A Whole Lotta Nothing

Edmund's a manly man

A couple years ago I remember being impressed with Edmund because he did the ultimate hike, the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs from Mexico to Canada. And he didn't just hike it, he speed hiked it, finishing the trail about two months faster than most people by wearing and carrying the barest essentials. I got to talk to him about it for a short while, but I've been meaning to do a lengthy interview with him as I find it a fascinating trek requiring superhuman stamina.

Now I see he's doing it again. Hiking the PCT takes about two years of preparation, and you have to be able to put your life on hold for about six months while you hike. A small number of folks try it each year and a very small number finish. I can't begin to describe how insane it is to do a 2,700 hike twice in just a few years.

Supersized Me

I finally saw Supersize Me and I was blown away. It's kind of like a jokey, dumbed-down version of the book Fast Food Nation, but really drives the point home. Last year I cut out some junk food from my diet ("french fry free in 2003" was my personal slogan) and lately I've been exercising a ton, but not losing any weight. After seeing this movie, I was reminded why. I've been lazy in the past couple months and I probably eat fast food of some sort 3-4 times a week. "Drive-thru no more in 2004" is my new personal slogan.

It's great to hear the movie is doing well, though I would have guessed that it did more business already. I hope everyone in America gets a chance to see it, it'll open your eyes, make you laugh a little, and blow your mind.

Google's word analysis engine

This is a fascinating little look at the way words are used by folks online.

Cogsci researchers put lots of effort into analyzing how humans process language and they've developed all sorts of crazy means to measure these sorts of things. But with Google grinding through 4 billion webpages, it's safe to say they've probably got the largest human language dataset that is easily queried. And stuff like page counts for word length is an easy way to plumb the depths. If it hasn't already happened, I bet there's a dissertation or article destined for Science on using Google as a cheap (free) text analysis tool for some robust studies. Though, as the post points out, large datasets will take incredible lengths of time to complete using existing tools. Still, I bet someone out there is up to the challenge.

Eventually, it had to happen

An offshoot photoblog, just about flowers.

Clever

I have a lot of ideas. Maybe a handful are good ones. Once in a great while I might have a clever idea, but I'm constantly impressed by people that can truly be creative. To take a problem thousands of years old, turn it on its head and solve it with a new clever idea is something to behold.

These two ideas are just about the most clever things I've ever seen.

Worth noting

This week the NYT issued a mea culpa on their Iraq war coverage, but a year ago according to this blog post it was pretty clear what the problem was, and who was to blame. Weird it took the NYT so long to come around and admit problems.

anti-social network

I've always considered LinkedIn as a sort of grown-up version of Friendster. Instead of Friendster focused on trying to get everyone laid, Linkedin seems to focus on more corporate pursuits, like getting jobs, making connections related to business, and generally growing your corporate network. I haven't done much with my account there, and I've only seen maybe one instance of someone using me to connect to someone I've worked with to discuss a new technology they developed.

What I have seen happen more often is that Linkedin is used as an introduction service. Every few weeks I'll get an email saying "Alice Smith would like to talk to John Doe, who you are two degrees from, click here to accept" and wonder why the first and last person didn't just email directly. Today someone four people away from me sent an innocous question that I would have answered over email in a second. It probably took a few days, and everyone in the chain that hadn't heard of the original question asker or the intended recipient had to go along with it.

I know a lot of people say "email is broken" but is it so far gone that people have to climb the corporate ladder just to drop a stranger a note? If we must use systems like this, isn't there a way to make it less of a hassle?

iPhoto to Typepad

PhotoToTypePad has been released for public beta. I've been testing it for the past couple weeks and Jonathon has incorporated pretty much every feature request and comment I made. It works perfectly for me, I typically create a new gallery, toss some photos in it, rename the titles on the images, then just export to Typepad as a new gallery.

