The second funniest thing about this Onion article is that it's almost sort of true. If you include Japanese wrestlers, anyway.
It'd be the funniest thing if not for the graphic of the luchadores doing planchas over the fence.
ALSO: Has it really been a year since Wrestlemania? Apparently so, 'cuz this year's is happening on Sunday. Anyone interested/know what the hell is going on in the WWE these days? A quick glance reveals that Rey Mysterio is competing for the heavyweight championship. Times (and steroid regimens) have changed, apparently.
Remember how Sony's UMD format for the PSP was unexpectedly taking off? And everyone was surprised at the sudden success of a proprietary format with nothing to offer anyone who wasn't a Sony shareholder?
Yeah, turns out that was bullshit. Walmart is dropping the format following poor sales, and studios are beginning to cease production of UMD movies.
So how's the proprietary-format scorecard looking, Sony? Betamax? MiniDisc? And how's Blu-Ray shaping up? The only reason Memory Stick is sold at all is because Sony devices require it. Nobody else uses it; its price and performance characteristics make it a loser.
I know, I know: Sony helped invent the Compact Disc standard, then successfully licensed it. But Phillips handled the licensing (and much of the technology) for that, did it intelligently, and consequently avoided dooming the format to proprietary obscurity.
It's a beautiful dream, locking people into a format you own and then squeezing money out of them. But it doesn't work anymore. It'd be nice if the Sonys (and Apples) of the world would knock it off, rather than stranding their customers with useless devices every half decade.
Oh, Howie, Howie, Howie. First you post a picture of Turkey and claim that it's peaceful, kite-flyin', tube-top-wearin' Baghdad. But sadly, people recognize subtle, seemingly impossible-to-notice inconsistencies — things like, oh, say, Turkish writing. Suspicions are raised. And then bloggers find a different photo of the same street corner, taken from another perspective, on PhotosOfTurkeyNotIraq.com (or something similar). The jig is utterly up.
What to do? Damage control. Blame an intern, put up a shot from your REAL Baghdad vacation, and apologize for the misunderstanding. It's a not-very-convincing aerial shot, but hey, it's something.
Except whoops! Looks like you didn't scrub the metadata from the new shot. Turns out the photo was taken on July 13, 2005. Which, it seems safe to say, probably doesn't qualify as occurring during your "recent" trip.
Also, now your website is down. Not the greatest example of an effective online political strategy, I'm afraid.
sometimes, random news articles brighten may day just a little bit. this piece about lewis, the crazy cat, is one of them.
FAIRFIELD, Conn. (AP) -- Residents of the neighborhood of Sunset Circle say they have been terrorized by a crazy cat named Lewis. Lewis for his part has been uniquely cited, personally issued a restraining order by the town's animal control officer.
"He looks like Felix the Cat and has six toes on each foot, each with a long claw," Janet Kettman, a neighbor said Monday. "They are formidable weapons."
The neighbors said those weapons, along with catlike stealth, have allowed Lewis to attack at least a half dozen people and ambush the Avon lady as she was getting out of her car.
i love the part about "the Avon lady." like, they don't even name her. she's just The one and only avon lady. who cats hate. awesome.
It's pretty disappointing to see BoingBoing post about "electrosensitivity", an imagined allergy to electrical noise. People have been looking for a connection between electromagnetic fields and cancer for ages without much luck. Now I guess the kooks are retreating to claims that these mysterious (and therefore evil) rays are causing vague and difficult-to-quantify declines in quality of life and, I don't know, aura color, maybe?
All of that would be fine if it didn't seem so likely to be embraced, extended, and eventually put on the cover of Time with a big headline ending in a question mark. We've already got every nerd with a Perl book and a twin bed going around explaining to the world how he has Asperger's. I really, really don't need hypochondriacs seated next to me on airplanes to start asking me to shut off my laptop for the flight's duration.
None of this is to deny that some people might get headaches from the omnipresent 60 Hz hum that surrounds North American electricity users. But that's something different entirely from the high-tech animism that motivates this disease-of-the-week nonsense. Bah! Remember, BoingBoing: electricity good, patent regime bad...
Justin reports that cops are handing out jaywalking tickets in the Golden Triangle this morning. Beware! Also, as always please bear in mind that your downtown business district may be haunted. Take appropriate precautions.
oh my god. can we make any more lame-o stereotypical nicknames involving some retardation of yuppie? we've got the yupster, and now new york magazine gives us the grups.
...oh cripes. just reading into the article, i have discovered, though i am a 26-year-old female, i am apparently a grupster:
Let's start with a question. A few questions, actually: When did it become normal for your average 35-year-old New Yorker to (a) walk around with an iPod plugged into his ears at all times, listening to the latest from Bloc Party; (b) regularly buy his clothes at Urban Outfitters; (c) take her toddler to a Mommy's Happy Hour at a Brooklyn bar; (d) stay out till 4 A.M. because he just cant miss the latest New Pornographers show, because who knows when Neko Case will decide to stop touring with them, and everyone knows shes the heart of the band;...
except for the having of a toddler part. i have not hidden a toddler away in my shoe closet of doom, nor am i with toddler, but i totally will subject my toddler one day to the stylings of radiohead. and lo, he will be a moody adolescent.
UPDATE: oh my god. reading even more into the article, i find out that "grups" is actually a star trek reference. arghghahahahgghh! did i tell you, about the saturday night, that i spent with tommy last week, where he was flipping between star trek and anime on tv and, when those were on commercials, watching battlestar gallactica on his computer's dvd player? nothing to do with this post, really, just wanted to tell you that. although i have to admit that the anime was princess mononoke and i liked it, and BG actually seemed really good.
i have gotten some questions about these black leather strappy boots, and as a service to humanity, i'm letting you know they're made by seychelles. but, i cannot find them online anymore. i bought them last fall from olive & bettes when i saw them noted in, of all places, US weekly. as a result of that placement, they were pretty much sold out, and my order was placed on backorder for like two months. i almost forgot i had bought them until they showed up on my doorstep. like a present from the shoe god...anyway, i searched ebay and some other sources, but couldn't find them, so if you want to buy them, i think you might be outta luck. which might be okay, as people might be terrified of you if you wear them with a miniskirt.
UPDATE: i found them! (in brown) yes, i know, expensive. so sue me.
so here's the thing. i'm thinking about doing me some yoga.
this is very out-of-character for me. i'm a hit-the-treadmill, lift-a-few-weights, leave-the-gym sort of gal. my normal workout routine consists of 4-5 miles, stretching, and some arm weights if i'm feeling enterprising. i avoid with a passion all other machines (except when i'm on a spinning streak). i think the elliptical is the pussiest machine alive and i've never had a good workout on it (though i do appreciate that it is a good alternative for people whose joints, knees, etc won't allow them to run).
but i'm getting bored with the just running. spinning in the darkness just became too much for me, and there is no way in hell i am every taking anything resembling a step aerobic class, because i have witnessed the coordination needed for those things first-hand, and since i cannot so much do the laundry without tripping on my face, i am having none of it.
and most of all: let's face, i'm getting old. i could use some release for my stiff joints and tight muscles, and i think yoga might be just the ticket, as well as being a good complement to my running routine.
but it is scary. and foreign. and, like, omg, am i going to be a granola-eating pussy forever if i do it? i mean i can't even get a handle on the kinds of yoga out there. my gym offers ashtanga yoga? hatha yoga? forrest yoga? iyengar yoga, which "features use of props such as blocks and straps." PROPS? or heated yoga? heat? or the ever-popular offering of Yoga With Balls? do i need to buy a mat? do i need special clothes (the one part of the whole enterprise that i might not mind dealing with?) do i need to be super-bendy? yogabloggers, help!
