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 29, 1:39Demos some of the working HTML5 features now available in recent builds of FireFox, IE8, Safari, and Opera. "Speaker: Ian Hickson. As the HTML5 effort reaches its first big milestone -- feature
completeness -- browsers are starting to implement it. It will be years before you can rely on HTML5 support when writing Web pages and applications, but you can start to experiment today to get a
feel of what the new standard offers. This talk will explore some of the most recent implementations of HTML5 features."
html5 ian-hickson html google video browser ie8 2008 Sep 27, 7:18"Nikon has launched the Coolpix S60 in addition to the four S-series compact cameras. This 10MP digital camera with 3.5" touch-panel LCD and 5x zoom lens, has Vibration Reduction along with features
such as time-lapse movies, in-camera retouch and HDMi output."
nikon camera digital photography photo review 2008 Sep 26, 7:18Real life Bambi and Thumper. Cute!
youtube cute video bunny dear 2008 Sep 26, 2:22This made me laugh: "People think of goths as weirdoes who take vampires too seriously, and therefore they can't help being worried on some level that a crazy goth might, you know, want to make them
bleed. Whereas steampunks are - what? Weirdoes who take pocket-watches too seriously? What are they gonna do, vehemently tell you what time it is?"
steampunk article goth scifi geek via:ethan_t_hein 2008 Sep 24, 6:37Info on how to get at what RSS feeds Facebook provides. "Facebook allows you to subscribe to a variety of rapidly updating content on the site. You can easily keep track of all of your friend's
status updates, posted items and notes." I'd like a RSS feed of my news feed please.
rss facebook reference help 2008 Sep 24, 1:44"Microsoft Image Composite Editor is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. You shoot a set of overlapping photographs of a scene from a single location, and Image Composite Editor creates a
high-resolution panorama incorporating all your images at full resolution."
microsoft research image photo panorama tool free ice stitching 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 23, 1:19The economic bailout program written as 419 spam. "I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800
billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you."
humor politics economics satire spam via:boingboing 2008 Sep 23, 10:58Matt says this is a good restaurant. It certainly looks interesting.
via:swannman seattle food restaurant 2008 Sep 18, 10:31
Netflix has recommended three party movies over my time with Netflix and if you're OK with movies featuring sex, drugs, rock&roll (or techno) as almost the main character then I can recommend
at least The Boys and Girls Guide to Getting Down.
24 Hour Party People is based on the true story of Tony Wilson, journalist, band manager, and club owner (not all at once)
around the rise of punk and new wave in England. Like many true-story based movies it starts off strong and very interesting but gets very slow at the end like the writers got bored and just
started copying the actual events. Unless you have some interest in the history of music in the 80s in Manchester I don't recommend this movie.
Human Traffic is fun and funny following a group of friends going out for a night of clubbing and partying. I had to get over
seeing John Simm as not The Master from Doctor Who but rather as a partying youth. It felt like it was geared towards viewers who were on
something like the totally odd techno musical interludes with the characters dancing for no apparent reason. Otherwise the movie was good.
The Boys and Girls Guide to Getting Down is done in the style of an old educational movie on the topic
of clubbing and partying. It sounds like a premise that would get old but they do a good job. While demonstrating drinking and driving they have scientists push a mouse around in a toy convertible.
Enough said. It was funny and I recommend it.
party movie netflix 2008 Sep 18, 11:33"This was just too funny and a great idea. The hand holding just added to the humor. It is good to see Vader in a relationship finally. Maybe he won't be so grumpy and short tempered from now on."
geek humor starwars darth-vader 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 16, 7:54
I just upgraded to the Zune 3.0 software which includes games and purchasing music on the Zune via WiFi
and once again I'm thrilled that the new firmware is available for old
Zunes like mine. Rooting around looking at the new features I noticed Zune Badges for
the first time. They're like Xbox Achievements, for example I have a Pixies Silver Artist Power Listener award for listening to the Pixies over 1000 times. I know its ridiculous but I like it, and
now I want achievements for everything.
Achievements everywhere would require more developments in self-tracking. Self-trackers, folks who keep statistics on exactly when and what they eat, when and how much they exercise, anything one
may track about one's self, were the topic of a Kevin Kelly Quantified Self blog post (also check out Cory Doctorow's SF
short story The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away featuring a colony of self-trackers).
For someone like me with a medium length attention span the data collection needs to be completely automatic or I will lose interest and stop collecting within a week. For instance, Nike iPod shoes that keep track of how many steps the wearer takes. I'll also need software to analyze, display, and share this data on a website like
Mycrocosm. I don't want to have to spend extreme amounts of time to create something as wonderful as the Feltron
Report (check out his statistic on how many daily measurements he takes for the report). Once we have the data we can give out achievements for everything!
Achievements for Everyday Life
|
Carnivore
Eat at least ten different kinds of animals.
|
|
Make Friends
Meet at least 10% of the residents in your home town.
|
|
Globetrotter
Visit a city in every country.
|
|
You're Old
Survive at least 80 years of life.
|
Of course none of the above is practical yet, but how about Delicious achievements based on the public Delicious feeds? That should be doable...
self-tracking data achievements 2008 Sep 16, 5:08"Today I invented a new way to tell time. ... it will revolutionize time-keeping as we know it.... time is based on the percentage of the day. 12:00 midnight is 0%, 12:00 noon is 50%, 6:00 p.m. is
75%, and so on." I imagine this would be the most depressing way to look at time. Good morning, you've already wasted 33% of the day unconscious in your bed! Every day would be a progress bar slowly
counting down the time. I'd probably stop watching TV completely. Why stop at counting the percentage of the day, how about the year, or how about the percentage of your life expended based on
average life expectency?
time humor 2008 Sep 16, 4:30Wikimedia Commons' list of 'Valued images'
wiki wikimedia creativecommons copyright photos 2008 Sep 16, 4:25I'd seen the previous year's Feltron Annual Report but not the rest of the portfolio. Great stuff.
blog art visualization statistics data portfolio design 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 16, 2:44Update via the web, email, or your phone, stats on day to day activities. For example send 'lunch time' to create a new time dataset named lunch and then send 'lunch' when you eat lunch and it will
note all the times you ate lunch. I was tempted to use this to see a graph of when I add delicious posts but it doesn't support importing old data. Don't think I'll use it but it uses OpenID
perfectly.
blog statistics openid social graph visualization tool 2008 Sep 15, 1:50This just in: people on the Internet are complaining. Also Radiohead has a remix contest. Neat. "No good deed goes unpunished. After letting fans pay whatever they wanted for In Rainbows and
releasing stem tracks via iTunes so that one of the songs on the record could be remixed, Radiohead is facing accusations that its "Nude" remix contest is unfair."
music wired radiohead remix contest
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