2007 Dec 31, 2:49Interview with that guy on the Segway I always see riding around Microsoft. FTA: "So, you never feel dorky wearing a gold helmet?", "Come on: I'm riding a Segway - I'm already dorky."
interview blog segway humor microsoft 2007 Dec 31, 1:18A short short story titled 'The Riddle of the Universe and Its Solution' by CHRISTOPHER CHERNIAK. A classic (apparently) from the early 80s. No spoilers here. If you liked Snow Crash just read it.
read scifi story literature free fiction short-story rainbow 2007 Dec 30, 2:11Jesse's photos including when we were in Vegas.
jesse-ralston friend photo photos 2007 Dec 28, 8:23Todd's cycling blog.|Todd Sahl
friend blog microsoft bike todd-sahl seattle 2007 Dec 28, 11:25Programming language that again works on a 2D memory field this time using black and white images.
art code language programming visualization 2007 Dec 27, 5:33A programming language written on a 2D plane with arrows pointing up, down, left, right to control the flow of execution.
geek humor language programming wiki wikipedia befunge 2007 Dec 27, 3:54Jack Black on piracy. Another humorous piracy related video on youtube. Who would have thought?
piracy youtube video jack-black humor 2007 Dec 27, 3:36Mark Liberman suggests the paper on which recent articles like "Humor Develops From Aggression Caused By Male Hormones, Professor Says" was a joke. The paper is based on determitologist's notes on
reactions to his unicycle riding.
article blog language language-log mark-liberman sam-shuster science unicycle humor bad-science 2007 Dec 26, 8:41So many things I shouldn't like: its on court tv, its a reality show, lame name, the website is entirely flash. But its like Sneakers the TV series so...
television tiger-team video free 2007 Dec 26, 5:45Miscellaneous thoughts I had that would have been relevant many months ago:
- A History Channel program had a reenactment of a 1920's archaeologist discovering a stone tablet, sending the tablet to a warehouse, etc. all behind the voice over giving the dry facts. The
reenactor hammed it up a bit and I would have rather had clips from Indiana Jones in the background. If they're already not showing me the archaeologist who discovered the tablet, they may as well
show me one who will be entertaining.
- There are many parodies of the Get a Mac ads and so when I saw a UK Get a Mac ad I payed attention to see what the joke was. I was
disappointed by the 'parody' because it was a conventional Get a Mac ad with different actors. Apple localized their Get a Mac ad campaign in this fashion in the UK and in Japan. I've got a
playlist of the US, UK, and Japan's version of the Piechart ad. Ranking the lovable bumblingness of the PC I give the order
UK, Japan, then US and ranking the sumgness of the Mac I give the order UK, US, then Japan. But don't take my word for it, view
the ads for yourself.
-
Yahoo Pipes lets users generate an RSS feed altering service that runs on Yahoo's server using a GUI. This is very different from Microsoft's Popfly which allows users to component-ize and share javascript utilities that run client side on a webbrowser. Both have the awesome power of buzzword associations
like 'Web 2.0' and 'Mashup' but in my mind Yahoo Pipes is for server side RSS feed modification and Popfly is about client side javascript webpages. And neither will allow me to run an arbitrary
XSLT =).
popfly apple personal history-channel indiana-jones pipes mac technical microsoft mashup yahoo nontechnical 2007 Dec 24, 12:41These days it seems like there's a social sharing website for everything representable as bits. Like
Scribd for (mostly legal) documents,
SciVee for scientific research videos,
Wordie for words, and
Kuler for color themes. Kuler seems
like a ridiculous website (overkill) but I had been meaning to update my homepage's color design and Kuler has an
RSS based REST API.
The API lets you obtain things like the most recently added color themes or the most popular or all themes containing the color dark red, etc... So of course rather than update my website's design I
hooked up my css to the color themes coming out of Kuler. Select my main page's color theme from a
list of random Kuler themes. As I'm sure
the regular readers can guess I use
an xslt and blah blah blah... It looks OK with
Silver Surfer and
Happy Hipo but in general
changing the colors this way doesn't produce something pretty.
When reading about Kuler I found that they may have stolen the whole idea wholeslae from
ColourLovers. They discuss
the thievery in an article on their blog. I would have switched over to ColourLovers out of principle but
they don't have an easily accessible API.
colourlovers color xslt theme homepage technical kuler design 2007 Dec 23, 11:18Sarah and I went down to California at the end of last month for a Thanksgiving visit with my parents. We visited the famous
Monterey Bay Aquarium (fun fact: the aquarium scenes in Star Trek IV were filmed here) and saw many jelly fish. We wandered around Capitola where we visited many local
shops and ate on the wharf. We shopped in Carmel and ate at the
Forge in the Forest (fun fact: Clint Eastwood was the mayor of this city in the late
80s). We visited the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk which was very cold and closed.
My parents took us out to dinner on the first night and the rest of the nights we ate dinner at their house. They had the Shelton's over and I got
to see Chris and Alison. It was fun to talk with them and catch up since its been quite a while since I'd seen them.
We stayed in the lovely beach house of our family friend's the Goodwins.
My parents have been helping them fix it up and decorate it and it looks great. It was quite a treat staying in a house right on the ocean. Also of note, this was the first trip on which I was old
enough to rent the car and accordingly I did all of the driving. This trip was very fun and relaxing.
aquarium friends parents personal beach california vacation 2007 Dec 23, 8:48Banksy article and interview in Wired.
art article banksy graffiti hack humor wired streetart interview 2007 Dec 23, 8:46Banksy replaces Paris Hilton CDs with his own satirical music and cover art in stores.
art article culture graffiti hack humor music parody prank streetart paris-hilton bbc 2007 Dec 23, 8:44Banksy adds his own pieces to NY's museums.
art article culture graffiti hack humor museum nyc painting prank streetart banksy 2007 Dec 23, 2:02purchase gift doll