Wow. What a spectacularly unproductive evening. I got sidetracked helping a new acquaintance set up a VNC/SSH setup, and even that didn't work.
So it's now 1AM, because god dammit I was determined to get something productive accomplished. So, here: the promised GreaseMonkey script. If you use Movable Type (and configure the include path to point at the URL for your installation(s)), this will autosave your work every five seconds, guarding against the browser crashes that we could avoid by responsibly writing entries in text editors, but don't. To restore your work, just bring up a MT entry editing screen and press the button that will magically appear near the top of the screen.
It ought to keep separate drafts for each individual MT weblog you work on, but that functionality hasn't really been tested. I'd doublecheck before relying on it.
This is for MT only, I'm afraid — it's what this site and DCist both use. It should be pretty trivial to adapt to other blogging platforms, though, if anyone's so inclined. Also, it's written for MT version 3.2 — I have no idea if it'll work with other versions, but it might be worth a shot.
UPDATE: Whoops! Found a major bug wherein a new, blank entry would overwrite your saved draft within a few seconds of bringing it up. That'd make this pretty useless, huh? Well, it's fixed now. Your in-memory draft will only be erased if you type something into one of the blank fields on a new entry form.
Seriously now: I'm on cell phone number 2 and cell phone cable number 3, and I STILL can't get Gammu working. Right now I'm trying to work off of these instructions, but it's not even clear that the thread's participants had success. And, to be honest, I'm not following all the instructions — compiling custom kernel modules seems a little advanced, but I suppose I'll give it a shot eventually.
Anyway, I'm officially running crying back to mommy, aka the project listserv. They haven't been able to help me out yet, but the current batch of Nokia crap was bought on their recommendation, so I'm doing my best to maintain my trademark childlike optimism.
i got a little carried away with the note feature noting my shoes, so click through if you care. about shoes. and my reorganizing of them. and really, why wouldn't you?
Scientists have run a complete simulation of a virus, down to the atomic level, for 50 ns. This seems like a pretty big deal. Admittedly, we already do really sophisticated modeling of the interplay between cell receptors and viruses. Without a complete model of a cell, a viral model doesn't seem likely to do you a whole lot of good, and cells are waaay more complicated than viruses. Still, it's encouraging just to know that this kind of thing can be done. It's going to be an amazing breakthrough when a complete viral lifecycle can be simulated on an atomic level.
And hey, maybe it wouldn't be that hard to build a complete model of a ribosome (here's where we overstep my knowledge of cell biology). That seems likely to do a lot of good in and of itself (although I have no idea if it'd let you sidestep the computation necessary to solve protein-folding problems or not — if not, you'd be headed from one supercomputing problem straight into another).
This looks pretty cool, and at prices ranging from $35-100 per wheel (depending on quality of the effect), seems to offer an excellent return on girlfriend-embarrassment per dollar. Sadly, I'm not man enough for this project: the shame and theft risk means I'd only undertake it if I put it on a dedicated, removable front wheel, which seems likely to (at least) double the cost of the project. Not out of the question, but I'd have to have something really important/stupid to say via magic bike wheel in order to spend that kind of money. Also on the neat-but-impractical-for-my-self-conscious-renter-self LED project tip: this.
The latest in my ongoing procession of disappointing SMS cables has arrived. Spirits are high, but a part of me knows it's just going to break my heart all over again.
Firefox crashed while I was composing this entry. It no longer surprises me when this happens, not even a little. I've gotten over most of the annoyances related to my switch to OS X, but the utter suckiness of Mac Firefox continues to disappoint. Safari seems stable, but its tabbed browsing is non-obvious (or not available by default?) and the stupidity of enforced Aqua-style HTML form elements cannot be overstated (why do you think you're better than CSS, you goddamn hippies?). Anyway, a GreaseMonkey script to do Gmail-style Movable Type draft-saving would take approximately five minutes to write, and probably solve much of this losing-blog-posts problem. I'll try to hammer that out tonight, if I can find the time. I've got a lead on fixing my Gmail Colorizer script to work properly, too — might be a GreaseMonkey-heavy evening.
So many projects! This is the catch-22 of Catherine's visits: they make me happy, which puts me in a hyper-productive/inspired state, which then can't be satisfied because I'm spending all of my time being happy with my girlfriend. The trick, I think, is to get the projects started, then grind them out when ennui sets back in. Let's call it the long-distance relationship software development methodology.
how to be an awesome guest: even when your host-in-absence gives you the ENTIRELY WRONG SET OF KEYS to her apartment while she's in d.c., and you don't really have anywhere else to stay, or a hotel reservation, and don't necessarily know the city very well, and end up having to deal with your host-in-absence's weirdo russian building supervisor to extract a set of extra keys from him, you still leave your fully-panicked-and-embarrassed host-in-absence this loveliness:
thanks, emily. after a 6:30 am flight this morning back to chi-town and three hours of class in the new quarter today, i feel pretty certain that this evening will call for one-to-four mojitos.
scene: tommy and catherine sitting on the couch, sipping coffee and internet surfing while michael chiarello makes some sort of antipasti plate on the tv in the background.
catherine (being stupidly lovey-dovey to tommy): i love you!
tommy: i love you.
michael chiarello: i LOVE pickles.
Apparently someone has a problem with the comments left on this post. Because I do feel sort of badly for the complainant, I'll refrain from repeating his/her name here (perceptive readers can probably figure it out). But a cursory glance at our archives would have revealed to them that my EFF-loving ass probably wouldn't react very well to this kind of thing. To wit, here's what I sent back:
I think there may be some confusion here. The comments to which you refer seem to me to express a personal opinion, which does not constitute libel or slander. Nor were the postings "in your name" -- no one in the thread purported to be you, they simply referred to you.
Our site is a personal blog written for our and our friends' amusement. Comments are open, unmoderated, and unpoliced except for spam removal. I'm sorry, but we have no interest in mediating a tedious spat between children from New York who we've never heard of.
Finally, please also note that, contrary to what is implied by your email footer, neither Catherine nor I have entered into a contract with you or agreed to keep our correspondence confidential. You are, of course, protected by copyright. But please be aware that we reserve the right to legally protected fair use of that material, including use for purposes of commentary.
Isn't it cute when two jerks on the internet pretend to be lawyers? I think it is, anyway.
The funniest thing about the whole incident is how it started. The letter-writer wasn't mentioned in the entry at all! It appears that someone just googled for "socialite", dropped in and started talking shit. And then — this is the kicker — someone else arriving from Google stopped by to note how shallow Americans are for being obsessed with socialites. Presumably they found the thread by searching for the thing they find so shallow! Too fantastic. The only way it could be better is if they signed their comment with some dumbass name like, say, "dropsofjupiter1". Oh wait! They did!
tommy and i spent saturday eating lunch at pizzeria paradiso, taking in the dada exhibit at the national gallery and making fun of kids who can't fly kites good at the smithsonian kite festival. photos!
it's friday night, i've stayed in all evening and i'm feeling a little loopy, a sentiment only encouraged by brandon's captioning of ready.gov nuclear disaster images. i've seriously been giggling for, like, half an hour over here. terrorists make ninjas cry. bwahahahaha.
i know when i talk about the george ryan trial, to anyone living outside of illinois it sounds like this "BLAH BLAH BORING BLAH." and you're a little right. if you ever sat in on the testimony during the trial, you might have fallen into a deep REM sleep caused by the hour-long discussions of license plates and real estate contracts. totes boring.
but now! look! shit has gone and gotten all totally hysterically bad ass in the form of a group of petulant, immature jurors!
