A Whole Lotta Nothing

links for 2005-01-31

• BOOKFORUM | feb/mar 2005
  Fair use and "digital environmentalism"
  (categories: toread copyright creativecommons)
• News of the dead: SXSW
  Wiley Wiggins is doing a SXSW panel and movie showing
  (categories: film sxsw via:kyu)

goopy!

(goopy_art0010, originally uploaded by goopymart)

goopy's stuff is amazing. I wish I could buy t-shirts, greeting cards, and books filled with goopy art.

licensed images in squared circle 2005-01-25

(licensed images in squared circle 2005-01-25, originally uploaded by jbum)

Pretty cool visualization of the state of copyright licensing over at flickr

links for 2005-01-30

• The New York Times: Mommy (and Me)
  The Dooce in the NYT and get this -- it's not about being fired for a blog
  (categories: nyt dooce baby)

links for 2005-01-29

• United Church of Christ News Release: SpongeBob welcomed by UCC
  Jesus didn't turn people away. Neither do we (even spongebob).
  (categories: spongebob religion TheGay(TM))
• Democracy For America
  Dean for Chair of the DNC -- we need a shakeup after two loser outings and a general decline for decades
  (categories: politics democrats dean)

links for 2005-01-28

• Leaders Gather to Mark Liberation of Auschwitz
  60 years. It's my eternal hope is that we never see anything like it ever again.
  (categories: wwII)
• Flickr: Photos tagged with a9local
  Alan, formerly of Amazon, is posting the best a9 photos he can find. And here I thought he went to NYC on vacation.
  (categories: a9 photos flickr amazon)
• Health plans with high patient-paid deductibles, embraced by many Republicans as a market-based solution to quell soaring medical-care costs, lead to poorer quality care and increasing patient debt
  color me unsurprised
  (categories: privitization healthcare insurance)
• Flickr: Photos tagged with bugoftheday
  One to watch
  (categories: photos flickr bugs)

I heart you, lab boy

(I heart you, lab boy, originally uploaded by ChrisJ)

Love is everywhere

The "Office"

Have you seen the terrible US version of BBC's The Office?

This comment at MetaFilter totally nails what's wrong with the concept of taking a downbeat, dry, British comedy and trying to make it work as an NBC sitcom:

Here's how fast this goes wrong: in the first scene Carell says "If you think she's cute now, you should have seen her a couple of years ago" and "Pam" says "What?!" - Dawn would never have reacted. The whole point was that everyone in the office was too worn down by the drudgery and inanity of their jobs to challenge Brent's horrifying misogyny and other casual cruelties. Because that's what really happens in every office in the world all the fucking time.

Signs you need to cut back on the online shopping

The UPS man just drove up, but gave me the courtesy honk before coming to a rest in front of my house. The "hi! I'm here!" honk! When I was a kid the only person in the neighborhood that got that honk from the UPS truck ran a mail order business from their home. I haven't bought anything off ebay in weeks, but he has been here twice this week. Time to back away from the computer...

links for 2005-01-27

• notestips.com :: Photoshop CS .PSD Thumbnails in Windows Explorer
  I was just wondering about this the other day when I noticed PSD files no longer showed thumbnails. Now they can.
  (categories: windows photoshop adobe)
• Ribbit - The Big Question
  Brad from LiveJournal is getting married...along with everyone else they know
  (categories: marriage lj sixapart)
• Decisive Moments: A reason to ride
  My reasons for not riding since Fall: none
  (categories: cycling mr.seeman blizzard)
• Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism || kuro5hin.org
  A cofounder of wikipedia on what needs to change for wikipedia to survive long term
  (categories: wikipedia wiki k5)
• John Battelle's Searchblog: News: A9 Debuts "Yellow Pages" - Now *That's* Local
  The new A9 yellow pages are very cool. They even let you collaboratively add images of the store fronts to the database. Truly social software.
  (categories: socialsoftware mapping yellowpages)

One less worry in life

I'm an adult now and I have a home and savings and have all my bills in check, but I can never forget what it was like being 18 with my first bank account, back when using an ATM was like playing roulette (and like any form of gambling, I walked away empty handed more often than with any cash). So even though it's been ten years since I've left an ATM empty handed, I can't get an irrational thought out of my head every time I use an ATM: that I'm surprisingly and suddenly dead broke. It's sort of an adult version of the "waking up naked at the exam" nightmare I used to have in college.

