doing an interview with Rosanne, and needed someone to play piano in a pinch.

I ended up with the gig, thinking I would just do some background music and maybe a quick filler shot. It was a far cry from my normal day to day as a web admin!

Turns out, I ended up opening the video, and now I'm smack dab on the front of the Crisis Urban Village Project page.

The funny thing is, in the video, they make it sound as if I'm either a rehabilitated homeless person, or a Broadway musician. I don't know if I should be insulted or flattered in either case... Not a bad scam for the company Web Geek!

3:25 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 1 writebacks |

Off to a Running Start

Sorry, I couldn't resist the pun. Well I finally got myself some sneakers. It was weird to buy them, as I haven't had to deal with anyplace like foot locker for ages.

Retail in NYC in general is a horrible place to work, and I forget that sometimes as I usually only shop in independent stores and little niche markets. It's one of the perks of being a freak. Even the kids in Hot Topic tend to have a sense of ownership and pride in the store they work in.

Having to endure a store that was crowded full of overpriced, overbranded products, pushy shoppers, and workers macking on any lady that came in because they hate their job made for a... ahem... enjoyable experience.

See more ...

2:27 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

New Virus Is a Kick in the Head for Admins

There was a new virus out yesterday, and it's nothing that scary - just another NetSky variant. Everyone's virus server is handling it just fine, spitting out emails to users saying things like "you had a virus in your inbox, but i've quarantined it."

Unfortunately, all users (and pointy haired bosses) ever read is AHHH VIRUS, MUST CALL EYE TEE! STAT!

Of particular note about NetSky-D is that is appears to have a new mail forging algorithm. Instead of just faking the from address, it attempts to fake it specifically from someone you know. This little nasty is harvesting addresses from both address books and any file on your C: through Z: drives.

The reason this sucks so much is that ALL of the email addresses at Common Ground appear to have been harvested, possibly from infections on certain home user's pcs. The code in NetSky-D seems to be realizing that it has multiple addresses in the same domain and is using them together to make it look like internal mail. This isn't helped by the fact that Exchange translates email address, forged or not, to the complete name of the sender when they match.

Although these messages are being caught by the virus scanner, they look like legit mail which was inappropriately blocked. For example, I get errors saying that a message from John Doe to Tom Cruise was blocked due to an unscannable message body. In reality, a forged mail to tcruise@cg.org had jdoe@cg.org in the from, confusing the hell out of my server.

What a mess.

1:10 pm | permalink | /technology/microsoft | 0 writebacks |

Creative Commons Explained Through Fun Comics!

The Creative Commons website has some fantastic introductoriy materials for its licenses, in comic book form! What a neat way to make these dry legal documents more palatable.

Licenses Explained

How it Works

4:26 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Inventions

Last night, I was trying to get to sleep (why is that so freaking hard to do lately? I used to hit the pillow and then Zzzzzzzz) and I started thinking about various things my father claimed to have 'invented'. Although completely unverifiable because the ideas stayed in his head, the list is quite impressive. My mother has corroborated some of these claims, admitting that he did, in fact, think of it first.

• Tethered pacifier for babies, so when they spit it out it just hangs around their neck instead of hitting the floor.
• Screw tops for soda bottles, when they still needed a bottle opener
• Flip-tops for toothpaste, upon seeing the flip-top brilliance of Hunts Tomato Ketchup. It took them years to do this after he thought of it.
• Coining the term "Whiz" when referring to urination

I know there's more, but I can't think of them at the moment. Anyone else have crazy "My father invented..." stories?

For posterity, here's some of the things I myself claim to have "Invented," although the ideas will stay lodged in my brain until someone else patents them and bets the farm on the idea. I wonder, is there something like a GPL for patents?

See more ...

