2009 Jan 14, 2:03Google Maps now has a public transit route finder. Would have been useful in Munich and certainly will be useful here at home since they cover the Seattle area including the east-side. "I'm pleased
to announce the launch of the Transit Layer on Google Maps in more than 50 cities around the world making it easier for citizens and tourists around the globe to access public transportation line
information in their cities."
google map travel bus traffic seattle redmond munich transportation maps public-transportation transit 2009 Jan 13, 2:56Turn your snowed-in home's front door into a natural fridge. Good idea, although here we didn't get nearly enough snow to make this convenient.
humor beer cold brr snow canada design fridge 2009 Jan 13, 1:29"A crew of artists (Mr. Tailon, Baveux Prod., Kone & Epoxy) have done up a slick pop music advertisement with a Photoshop makeover. Typical Photoshop windows have been wheatpasted over the faces
of three ubiquitous top 40 music stars."
humor ad advertising streetart street art cultural-disobediance graffiti photoshop 2009 Jan 12, 12:48Results of a FOIA request for the DHS travel records: "I had been curious about what's in my travel dossier, so I made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for a copy. I'm posting here a few
sample pages of what officials sent me."
foia security airplane airport privacy government information 2008 Dec 29, 11:04
Another use for my new phone is as a replacement for my grocery
card, those little plastic cards with a bar code on them that the grocery store gives you to track your purchasing habits. I've previously gone to great lengths to increase space in my pockets by
removing infrequently used keys and reducing my wallet to the essentials. So I was glad to get rid of the QFC card and replace it with a photo of its bar code on my phone. Since the important part
of the QFC card is the bar code which is just an image of black lines, if your phone has a camera and a screen with a reasonable resolution you can take a photo of the bar code and later display it
to a reader. I've so far been able to try it once and successfully at a normal checkout line, but the reaction from the checkout lady was enough that I may in the future just keep a card in my car.
She was very excited, asked me what kind of phone I had, called over another checkout person and generally made a large fuss. Also the checkout people generally don't mind giving me a new card if I
don't have one with me.
technical boring barcode phone 2008 Dec 29, 2:20"But the most accurate account of the bomb's inner workings-an unnervingly detailed reconstruction, based on old photographs and documents-has been written by a sixty-one-year-old truck driver from
Waukesha, Wisconsin, named John Coster-Mullen, who was once a commercial photographer, and has never received a college degree."
via:swannman bomb atom-bomb atomic-bomb history goverment nuclear physics security research science 2008 Dec 19, 12:18
On Monday in Germany we went to Marienplatz and wandered around
the Christmas Market, some of the stores, had drinks in a little pub, visited the Toy Museum, and checked out an impressive looking church. We accidentally drew in some other tourists as we stood
gaping at the Glockenspiel tower waiting for the little show to begin at the wrong hour. That night Megan and Oliver came by our hotel and took us out to a traditional Bavarian restaurant and
brewery that had been brewing beer there for hundreds of years. It was fun although we may have kept Megan and Oliver out too late on a weeknight.
The next day we went to the Deutsches Museum the largest science and technology museum in the world. And indeed it is very large, six floors
on a large grounds. I needed to better pace myself: I spent too much energy being interested in the engineering sections with steam engines, mining, aerospace etc. I was completely worn out by the
time we got to physics, chemistry, etc. etc. and we didn't even look in the natural sciences section. Anyway, its very large. That night we ate with Jon at an Italian restaurant. During the meal
two period dressed children came in and began singing then tried to shake down their captive audience in the restaurant asking for money. The man at the table next to us asked one of the children
what charity the money was going towards, the child said they kept the money, and the man said never mind then and sent the child away.
germany personal vacation nontechnical 2008 Nov 20, 11:01Woo! "I love making films for the cinema but the production of Chicken Run and Curse of the Were-Rabbit were virtually back to back and each film took five years to complete. A Matter of Loaf and
Death will be so much quicker to make. I'm delighted to be back into production and back with BBC One with Wallace and Gromit. Over the years the BBC has been incredibly supportive of Wallace and
Gromit, this film feels like their homecoming."