Until now. I was poking around my small town credit union website and discovered a new alert feature, where they send an email based on your account activity. So I setup an automatic email that goes to my cellphone's email address when the checking account is below a fairly comfortable level. The feeling didn't leave immediately the next time I used an ATM, but after I saw the feature work when a bunch of bills went through, I now know that it is instantly wired to my bank balance, even when I'm far from a computer.

A lot of stuff I've read about simplifying your life involves removing all those little irrational worries that clog your thoughts and keep you from getting things done and living happy. In addition to this small thing, I've been to the dentist for the first time in years and removed the other big irrational fear that my teeth would fall out any day now. It's been nice to remove these worries from my life forever, as I've got a whole bunch of new worries lined up to deal with. :)

links for 2005-01-26

• The Australian: Reflections of a straight shooter [January 20, 2005]
  "The biggest regret is that we didn't stop 9/11. And then in the wake of 9/11, instead of redoubling what is our traditional export of hope and optimism we exported our fear and our anger. And presented a very intense and angry face to the world. I regret
  (categories: colinpowell politics 9/11)
• SportsShooter.com - Beheading the Messenger...
  "I'm getting kicked out of the SFSU freshmen dorms for documenting underage alcohol abuse and criminal activities that have taken place over the past semester." - student photojournalist at SFSU (I looked and looked, but can't find the offending images th
  (categories: photography photojournalism ethics college)
• Message Forum Spam | Metafilter
  AshleyTurfing
  (categories: corporatemusic ashleysimpson spam)
• Flickr Photo Download: miracleboy
  the littlest snowdeal in the newspaper
  (categories: baby hospital miracle snowdeal)
• OpenStreetMap
  cc-licensed maps of the world (in alpha)
  (categories: mapping gis creativecommons)
• PostSecret
  like grouphug.us, but only done via the mail, and scanned in afterwards
  (categories: confessions collaborative)
• .: Corvallis Gazette-Times :. News
  pb and ORblogs in the paper!
  (categories: fatherofthepermalink blogs pb)

links for 2005-01-25

• Dwell Baby
  Nice baby sheets
  (categories: wishlist baby moderndesign)
• Gabriel Jeffrey plugging grouphug.us on TV
  Silly news show meets grouphug. The host says "wow" way too much.
  (categories: tv grouphug.us)
• Hurricane Electric FAQ - BitTorrent
  Whoa, everyone hosting their site at HE.net can make torrents out of files automatically and serve them up. Awesome.
  (categories: bittorrent webhosting)
• ANT Beta is here! | ANT
  whoa, like video podcasting.
  (categories: video rss clientapps)
• As Sites Add Tags Tagtextual Advertising Will Follow
  Leave to marketers to see something useful like bottom-up organization and think "Wow, people like some useful new thing? We better stuff advertising in that!"
  (categories: marketinghell folksonomies tags)
• PayLoadz - Sell Digital Goods with PayPal
  lets you upload files to sell via paypal
  (categories: paypal ecommerce ebooks)
• McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Today, Some Lists.
  THINGS I'D PROBABLY SAY IF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION WERE JUST A WEEKLY TV SHOW AND I WERE A REGULAR VIEWER
  (categories: politics bush comedy)

Google Video Search

The google video search is pretty freaking cool. You can tell they're scraping show transcripts which lots of services already have (I seem to recall something called TVeyes used to email me when the word "blog" or "metafilter" was mentioned on TV, which used to happen only once or twice a year). But they also are doing screengrabs which is really interesting, so they must be pulling down video. They even show me all the local stations near my zip code that show up in my searches. Maybe someday Google will be like a iTunes Movie Store where I can one click download programs I wanted to watch?

Anyway, here are a couple cool searches: the only blogger I could find mentions of was Nick Denton and it looks like Movable Type really was mentioned on Jeopardy and those cards weren't just photoshop mockups someone posted months ago.

Oh, and of course Lessig shows up. That guy is everywhere.

Oscar, schmoscar

So I'm plugging away at my list, almost done seeing every film I aimed at seeing and so far I'm fairly disappointed. I think it was a bad year for film if these are floating to the top. Sideways, especially, surprised me in how much praise it garnered vs. how I felt after seeing the credits roll. I'm a huge fan of Paul Giamatti, but he's doing another Harvey from American Splendor character and maybe I found Thomas Haden Church's character's behavoir abhorrent, but the performances were good and it was a bit of a buddy roadtrip movie that made me want to watch, but in the end I wasn't blown away by any of it.

I'm kind of surprised by its place on every best of 2004 list. It was a fine picture and all, but I guess I didn't identify with either main character so it's probably just me.

links for 2005-01-24

• CC Mixter - The remix family tree
  Even mixter now has tags, thanks to victor's quick work
  (categories: music remix contest folksonomies tags)

Audioscrobbler - like an iPod shuffle for computers

I've been logging every song I listen to over on my audioscrobbler account for almost two years now, and I discovered a really cool random feature.