The potentially explosive development came on the heels of earlier signs the Ryan jury was close to exploding.
They come and go together, but during the day reporters have seen the Ryan jury gathering in smaller groups. The judge told them to cut it out Thursday.
"You have at least two factions in this case that apparently aren't speaking to each other," said CBS 2 Legal Consultant Irv Miller. "They're deliberating in different rooms, in different places."
In a hallway Wednesday, CBS 2 heard one juror say to several others, "We've got to stop with all this name calling."
"I expect you to treat your fellow jurors with dignity and respect," Pallmeyer said in a stern, three-paragraph note sent in response to two notes received from the jurors in recent days.
they've got cliques! the judge is sending them notes to express her concern! they call each other names. it's JUST. LIKE. HIGH SCHOOL. except, um, these are a bunch of middle-aged illinoisians who should be discussing oh, only, the MOST IMPORTANT TRIAL THE STATE HAS EVER SEEN. get it together, fools.
i like to think of myself as a general averter of fashion trends. i like to follow what's in, and i love to shop, but most of the time i know whatever is hot in a particular summer will come crashing down on its purchasers' heads in two years or less. never bought into the prairie skirt look. metallics? hell to the no. i've never owned a pair of skinny jeans in my life, because i don't care to create the illusion that my thighs are actually two enormous bags of sand, thank you very much. and you'll sure as hell never catch me in a pair of leggings worn under a miniskirt. i am happiest in a pair of jeans, a tank top, and flip flops or flats.
but, woe is me, it appears that i have fallen victim, am 100% totally and truly obsessed with one of this season's spring shoe trends, and i just can't help myself. ladies and gentlemen, meet catherine's new friends: the platform wedge.
argh!(#(@(@! I KNOW! what am i doing to myself? these shoes are decidedly 70ish, decidedly difficult to walk in, and, even i admit it, sort of decidedly ridiculous looking. but I LOVE THEM. it all started last spring, when i bought a pair of these over at urban outfitters. i thought that pair of shoes would satiate my wedge needs. BUT NO. as i discovered when i hit up the marshall's on route 7 this morning. (as an aside: when the hell did the shoe department at marshall's get so incredibly kick-ass? it's like DSW's little sister in there.)
first i had to have these (in black, not brown as shown):
I KNOW! i know, i know. except for the color, they look eerily similar to the wedge sandals purchased last spring. not to mention they literally make me about 6'1". it's all amazonia up in here when i'm prancing around in those things. i'm going to terrify children. and maybe unknowingly step on them.
"well, don't THESE look practical," i trilled to myself as i clomped through the store aisles. "they're a must-buy!"
all i can ask for now is your help in preventing me from throwing away even more money on this ridiculous style of shoes. if we walk into a store together, please steer me towards the pumas and ballet flats. if that DSW commercial featuring several adorable styles of wedge heels comes on, cover my eyes. and if i fall on you while wearing these monstrosities out in public, will you give a girl a hand and pick me back up?
I'm outta here in just a few short hours, and allegedly landing at National around 9:30. As you might guess from the whirlwind nature of this tour, I didn't get to see much of the city — and even skipped the salesforce.com-sponsored party at the space needle. But from what little I saw, I like Seattle. There's a monorail track outside my window, and although monorails never actually run on it, it seems like an important moral victory. Also, they've got what I'm told is called "liquid sunshine" going on outside, and it's not as horrifying as it sounds.
But this is the real kicker: I woke up every morning with KEXP blaring over my shitty hotel clock radio. Mountain Goats! Elvis Costello! Arcade Fire rarities! Ted Leo just did a promo for the morning guy! And, most importantly, lots of good music that I hadn't heard before. Yeah, there's an internet stream. But there really is something to be said for FM ubiquity. Your life and my life would be better if this station was on the air in DC. Seriously.
Alright, so they're both already well on their way to conquering the art and online worlds, but there's still something cool about seeing your friends show up in dead-tree format on every streetcorner in a city. So go check out the item by Kriston and the piece about Molly in this week's CityPaper.
I'm sure I'm irrationally drawing attention to what they consider to be a minor blip in their respective campaigns for multimedia domination — but this is the first time the struggle has made its way to a publication lowbrow enough for me to read.
I'm safe and sound and in Seattle for the N-TEN conference. Trenchant observations about the city follow:
It's rainy
The coffee is good
The space needle seems, from a distance, pretty much like you'd expect
The SEATAC parking lot reminds me a LOT of the buildings in the movie Aliens. Perhaps that's just because it seems like dropping a nuke on it might be a good idea.
I know, I know: I'm totally turning your Seattle preconceptions upside down. More to come! Possibly! But first: a shower and free booze.
The quote Catherine excerpted below about 80,000 blogs launching per week reminded me of a story I read yesterday: the Register totalled up the societal costs claimed by various pop-economic doomsayers (e.g. the NCAA tournament costs $X billion in lost productivity; failing to recycle bottle caps costs us $Y billion every week). And guess what? It turns out that the sum is more than the total amount of money in the world.
To be fair, I don't think there's any solid economic reason why that can't be true — but it certainly seems doubtful. To think that spending half an hour watching an NCAA tournament game actually introduces real costs to an individual's employer requires a childlike naivete, wherein every workday contains exactly 8 hours of work, all of which must be completed and all of which is relevant to the company's bottom line. I can understand why one would think such aggregate measures are necessary and plausible at a large scale. But realistically, most of these cost estimates probably ignore a lot of naturally-occurring elasticity in order to make their advocates' pet causes seem more important than they actually are.
the post's city guide just added a somewhat cool feature to their establishments' info - you can now send the name, location and phone number of a bar, restaurant, etc to your cellphone. that's neat, but it would be better if they would do a couple of things: actually publicize this in a venue beyond their post.blog, which is a neat blog but not widely-read by the kind of people who would actually be using the cellphone feature (maybe a post on the GOGblog as well? or a note on the front page of the city guide). second, and maybe this is in the works as far as i know, it would be cool if they had a google-ish text message feature, where you could SMS a particular number with a zip code and a description of what you're looking for - beer, chinese, whatever - and the city guide would send you back what's available in that area along with a brief descriptive blurb from the city guide's review. i'd hit it.
this has to be one of the stupidest opinion pieces i've ever read: this woman claims that the reason we traipsed so happily into the iraq war was that not enough people were reading newspapers. i'm sorry, was she even reading newspaper articles and columns around that time?
Think a little further. If more Americans had had a comprehensive view of the world -- the kind that is irrevocably blurred by the 80,000 new blogging sites launched every week -- it would have been barely possible for the 30 people who in essence started the Iraq war to have acted without the accord of the American people.
yes. the iraq war is the fault of bloggers and their dastardly plan to have readers read them. shite newspaper reporting had nothing to do with it.
that's the first ridiculous point. the second ridiculous point is basically that the reason for circulation declines is the readers' fault (with a healthy dose of blogs, of course). god forbid anyone ever think that maybe people don't read newspapers as much anymore because maybe newspapers aren't delivering what they need. the condescending view that only newspapers can properly educate people and the reason they're failing nowadays is the fault of the idiotic american public is one of the things that is sure to rile me up into a frenzy.