1:03 pm | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 1 writebacks |

Funny Web Abbreviations

While getting that link for Pebcak for the article below, I found this little "online chatroom abbreviations" page. Some of these are quite funny, and this is a handy little resource. Before the whole SCO case, I always forgot what IANAL meant, and YMMV keeps dropping out of my mental RAM for some reason, too.

5:02 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

We've Got a Live One!, err, umm... Three!

Holy Crap! I've seen three, count'em, three live viruses in one day.

See more ...

4:50 pm | permalink | /technology/microsoft | 0 writebacks |

Finally! Some Nice Weather!

Saturday Mostly sunny. Highs in the lower 50s.

Maybe this weekend I'll finally get off my duff and start that whole running thing.

4:06 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

This Just in From the Blogosphere

In lieu of an actual post today, I give you some interesting links.

From MyBoot.com

• Essay: Star Wars is my Best Movie
• What the Fuck?
• What the fuck?! Part Deux

From This Boy is Toast

• Anime Meets Live Action in new big budget movie

2:19 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Media Coverage: Flowers for Al And Don

Following up my post from the 20th: The donation total has jumped to over $8,000, and Wired news is covering the flower-giving phenomenon. Wired news often seems to be a precursor to wider media coverage when it's not "too geeky," so this bodes well that the issue may be picked up in less niche-y publications.

Keep your fingers crossed: if this becomes a hot enough issue, it may end up on the democratic political radar during the upcoming 2004 elections.

5:51 pm | permalink | /life/politics | 0 writebacks |

Sick But Not Sick

I'm in that weird place where my body is giving me mixed signals. On one hand, I tend to feel just fine for hours at a time, and on the other, I've got gunk coming out of my head that I've never seen before, and occasionally feel really miserable.

It's tough to know when to call it quits and see the doctor. It's been quite a while since I needed to go to one for just being sick, and I don't think I've had a traditional antibiotic for years. My immune systems is generally stellar, and I brag about getting little versions of colds, and then passing on the "real thing" to others.

After 2.5 weeks, I've figured a few things out. 1. I need to go to the doctor sooner next time, and 2. HIP is the worst insurance in the world.

See more ...

9:32 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Flowers for Al and Don

So, I don't often pull headlines right off of BoingBoing, but I want to help get the word out about this one. Earlier today, someone posted with the idea of sending flowers to one of the random couples waiting to express their right to matrimony on the steps of city hall in San Francisco.

As anyone who has a significant other knows, it's a bit cost prohibitive to send flowers at all, let alone to be delivered to a specific place at a specific time.

With that in mind, Darren has orgainized a "bulk buying" of flowers, and is raising money through paypal to get us all the most flower buying bang for the buck that we can get. He's been vouched for and is well known in the blogosphere, so you can be pretty certain it's not a scam.

I threw in a bit of money, in part because I want one of these couples to know that some random person out there cares, but also in part because I want the media to know that lots of random people out there care.

So I issue this challenge. I've donated $25. If you don't have the funds, throw in $1, if you've got the cash, match my $25. If you've got lots of gusto, donate more and let me know and I'll match the difference*.

Donate what you can, or maybe up the ante?

Read on for my matching fine print

See more ...

12:06 am | permalink | /life/politics | 0 writebacks |

I had a hacker!

Well, it's official, there's been a hacker on Glitchnyc.com. I'm not certain what their intentions were, but I was able to shut down the little "watcher" rootkit they were running at least temporarlily, and had fun dissecting the program to see what it did.

See more ...

12:31 pm | permalink | /technology/linux | 0 writebacks |

More Open Source Game Fun

Continuing on my trend of highlighting Open Source games which I enjoy here on the blog, I have a few new picks.

LBreakout2 is an extremely playable Arkanoid clone. It reminds me a lot of DXBall2, but of course, since it's open source, you don't have to steal/crack this one to play all the levels!

Pingus also gets an honorable mention this time around - it's a wonderful little Lemmings clone. The only reason this didn't get my full nod is that version 0.60 is broken on Windows, so those of you stuck on the proprietary OS will have to wait for 0.61 to play.

