Blog Entries
(via Classic pro-science-careers music video PSA: Chemical...
2012 Jun 29, 10:03(via Classic pro-science-careers music video PSA: Chemical Party)
Xeni says: “The EU wasn’t always so terrible at promoting science careers through funny internet music videos! (thanks, Guido)”
Content ID Run Amok: Isaac's Lip-Dub Proposal Removed from YouTube
2012 Jun 7, 3:14Waxy roundup of DMCA takedown process stupidity.
“So the Scripps TV broadcasts are indexed by YouTube, and the Content ID robots do the rest. And because Content ID disputes are judged by the copyright holder, complaints are routinely ignored or denied.”
Privacy through Obscurity
2012 Mar 9, 3:30With Facebook changing its privacy policy and settings so frequently and just generally the huge amount of social sites out there, for many of us it is far too late to ensure our name doesn't show up with unfortunate results in web searches. Information is too easily copyable and archive-able to make removing these results a viable option, so clearly the solution is to create more data.
Create fake profiles on Facebook using your name but with a different photo, different date of birth, and different hometown. Create enough doppelgangers to add noise to the search results for your name. And have them share embarrassing stories on their blogs. The goal is to ensure that the din of your alternates drowns out anything embarrassing showing up for you.
Although it will look suspicious if you're the only name on Google with such chaff. So clearly you must also do this for your friends and family. Really you'll be doing them a favor.
Dare To Be Stupid | Vinyl Rewind on blip.tv
2011 Jul 1, 10:04Eric outs himself as a Weird Al fan covering Dare To Be Stupid and I get a mention.On a related note, have you seen the Perform This Way video from Weird Al's latest album? It took me way too long to realize that wasn't Al's body. Performing this one live is going to make the Fat suit look like a cake walk.
Thought Experiments and Design Principles
2010 Jan 29, 3:54Raymond Chen has some thought experiments useful for discovering various kinds of stupidity in software design:
- What if two programs did this?
- Who says there's only one?
- Imagine if this were possible. / Imagine if things actually worked that way.
Tim Berners-Lee's principles of Web design includes my favorite: Test of Independent Invention. This has a thought experiment containing the construction of the MMM (Multi-Media Mesh) with MRIs (Media Resource Identifiers) and MMTP (Muli-Media Transport Protocol).
The Internet design principles (RFC 1958) includes the Robustness Principle: be strict when sending and tolerant when receiving. A good one, but applied too liberally can lead to interop issues. For instance, consider web browsers. Imagine one browser becomes so popular that web devs create web pages and just test out their pages in this popular browser. They don't ensure their pages conform to standards and accidentally end up depending on the manner in which this popular browser tolerantly accepts non-standard input. This non-standard behavior ends up as de facto standard and future updates to the standard essentially has had decisions made for it.
Awesome Spokesmen Billy Mays and Vince Offer
2009 Apr 8, 4:06
There can be no doubt that infomercial pitchmen Billy Mays and Vince Offer are awesome, but how can I decide which is my favorite?
- Infomercial Performance.
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Among other things they sell Zorbeez and ShamWow respectively, both of which are absorbant towels so first up I can get a somewhat apples-to-apples comparison on informercials for comparable
products. Thankfully someone has created a Vince Offer vs Billy Mays youtube video featuring these informercials.
Billy has an upbeat yell to everything he says while Vince has an endearing condescension to his "You followin' me camera guy?" In the end I must give this one to Vince Offer. -
- Extracurriculars.
- Billy Mays has a new show Pitchmen on the Discovery Channel, a reality show involving folks pitching inventions to the pitchmen Billy Mays and someone else. Vince Offer was arrested for assaulting a prostitute. A clear win for Billy.
- Intra-pitchman Interactions.
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Billy has challenged Vince to a pitchman-off which on the surface sounds like a point for Billy, but if you listen to the challenge Billy says that Vince attempted to extend the olive branch.
Billy Mays calls out Vince on the Adam Corolla Show
World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> I played WoW, I became a terrorist (story!)
2008 Dec 29, 12:22"This wasn't my fault. Anyone could have dropped his stupid iPod in the toilet. It's really the government here. I mean, at this point the building contained six customs officials, an army of policemen, people from various security agencies, a bomb squad, and a couple of detectives."Bloody Xmas: Macabre Plush Toys Are Perfect Xmas Gift for Future Psychokillers
2008 Dec 29, 12:06Too bad I missed these before Christmas: "Why buy a stupid Elmo when you can permanently disturb that young mind with a cute knitted plush rabbit killed with a giant carrot? Or a beautiful tiger eating some human remains? I love these."Chumby will be cool, despite its name
2008 Feb 19, 1:51
I signed up for the pre-release beta and purchased a Chumby last year. Chumby looks like a cousin to a GPS
unit. Its similar in size with a touch screen, but has WiFi, accelerometers, and is pillow like on the sides that aren't a screen. In practice its like an Internet alarm clock that shows you photos
and videos off the Web. Its hackable in that Chumby Industries tells you about the various ways to run your own stuff on the Chumby, modifying the boot sequence (it runs Linux), turning on sshd,
etc, etc. The Chumby forum too has lots of info from folks who have found interesting hacks for the device.
When you turn on the Chumby it downloads and runs the latest version of the Chumby software which lets you set alarms, play music, and display Flash widgets. The Chumby website lets anyone upload their own Flash widgets to share with the community. I tried my hand at creating one using Adobe's free Flash creation SDK but I don't know Flash and didn't have the patience to learn.
Currently my Chumby is set to wake me up at 8am on weekdays with music from ShoutCast and then displays traffic and weather. At 10am everyday it switches to showing me a slide-show of LolCats. At 11pm it switches to night mode where it displays the time in dark grey text on a black background at a reduced light level so as not to disturb me while I sleep.
I like the Chumby but I have two complaints. The first is that it forces me to learn flash in order to create anything cool rather than having a built-in Web browser or depending on a more Web friendly technology. The second complaint is about its name. At first I thought the name was stupid in a kind of silly way, but now that I'm used to the name it sounds vaguely dirty.
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