There's a feature called "Personal Radio" that lets you stream songs from a user's profile (you have to be logged in to see it, and you might need to donate to them to get it -- I donate $5 a month to Last.fm). Last night I was playing music from my own profile, on a computer that doesn't have any of my music collection locally. I expected to hear my current collection streaming back at me, but what I was heard was a randomized collection of all the music I've heard in the last six years of mp3 use.

I didn't realize it, but Audioscrobbler has a record of every song I've ever listened to, which currently numbers about 5400 songs. My current iTunes collection only contains 1800 songs, because I do a monthly delete of songs I no longer care for as I add new ones. I completely forgot about my 1999 era music archives I heard on two other computers in the past two years, but no longer listen to.

What's cool about this is that I can log into Audioscrobbler from any computer on earth and start streaming my entire all-time music collection without having anything more than a player that understands music streams.

links for 2005-01-23

• New greeting card idea: Life Begins at 30 | Metafilter
  The "trend" of people marrying at older ages is not a new thing
  (categories: sociology marriage life)
• Everything from Art to everydayobjects
  tags as art - the top 150 tags on MetaFilter, sorted by popularity
  (categories: screenshot art metafilter)
• styled RSS
  that's the prettiest feed I've seen
  (categories: rss css browsers)

Needs more liberty bell

So I grabbed a drum loop and took the audio from my previous post to make this: libertybell.mp3 (600kb, 30 seconds long)

The scary part is that while I added drums behind it, I didn't edit any of the speech. He actually said those phrases over and over and over again in a single speech.

links for 2005-01-22

• Boingboing.net Stats search
  Andy has the coolest demo of that PHP/Flash chart engine
  (categories: me boingboing chartsngraphs)
• Yahoo! News - Everyone get Cheney
  Snowball fight!
  (categories: photos politics j20)
• TiVo To Go MPEG2 Decrypting
  convert your TTG files to mpeg in five minutes. Nice!
  (categories: tivo mpeg tv)
• Welcome to Veganopolis!
  I just heard that jack saturn is alive and well, working at this new vegan restaurant in Portland.
  (categories: vegetarianism food pdx)

Freedom. Liberty. Liberty. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Liberty

If you missed last night's daily show, here's the very best segment (17Mb mpeg)

I need to extract the audio and provide it for remixes. If anyone figures out how to get a mp3 from the mpeg2 file, post it somewhere and I'll point some DJs at it.

update: Victor was nice enough to turn out a mp3

Pyramids without a point

Every time I see a spam email or spam blog comment hawking someone's freeiPods.com/freeiPodMini.com/freeMiniMacs.com link code, I wonder why people fall for pyramid schemes time and time again. I'm only 32, but I seem to see these scams pop up every couple years (Herbalife, Amway, etc) and people just keep falling for them every single time.

I wonder if it's one of those natural laws, like pi being around 3.14 or the natural log of trends curving around 2.71. Maybe the conditional reinforcement of pyramid schemes hits some magic sweet spot where just enough people at the top actually get something while every sad sucker beneath gets diddly squat, and the ratio of rewards to bupkis is a perfect number.

Collaboration in the what now?

Calendar: Wednesday, Jan. 26, through Sunday, Jan. 30 - The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon, USA

Metamedia Cooperation - An experience in sharing and collaboration, celebrating the connections between creative solutions in art, science and community; event includes art installations featuring the works of Dhira Lawrence, Mark Henson, Nemo, Carey Thompson, Roman Villagrana and others, multimedia video presentations on Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons and remixed works by the Theurgic Seed Cooperative and others, visuals by Dreamer John; hosted by Jair, 5 p.m., Downtown Initiative for the Visual Arts, 110 W. Broadway. $5. (344-3482)

Odd, I hadn't heard about this, but it's in my own backyard so I'll go. I can't tell if Larry will be there or if it's just a video of him. Probably a video -- we're talking about Eugene, Oregon of all places. :)

My Blogger HoOdie

(My Blogger HoOdie, originally uploaded by a trying youth)