1:16 am | permalink | /technology/games | 0 writebacks |

Time for Updates!

In keeping with the current run of tech-related news items - PATCH YOUR SYSTEMS.

Click that Windows Update button and get your system up to date, because Microsoft just made public a deep, vulnerable hole in nearly every current version of Windows. Every malicious virus writer in the biz is hoping to beat you to the punch right now, and get their exploit out before you get your system patched.

Update Now!

Read more about the security hole

As Remy put it, "Not to harp on Linux, but I was just reminded of one of the reasons I quit Windows"

4:41 pm | permalink | /technology/microsoft | 0 writebacks |

The Quiet Jiminy Cricket of Open Source

There's a lot of talk in "the business" right now about open source software. Slowly, it's becoming universally understood that shared software just makes sense when it's stuff that everyone needs, especially when we all need basically the same thing. Web servers - they're pretty much all the same, databases, yup, 98% of what you need is basic, even word processors and spreadsheets are pretty much standard fare. Everyone chips in to write it once, and after a while, it just gets so good you don't remember when it didn't exist.

The other 99% of programs that people use are going to be a bit more of a challenge because they're more about user choice and comfortability than just getting a job done, and that's a big part of the reason that the real guru's don't see Linux on the desktop in the mainstream in the next year, or two, or ten.

See more ...

12:49 am | permalink | /technology/linux | 0 writebacks |

Mozilla Firefox - New Name, Fresh Installer

Mozilla's standalone browser, formerly known as Phoenix, then FireBird, is now known as Mozilla FireFox. The new name should end any confusion with other open source projects, and signifies their 0.8 release. They're coming close to 1.0 with it, and it's beginning to look really slick.

For ANYONE who is still using Internet Explorer I urge you to install this slim little browser. It's fast and uses tabbed browsing (middle click a link, and it loads quietly in the background, with a tab at the top of your browser.) Once you try it, you won't go back.

Add to the list perfect popup blocking without spyware, protection from the nefarious Internet Explorer exploits which allow hackers to trick you into installing malicious software, and faster, standards compliant page rendering, and this is the best browser out there bar none.

The Mozilla servers are a bit clogged with everyone downloading this today, so download it from me here.

10:09 am | permalink | /technology/web | 1 writebacks |

Lex Vignettes 9

I lay in the field of corn - not far from where I'd spent hours huddled just a few nights before, looking up at the stars.

It's amazing how the subtle value of silence escapes you when you never truly have a chance to appreciate it. Sure, Many places incity are technically silent - but it's a sterile silence, brought on by noise canceling transducers and sound-proofed materials.

See more ...

12:25 am | permalink | /fiction/lex | 0 writebacks |

Is NC-17 the new "R"?

There's a new movie out, and I'm determined to see it now.

Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Dreamers" is a tale of two twincestual Parisian siblings who've never been apart, and their dangerous game of seducing a young American.

Put out by Fox Searchlight, the film is far from fringe media, yet it's being released with an NC-17 rating, usually reserved for softcore or straight to video flops. It's also being pushed hard with web ads on nytimes.com, and is being hailed as a masterpiece at film festivals.

See more ...

1:28 pm | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

Cost of War With Iraq Nears $100,000,000,000

The cost of war counter (which, strangely enough, can be found at CostOfWar.com) Is nearing 100,000,000,000. One hundred billion. Money enough to solve hunger, homelessness, and poverty throughout the US, fix our education system, and put one hell of a dent in world starvation, disease, unrest, and other terrorism inducing afflictions.

Cost of the War in Iraq

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To see more details, click here.

11:50 am | permalink | /life/politics | 0 writebacks |

Eastern Standard Tribe Released

Cory Doctorow, the man who is unwittingly my mentor, has released his second novel. Like his first, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," this book is released under the Creative Commons.