"My theory is that we Americans have so picked and chosen our news that we have lost that comprehensive view of the world that only a newspaper gives."
huh. if only we could do something about this...something like not allowing people to pick and choose what they want to read...perhaps a government-licensed newspaper that everybody is forced to read? that sounds like just the ticket!
for what it's worth, my chicago friends, i had a very accurately-detailed dream last night that george ryan, the former illinois governor charged with racketeering and mail fround, was found guilty of about half of the 22 counts. (the jury is in their sixth day of deliberation right now after a five-month trial.) seeing as i have previously proven myself to be a political oracle, i think we should assume that ryan will be spending at least part of the end of his life (the dude's nearly 80) sitting on his bum in jail.
anyway. sorry for the lack of posting up until now. i'm sick and miserable, tommy leaves for seattle tomorrow for a few days (bah!) and i have all these things i'd promise myself i'd do during break not getting done (i HAVE done well at drinking tea and watching the food network, though; how i miss cable!). so, i'm a lazy git. hopefully i'll be inspired later on.
It's strange, but I think we may be running out of internet. It might just be me — but I don't think so. Catherine's been complaining of the same thing. I now frequently find my RSS reader empty, forlorn. Oh sure, Wonkette can be reliably counted on to fill up a feed with entries I've already read, since its authors are now pathologically incapable of leaving a post unrevised. And sites like TUAW and Gizmodo reliably spam me with totally uninteresting posts, thanks to the Dentons and Dobkins of the world deciding that they earn their pay with quantity rather than quality. But post volume seems to be down on the good blogs — by which I mean my friends' sites.
Certainly, I'm guilty as well. Although the site's traffic has mostly levelled off, I feel a lot more pressure to tone down the bloggy self-indulgence here than I used to. I know that people who are professionally, personally or just plain old important to me stop by here with some regularity, and that makes me think twice before rattling off a thousand-word screed about how such-and-such or so-and-so ought to be publicly euthanized for society's benefit.
There are other reasons, too. In the last year or two, many of my friends' online lives have taken on a more professional character. By and large, this is fantastic — I'm incredibly glad that Kriston is getting paid to blog, that Catherine is writing papers on RSS, and that I can claim "blog reading" on my timesheet. But it does sort of change the way the whole thing feels. The days of pretending to work in a Crystal City cubicle, furiously penning Wonkette-bait are over.
It's pretty stupid, in retrospect — approaching the internet like a private clubhouse for you and your buddies. But I'm still sort of sad to feel the thing become complicated. I don't think there's a solution, short of fleeing to MySpace. And I'm not prepared to debase myself like that.
For what it's worth, I'll do my best to be a little less self-conscious about writing here. There's no reason we can't reclaim the heights of lowly self-involvement we once reached.
POSTSCRIPT: Aaand before even hitting publish, I've already violated my new resolution. There's an entertainingly passive-aggressive anonymous note plastered all over the men's room. I doubt it's from a coworker — but this is a shared office space, so there's no telling. So: no putting it on the internet. Drat. But just between you and me, anonymous bathroom-note-author, I'm not the one who's been peeing on the seats.
Transpodder — when combined with a podcatching setup — will download your favorite shows via Bittorrent, transcode them to an iPod Video-friendly format, and provide an RSS feed so that iTunes can keep your iPod synched up. Slick.
co.mments has an awful, awful web 2.0 (stoopd) name, but a good idea. Sign up, subscribe to a personalized RSS feed, and add a bookmarklet to your web browser. Then when you next find yourself leaving a comment somewhere, hit the bookmarklet button. The conversation will be marked and periodically checked by co.mments, which will let you know about new entries via RSS. Unfortunately, co.mments seems kind of slow about checking up on conversations — and using the personal RSS feed via Bloglines makes it really, REALLY slow. But if you use a desktop newsreader, you might find it useful.
It looks like the Xbox 360 has been cracked. Check out the video:
It's true that another 360 could be plugged into the back of the TV. But word on the forums is that the video's author has a good reputation and the technical chops to have pulled this off. Plus, much of the work leading up to the breakthrough occurred in a public online forum. As of right now the verdict of the usually-dubious Xbox hacking scene is that this is probably the real deal.
The exploit is a little different from those that were used on the original Xbox. Instead of the BIOS being subverted, the DVD-ROM's firmware was modified to prevent it from telling the difference between a burned and pressed disc. MS beefed up the security on the parts of the system that had been attacked on the XB1; that console's DVD firmware was cracked, but very late in the system's lifecycle. By all appearances, MS didn't see this class of attack coming.
The downside: because the rest of the system remains secure, unsigned code still can't be run. So this hack is really only useful for playing backups — aka pirated games. Cool apps like emulators and media players are still out of reach.
The other fly in the ointment: the hack hasn't been publicly released. "TheSpecialist" and the rest of the developers might legitimately not want to foster piracy — or they may just fear Microsoft. But either way, their notes are available for all the world to see. Given that, I doubt it'll be very long until we see a mass-market mod of some sort for the 360.
Don't get me wrong: the new Macbook Pros look pretty sweet. Yglesias bought one after his Powerbook got pinched, and it's a beautiful machine. But most of the new features don't thrill me. Matt reports that the integrated iSight is tough to aim. And Apple has long ago spent all their credibility when it comes to the relative merits of different processor architectures.
No, the one feature that really got me excited was the new magnetic power connector. And now Gizmodo has a report of one of them catching on fire. Sigh. Here's hoping this is just a weird aberration.
Unlike more diplomatic people, I'm not afraid to say it: I don't really like St. Patrick's Day.
Maybe it's inherited. My Anglo roots go back to England, not the Emerald Isle. St. Patrick's day just isn't in my blood. I'm genetically predisposed to spending March 17th brewing a nice pot of darjeeling and discussing what new taxes to levy against the Papist Menace.
But there's another class of reasons why I don't really like the holiday. Reasons like the one I happened upon last weekend:
preemptive warning: this shitznit was written at 3am by a very delirious catherine. it is long and graphic intensive and doesn't make much sense so i shall put it behind the cut.
Apologies, Heineken Light. It turns out that you didn't try to poison me. I just got sick. I suppose it might just be that you did an unusually thorough job of poisoning me. But that seems unlikely. No, I now have no doubt that use of your fine product will lead to a robust physique and, based upon recent light beer commercials I've seen, improved performance at rollerblading, windsurfing, and other sports that were briefly cool in the eighties.
It seems that everyoneisgettingsick. I guess winter hadn't planned on spring elbowing in on its action quite so soon. The season has flown by, and it barely has any more time to make our lives miserable. "Flowers? Pollen? WTF! Better infect some suckers while I still can."
I would've used a sick day if not for a particularly exciting cell phone cable that, via the magic of Ebay, should be arriving at the office any day now. But now I'm starting to wonder whether any cable — regardless of the embedded microcontroller! — could be better than sitting at home in my pajamas watching TV all day. I know, it doesn't sound like me at all. I think I may be delirious with fever.