About the only downside I've found so far is the resolution limits at Typepad, which seem to force images whatever max width and height is in your settings (typically 500-640px). Also, I have no idea how much the final version of PhotoToTypepad will cost, hopefully it'll be $5-10.

Every time you don't recycle, God wipes out a species

This image found on usenet looks like the high-class, wild animal version of this classic kitten image which has been joked to death.

The new licenses are here, the new licenses are here!

I just updated the licenses on this blog to the new versions. Personally, I did it for the change in warranty provision. Check it out if you have any currently CC'd content, and update accordingly (it's just changing the URL path from 1.0 to 2.0 in your HTML) if you feel the changes are for the better as well.

trademarked, patented shrubbery

As I'm planting my front yard, I'm doing a lot of research on various plants and trees. One tree that caught my eye for one spot is this River Birch. But the wacky thing about it is that the name is a registered trademark and it also carries this warning "Propagation of this plant is prohibited due to patent protection."

Patented garden plants? I suddenly had visions of a sci-fi future where Johnny Appleseed works for Monsanto, and you're not allowed to eat the apples or graft new trees since it's all copyrighted, patented, and trademarked up the wazoo.

I think I'll get a different tree for that spot.

Simpsons finale: Fox vs. Bloggers

My money's on this leading to this result as the driving force behind tonight's simpsons script.

The hills are alive with the sounds of screaming

The Happiness of the Katakuris is one of the wackiest movies I've seen. It's musical-horror-comedy, with karaoke, zombies, and claymation. There's nothing else like it.

I just caught it on the Sundance channel, which is replaying it on May 30th, but I hear Netflix has it too.

Ultimate Blogging Board

It's been said numerous times that the word "weblog" that morphed into the hideous "blog" has all but become meaningless. Still, it's worth nothing when you see a new (mis)use of the term. This article in the Boston Globe about the TiVo community forum refers to their boards as a "blog". When mentioning forum members, they are called "bloggers" on the TiVo "blog". My guess is in a few years "blog" will be synonymous with publishing anything on the web. The article also fails to even link to the site being talked about.

YouGoGirl.gov

Did you know there was a girlpower.gov site? I'm all for female empowerment and gender-specific information for target audiences, but the domain name seems odd to me and the content is kind of silly. 4girls.gov seems more straightforward.

Dear Maury

Holy cow, this example of people thinking they are talking to Maury is even better than the overhaulin' example. Despite the page saying clearly it was just one person's account of seeing a show, and despite the author making comments pleading with people to stop and openly mocking them, they continue.

Aside from my Google hypothesis, my other one of course is that people never read anything and Google results leading to blogs just makes that more obvious.

Dear Overhaulin

There's a show on TV called Overhaulin' that is basically like trading spaces, except with cars, and if you search for the title, for one reason or another this blog post comes up first in the results.

If you've been reading lots of blogs in the past year or so, you might have noticed that sometimes people searching the web mistake a blog post about a subject for the actual subject. Someone makes a post about Prince, and you see a comment that starts out "Dear Prince" and in all sincerity, people believe they are talking to the subject of the post.

That Overhaulin blog post is the best example I've seen yet. Dozens of people convinced they are speaking directly to someone involved with the show, and it even includes AN ALL CAPS GUY LEAVING A COMMENT.

It seems obvious to all us that have seen weblogs before, the original post clearly is someone commenting on a TV show. But my guess is that regular folks see Google as an internet appliance, and when you put in "overhaulin" you will get the right site as the first result and if that site asks for comments, it must be the show, right?

In case you hadn't seen it...

On Sunday's Meet the Press, Powell's aide pushed the camera way for some reason, and Powell insisted it return so he could finish his question. Here's the video in Windows Media Format (right click to download) in case you didn't catch it.

Hacking Idol

It's great to finally hear someone talk about phone phreaking and other attempts to subvert American Idol voting. Just last week I was trolling the web looking for web-to-SMS gateways to see if one could write a bot to vote-spam an American Idol contestant. To hear that folks are using automated dialers to shut out voters seems even more obvious. They should probably just make the voting a 900 number, at say, 50 cents a vote, in order to limit hackery but people could still simply jam the lines with DoS attacks using dialers.