What that means for you is that you can download it and read it right now for free. If you like it, buy the book and support him, but in the mean time, tell your friends, pass it around, and in general create buzz about the book, because if it's anything like his first and his short stories, this is some of the best new SciFi work out there.

Read, Download, Copy, Pass Around, P2P, and otherwise Distribute
Eastern Standard Tribe.

11:02 am | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Perseverance Pays Off

Well, it's February, and I've finally figured out how to get this little VIA box working for MythTV. It was a serious pain in the ass, and there was no way I could have gotten it done by Christmas - thank god I had my main PC up and running in time, or this would have been a very delayed Christmas present.

That said, I now have to decide whether or not I want to leave my Desktop PC as the main (always on) MythTV backend server, or switch out this little guy, which runs quieter and at lower power. I'll probably be mulling that one over for at least another month.

Read on for the technical stuff

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3:27 pm | permalink | /technology/linux | 0 writebacks |

Lex vignettes 8

"Lex"

My eyes snapped open to the pitch blackness in my room at the commune. My guide's voice was not something I was accustomed to hearing in my ear while I slept, and my heart was already racing.

"what is it?" I subbed, not daring to break the silence. If he was waking me now, something was very wrong.

"Troub - ble , le ex get out ge et ou u" his voice stuttered.

I was already moving by the time I heard the first stutter. I'd only ever heard his vocalization engine fail once before when he was facing off against another guide AI in newnet.

We had been playing hard, and he knew I wanted to win. At my request, he had given the game process almost real time priority. It was like watching someone have seizure, and there was no hiding that it hurt him to do so. I've never called on him to use that much mental capacity again, and here he was doing it for me of his own will.

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1:56 pm | permalink | /fiction/lex | 0 writebacks |

What We're Watching

So once in a while I tackle a "Just Because" project just to see if I can do it / if it can be done. Often, at the time I feel as though I'm goofing off when I should be working on something else, only to find that the skills I picked up on the little side project came in VERY handy when needed. Setting up glitchnyc.com as a linux server was one such project, and it's paid out ten-fold in knowledge and experience for both my job at Strategic and here at Common Ground.

Today, I finished up another little useless project - the "What We're Watching" box down at the bottom right of this page. It's pretty cool - pulling in the live info from our "MythTV" setup at home every 10 minutes - but really, it's pretty unneccessary. If history continues to repeat itself, I should be saying "Aha!" sometime in the next year, finding some task that the skills I gleaned came in handy for. We'll see. In the meantime, either gawk in voyeuristic glee at the up-to-the minute info of what's going to be on our boob-tube, or read on for the technical details

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6:34 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Touché, Mother Nature.

It seems all it took was for me to question the weather geniuses at Weather Underground to get the heavens to open up.

Well Played.

See more snow photos (I finally got myself a card reader for home! Wo0t!)

1:49 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Yanking our Collective Weather Chain

Ever get the feeling that weather people just get together to make it up sometimes? Like the weather channel isn't getting enough viewers so they forge up a nice little NOAA warning about a noreaster that never appears due to the random nature of meterology.

It seems like every night for a week we've been "supposed to get it tonight, 0-8 inches!" and then we wake up to zilch. Here's tonights "advisory." Seems like they're finally zeroing in on an actual prediction

This Afternoon
Occasional sleet or light snow...mixing with spotty freezing drizzle at times early. Snow becoming more widespread toward evening and possibly mixing with sleet. Snow accumulation by evening around an inch possible. Highs in the upper 20s. East winds 15 to 20 mph.

Tonight
Snow...mixing with sleet during the evening. The snow may be heavy at times. Snow accumulation of 5 to 8 inches. Lows in the mid 20s. Northeast winds around 15 mph...becoming north 15 to 20 mph after midnight.

3:51 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Oh yeah.

And I just realized my fly has been down all morning. Really though, I haven't been to the bathroom since I left the house. Either nobody noticed, or no one knew how to tell me.