This is the coolest Blogger logo shot

links for 2005-01-21

• dangerousmeta!: On this inauguration day,
  A bunch of great quotes to think about
  (categories: quotations politics bush j20)
• centricle : photos
  Killer photo from the inauguration day
  (categories: j20 photos police)

links for 2005-01-20

• Eric's Archived Thoughts: Signs of Intelligence
  The last time I saw my year and a half old niece, we had a long conversation involving the 5 or 6 signs she knew. Most of it was "up" and "more" signs.
  (categories: baby signlanguage communication)
• HubLog: mp3blog TopList
  nice way to bootstrap a best-of-best list off public services like delicious and technorati
  (categories: webapi mp3blogs music)
• Automotive News
  My parents had a Jeep Scrambler when I was a kid, which was a CJ7 with an extended bed like a truck. Looks like they're bringing it back
  (categories: cars jeep suv)
• CNN.com - Poll: Nation split on Bush as uniter or divider - Jan 19, 2005
  Greatest headline I've ever seen on CNN
  (categories: comedy irony politics)

nofollow

12 hours after I first heard about the nofollow idea, I have to say I'm 100% happy with the idea. Last night I made a dumb jokey comment that they should have used nofollow in the links on the blog, not knowing it was aimed at just comment areas. I also had a first reaction of "this won't solve comment spam overnight" which it won't, but that's fine because it will make Google better by giving it better results today and maybe curb spamming eventually.

I have a love-hate relationship with pagerank in general and more specifically with the inflated pagerank given to blogs. But when I got a crazy high rank for PVRblog (I think it's gone down since then), I felt an obligation to keep artificial URLs away from the site.

My premise was that if Google thinks I'm an authoritative source of information (even if I'm not sure I deserve it) and that my posts are highly topical and help people searching for information, then it was my duty to keep the information neat and tidy, and keep people from cheaply trying to take advantage of my position. A nofollow feature would be perfect for PVRblog since I didn't want my good article on how to setup a TiVo without a phone line to get mucked up with people trying to sell satellite systems or even worse, viagra pill offers.

And someone on MetaFilter explained it well with the old adage you hear from anyone that ever built an application used by many: never trust user input. That's what nofollow does, is allow site owners to maintain their sites with good information they deem worth posting about, while at the same time keeping user submitted data apart from that, to be viewed by search engines as "here's the stuff I wrote and some other people added stuff here below that you can feel free to index as text, but ignore any links they add since I can't be an authority on whether they provide additional information or not."

Sounds about right to me.

This is Broken

I got an American Express card in 2004 so I could put all my business expenses on that card. My thought was by having a card devoted to business expenses, it would make tax time next year a lot easier, since purchases could be easily totalled up and verified. Today I got my year-end summary of purchases and there were a bunch of charges I couldn't remember from Jan-March of 2004, so I logged into the americanexpress.com site to look up those months and these were my statement options. What you see above is the dropdown option to fetch statements, but it stops at July of 2004

I looked and looked, and couldn't find older statements so I called customer service for the web site and was told they only maintain 6 months of archived statements. It's funny because conventional tax/accounting wisdom is that statements should be saved for 7 years in case of an audit, and I specifically went paperless/snailmailess with AMEX so that I could access everything online. The kicker is that any statement over 6 months old costs $5 to retreive through their archive service.

Suffice to say that it's time for me to pick a new credit card that can actually deliver business service.

links for 2005-01-19

• Archinect : T-Shirts
  I need to buy Bryan one of those "architecture sucks" shirts
  (categories: tshirts wishlist blogs)
• Prepare to lose your mind
  the best thing on the web ever (this week, at least)
  (categories: awesomest hasselhoff recursion)
• Google Search: anne geddes photo
  Merlin reigns supreme.
  (categories: 5ives merlinmann googlefun)
• MercuryNews.com | 01/18/2005 | Wiki war born out of Walt Disney deal
  (whispering) Shhh, let them be... they're wiki fighting!
  (categories: wiki vc siliconvalley disney)
• wordPhoto.org - commence visual interpretation please
  Buffington's ice beard on his WRX
  (categories: photos buffington wrx ice)
• Google Blog on nofollow
  Why does the google blog use a dumb non-pagerank special Google URL to link to everyone instead of using the "nofollow" that they're annoucing in the same post?
  (categories: irony google pagerank seo)

Please, fence me in

I see that there is now a whole website devoted to the Mac mini and I realized why I have a bit of my own enthusiasm for the small unit and why I think my friends all want one, even though they've got more powerful computers already on their desktops: People like limits.

Now I'm not saying people prefer pessimism over optimism, on the contrary, the challenge of working in a limited medium and constantly finding clever innovation as you bang into the walls of constraint is an attractive place to work for many engineers and designers.

