2008 Nov 20, 11:30KITH + Portal! "We're not sure how deep into the goof juice the Kids in the Hall were when troupe funnyman Scott Thompson started sulking and playing Portal in the back of the tour bus, but something
got into Kids during this sad little gaming session. Yes, the comedic stylings of Valve writer Erik Wolpaw are most amusing, as is the struggle of watching Thompson attempt to do anything more than
move a cube - uncrouch already! - but something tells me there's something magical in those cups. Thanks for the tip, Sascha23!"
portal video humor valve kith scott-thompson 2008 Nov 18, 1:10"...Just in case the previous 62 questions do not ferret out any potential controversy, the 63rd is all-encompassing: 'Please provide any other information, including information about other members
of your family, that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the president-elect.' ... For those who clear all the hurdles, the reward
could be the job they wanted. But first there will be more forms, for security and ethics clearances from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Office of Government Ethics."
government obama fbi privacy 2008 Nov 17, 4:20"...he said that The Roots were retiring from touring in order to become the house band for Jimmy Fallon when he takes over Conan O'Brien's late night show next year. But that video was quickly
pulled, so everyone has been scrambling to find out whether this apocalyptic... thing is actually true. NBC has no official comment, but we hear that it probably is. Essaywhuman?!!!??! This is one of
those things that proves you're getting old."
via:ethan_t_hein tv the-roots music 2008 Nov 9, 11:29
I finally replaced my old regular cell-phone which was literally being held together by a rubber band with a fancy new G1, my first Internet accessible phone.
I had to call the T-Mobile support line to get data added to my plan and the person helping me was disconcertingly friendly. She asked about my weekend plans and so I felt compelled to ask her the
same. Her plans involved replacing her video card so she could get back to World of Warcraft and do I enjoy computer gaming? I couldn't tell if she was genuine or if she was signing me up for
magazines.
I was with Sarah in her new car, trying out the phone's GPS functionality via Google Maps while she drove. I switched to Street View and happened to
find my car. It was a weird feeling, kind of like those Google
conspiracy videos.
The phone runs Google's open source OS and I really enjoy the application API. Its all in Java and URIs and mime-types are sort of
basics. Rather than invoking the builtin item picker control directly you invoke an 'intent' specifying the URI of your list of items, a mime-type describing the type of items in the list, and an
action 'PICK' and whatever is registered as the picker on the system pops up and lets the user pick from that list. The same goes if you want to 'EDIT' an image, or 'VIEW' an mp3.
I wanted to replace the Google search box gadget that appears on the home screen with my own search box widget that uses OpenSearch descriptors but apparently in the current API you can't make home screen gadgets without changing
parts of the OS. My other desired application is something to replace this GPS photo tracker device by recording my
location to a file and an additional program on my computer to apply those locations to photos.
tmobile personal api phone technical g1 android google 2008 Nov 6, 6:27Examination of the who and why behind those 'Single?' lawn signs: 'At this point, I came to the realization that every question I answered seemed to introduce two more. In this case, they were "did
someone hire these firms or are they acting on their own?" and, more confusingly, "how did a web design firm in Panama or India get a lawn sign physically planted in the front lawn of my high school
in South Jersey?"'
sign blog marketing dns advertising business web internet research 2008 Nov 6, 6:24Comparison of various website's US presidential election maps: "Most media outlets covering the 2008 US Presidential Election used the familar red/blue map to track the progress of the race as
results from the polls rolled in Tueday evening. Here are several of those maps, in some ways as similar to each other as they are varied."
map visualization geography president election vote voting politics 2008 Oct 30, 12:13On hearing news of Live ID supporting OpenID this is pretty much exactly what I was thinking: "With every big portal acting as a provider but not a consumer of identity credentials, users are still
going to wind up creating accounts for more than one service (says this user of Flickr and Google Calendars). When it comes to third-party sites, they may not need to remember a new username and
password, but they will have to remember to which of the providers they chose to provide the credentials for their account. Anyone who slips up may wind up with three or more identities on a single
website, with different data associated with each."
openid identity microsoft google 2008 Oct 28, 11:23
If you view a plain text document in Internet Explorer 8, for instance the plain text version of Cory Doctorow's book
Little Brother and press F12 to bring up the developer toolbar, you can see that IE simply takes the plain text, sticks it inside a
tag, and renders it. This means that word wrapping isn't supplied and the only line breaks that appear are those in the document. However, since the text document is converted to HTML it means I can implement word wrap myself using a bookmarklet:
javascript:function ww() { var preTag = document.getElementsByTagName('pre')[0]; preTag.style.fontFamily="arial"; preTag.style.wordWrap='break-word'; }; ww();
After adding a favorite and setting the favorite's URL to the previous, I can view plain text documents, and select my Word Wrap favorite to apply word wrap and non-fixed width font.
browser technical ie wordwrap 2008 Oct 27, 1:39Rubber-hose cryptanalysis is first defined by Marcus J. Ranum on Oct 15 1990: "..unless you resort to the rubber-hose technique of cryptanalysis. (in which a rubber hose is applied forcefully and
frequently to the soles of the feet until the key to the cryptosystem is discovered, a process that can take a surprisingly short time and is quite computationally inexpensive)"
humor cryptography rubber-hose security 2008 Oct 25, 10:22My Xbox has a blog and my Wii has an email address: "Email a chum's Wii: You'll need to have a record of those damnably unmemorable friend codes for anyone you want to mail, but once you do it's
simple: just drop a message to w[friendcode]@wii.com. For instance, w1234567891011@wii.com."