Awesome.

12:37 pm | permalink | /life | 1 writebacks |

Novarg (AKA MyDoom) Virus Proves that People Never Learn

A new virus spreading like wildfire today proves and important point to remember when thinking about computer security.

People never learn. Never.

Watching "hackers" years ago, I laughed when Dade passed himself off as "Eddie Vedder from IT", using a crude form of social engineering to extract the modem number he needed. "No one could fall for that!" I remembered thinking.

Years later, I've learning that people "falling for that" is still the greatest stumbling block to keeping a network running and secure.

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12:33 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Ka-Blam!

Well, it seems that I've done something to upset the computer gods. I came in today after busting my butt this week to give a presentation, and had to move the computer into the conference room.

I don't know if I walked through the bermuda triangle of computing or what, but by the time I'd made it the 20 feet to the conference room, the thing was toast.

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3:34 pm | permalink | /technology/microsoft | 0 writebacks |

It all comes full circle.

Years ago I found a few pictures of a band called "flesh for eve" which was produced by vampire technology. I never really thought much about the two groups, but now almost 8 years later they're selling the designs which I'd collected pictures of, and they're still freaking amazing.

Many of these designs and the general aesthetic influenced the world that Lex takes place in, especially the Burton-esque stripwear.

Vampiretechnology.com

1:48 am | permalink | /fiction/lex | 0 writebacks |

Lex Vignettes 7

I awoke for the first time in the outcity in a bed.

My face was throbbing, swollen and bruised from the falls I'd taken learning on the stripwear. My ribs hurt, too, and I could feel the dirt clinging to my body, crusty in the scabs and caked blood where my body had met the ground.

The Stripwear, sensing I was awake began to organize itself, and I could feel little breezes as it swished through the air above my skin, lifting itself ever so slightly away from my body and unweaving itself from the blanket it had formed while I slept.

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11:33 pm | permalink | /fiction/lex | 1 writebacks |

Well, after flying last time, I'm pretty sure I'm on the CAPPS list

I mean, they made me take of my shoes and scan them, and kinda looked at me all wide eyed when they saw my name on the list. What'd I do?

Anyway, this was funny.

Threat rating: High. The Bush administration is
concerned that it may not get a second term.
Therefore, we are going to change the rules so
that each Democrat vote only counts as 0.2
votes because Democrat is a shorter word than
Republican

What threat to the Bush administration are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

12:17 pm | permalink | /technology/web/quizzes | 4 writebacks |

Now Computer Really Equals Frenchfry.

A few months back, my computer decided to eat my "mp3" hard drive which was also home to most of my pictures, and other creative works, alive.

I was not that happy a camper about this, but was able to recover 90% of my stuff, minus some of my photos.

Tonight, the hard drive which I had recoverd that data TO completly and unrecoverably crashed so hard that there is no salvaging anything on it. All I can hope is that I made some backups of the stuff I saved off the old disk last time. but I don't remember doing that.

This is like losing all your photo albums in a fire. You know you can replaced the house, but you can't replace the pictures.

Grrrrr.

UPDATE: I seem to have kept at least a marginally complete backup on CD and randomly scattered around my different systems & servers, so although a pain in the butt to have to do this again, I don't think I permanently lost anything huge.

4:25 am | permalink | /technology/linux | 0 writebacks |

Computer = Frenchfry.

THE funniest computer support call I have ever gotten, and possibly one of the most hillarious things ever said to me (or my voicemail) period, rediscovered during the rescue of a failing harddrive. Now in glorious mp3 for your listening pleasure.

The mp3 of DOOM.

The journal of aeriesstars, the creator of said message

3:30 pm | permalink | /life/friends | 1 writebacks |

CNN: Philadelphia schools ban soda sales; Snapple, Inc. President Cackles Evilly.

Well, this is genius.