I think I (and many others) fell in love with HTML in the mid-90s because it was so limited, but within those bounds you could expresss your creativity in all sorts of ways. There were daily innovations being discovered and shared by folks around the world. I see that with the Mac mini already. It presents a new baseline set of capabilities to work with, and within the constrained environment I could see myself competing with friends to see who is the first to do something seemingly mind blowing with this limited device.

A lot has been written about the role of constraint and limits in design. I seem to recall Stewart had a talk about the 5k contest that explained why people would flock so enthusiastically to a contest that imposed strict limits on the participants. Problem solving is a core aspect of what design is and it's a rewarding experience to innovate within boundaries to do something you didn't think was possible.

links for 2005-01-18

• Rain-X windshield fluid
  Rain X is the best thing since sliced bread in the Pacific Northwest, but applying it monthly is a chore. This makes it automatic everytime you clean the window.
  (categories: productsilove rainx clever)
• Ripshark - CD to MP3 made easy.
  Great new CD-ripping service from Adam Sellke of sellke.com. Wish I lived in MN so I could get my discs ripped via hand delivery.
  (categories: blogs audio cdripping)
• Restoring The Balance reBlog
  George's reblog of a dozen copyright blogs
  (categories: copyright iplaw blogs)
• Airliners.net Photos: Untitled (Airbus Industrie) Airbus A380-841
  That is one big assed plane. Any flight with 800 people can't be fun (must take forever to board, eat, and disembark)
  (categories: planes photos airlines)
• Our Menu
  Sewdorky's permadonuts make for good cubicle toys or very tiny pillows
  (categories: wishlist crafts diy)
• trenchant.org - entwined - matthaughey
  I

  (categories: taggging folksonomy crazyoldman)

Oscar baby

Thanks to various situations where I was stuck in an airplane, hotel room, or at the end of a sold-out movie ticket line, I seen four of the worst movies in recent memory. Mr. 3000, Shark Tale, Fat Albert, and Taxi were good representitives of all the complaints people have about stupid movies with a dumb premise that use every hackneyed plot point you've seen a hundred times before. Taxi was so bad I tried twice and couldn't watch more than ten minutes of it. Pure dreck.

To balance out the cosmic karma, I've gone on a quest to see every movie that is up for a major academy award this year (a first for me). I've looked to the golden globes and early predictions to get up to speed, but after a long weekend binge, I've tackled the following:

Ray

I didn't think Jamie Foxx had it in him, but he was great, though the story glossed over quite a bit and was fairly straightforward. I'm a longtime fan of Ray Charles (and have the boxsets to prove it) so I liked this film, though wouldn't classify it as top five for the year.

Spanglish

Adam Sandler does a good job but the best work came from the girl playing Cristina. There were several amazing emotional scenes, but a few so-so other scenes kept this film from being really something.

Finding Neverland

Johnny Depp, as always, did well, and it was a nice little story but nothing to write home about. I don't know why it's on anyone's list as a possible best picture, there was nothing wrong with it, but it just didn't transcend the "good film" level to greatness.

Million Dollar Baby

Great stuff, and I could see this film rightfully landing in the Best Picture category.

Friday Night Lights

I don't even like football but I loved this movie. It's hard to place it against all other films that came out in 2004 (a sports performance isn't always the best way to demonstrate good acting) but it was definitely the best football film I've seen.

Aviator

Meh. I don't see what all the fuss is about this film, is it all because Scorsese directed it? Sure it looks good, but the story bored me to tears. It glossed over all the records Hughes broke and his innovations while zooming in on how freaky-deaky he could be. I take back what I said about Finding Neverland -- that movie should be in best picture lists and not this one.

My goal for the next couple weeks are to catch these films:
- Sideways
- Closer
- Hotel Rwanda
- Kinsey
- Lemony Snickets

I'm pretty confident I'll be able to meet the Oscars goal early.

update: I'm plucking titles out of the second list and posting short reviews in the first list as I see them.

links for 2005-01-17

• Biz Stone, Genius: Ballots in Iraq Are Being Sold
  d'oh.
  (categories: iraq elections democracyisonthemarchforaprice)
• Why won't my browser understand RSS? | Ask MetaFilter
  Awesome real world user experience with orange rss buttons. You click them and they should do something, right?
  (categories: rss usability browsers)
• The Trademark Blog
  The trademark blog considers bloglines commercial reuse of his RSS feed. Seems like a stretch.
  (categories: creativecommons rss iplaw)
• QDN: Who knew the domain system was broken?!?
  panix.com is up in the air, and someone may be pulling down all the information in every email
  (categories: dns internet domainhijacking)
• Decisive Moments: A disclaimer
  yay! Luke is blogging again. I blame Greg Knauss.
  (categories: blogs mr.seeman chicago)