The difference between throwing a bullet and shooting it out of a gun

I've started trying to exercise more regularly for the past couple weeks, going for a 12 mile, hilly bike ride 3 times a week. Today I did my ride with a decent average speed and finished it in the shortest time yet. The loop I ride has a couple 10% grades in it and I do about 250ft of climbing through it. I was walking around the house today feeling pretty cocky about my progress when I sat down to watch one of my current favorite shows, The Lance Chronicles.

On tonight's episode they followed Lance Armstrong through his european training. One of his regular rides was a 4 1/2 hour, 30 mile climb from the flats high into the mountains, going straight up. It turns out he climbs over 13,000ft in that single ride. When I was in marathon shape, I did a few hikes where I would gain about 6,000ft in a single day from basecamp to summit, and Lance is doing more than twice that. As a training ride.

I'm thinking he's a shoe-in for this year's Tour.

That's it, I'm getting a Dell Digital Jukebox

Have you seen the new Apple iPod page? The new units are outrageously priced at $300 to $500 dollars. Worse yet, every iPod comes with all sorts of new limits! You can only marry one computer to your iPod, under one user. You can only fit 15Gb, 20Gb, and 40Gb of music on each. I have 54Gb of music that my entire family shares, and now there's no iPod that fits my use. You can't play Windows Media Player files. You can't play OGG files on it either. I'll wait until Steve Jobs changes the Apple homepage, but in the meantime I'm seriously considering moving to the Dell DJ.

On being gay

From this MetaFilter comment on some homophobic post, comes this comedic gem:

When his father asked him about what it is that he and his gay partner do, Jim replied "You know all those things that you wish Mom would do? That's what we do."

iPhoto2Typepad

I'm helping beta test PhotoToTypePad and it's working really well. If I didn't host my own image galleries using other iPhoto export plugins, I'd be all over this for daily use. It should be in public beta soon and soon after I expect it'll be a favorite for lots of mac users.

Barry '101010101' Bonds

Things I've wondered about free wifi at baseball parks: how do you catch a foul ball with your laptop? How do you keep beer from spilling on your keyboard? When you realize how boring baseball is and you have the connection, do you ever pay attention to the game?

Testing, testing

I'm just taking the new evil MT 3.0 developer version out for a spin. So far it looks good.

My new favorite fast food joint

I caught Dining & Wine > At the Nation's Table: Fast Food That's Straight From the Farm" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/28/dining/28TABL.html?ex=1398484800&en=3da8bc75a21cbf44&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND">this story about Burgerville in the NYTimes last month and was intrigued to hear that an Oregon fast food place was doing seasonal items and using local meat and produce, just like a high falutin' restuarant. I had seen Burgervilles often since I moved to Oregon and I've ignored them all this time because they appeared to be some local-yokel chain with a generic, boring name and exterior to match.

Today I finally checked them out and I was blown away. Now, I've read Fast Food Nation, and I know pretty much everyone in the industry is panned except for In-N-Out. I enjoy In-N-Out burger whenever I'm in California, but after trying Burgerville, I have to say that if Schlosser wrote about them, there's no doubt he would have praised them more than In-N-Out.

The following is a partial list of what they have going for them. Every couple of months, whatever's in season is an item on the menu, and they buy from local producers. My strawberry shake tonight was loaded with a ridiculous amount of chunked fresh strawberries. They offer not one but two different veggie burgers on the menu. They let you add local favorite Tillamook cheese to burgers, just like I have at home. The turkey burgers are made with only cage-free birds. All the beef is Oregon-raised and fed vegetarian diets so you'll never have a mad cow problem. The fish and chips use halibut caught in the Northwest. All buns come from an area bakery. They had nutrition info right on counter, clear as day. And while waiting for my food inside one of their locations today, I noticed in a rack of information on the company there was a pamphlet explaining some healthy environment certification that the chain received because they only buy from responsible farmers and ranchers. Crazy, no?