...sort of. rather, my last legal reporting assignment for the quarter was to visit, with my class and instructor, the metropolitan correctional center in chicago, the federal facility right downtown (next to the sears tower, in fact). it's designed to hold inmates before and while they need to appear in federal courts before their acquittal or sentencing. we all went on a funtimes tour with the warden, and i learned several interesting things. lucky for you, i will now relay them in educational bullet points. yes, you get catherine's wise lesson on federal prisons for the day:
the warden, while a very nice and intelligent man, dresses like regis philbin circa "who wants to be a millionaire." this is disconcerting.
the MCC is triangular and, though rather ugly, kind of looks like somebody put some sort of architectural thought into designing it. which, for what is essentially a prison, is disconcerting.
the MCC is 26 floors. the very top floor is an outdoor roof recreation area with a very nice view of the lake. each unit of inmates, 88 to every unit, gets to go outside for an hour every day. on the roof there is a volleyball net and a couple of basketball hoops. the area is covered with barbed wire on the walls and a wire netting over top. my first thought as to why the wire was there? something along the lines of, that makes sense, if a basketball were misshot and went over the wall and fell 26 floors, that could, uh, kill somebody. but no. the real reason is that once, somewhere, in real life, a couple of inmates escaped from a jail by helicopter. this also happened in some 80s movie. and thus the federal government was scared into covering outdoor roofs with wire. maybe not a terrible idea. also, along one side of the triangular roof area, the openings are covered by tarps so that you can't see the buildings next door. the reason for this? apparently a few years back, the facility staff discovered that "ladies," paid by some unknown angel funder, were "putting on shows" from the parking lot across the street every week at a designated hour. but the tarps put an end to that.
according to an inmate on floor 24, i have an "apple bottom." thanks.
the crepes of wrath is a featured book in the prison library. plot summary? "Just desserts? Lizzie Mast was the world's worst cook--there's little doubt about that in the chatty town of Hernia, Pennsylvania. So when someone kills her with a bad batch of crepes, most folks think she got what she deserved."
indeed.
in fact, most of the books in the prison libraries are masterful mystery/murder thrillers. should we really be teaching people accused of everything from mail fraud to murder how to execute cunning if improbable criminal plots? i mean, just think of the terror a david baldacci book could unleash in the real world.
according to the warden, the difference between the male and female inmates is as follows: "you get lots of fights with the men, they'll beat each other up, but a few weeks later they'll send a note saying it's over, you won, whatever. with the females, in january, they'll have a fight over some cookies: 'hey, you've got three cookies, and i've only got two, and why you give that other cookie to your friend instead of me?' come july, they're still fighting about the damn cookies."
well, i'm now a prison expert after my hour and a half tour, so feel free to shoot any inquiries my way.
One of the cool things about working on DCist is that occasionally it gets me free booze. There'll be some media event, and the PR person behind it will want to invite some bloggers so that she sounds innovative at her next annual review. That, or invitations will trickle into the greater DCist swag ecosystem via the various legitimate media outlets for which folks on staff work.
Last night was one such instance. Heineken is debuting a light beer version of itself, and I managed to finagle an invitation to the premiere event thingy at the now-defunct City Museum. Free beer within five blocks of my house! It sounded pretty good.
Becks and Catherine are already providing multimedia insights into the contemporary state of sexual politics. So let's continue the trend — behold! Emily's take on what web 2.0 means for women.
(that's right — it takes only the flimsiest of excuses to get me to embed video these days. I've been entirely corrupted)
well, i had meant to do a more detailed, full-blown review of this show earlier, but i succumbed to that disease that affects so many of us bloggers: laziness. or was it wine? either way, here are my much abridged thoughts:
new porngraphers - just should not tour without neko case. carl newman sounded great, but kathryn calder, sick or not, does not have the interesting or full sounding vocals to carry her songs. additionally, the mix sounded strangely tinny, and the band seemed weary and determined on tearing through the set with business-like speed. i believe i remember exactly one line of in-between song banter from newman. which is sad, because he's quite funny.
belle and sebastian: it sure SOUNDED like they put on a great show. however, in between the two bands, dcsobloop and i opted for a trip to the bathroom and another beer, which meant we ended up on the slightly-raised second level platform. you'd think "slightly-raised" would mean "with a view of the stage," but that is exactly the opposite of what it meant. we couldn't see a bloody thing. additionally, stuart was crazy with the stories in between songs; unfortunately, apparently when not singing, he can only manage incomprehensible scottish mumbles. and, as i mentioned previously, i was frustrated that they only played one song off of "if you're feeling sinister." oh well. i guess i got my fill of IYFS songs when i saw them back in 1998 at the black cat. that's right, i'm cooler than you. i'm also old. that was eight years ago. christ.
sigh. at least i got a new t-shirt out of the show. methinks i like it better than the old one.
hah. check out this great picture over at becks' place. maybe men will finally start realizing that this is, in fact, an annoying, widespread reality and not some phantom blog meme made up by a few overly sensitive women. though i must say, not a single person has told me to smile since i moved to chicago.
after waiting seven years for them to do so, did anyone find josh and donna's kiss just a little bit repulsive looking?
grey's made me weepy. AGAIN. after a supbar episode last time, they are back on form. tommy and charles: my spring break mission is to make you love this show. i shall do it, even though i may need to drink several bottles of wine on my own to do so. i am willing to make this sacrifice. but the question is: ARE YOU?
if you need a godlike tiramisu recipe, may i suggest this one, with minor changes: you'll need 14 oz of ladyfingers, double the espresso, and i would recommend freezing it for several hours instead of merely refridgeratoring it. cannot spell refridgeratiatototoring.
am drunk.
how does one know one is getting old? may i submit that slathering on moisturizer on your hands and sleeping in cotton moisture-locking-in gloves is one symptom? because your hands are looking elderly? 26, this is going to be a great year. a year of sleeping in gloves. i can't wait. the year of the hand glove. sort of relatedly, i may be going in for my first manicure on wednesday. i'll make sure to report back. hold your breath.
hey! let's play a game! everybody, try to figure out the point of this weekend's modern love column. anyone who can sum it up accurately in one sentence will get, uh, something. fame and fortune, most likely.
my entry: "i seem to have a wonderful husband, a wonderful child, yet i can't shake this feeling, somehow, that i am the most annoying person on the planet."
so, i'm in the medill newsroom. i tried to leave about 20 minutes ago to get home, but i could not. because i am in the middle of this. and it is literally a wall of humans and it is impossible to move. i spent 10 minutes going 10 feet and gave up when i saw from a distance that my el stop appears to be servicing approximately 12 gazillion people right now. i mean, i'm all about immigrant rights. but what about catherine's right to get home, have a beer and see the belle & sebastian concert? gah.
see, this is what i was dealing with:
more photos at my flickr stream of the enormous crowd.
but, you will be so relieved to know, i eventually was able to escape the clutches of the newsroom and make it to the new pornographers/belle & sebastian show. a full report to come tomorrow. but for now, i say this: ONE SONG OFF OF IYFS? SERIOUSLY? SERIOUSLY?!
I suppose I shouldn't be the one to cast the first stone — I'm more guilty than most of turning hilarious-while-drunk-isms into websites. But the hilarity:effort ratio here seems pretty goddamn low.
Well, my star-crossed SMS project continues to trundle along. I've had to give up on my beloved T39 — it's just not working out between us. So I bought this Nokia 3100 off of Ebay for 99 cents (+ $10 shipping). That white blotch on the right side of its screen isn't glare; it's a big ol' crack in the LCD. In real life it's neon pink and looks vaguely like a pornographic cartoon.
It arrived in the mail today, loosely wrapped in newspaper. Thanks for the care, anonymous Ebay guy. In return I'll refrain from calling all of your definitely-not-deleted contacts and leaving obscene messages.
I headed off to Eport World, the slightly weird cellphone emporium down the street, to pick up a charger and a cable.
I'm a sucker. If I'd read the documentation a little more carefully, I'd know that any cable except the official Nokia one will work under Linux. Naturally, I ended up with the genuine article, which is totally useless on non-Windows machines. Worse, Eport World's return policy is nonexistent (I asked). So it looks like I'm out $25. D'oh. My only hope is to lean on the goodwill I earned by explaining my project to the guys there. The clerks were clearly in need of friendly cell phone nerd/computer nerd interaction and started quizzing me about posting to blogs via SMS. Here's hoping they don't actually use the email address I left — I'm pretty well tech-supported out at the moment.