links for 2005-01-15

• Michael Buffington "Apple is Pure Evil or Totally Rad or Both"
  Awesome idea for getting free advertising: game the system with a dumb lawsuit you don't intend on following through with, just for the headlines
  (categories: apple stevejobs evilgenius)

links for 2005-01-14

• zonkette: Financially Interested Blogging
  I bet all the candidates do this, but damn is it a dumb practice. I thought better of Dean's team
  (categories: politics payola blogs)

links for 2005-01-13

• The Uncle Liam Show: Welcome to Jenville
  Watch it and you'll be singing "and O my god it's Arlo" too.
  (categories: baby arlo video)
• Children's, kids music and video by robot band Bzots! Bizots, Bizzots.
  I have a feeling I'll be looking for kid-friendly music for the rest of my life. Might as well start now.
  (categories: kidmusic bands children)
• US gives up search for Iraq WMD
  It's funny, when CBS fucked one story up, they fired four people and a newsman stepped down after decades at his post, but George W Bush can't recall ever making a single mistake in his presidency. Interesting.
  (categories: politics bush iraq)
• BlueTrip: Griffin Technology
  whoa, bluetooth audio out from an ipod to any device up to 30 feet away. And you keep the iPod as the controller while it plays.
  (categories: apple ipod bluetooth)
• Apple's Tipping Point: Macs for the Masses
  The king of infographics works his magic to sum up Apple's new plays for the middle of the bell curve
  (categories: apple macmini infographics)
• Yahoo! Maps - Woz Way, San Jose, CA 95110
  San Jose named a street after Steve Wozniack, cofounder of Apple.
  (categories: apple woz siliconvalley)
• Investors Supporting Spyware
  Do not take money from these guys. Even the dude in charge of The WELL is in on the game.
  (categories: spyware venturecapital funding)

Snowquet!

(Spray shot, originally uploaded by santheo)

I guess this gets filed under things to do in Chicago when you're bored.

links for 2005-01-12

• iPod shuffle
  George Hotelling showed this URL this morning, and we both thought it was a hoax
  (categories: ipod apple macworld)
• Geotagging Web Pages and RSS Feeds | Linux Journal
  Geourl, o how I miss thee
  (categories: gis geourl web)
• Other World Computing- MWSF2004 WebCam
  all the boredom of wandering a booth at macworld, from the comfort of your home.
  (categories: streamingvideo macworld apple)
• oqo: home
  The long rumored, never released semi-portable computer OQO reminds me of what the Mac mini could be: a transportable brick you take from home to the office instead of a laptop
  (categories: apple macmini oqo)
• Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | The war on copyright communists
  "Bill Gates wants software patents to protect his profit, not the public"
  (categories: microsoft fuckbillgates copyright)
• Om Malik on Broadband � The true Nick dePlume has been unmasked?
  The guy behind Think Secret might be a college freshman. That would be hilarious.
  (categories: apple lawsuits rumorsontheinternets)
• BushBlackOut - 24 Hours Of Silent Protest
  I dunno how big this will be on the web, but interesting someone is trying it
  (categories: bush politics j20)

Macworld

All the announcements from Apple today look great. And I'm not an apple fanboy, but getting a cheap PC out there that is free of IE and Outlook viruses should do a lot of good for Apple's marketshare. Heck, I'd like to buy one for every one of my relatives struggling on their Dells and HPs running windows, overrun with spyware. The tiny iPod shuffle looks good too, especially since running with a full sized iPod is cumbersome, and I've been thinking about buying a big usb thumb drive anyway, so the shuffle fits nicely.

I'm happy to see iWork and Apple launching a word processor. Personally, I use Subethaedit for all my text documents, only using Word when a coworker or book editor sends me something. People should retreat to text editors, but until they do, having a Word alternative will be nice.