The food was great, better than what I expect from fast food, but the company philosophy and the way they conduct their business really blew me away. It's not everyday you find a place with a drive-thru selling greasy burgers that cares about anything aside from the quick buck. I think I may have found something better than In-N-Out and I'm glad to know it's in my new home state.

Viva la indie rock

For fans of The Long Winters, stream this 'no love for ned' radio show and fast forward to about 1:02:00. The band does a few live songs in the studio using the equipment available (a laptop, an acoustic guitar, and old electric guitar). The band rearranged their songs for the stuff on hand and it's always interesting to hear new takes on songs you've heard many times before.

Blog this

The new Blogger came out finally, and it looks terrific. I've already heard some comments that it's too dumbed down, but I think it's perfect for a new audience while at the same time isn't insulting to seasoned users.

One of the many new features at Blogger is the ability to have comments, and when I followed Ev's comment link and ended up at the Comment Sign In, I started cracking up.

After a couple months of hand-wringing over Typekey, Blogger basically relaunched with a more restrictive version of Typekey (no anon comments?), but I doubt we'll hear bad things about it. Maybe Sixapart should have just launched Typekey without telling anyone about it first. :)

Other notable things include great new all-CSS designs (that make blogspot/google ads on top look kinda assy), single post archives, and the new archive URL scheme. It's almost like they optimized Blogger blogs for search engines, which is kind of weird since it's Google running the service.

I'm totally amazed that they got keystrokes to work on the mac (in firefox). I've been struggling with the javascript that a couple friends gave me for MetaFilter comment boxes. I got keystrokes to work in Moz and IE on windows, but could never figure out how to make them work on a Mac. I'll have to steal the js for my other sites.

Overall I think it's a great redo of the service and site. They took on some of the features of Movable Type, but not enough for power users (when they allow for unlimited template creation and editing, then more people will try them out for complex blogs), while at the same time making the service easy enough for the 99.9999% of the population that has never posted anything online in their lives. This new design may just be the thing that jumps the chasm for blogs, making them more mainstream than ever.

Raise a glass for Pat

Leonard pulled the recent under the radar stuff about Pat Tillman into one nice post. I was impressed with Tillman's resolve and unselfishness in ditching sports for the military, but after reading the SFGate article he sounds like an interesting and very human person to boot. The funeral sounded like a perfect send-off, done the way he would have wanted it, and Ted Rall is an asshole for making a dark cynical joke of the guy's ultimate sacrifice.

This is why blogs are a good thing for the existing media - due to the language used at the funeral, no media outlet in america can carry it, and probably due to our religious sensibilities, the photo from the funeral is only running on an overseas news wire. So you can only get the rest of the story thanks to the millions of eyeballs scouring the net for interesting angles on what would otherwise be one-dimensional soundbites.

Rummy and digital cameras

From today's testimony:

We're functioning in a -- with peacetime restraints, with legal requirements in a war-time situation, in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon.

Rumsfeld ain't a fan of digital cameras or citizen media

SF, LA, NYC, Paris, etc...

Apparently the jury's still out on what is the most photographed city in the world.

Photos, baby!

A mess of photos from my recent trip to NYC.

Tina Fey, sexiest woman alive

Put simply, Mean Girls is the best teen-related movie I've ever seen. Wickedly smart and funny, it walked the line between the comedy of Heathers and the pure entertainment of something like Bring It On.

I'm definitely seeing it again, if for nothing else, to enjoy the hip-hop styling of the mighty KG.

Oh, it's on

While goofing around in NYC this weekend, I think I captured the greatest photoblog image of all time, ever ever forever, until the heat death of the universe.

At least until someone else can cram more visual clichés into a single photo.