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (Reuters) -- Philadelphia officials have banned the sale of sodas throughout the public school system, a move nutrition experts said Thursday would help guard children against obesity.

The article says they're expecting kids to drink more juice (AKA. Snapple or Fruitopia, depending on which owns the rights to the schools marketing impressions... I mean... Students.)

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2:23 pm | permalink | /life/politics | 0 writebacks |

Holy Crap! My Name is a Narsty Porn Site

So every few months or so I tend to google for my various handles and names to make sure that I'm not showing up anywhere I don't want to. Eskiff is the username I'm given almost everywhere since there aren't that many other "Skiffs".

Usually, googling for my full name or that handle just turns up usenet posts from a lot of other geeks with the same handle (which I'm sure helped when I was "background checked" applying for a job. Sometimes they really do just google for you name. There's an Eric Skiff who was a boozing frat guy who almost got me in trouble!), and if you scroll waaaaaay down, you might eventually find the geocities site or the dansmusic archive that held my musicals. (Don't ask.)

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12:45 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 1 writebacks |

Microsoft Update IE... to the open source MOZILLA!

Microsoft Internet Explorer Update Page

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11:43 am | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

We've Booked the Honeymoon!

Sara & I have really gotten going with wedding stuff in the past 24 hours. We've gotten the invite list together, budgeted expenses and stuff, and now we've even booked the honeymoon! We'll be staying at "Le Pavillon Hotel" in New Orleans for the week directly after our wedding.

Next we firm up with the Caterer, and then it's on to "Save the Dates" this weekend! This is getting fun!

Le Pavillon Hotel Website

3:14 pm | permalink | /life/travel | 0 writebacks |

OpenSource Games Come Of Age

I've been running on Linux for almost a year now, and as such, once in a while, I want to relax and play a game or two.

Mind you, I've never been an avid gamer (I'm still running on a crappy old Ati Rage 128), and often opt to play on the consoles when I do play at all. When I play on a computer, it's either to play online, or because I'm waiting for something else to finish.

With all that in mind, I've discovered three games recently that are worth mentioning: Bomberclone, Armagetron, and FrozenBubble

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12:29 pm | permalink | /technology/games | 1 writebacks |

The Model Music Label: Magnatune

I was reading through my Linux Journal today, and they gave this up-and-coming music label a lot of play for being free and open.

Magnatune is cool both in terms of the technology they use, and they way they embrace the music listener as a consumer, rather than alienate them as a theif or pirate. They believe that the music buyer has a right to hear the music before they buy it, and that they will not only support the artists and the label by buying music they like, but also help them promote it by, get this, TRADING FILES. It's perfectly acceptable by their liscences, and all they ask is that if you like a group, you pay for the high quality permanent download.

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11:45 am | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Disney Closed Major Animation Studio Yesterday!

This isn't the usual fodder here, but I had to comment. Check out the CNN story.

Disney has gone from 2,200 hand animators down to less than 1000 in the past 3-4 years, and from the looks of it, has just laid off the majority of it's 258 person Orlando studio.

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11:07 am | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

Fun Flash Games

I was thinking about finally working on that "New Version of Torus" now that I finally have some flash skills, and wanted to see if you could write a decently fun and responsive game in flash. A quick google for "flash tetris" popped up this neat little site with some great games!

Flash Games

3:08 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 1 writebacks |

Wo0t! I got Deacon Frost!

Which Evil Villain Bad Habit are you?

12:16 pm | permalink | /technology/web/quizzes | 0 writebacks |

"The Neverending Saga of That F8%$)@! Mini-PC" or "Why Not Sleeping Makes You Legally Insane"

So it was mid-November, and I thought I had Christmas all figured out. As I talked about in the last post, I had pretty much finished all the difficult technical stuff getting MythTV working, and was all set to deliver a home-brew Tivo system to Sara for christmas.

Or so I thought...

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2:50 am | permalink | /technology/linux | 0 writebacks |