links for 2005-01-11

• All the other crazy shit I saw at CES
  The end of my trip reports from Vegas
  (categories: pvrblog lasvegas ces)
• john vanderslice: mass suicide mp3s
  How much would it rock if Vanderslice licensed "Bill Gates Must Die" under a CC license? It would rock a great deal.
  (categories: wishlist fuckbillgates indierock)
• Flickr: Mushrooms
  "There's fungi, there's fungus, and now there's mushrooms. Three groups with exactly the same concept and some overlap in the membership."
  (categories: socialsoftware flickr communityproblems)
• The New York Times > Opinion > For the Record on Social Security
  "the administration is manipulating information" -- NYT editors
  (categories: nyt toread socialsecurity)
• The Daily Whim: Pay the Gray Lady
  Photodude does the math and shows if the NYT made all their archives free, they could make a lot more money on advertising on thousands of new pages. C'mon NYT, follow his advice and open it up instead of closing it all down.
  (categories: nyt economics advertising)
• Linksys WRT54G and WRT54GS Hacking - Taking Advantage Of Technology
  quick guide to updating
  (categories: linksys hacking wireless)
• Daring Fireball: The Rumor Game
  I've got to say he's right about false rumors and how rumor sites don't promote but just capitalize on news. I didn't like the ipod mini unti l held one in my hand (You can't really tell how small they are until you hold one)
  (categories: apple rumorsontheinternets ipod)
• Mac Rumors: No MacWorld SF Keynote Broadcast?
  WTF?! This is my annual ritual: watching grainy, pixellated video and listening to Jobs announce stuff in between buffering errors. It just won't be the same if it's not real-time.
  (categories: macworld apple stevejobs)
• MacCentral: Apple to delay webcast of Jobs keynote
  keynote webcast to follow NINE HOURS LATER. Why?
  (categories: macworld apple stevejobs)

links for 2005-01-10

• Mini wagon mod
  How do you take an elegant design and make it look like a turd? Here's how.
  (categories: mini carmods ugly)

The point that I lost all respect for Bill Gates

I've used Windows on every primary computer of mine since 3.1. I'm only a recent convert to OS X, and I still share a desktop with a fast cheap PC running winXP that I devote to all coding. IE was my favorite browser from the days of 4.0 betas until a year or two ago when mozilla surpassed it. I've heard a lot of criticism of MS and specifically Bill Gates, but I've often defended both the corporation and the man. But my time as a microsoft apologist is over.

After ridiculous comments this week at CES, where Gates equated the last three years of my work with Creative Commons as some sort of Red Menace that needs to be stopped, it's clear he's off his rocker. Bill's spouting lines that make him sound like the new Jack Valenti. From the first Gizmodo interview:

"There's always a tricky issue when you get into stolen material or pornography...if you get notified that it's stolen materials or pornography or things like that...The laws for online publishing the same as for print-based publishing."

Translated: Bill Gates has a talking points team that wants him to equate potential copyright violators with pornographers so he's sure to mention it twice. The term "potentional copyright violators" while correct, isn't as forceful as "stolen material" so he repeats that as often as possible too. His last statement makes clear that to him online publishing = print publishing. In other words, intellectual property = physical property and should be treated as such in the eyes of the law, a concept so fraught with problems I won't even go into the ridiculousness of it all.

I'm pretty sure I've figured out what Bill's problem is and it's pretty simple: Gates is convinced that Microsoft's version of DRM is the One True Path for MS domination of internet content, and he's saying anything he can to promote it.

Microsoft missed the internet boat early on, asleep at the wheel until 1996 and has been behind the times on every venture they've tried since. They've tried to be the king of web publishing, but Dreamweaver owns that. They tried to be an ISP but AOL is still in front. IM? AOL is crushing them again. Passport was supposed to give MS control of every login on the web, but it turns out people didn't trust nor like it. They've tried search over and over, but Google is still the clear king. They're the newest johnny-come-lately to blogging and they don't stand a chance against Blogger, MT, Wordpress and everything else that came before.

This isn't the One True Way, it Bill's Last Chance. The last chance that MS has to try and make a ploy for control of all music, movies, photos, and text shared online from content companies by slapping some crappy rights-restricting wrapper on it all and taking a cut for MS.

There are a few obvious problems with that. Apple's iTunes music store and Apple's DRM works just fine for millions of folks, and the most popular music player since the walkman doesn't play MS' files. The internet is doing a damn fine job of letting musicians, filmmakers, authors, and photographers share their work openly, without any DRM of any kind. And the clear message from anyone that has ever been blocked from doing something completely benign with their files is that people won't stand for DRM that gets in their way and makes them feel like they're merely leasing content instead of buying. But MS keeps pushing it anyway.

Sorry Bill, you're going to lose this battle like you lost every other internet play you've dipped a toe into.

links for 2005-01-09

• People Who Probably Need A Cock Punch
  Awesome. I wish punchy kept this up to date
  (categories: comedy weblogs)
• Seattle Loft for Sale on Capitol Hill - the Monique Lofts
  Seems like a cool place, though sounds small for the price
  (categories: seattle realestate lofts)
• Mule Design Feed Store | Intern
  The Mule Interns; they SHARE a glock.
  (categories: lifeaquatic mule tshirts)

Posted Elsewhere needs to go internet-wide

If you're a big Flickr user, chances are the recent comments URL is your new inbox. All my friends punch it up like a skinner box. The opposite URL for tracking the comments you've left on others' photos works in a similar way and is just as addictive. Obviously, after loading both for the tenth time today, I thought why don't I have two similar URLs for tracking the same info about my blog?