wii howto email nintendo tips via:sarah 2008 Oct 23, 2:18I had no idea lingual prescriptivists vs descriptivists were split in a partisan manner: '... The Secretary [of the Department of Education] released a report that includes dire warnings of impending
doom...The cause of this immanent catastrophe is, of course, those pesky linguists, the libertarian destroyers of good usage who claim that, well, anything goes. According to the report, "the
language problem has now reached the crisis level and we are now experiencing a severe epidemic of bad grammar that will affect the very fiber of our nation." The Secretary added, "an alarming number
of children are suffering from the bad advice given by those socialist, left-wing, atheistic linguists and we just gotta do something about it."'
humor language politics grammar 2008 Oct 23, 2:07Thoughts on how an army of robot soldiers can be made to act more ethically than humans: "One of the fundamental abilities I want to give [these systems] is to refuse an order and explain
why."..."For those situations we have very clear cut guidance from the Geneva Convention, the Hague and elsewhere about what is ethical."
robot army ai ethics 2008 Oct 22, 12:54
Electronic devices shouldn't fail, they should just sit wherever I place them and work forever. A while back my home web server started failing so I moved over to a real web hosting service. And
this was the home web server I built from pieces Eric gave me after my previous one died during the big power failure the year before. The power socket on my old laptop has come undone from the
motherboard so that it can no longer be powered. Just a week or two ago my Xbox 360 stopped displaying video. The CPU fan on my media center died. I also want to put my camera and GPS in this list,
but the camera died due to accidentally turning on in my pocket and the GPS was stolen so those aren't the devices just arbitrarily failing.
boring personal complaining nontechnical 2008 Oct 14, 12:50Cardboard filter that turns video monitors into an array of large color-changing boxes applied to public video billboard ads: "Pixelator turns those ugly, blinding video billboard ads into art."
art streetart cultural-disobediance subway graffiti advertising nyc diy howto 2008 Sep 30, 11:14Tools and hints for debugging esp. WinDbg. Some interesting things in here. "...When I'm not debugging applications with Windbg, I'm working on tools (utility software) like those presented in this
blog. My tools should help you during your debugging or troubleshooting session. "
blog windows debug windbg powershell tool programming 2008 Sep 29, 2:33A short post on the topic of those irritating high fructose corn syrup commericals: 'Really, there's no way that you could make something called "high fructose corn syrup" sound good for you. Which
is why, instead of irritating the public with defensive commercials featuring gross, brightly colored "juice," the Corn Refiners Association should just call "high fructose corn syrup" something more
appealing: like "Deliciosity," or "Yummy Tummy Syrup," or "So You Think You Can Sweeten?" or "Fun Sugar"'
humor onion video corn-syrup corn propaganda tv commercial 2008 Sep 23, 2:15
The names in the following anecdote have been changed. Except for my name
(I'm Dave).
I got a new laptop a while back. I had it in my office and Tim came in to ask me something but paused when he saw my laptop. "Oh, is this one of those new touch screen laptops?" he asked, the whole
time moving his hand towards my laptop and punctuating his sentence by pressing his finger to the screen. "No" I responded.
Walking down a hallway I heard Winston, one of our managers, say, "Hey Tim!" Winston catches up to me and asks, "Are you almost done with the XYZ bug?" I realized Winston was talking to me and got
my name wrong but I figured I'll ignore it and perhaps he'll realize his mistake. Winston continued "I just talked with some people who say they're blocked and waiting for Tim to finish the XYZ
bug." "Dave" I said helpfully attempting to diplomatically correct Winston since he apparently hadn't realized his error. "No, it was Jeremy and Bill." Winston said naming the people he had talked
to who were waiting for me to fix the XYZ bug. At this point I decided it would be easier to just answer his question and end the conversation than to get into this whole thing. As far as I know,
Winston has not gotten my name wrong at any other time.
work nontechnical 2008 Sep 18, 10:05Sarah Palin's Yahoo email addresses were hacked. I agree with the commenter: "I was just about to post how I feel bad for her despite disagreeing with most of her politics. There are plenty of
legitimate reasons to attack her (or any politician), but this is clearly personal, not politics. From what I've read, this wasn't even the account she used for those communications she wanted to
hide from subpoena, so the vigilante justice angle is BS. This is just plain mean." Although the last sentence of the following made me laugh: "A good samaritan in the /b/ thread reset the password
account with the intention of handing it over to Palin, a process known on /b/ as "white knighting". This locked everyone else out of the account. The "white knight" posted a screenshot to /b/ of his
pending message to one of Palin's contacts about how to recover the account, but made the critical mistake of not blanking out the new password he set."
security politics hack privacy government legal email yahoo 2008 Sep 9, 8:42Links to people who add delicious to delicious, and people who add those adds, etc etc. And now I've added this page to delicious. Meta-fun!
via:ethan_t_hein delicious humor meta link
The weekend before last Sarah and I went down to Gas Works Park in Seattle. Gas Works Park is a former Seattle Gas Light Company gasification plant now turned into a
park with the machinery kept intact and found right on the shore of Lake Union. There's a large hill right next to the plant with an embedded art installation from which you get an excellent view
of the park and the lake. Anyway a very cool place. Afer, we ate at Julia's of Wallingford where I stereotypically had the Santa Cruz
omelet. Good food, nice place, nice neighborhood.
This past weekend was Halloween weekend. On Halloween at Microsoft parents bring their kids around the office buildings and collect candy from those who
have candy in their office. See Matt's photo of one such hallway at Microsoft. The next day Sarah and I went to two birthday parties the second of which required costume. I went as House (from the
television show House) by putting on a suit jacket and carrying a cane. Sarah wore scrubs to lend cred. to my lazy costume. Oh yeah and on Sunday Sarah bought a new car.
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