wallace gromit wallace-grommit bbc animation clay claymation via:kris.kowal humor 2008 Nov 17, 8:21"The organization is now five years old, and our membership is larger than ever. It is estimated that one out of every four people on Earth is now a devoted member. The secret language has been
perfected-- it allows us to talk freely, and sounds just like normal small talk. Also, we have an order of special agents who are particularly dangerous, and are all disguised as normal people. Our
goal is the annihilation of all paranoid people."
humor club paranoia sam-kass 2008 Nov 17, 4:54"One of our unwritten rules is that, in order to work here, you had to have cleaned a grease trap at some point, and you had to have been punched in the face at least once,"
via:ethan_t_hein humor onion 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 13, 10:21"Ever since I read about the incremental updates feature of the PDF file format, I've been patiently waiting for a malicious PDF document with incremental updates to come my way. Thanks to Bojan,
that day has finally arrived."
pdf security javascript exploit malware adobe 2008 Oct 7, 12:21
Last Thursday I saw a bunch of college friends that I hadn't seen in a while, despite all of us working at Microsoft, and Saul and Ciera who were visiting. We had dinner at Typhoon! which I haven't
been to in quite a while. Daniil and Val brought their cute child. I got to see Charlie and Matt who I'm not sure I've seen since my 25th birthday. There was much nerdiness. I need to remember to
organize such a night myself sometime in near future so I don't have to wait another year to see them.
On the weekend Sarah and I went out to dinner at Carnegie's, a former
public library in Ballard, Seattle that's now a restaurant. I saw the restaurant's website in Matt's delicious links and thought it looked interesting. The exterior and entryway look like a public
library, but just inside its redone as a sort of modern version of french classical with a bar and two dining rooms. No pictures since my replacement camera only arrived today, but there are
photos available. They serve french cuisine which was good and
not as expensive as I would have expected. An interesting place, although its a bit of a drive and I'm not sure if we'll be going back soon.
carnegies personal restaurant weekend nontechnical 2008 Oct 3, 5:29I thought the disemvowelment of trolls was a pretty funny punishment -- much better than simply removing the comment: "Disemvowelment is - obviously enough - the act of removing the vowels from a
passage of text, as well as a pun on the word 'disembowelling'. A number of blogs and websites do this to offensive text which has been placed in their 'comments' section. ... This site exists
because I couldn't resists the challenge of trying to re-emvowel disemvowelled text. This is a challenging task, as the disemvowelled word 'dg' may well have been 'dog', but also 'dig', 'dug',
'doge', diego' and so on. I have a first cut of this functionality at the re-emvowel link at the side of the page. A more advanced version is in progress."
tool disemvowelment web comment forum troll language 2008 Sep 30, 10:46A rogue group of knitters 'tag' public objects and places with knit pieces. See thier gallery. "tag crew of knitters, bombing the inner city with vibrant, stitched works of art, wrapped around
everything from beer bottles on easy nights to public monuments and utility poles on more ambitious outings."
humor art graffiti streetart knit cultural-disobediance 2008 Sep 29, 1:41"Lately I have been thinking about Glitch-Art, an emerging aesthetics inside Digital Art which takes the computational error as its subject."
art computer error glitch 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 16, 3:57Interview with Ben Adida on RDFa: "...RDFa is ready. It has just been approved by the W3C as a Candidate Recommendation, with the specific text of the specification and a brand new Primer published
on June 20th. Y!: What can I do with RDFa? BA: You can tell the world what various components on your web page mean by marking up things like: The title of a photo Your name and contact information
The license under which you're distributing your latest MP3 The ingredients of a cooking recipe The price of an item A gene on which you recently wrote a paper ... Anything that you want to make more
machine-readable"
rdf microformats yahoo semantic interview ben-adida semanticweb via:felix42 2008 Sep 9, 8:36"You'd better read this today, because it's possible the world will end tomorrow. Strictly speaking, the probability of doomsday isn't any higher than it is on any normal Wednesday, but there's been
a fair bit of kerfuffle and hullabaloo over the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and whether it will create a black hole that will destroy the entire planet."
lhc cern humor wired technology science blog physics apocalypse
Some rights reserved