Emulating the first is easy -- most any blog software can give you a view of recent activity, which you can use to find out who is commenting on your posts and what is being said on your site. The second feature is a bit harder.

In spring of 2003, I started an experiment where I would trackback all the comments I left on other sites back to a special category here, so I could keep a public, running tally of offsite comments. It was a pain and as much as I tried to automate it with custom submit forms and javascript bookmarklets, it was a manual operation and I am busy/lazy enough where anything remotely manual gets dropped eventually. Here's a screencap of what that looked like on my site, taken from this old archive.org page.

I know I'm not the first to request this, but I'd love to see someone propose a system that could track your comments across all blogs automatically. I think trackback pings could still do it if someone piggybacked a server onto TypeKey or something similar, so that every time I left a TypeKey logged-in comment, an automatic ping would go from a blog I was commenting on to my profile's personal trackback URL. I could then use those pings to create a page that looks like this, but for all (MT at the least, but hopefully other systems could play) blogs I read and comment on.

Lazyweb, don't fail me now.

update: can RSD be used for an auto-detect?

The Hamburgler appeared on our dinner placemat

(The Hamburgler appeared on our dinner placemat, originally uploaded by mathowie)

McNugget 21:4 "And Ronald said onto thee, Robble, Robble, Robble"

links for 2005-01-06

• - Physicist and stunt rider create World's first 'Einstein Flip'
  anyone got video of this? I could swear I saw Stephen Murray do tabletop backflips years ago.
  (categories: bmx extreme physics)
• Rumor du jour
  Those pesky internets, always bringing up rurmors
  (categories: flickr bloggingbubble acquired)
• Wonkette : Crossfire is being cancelled
  OMG, the JonStewartosphere totally took down Crossfire! TuckerGate is over! Tucker really is a big dick afterall! *high fives all fellow members of the JonStewartosphere*
  (categories: comedy politics crossfire)
• the H-List: DIY Team Zissou Adidas Shoes
  How to make your own Team Zissou kicks
  (categories: DIY shoes wishlist)
• eBay - life aquatic, Movie Memorabilia, CDs, and Men's Shoes items at low prices
  I love the crazy sudden boom for $50 beanies and $200 homemade shoes. If the eBay zeitgest thing worked, it would track these hot-as-lava trends the day they happened
  (categories: ebay lifeaquatic meme)

Down with FT

Quick, before it disappears behind the subscriber wall, you can read another article about blog ads, this time in the Financial Times. I'm proud of it because the reporter hit me at a cynical, bitter time. I had talked to three reporters from different outfits the previous week, all doing rah-rah "anyone can do this!" stories on blogs. So I unleashed a bunch of bile on the tech journalists' attempts to fluff up the latest bubblet. Here's me sounding like a pompous jackass:

Surprisingly, some of the most cautious notes are being sounded by bloggers themselves. Matt Haughey runs a number of blogs, the most famous of which is Metafilter, a vast community weblog whose members number in the tens of thousands: "Together, the ad revenue from all of my blogs represents a pretty decent salary," he says, "but I've been very lucky. I'd like to stress that there are a few dozen people at the most who can be like this - everyone else will make $5. People are trying to make a bubble. Every article I ever read says that anyone can do this. But anyone can be Britney Spears."

Convergence, not so bad sometimes

My 5 year old cordless vtech phone has been cutting out my wifi lately, so I've been shopping around for 5.8 Ghz phones. I've also been considering giving Vonage another try, since I gave up on them in Fall of 2003 (due to unreliability).

I'm usually not a big fan of convergence devices -- it usually means you get a so-so product A squished into a so-so version of product B, and the sum of the parts is often worse than either device alone, but this new VTech/Vonage combo phone system is exactly what I was looking for. I doubt very many people share my position, in that they need both a new phone system and something for Vonage, but I can't wait to see this show up in stores.

links for 2005-01-04

• Fairvue Central >> Bloggies >> Fifth Annual Weblog Awards
  This year's bloggies are at it again
  (categories: blogs awards bestof2004)
• eBay - Want It Now
  When did ebay add a "wanted" section?
  (categories: ebay classifiedads buyingstuff)

Nerdlinger

I just spent a couple hours futzing with various scripts on various servers so that I could get all my TiVo's info online. And yes, this is what I consider fun after-work activities.