a couple of people have asked me about the design. well, i'm here to tell you: i was inspired by/ripped off the v/ox blog. sorry v/ox dudes. except for the green, which i picked at random and has the magical ability of looking like a different color on every monitor i view it on. the header font is poynter agate comp, which i used because i used that a lot when i was designing pages for last quarter's project (cause it's a startribune.com font) and i like it. i had wanted to use that for the post titles, too, but tommy didn't have it on his computer and he was the one who implemented it so i believe we're using minion myriad. the header is temporary until brilliance strikes us, which, seeing the rate we move on blog stuff, will be two years from now. which reminds me that the blog's four-year anniversary is coming up, which: whoa. there'll be candles and cake and stuff, don't you worry.

some small fireworks went off near reagan just as my plane touched down last night. besides the worry factor in people, uh, setting off fireworks near an airport, it was pretty awesome.

When you're fretting about a server not having enough capacity — which is the root of the problems DCist is currently facing — you start thinking about bottlenecks. What's the slowest part of the system? That's where you need to direct your efforts, whether it be the connection, database, scripts or external services. Speed up the slowest thing, then hope that's enough. If it isn't, find the next-slowest thing and fix that. Repeat as necessary until you run out of patience or money.

This is the frame of mind I'm currently in. So it was pretty interesting to read this post of Jeff's, in which he discusses a book he's just read about the science of food production. According to the author, if you look at the global ecosystem — the growth and metabolic processing of life on this planet as a coherent whole — it turns out that you can locate the system's bottleneck: it's the rate at which nitrogen can be removed from the air and turned into a form directly usable by life.

We're past that bottleneck now, thanks to our ability to synthesize fertilizer. But Jeff reports that if we gave that up, reintroduced the bottleneck, and simply ran the system at peak efficiency — all organic farming, everywhere, all the time, in other words — a few billion people would have to quickly convert to Breatharianism.

Maybe I'm just in a weird mood, but I find all this pretty interesting. It's tough to see where these bottlenecks exist. In hindsight it's easy to see that advances like agriculture, sanitation, industrial manufacturing and digital technology all allowed rate-limited but otherwise ready systems to suddenly spring forward. Makes you wonder what's holding us back right now.

the harry potter overheard item over on DCist might be one of my favorites. deliciously nasty.

this video of youtube folks doing the yeah yeah yeahs for "cheated hearts" might be just about the sweetest and most awesome thing i've seen all week. yay fans.

• I've got nothing to do with this. (Removed due to signs of life — actual communication! It's great.).

  So consider this post my pathetic cry to current and future employers, peers, relations and acquaintances: I actually know what I'm doing, I swear.

• This is astonishingly stupid. Like, almost audiophile stupid.
• I've now accidentally caught Dashboard Confessional on both Leno and Letterman. That dude really can't sing, can he? His wha-oh-wha-ohs are okay, but the rest is pretty miserable.

yesterday evening i joined my coworker m. and a couple of his friends for a night full of georgie james and camera obscura at the earl in east atlanta. i was excited because 1) i haven't yet had a chance to catch georgie james, the toast of the d.c. blogosphere, live yet and 2) it was my first opportunity to observe atlanta hipsters in their natural environment.

don't forget: the office started showing webisodes yesterday. the first two are online and i believe they plan on showing 13 or so. the storyline follows the three accountants figuring out a possible embezzlement scandal. pretty funny!

things i like about working here: cutie canadian metrosexual and space/tech reporter da/ni/el sieb/erg was behind me this morning in line for starbucks. you may have seen him recently on cnn's coverage of the shuttle launch. the cashiers greeted him enthusiastically (apparently they are all good friends) and said they hadn't seen him in a while. he responded, "well, i've been on the road. that's the life of a correspondent, you know."

indeed. also, he smelled good.

Behold! Catherine's lovely new design for the site, which I stayed up waaaay too late last night implementing. There are a lot of pieces that still have to be done — archives, a different header, the about page, some fancy del.icio.us crap that Catherine asked for and I'm happy to oblige, plus who knows what else I forgot. But here we are. It's filled with XHTML goodness (although the entries' crappy, non-compliant HTML will usually prevent the page from validating). Plus actually well-written CSS (relatively speaking), some unnecessary Javascript, and Flickr integration. Woo!

Since parts of the design are still in flux I haven't yet applied the individual entry template, which means that as soon as you click on a comment or try to "read more" you'll be back at the old ugly blue site. I've got a few more things to wrap up before that goes away — plus, I probably ought to wait for a low-traffic time to do the rebuild, since we've already incurred the wrath of our host for taking more than our fair share of the CPU.

my favorite lede of the day, by far:

Forget cute, cuddly marsupials. A team of Australian palaeontologists say they have found the fossilised remains of a fanged killer kangaroo and what they describe as a "demon duck of doom".

the article goes on to reveal these interesting finds:

Professor Michael Archer said on Wednesday the remains of a meat-eating kangaroo with wolf-like fangs were found as well as a galloping kangaroo with long forearms that could not hop like a modern kangaroo.

"Because they didn't hop, these were galloping kangaroos, with big, powerful forelimbs. Some of them had long canines (fangs) like wolves," Archer told Australian Broadcasting Corp radio.

Vertebrate palaeontologist Sue Hand said modern kangaroos look almost nothing like their ferocious forebears, which lived between 10 million and 20 million years ago.

The species found at the dig had "well muscled-in teeth, not for grazing. These things had slicing crests that could have crunched through bone and sliced off flesh", Hand said.

