A Whole Lotta Nothing

Thoughts going through my mind while at the dentist, listening to my iPod and on nitrous for the first time

Oh my god I love this song. Love it. The part in the chorus with the drums? Awesome! I totally need to see these guys live, I bet they're so good. God this song rocks. Man, it sounds like someone really far away is getting a gnarly scraping, but all I hear is this awesome song. I'm gonna turn it up. It's sooo good! I'm going to twirl now, just sit here and twirl in place. Such a great fucking song!

Some of my bikes for sale (Portland, OR area)

Remember this? Now is your chance to own a piece of history (sold!). I'm cleaning my garage out and getting rid of a few bikes (my cruiser, my old mt. bike) at rock-bottom prices. If you're in the Portland area, drop me an email, stop on by and give them a ride.

Decursivication (new word)

[di-kur-siv-fi-key-shuhn] noun. The process of losing one's penmanship, thanks to automatic billing and an increasingly electronic world. Bob attributed his chicken scratch-like note writing to the process of decursivication.

Basketball half bakery ideas

I thought of these during March Madness games, but neglected to post it until now, so here goes, my wishlist for technology additions to the sport of basketball:

1. Put RFID tags inside the soles of players' shoes as well as embedded in the floor. Take the "3 seconds in the key" call away from the refs and let technology automatically measure your time in the paint. There is no disputing the call when you trip the clock, and refs can focus on other more important stuff.

2. Accelerometers in shoes communicating with one inside the ball could probably do a better job calling Traveling than the ref.

3. Accelerometers in shoes of players could give the referees more data to judge charging vs. personal foul calls. You could have actual data for who planted their feet first and deserves a charge call or who wasn't stationary in time and deserves a foul.

Not quite so modern after all

What is most amazing about Room & Board and Design Within Reach is not that they offer unique modern furnishings for your home, it's that they're based on a business model from the early 1900s. They're catalog stores, plain and simple. You go in, check out the comfy sofas and interesting tables and you order stuff, exactly as you would at home using the web, only you're dictating your address to someone in the store using a computer.

For all that seems fresh and modern about these businesses, trying to buy something on the spot that you could walk out holding reminded me of the past. I guess in the age of the internet, we still need to try things on, sit on them, and see if that orange paint is too orangey, but it seems like weird to base a business on such an old school idea. I guess what they offer is such a niche kind of product they can't be undercut by a million websites offering copies.

GarageBand's podcasting limitations

Today I ran into the 999 measure limit in GarageBand. The app is built with music in mind, with a default of 120 beats per minute. When I dragged in a couple podcast tracks that clocked in at one hour and 14 minutes, I couldn't hear all the way to the end and my waveforms weren't showing up in the editor. Turns out it was too much information for GarageBand to natively display (despite that I'm on a quad processor desktop with 3Gb of RAM) and you have to turn down the beats per minute to 40. Once you do that, everything will magically work just fine.

Flickr: Photos from oregonianphoto

This is wicked cool: Flickr: Photos from oregonianphoto

Someone from the big state newspaper The Oregonian is posting all the photos that go with stories in the paper to Flickr. I found it because I follow my small town's photos by flickr tag feeds. The paper gets new readers by mixing it up on Flickr, and they get to sell more photo reprints of stuff people like.

People keep saying that the internet is going to kill newspapers but stuff like this is the future: mixing a paper's output with related web communities that benefits both parties in the end.

links for 2007-04-02

• Truly Awful Stuff: Toy Molotov Cocktail (You know, for kids!)
  best toy ever.
  (tags: wtf toys)

links for 2007-04-01

• “She looks so pregnant!” - a photoset on Flickr
  bump alert! The pathetic celebrity magazine industry's favorite new trend.
  (tags: magazine wtf)