So it's back to Ebay, I guess. Attention, googling cell phone hackers: you need a DKU-5 cable with a PL2303 chip in it. 2303 I say!
Pfft. I can produce way more boring posts than that.
To wit: I just got done adding a Drupal module to the company's open source offerings. Now, not only is it likely that none of you who aren't coworkers know what Drupal is, but any of you who do will probably find this module astoundingly useless. It creates a live tag cloud. Which, for anything but a huge flurry of folksonomic activity, will look a lot like an, um, normal tag cloud.
But! In the course of massively over-engineering this thing, I actually ended up using the Prototype Javascript library. And since the number of you who occasionally write JS may be non-zero, I should take a moment to sing its praises. I thought it was just an AJAX library, but no — it really makes a lot of things much, much easier (and with basically guaranteed compatibility). Some people say it's too large, but to them I say: shhh.
Its biggest problem is that it seems to be somewhat sparsely documented compared to its offspring Scriptaculous. But this article does a decent job of showing off its basic features, and providing enough code for you to get started.
Finally: I've mentioned it before, but if you're applying lots of event handlers to elements, consider Behaviour.
UPDATE: From the linked article, JQuery also looks pretty promising. And I might as well include the code for one of my all-time favorite JS functions, a method for safely adding OnLoad functions. It's behind the cut. Apologies to whoever the original author is.
And haters, for that matter: NBC4, 4:45. Potential live TV embarrassment! Not for me, mind you. But for certain bearded associates.
I'll have to see if I can sneak a plasma TV channel-change by the people who run this temporary office space. So long as I can withstand the barrage of passive-aggressive notes that will show up tomorrow, I like my odds.
UPDATE: Just saw it. Nice job, Martin! No DCist.com graphic, sadly, but still a good piece. And Kathryn made it to the screen, despite her in-comment pessimism.
in doing research for an article about judicial elections i found out something interesting - judges in cook county, IL are something like two billion percent more likely to be elected if they're female and/or have a distinctly-irish sounding name. some wannabe judges even change their names to sound more irish.
i love this bit from an old chicago reporter article:
In the 2002 Democratic primary for Judge Thomas R. Rakowski's appellate court vacancy, James Fitzgerald Smith beat William D. O'Neal, Thomas H. Fegan and Roger G. Fein...
Smith received seven "not recommended" or "not qualified" marks among his evaluations from 12 Chicago-area bar associations. O'Neal received eight unfavorable marks. But Fein, who was slated by the Democratic Party, received one unfavorable rating and Fegan, who is Irish, got approving marks from every bar group.
Slated judicial candidates are supported by a committee of party leaders. Beating them is not an easy task, according to a Chicago Council of Lawyers' unpublished analysis of judicial candidates from 1988 to 2000, which shows slated candidates won elections for vacant judgeships 72 percent of the time.
In addition, Smith was reported by the Chicago Sun-Times to have run for judge in 1992 as "James G. Smith" but then ran as "James Fitzgerald Smith" in 1994, when he was elected to the bench in a subcircuit race. Smith did not return repeated phone calls from the Reporter.
...
In 1998, Bonnie Carol McGrath ran as a Republican candidate for a Cook County circuit court judgeship. Under the advice of her election lawyer, former Chicago Board of Election Commissioners Chairman Michael E. LaVelle, McGrath dropped "Carol" and replaced it with "Fitzgerald" even though it was neither part of her name nor that of anyone in her immediate family, she said.
She won the primary but lost in the general election to James Patrick McCarthy.
just in case you ever wanna be a judge in cook county.
i also find the fact that women have an easier time of being elected to judgeships interesting. tommy guessed it might be because people perceive them as fairer and more even-handed. what do you think?
i was thinking about writing a cover letter for a potential thingy-thing this summer. and then i stabbed myself in the eye. because, really, is there anything more ridiculous out there than a cover letter? of course, i say this as somebody who's never been in a hiring position. i suppose it's possible that people find these things useful. i can't imagine why, though. though i generally tailor my cover letters to the position, they generally seem like wastes of time. can anyone out there who's been in a position to hire people speak as to how important they find a cover letter, and what might be good tips to include in one?
i wrote about the weirdness/awesomeness of tilt-shift photography a little while back. now, the flickr blog points me towards a whole group dedicated to the effect, which makes real-life subjects look like tiny, creepy miniatures. it's super neat.
So: New Pornographers/Belle & Sebastian. I was ready to reaffirm my love for the band, but tonight's effort doesn't really merit it. I've seen them three times now — once at the Black Cat, once at 9:30 back in October, and then again at 9:30 tonight. They've never managed to wow me with their live act, but in the past I've been pretty happy with the show. Not tonight — this was by far the weakest of the three outings.
Neko Case is off touring behind her latest solo album, so the set was doomed to mediocrity from the start. Topping that off, the lone remaining female vocalist, Kathryn Calder, had laryngitis. That effectively cuts out a third or more of the band's material. Not a good start.
Throw in too-long transitions between songs, an oddly anemic sound mix and an apathetic start and you end up with a pretty poor set. There were some bright spots: Newman's singing was mostly strong and he exuded less contempt for the audience this go-round. More importantly, the band actually switched up the arrangements in some minor ways — something I've been complaining about since the first time I saw them. But overall it was not a good show.
Belle & Sebastian! I have to admit: B&S are not really my thing. I'm not that familiar with their stuff, having only been exposed to them via Catherine's occasional efforts to get me to listen to them at the start of our relationship. That, and listening to the Avalanches remix of I'm a Cuckoo about a million times. But everything I know and that I think I need to know about the band is summed up in the following two paraphrased statements, both of which were made tonight by frontman Stuart Murdoch:
"When I was growing up I used to go to some discos where people would bring their knitting and just do it at the show."
"We've got the spirit of Fugazi."
See what I mean? They seem like they mean well, but some sort of serious misunderstanding must have happened somewhere along the way. At one point Stuart said he didn't know what a song was about and an audience member helpfully yelled, "It's about modern rock!" But no, it pretty clearly isn't. Rock music is about catharsis, whether it's melodic or lyrical — that's what it's about for me, anyway. B&S's stuff doesn't have that payoff. It's not that I'm opposed to tweeness — I like the Decemberists, after all. It's that B&S songs don't establish tension, so there's never any resolution. They write ditties, not rock songs.
But as I mentioned, I'm speaking from a position of ignorance. A live show is no place to learn a band's lyrics, so perhaps that's where I would locate the depth that I perceive to be missing. From what I could make out they seem to have a lot of songs about lesbians. That seems like a decent start.
Another reason I'm probably wrong about the band: the crowd was way into them. Not dancing into-them — don't be silly! — but certainly enthusiastic and loud. Maybe a little too loud: they were prone to yelling out requests, a bad habit that the NP encouraged early on (they used the same tactic last time I saw them, wherein Carl asks for requests until someone yells the next song on the setlist).
But the band bore the idiots well, playing to the audience in clever ways but without becoming tiresome. Despite their best efforts, the music stubbornly refused to trigger my brain's rocking out nucleus, and I was pretty deathly bored by the end of their set.
Still, even a B&S skeptic like myself has to admit that they're a great live band. They're good instrumentalists and vocalists; Stuart's stage banter was endearing; and they played a nice, long set. Their material is fundamentally unexciting to me — but if I were a fan, I'd be very happy fan right now.
