i recently downloaded season two of the office and am finally getting to see all the lovely hysterics. i'm kind of on a vmars-like-dvd-type-roll; i go through multiple episodes in stretches of time. hell, i had meant to start running with scissors tomorrow, having finished everything is illuminated, but maybe (since i have the day off) i will just finish the whole darn season. i'm craaazy like that.

while watching the email surveillance episode, i had a flash of genius. fountains of wayne should totally guest-band on the office. it would be the best musical tv appearance ever. new jersey power pop gods, writers of anthems for the weary office set - it's like a match made in heaven. "hey julie"? "bright future in sales"? C'MON. make it happen, steve carell. i have no conceivable idea of what the setup would be, but i'm sure they could do a good job.

The McCollough Effect. Here's another good, if shorter-lived visual effect. And, if you're feeling like crossing sensory modalities (and why wouldn't you be!?), I provided some Shepard Tone links in this long, long post about audio compression.

Man. It seems so long ago that I could waste time writing thousands of words every day about nerdy stuff. Good times.

But back to my point: brains are weird, and terrifying. I love these sorts of demonstrations, where our inherent limitations are laid bare. If there's one thing humans are bad at, it's noticing our own shortcomings. And I don't just mean that in a dippy, navel-gazing, self-improving, let's-all-hold-hands-and-sing sort of way. I mean it in the you can go blind and not realize it sort of way. Hell, we've all got a gap in our visual fields where the optic nerve exits the retina — we just don't realize it (figuring out if/how the brain "papers over" this blind spot was a particularly tedious and thoroughly-investigated area of neuroscience, if I remember correctly).

Anyway, I've always thought that our inability to naturally recognize these sorts of limitations is a good thing to keep in mind — to whatever extent our puny human brains are capable of genuinely believing in their puniness, that is.

i see this mysterious commercial about 12 times a day on CNN. so, you know, if i go insane this summer, you'll know why. GAH! WHAT IS IT EVEN?

UPDATE: some googling seems to reveal that it's some sort of headache relief thing. if you REALLY want to be driven insane by this product, though, go here.

I've been holed up in the apartment coding an Awesome Science Project all weekend, so I'm a bit too exhausted to try this out at the moment — but I just got an email indicating that Mozes has just announced developer support for their text-messaging product.

If you don't remember Mozes' debut, I don't blame you. Basically, they've bought an SMS short code — one of those nifty five-digit phone numbers that you can text things to (instead of using a cumbersome ten digit code like some services I know). You go to their website, register for a keyword that's unique to you, and then... uh... things happen. Maybe. When other folks SMS your keyword to Mozes, they get your contact info. And you can store song titles and stuff. It doesn't make much sense to me, to be honest.

But! Although I don't see the appeal of their SMS-based note-taking functionality, I think the newly-announced developer access is a big, big deal. So far as I can tell, it lets you hook a script up to your Mozes keyword. So you can host a service elsewhere on the web and get free SMS service via Mozes. This is a fairly cool thing to get for free — shortcodes cost $2k to set up, then $1k/month after that — and that's before the charge you have to pay for every SMS you send or receive. Having your users specify your keyword for every query might be a pain, but for simple apps this could be a great way for developers to get SMS capabilities without having to find funding first.

Of course, if you start to make money off of the service you can bet that Mozes will shut you down pretty quickly. Hell, if Mozes starts to make money off of reselling their short code, I imagine the telcos will shut them down pretty quickly.

But it's a neat service, and a step in the right direction. Mobile services are a pretty closed set of systems right now. But that can't last. This stuff is going to continue to get more accessible to the common geek, I think.

i'm building an interactive july 4th quiz right now, and one of the questions from the text i'm working with is this:

The Declaration of Independence announced that the 13 colonies were breaking ties with what country?
France
England
Spain
Portugal

CNN: doubting the american public since 1980.

i've started keeping a list of things i'd like to do in atlanta over at my del.icio.us account - check it. if you've got any suggestions, please have at it. i feel like since my time in atlanta is rather compressed (three months) i want to get as much out of it as possible. i'm also spurred by the fact that in chicago i was like, oh! i have a whole year! i can do anything! and so i never really did anything that i meant to. and now i'm sad.

UPDATE: as a rather random aside, the atlanta zoo seems to have its own panda cam. ain't no butterstick, that's for sure.

do us all an effing favor and stop searching for li/ger. jeez:

Hmm. I just biked back from Matt & Kriston's, where I consumed burgers, beer and Deadwood. That's all pretty standard for a Sunday night. What was out of the ordinary was what happened as I turned off 11th onto O. There was a skinny white kid wearing overly large shorts and a baseball cap in a particularly ridiculous configuration. And he said something to me as I whizzed by. I'm not sure what, but it definitely sounded indignant, and contained the phrase "my territory".

It was just a little too much. There I was, bike helmet, cargo shorts, ironic internet-themed t-shirt and Gap sandals — and at least mostly not predisposed to picking fights with neighborhood thugs — and I still couldn't stifle the snorted laughter that erupted.

I heard a response. It contained "aw shit", but I'm not sure what else. And it sounded kind of sad.

Anyway, my apologies, aspiring pimps of Logan/Shaw. I realize that yours is a difficult industry in which to find a foothold. It's not like there are internships on Craigslist that you can email your resume to. And even now, after you've found a position, you probably don't know who to approach about filling out the forms necessary to translate threatening neighborhood bicyclists into course credit. I mean sure, it's great that they gave that song the Oscar, but it hasn't changed the facts on the ground, right? It's just lip service.

Well, I wish you the best of luck. But I've gotta say, if you can't even scare the neighborhood's drunken, cycling nerds, I don't know how you're going to intimidate its hookers and/or gang-bangers. I'm sure you'll think of something, though. Maybe a bigger hat? It might make you seem taller.