NPR recorded the whole thing. I mostly think this is great because it meant that the bands started their sets on time. But I guess it also means that you can listen to the whole concert here.
sooo.....the internet hates me. this became an undeniable realization after my free stolen wifi crapped out on me for the second time - again at a critical juncture in the academic quarter. the time when i have 52 billion things to do that require internet research/writeboard usage/procrastination via IMing/blog reading/the usual suspects.
but all is not lost! i'm making actual progress here. thanks to jodasm, dcsobloop and my brain, which has surprised itself with the fact that it is actually a BRILLIANT LEGAL MIND, i have completed the first major paper, a thrilling, THRILLING I TELL YOU, documentation of the details of Global Crossing Telecommunications, Inc. v. Metrophones Telecommunications, Inc. how thrilling is it, you ask? well, i reference carrot top in the first paragraph. i know. your minds are blown.
the rest of the week involves writing a lengthy story on judicial elections in cook county (if you know anything about that, or judicial elections in general, and if you might be of the opinion that said elections are becoming more political and special interest groups are playing more of a part and money is flowing in, give love an email) and building a super awesome web site on the neighborhood of andersonville. and maybe squeezing in on the closing arguments of the george ryan corruption trial because i am a little, just a little bit in love with the two hot federal prosecutors handling the case. mm. handling.
ahem. then on friday, dcsobloop and i will be at the riviera theater, absorbing the sweet, sweet sounds of the new pornographers and belle and sebastian. did you know people exist out there who do not like the new pron? not that i mean to judge - i am just surprised. i have surrounded myself with fellow carl newman fans for so long that my naive self nearly fell off the chair upon reading it. oh well. more carl for moi!
and then i will be drunk! wait, no. then i will be running 12 miles. having forgotten that i signed up for this little half marathon in d.c. a few months ago, i have also forgotten that i "need" to "train." the training, it is causing me pain. i ran 11 miles on saturday. and you know what? my toenail is going to fall off again. yup. you read it right. it fell off during marathon training in '04, and it's gonna fall off again. and it's just as pleasant as you might imagine. anyway, if you want to see toenail-less, sober, angry, brilliant legal mind catherine, you can catch me hobbling around the RFK stadium area on march 25. i can promise you fun times.
now that it's public knowledge i can publicly congratulate them: cheers to the lovely and wonderful ryan and lisa, who got engaged this weekend! we couldn't be happier for them, and not just cause they do fun stuff like ply us with pomegranate martinis and wear DCist underwear on their heads (well, not lisa). congrats, guys.
besides my head TOTALLY EXPLODING after crash won for best picture (see sarah b for my basic reaction), i basically wanted to throw up during the rest of the oscars because of the repeated, condescending references to how you can't, like, enjoy a movie at all unless you are watching it in a glorious big-screen theater and also buying 10s of bags of popcorns and 12 sodas. it's not MAGICAL that way, don't you see?
did that make anyone else want to punch in the tv screen? gah. am never going to the theater again. not that i can afford it, anyways.
however, in other news, i found jon stewart delightful. three cheers for him making the oscars funny.
Scott sent me this video of Sims-creator Will Wright demonstrating his new project, Spore, at the Game Developers Conference. The video is 35 minutes long, but he's demonstrating new functionality throughout all of it. The game looks flat-out amazing. It revolves around guiding the evolution of a species from its existence as a single cell to colonizing the galaxy — all with complete flexibility and customization. The way your species walks, dances, develops a culture and builds structures are all emergent behavior that comes from algorithms examining your choices, rather than canned actions. This is the most excited I've been about a videogame in a while — if it were anyone but Wright, I'd think this was just a slick demo. But he seems likely to have actually pulled this off.
This and this are probably the clearest, simplest explanation of Fourier Series that I've ever seen (admittedly, that may not be saying much). Perhaps not everyone's cup of tea, but I find it kind of fascinating. This is the essential mathematical insight that allows digital compression of analog information. Without it MP3s, digital video, our modern phone system, JPEGs, and a whole bunch of other essential stuff wouldn't exist.
Amanda takes on one of my pet peeves, and expresses her irritation with people who don't know that punctuation is generally supposed to go inside quotation marks. She's right to be irked: this is elementary school shit. Amanda, if it's any consolation, I know that this rule exists. I just ignore it.
File it under "ways computers have destroyed my brain", I guess (along with the rest of this blog). But when I'm writing I look at clauses as logical units, and punctuation as the modifiers, operators and delimiters that one applies to those units. In the first sentence of this paragraph I intended for ways computers have destroyed my brain to remain an atomic, whole unit that operates as a plural noun. A trailing comma isn't part of that unit — so why should it go inside the quotation marks, which function as the unit's delimiters?
I admit that this probably sounds like gibberish to people who aren't programmers, logicians or other varieties of weirdo. And I'll admit I'm somewhat inconsistent on this score: when dealing with dialogue I follow the rules. I've tried to break them, but it doesn't work. "Hmm," I'll think, "That just doesn't look right." I excuse this hypocrisy by arguing that the clause of which the quote is the object generally ought to be inserted into the quote at a point where a comma would naturally reside — thus making the comma a part of the quote-unit, and properly included within the quotes. But as you can probably tell from the length of the preceding sentence, I'm really just fooling myself.
It doesn't matter, though. At this point these are tics I can't help any more than I can avoid constant overuse of emdashes. My English-teacher grandmother would be crushed if she knew.
in other news, today is both the birthday of charles and my father! happy happy to them! may they both get incredibly drunk tonight. well, my dad, anyways.
my dear friend claire agre, who i met while working in milan and who is now a graduate landscape architecture student at harvard, is in the new york times today! woohoo! it's an article about the environmentally responsible redevelopment of a historic piece of former mining land in colorado. check it:
Academics and experts on mine reclamation---one of the biggest environmental problems of the West, where there are perhaps 500,000 abandoned mines---say that Breckenridge's groundbreaking path could change how mine reclamation works. With ownership of the pollution and control of the land, they say, comes the power to shape the post-mining landscape in a way that goes far beyond just cleaning it up.
"Breckenridge can lead the way," said Alan Berger, an associate professor of landscape architecture at Harvard and founder of the Project for Reclamation Excellence, a group at the design school that works on reclaiming land damaged by resource extraction. "The opportunities of what the town and county can do here are completely open-ended."
And so are the burdens. The property is hatch-marked by miles of unmarked and unmapped trails carved by generations of backcountry users at a time when no owner was around to say boo. The new owners are bracing for what they expect will be contentious public meetings beginning this spring as managers decide which trails to keep open and who may use them. The town favors things like hiking and biking, while the county wants to make sure that motorized users have their say as well.
Mining's legacy on the forest is another headache. In gold's heyday, lumber was needed for mills and tunnels, and by the late 1800's the Horseshoe was stripped. The result today is a narrow monoculture in which the oldest trees are about 120 years old---mostly lodgepole pines.
Pine beetles, which have ravaged vast parts of the West, are just hitting this part of Colorado. Local officials warn that the bugs, which love mature lodgepoles, could kill 80 percent of Horseshoe's trees.
But Breckenridge, which has carved a tourist niche around its mining history and historic buildings also wants to incorporate the story of the Horseshoe into the fabric of the local economy. That means thinking about mines and miners, and how they gave rise to Breckenridge.
That is where Claire Agre, a Harvard graduate student in landscape architecture, enters the picture.
you'll have to read the rest to find out what superhero claire agre is doing to save the world!
you can see my world-renowned series of "claire, pensive" photos here, here and here.
anyone interested in attending the pitchfork festival/visiting me this summer in chicago, take note: passes for the festival go on sale monday, and they've announced six of their 36 bands:
Mission of Burma
Ted Leo/Pharmacists
Mountain Goats
The National
Jens Lekman
Hot Machines
a decent if not blow-your-minds sort of line up, and there are still 30 slots left.
anyway, i'm going to try to snag two tickets for tommy and myself this monday. the magic futon is available for all who dare...
An IEEE Spectrum article about electrical neural stimulation techniques? Yes! This is the type of article that my college-era self and my college-era housemate Jon Brookshire could both be fascinated by: neuroscience problems combined with capacitor-efficiency problems. Rockin'.
Admittedly, the things I used to know about this stuff have faded alarmingly quickly — I found an old exam while cleaning out my car a little while ago and was completely shocked at the things I had forgotten. My essay answers were gibberish — did I really once know which enzymes consumed which neurotransmitters? I'd forgotten that I'd forgotten that.
But what little I do remember makes me excited about these therapies. Solving psychological problems by manipulating neurotransmitters with drugs is like trying to solve a city's downtown traffic congestion problem by manipulating the number of taxis on the streets: it's possible, and not too hard to implement, but it's difficult to anticipate the total effect on other parts of the system. Sometimes the taxi system really will be the thing that's fucked up, and what ought to be fixed — but not always. These electrostimulation techniques are still (mostly) pretty inexact, but seem ultimately likely to provide much more targeted action than pharmaceuticals.
One of the things I've been helping out with at work is the setup for DearAOL.com, an open letter/petition put together by the EFF to oppose AOL's recent adoption of a premium email service. The idea is that users can pay a small premium to have their email bypass spam filters. The spam filters could then be tightened up, and spammers would be dissuaded from plying their noxious trade.
The problem is that this would also affect groups like MoveOn, as well as a vast array of email-heavy businesses. Yes, there are supposed to be one-year exceptions for the MoveOns of the world; no, there are no guarantees. And the basic point made by the EFF — that under this scenario AOL will have a financial incentive to do a poor job maintaining its unpaid-email-spamfilters — seems basically sound to me.
But people seem to have mixed feelings about this initiative. Hurting online advocates would be bad, but spam is pretty bad, too. In a perfect world we'd pay the email toll computationally, donating time to worthy causes through SETI@home-style computing. But botnets make that idea useless.
I'm inclined to agree with something our CTO JP said at work: this issue is more about precedent than the merits of the AOL scheme.
I like you, TechCrunch. I really do — you're a great way to keep up on what's cutting-edge. And certainly you can't be blamed for nearly everyone you profile failing and going out of business — that's just the nature of bubbly bubble boosterism.
I expect Ether to ramp quickly towards success, and it will be extremely hard for competitors to enter the space given the capital intensive infrastructure needed to do something like this.
"Something like this" refers to Ether's gameplan: selling ad-hoc expert services over the phone. But the "capital intensive infrastructure"? That'd be, um, voice over IP. Which, it turns out, isn't very capital intensive at all these days, unless for some reason you insist on building and maintaining your PSTN gateway yourself. But why would you do that?
So yeah: lease some space in a datacenter, talk to a bank about processing credit cards, then start setting up Asterisk boxes. This ain't the Apollo program (although it's still a neat idea).
I love my mother, and I try to be a good and attentive son when she asks me for help with something. But helping her upload a photo for her match.com profile? I'm sorry, but no. The combination of a tech-support request, an uncomfortable window into a parent's romantic life, and guilt over not wanting to help is some kind of new maternal superweapon. If she could somehow integrate asking me to pick up my room and warning me not to smoke, she and her allies might finally be able to declare victory over filial forces everywhere.
"iPoop... iCry. I was so hoping for something more."
"I still can't believe this! All this hype for something so ridiculous! Who cares about an MP3 player? I want something new! I want them to think differently! Why oh why would they do this?! It's so wrong! It's so stupid!"
"All that hype for an MP3 player? Break-thru digital device? The Reality Distiortion Field™ is starting to warp Steve's mind if he thinks for one second that this thing is gonna take off."
hanging out in my favorite cafe, i was waiting for my drink by the register while a man next to me was ordering what appeared to be several pints of ice cream. it appeared, by the expression of the lady helping him, that this had already been a long, arduous process. it was going something like this:
"uhhh, do you have quarts of ice cream?"
"yup, right here!"
dialing cell phone..."they've got quarts, okay? what do you want? okay, okay." hangs up. "i'll take a quart, of, uhh...vanilla, and....shit. hold on." dials cell phone. "what was the other one you wanted? okay, okay." hangs up. "and a quart of chocolate peanut butter."
the lady smiles and nods and goes to scoop the quarts, then comes to the realization that they don't actually have a flavor called chocolate peanut butter and informs the man as such.
"shit." dials cell phone. "they don't HAVE chocolate peanut butter...i DON'T KNOW, OKAY? they're OUT, or something."
and totally audible from the other end of the line, at least to me: "BUTJESUS, I WANT MY CHOCOLATE PEANUT BUTTER!"
dude quickly hangs up. "i'll just get a quart of chocolate. plain chocolate. thanks."
in other news...if anyone is an expert, or, hell, even familiar with telecommunications law, i would greatly appreciate you contacting me. or if you even understand the following: Whether 47 U.S.C. § 201(b) of the Communications Act of 1934 creates a private right of action for a provider of payphone services to sue a long distance carrier for alleged violations of the FCC's regulations concerning compensation for coinless payphone calls.
i see the crash hatred, which i expressed not so eloquently a while back, is thankfully spreading due to the fact that there are loud rumblings that it could win the best picture oscar this year. via amber, a couple excellent beat downs of the vapid film can be found here and here. quotes:
As your headline suggests, I wrote in the forum that Crash was among my least favorite movies of 2005 and called it "one of those self-congratulatory liberal jerk-off movies that roll around every once in a while to remind us of how white people suffer too, how nobody is without his prejudices, and how, when the going gets tough, even the white-supremacist cop who gets his kicks from sexually harassing innocent black motorists is capable of rising to the occasion."
and
I realize the academy has been making lot of wafer-bland Best Picture choices since the 90s ("American Beauty," "Shakespeare in Love," "A Beautiful Mind," "Chicago"), honoring films that are slick and entertaining and perfunctorily "smart" but not the least bit resonant, films that don't hold a candle to at least 10 or 15 English language films from that same year that didn't win....Yes, I admit, the movie's more primally exciting than, say, "American Beauty" or "A Beautiful Mind" or "The English Patient," and more superficially "edgy." But it's also dumber and meaner and uglier, an Importance Machine that rolls over you like a tank. And it's lazy and simplistically cynical about its central subject, race, in that it promulgates a false idea of how Americans express racial attitudes in public. Cowritten by Haggis and Robert Moresco, "Crash" directly contradicts what we know about how race plays out in the U.S. today, not just in Los Angeles, but all over. In the name of Big Drama, it ignores the chilling effect of political correctness, which compels everyone who's not a fringe-dwelling hatemonger or a person pushed to the edge of his or her rope to express racist thoughts in code.
ooh, and this is a good one as well. i just can't stop:
Haggis doesn't care about such distinctions because deep down he doesn't actually want to say something useful about the modern state of race relations. He just wants to be able to play with racially charged material and be acclaimed for his bravery.
Well, my star-crossed SMS project continues to trundle along. I've had to give up on my beloved T39 — it's just not working out between us. So I bought this Nokia 3100 off of Ebay for 99 cents (+ $10 shipping). That white blotch on the right side of its screen isn't glare; it's a big ol' crack in the LCD. In real life it's neon pink and looks vaguely like a pornographic cartoon.