The team also found prehistoric lungfish and large duck-like birds.

"Very big birds ... more like ducks, earned the name 'demon duck of doom', some at least may have been carnivorous as well," Hand told ABC radio.

awesome. via more patriotic than you, who's got a detailed illustration of the duck.

rob got linked on romenesko. cool!

jarvis cocker's new song is kind of good.

what's up with pulp, anyways? i had kind of assumed they'd just broken up since i haven't heard about them in so long, but their web site says they're "in a dormant state." they still remain the #1 band i want to see live in concert. i did kind of, when they played three songs to open for radiohead's secret 9:30 club show, which was, holy shit, eight years ago? and where i witnessed the unholy pitt-aniston alliance and freaked the fuck out. good times.

anyway, jarvis cocker somehow still remains the height of skeevy sexiness. just listen to "seductive barry" and say it ain't so.

This is why I don't like Sudoku. It's a puzzle that isn't complex enough to hide its plodding, algorithmic nature. There's a discrete set of steps that one can employ to solve every one. Once that becomes clear, it ceases to be a brain teaser and simply becomes a mechanical routine you have to go through. Why not just use or build a machine to do it for you? Or better yet, not do it at all?

This is also the reason that I no longer have much respect for Will Shortz. Computer-assisted though it may be, editing crossword puzzles requires knowledge, finesse, and cleverness — the clues don't write themselves, after all (although I imagine there's a database of frequently-used ones employed to flesh out the puzzle after the original clues have been entered and the computer has arranged them — any way you slice it, puzzle editor is probably a pretty cushy job). But by hitching his wagon to the Sudoku craze, he's pretty well surrendered any pretense of curatorial merit that he might have claimed before. Are we really supposed to believe that these Sudokus can help you unwind, but these Sudokus are optimized for the beach?

Give me a fucking break. There's no creative act here: to make one of these puzzles, one simply has to run a program and enter a weight value to determine how many squares remain blank (with that value lying in the range [solvable-solved)). It's as simple as that. I imagine there are other, more tedious ways to generate these puzzles — maybe Shortz uses those methods, although I have a hard time imagining that it affects the final product very much.

I suppose I wouldn't be able to resist attaching my name to a machine that prints free money, either. But I'd probably try to keep my name in a slightly more humble font size.

tommy and i realize we are SUPER out-of-date on our blogroll and there are many lovely people out there we should have added eons ago. but, we're lazy. so whenever the new redesign comes around, so will a current and mind-blowing new blogroll. prepare yourselves.

So, Hasweb briefly disabled Movable Type over the weekend. They said mt.cgi was consuming too many resourced — I suspect they just took a snapshot of the system's CPU utilization during a rebuild for a new entry, making it seem like we were hogging the machine (we were, but only for five seconds or so once or twice a day). I convinced them to turn things back on, but they're keeping a watchful eye on us.

The thing is, mt.cgi isn't supposed to be cause these problems. The comment scripts can (as in Unfogged's case), but not mt.cgi itself. As far as I can tell this is just a combination of bad luck and some slightly inefficient templates.

So, just a word of warning: I'm likely to put up a Six Apart-approved template sometime today. It'll just be a stopgap — Catherine has come up with a good-looking design, but I want to add some bells and/or whistles, then it'll probably take me some time to turn it into HTML. So, something mediocre is forthcoming. But hey, it couldn't be as bad as the status quo, right?

i spent a big chunk of today at the atlanta botanical garden, which, while nice and pretty and full of adorable little children and a neat asian festival, did not really impress. i guess when the only other gardens you've seen are the boboli (with their sweetass giant bathtubs), the florence rose garden (with the duomo rising in the horizon) and the borghese park (with its kickass trees), it is tough to compare. anyway, if you're the kind of person who gets easily annoyed by endless streams of boring flower shots, then i most certainly would not click here.

i did see one fun thing while i was there, though. part of this random festival that was going on included lots of demonstrations of martial arts and dancing, etc. one was this totally boring sword-swinging routine of some sort. these dudes were swinging around their swords - not all that proficiently, i might add - but then came the awesome part. they cut off the tips of some stalks of bamboo that were stuck in the ground. woohoo. but then, they went absolutely fucking ballistic on the bamboo with their swords, shredding them to pieces. i don't know what the purpose of the whole demonstration was, but i thought it was hysterical.

yes, bamboo-shredding is now hilarious to me. and that fact is driving me back to d.c. next weekend. see you then.

this is awesome. sorry if it's been all over the internet already.

let's play a game: which of these reviews of the eraser sucks up to thom yorke harder? i'm partial to "The Eraser's title track reminds our rulers that their lies won't work and will come back to haunt them. Our movement needs more musicians prepared to stick their necks out and take risks like this" or "The Eraser is an album full of 'moments' some of them are familiar, some of them are brand new and exciting but they are all undeniably Thom Yorke and that is what he will be remembered for; constantly striving to go slightly left of the middle." yes, we're all going forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always striving, striving, striving slightly left of the middle.

my coworker t. just gave me a copy of the album (kriston had sent it to me a while back but it..disappeared? seriously, my desktop is an abyss) so maybe i can see what i think of it myself soon.

i wasn't going to link it out of respect to patient confidentiality and the troubles he had with his last blog, but it's too good to not. a good friend of tommy's and mine from college who must be close to being a real doctor by now (how does all that stuff work? surprisingly, my intake of scrubs and grey's anatomy has not really educated me on that whole process) is blogging again, and it's great. who else could write so hysterically on rectal exams? not me!

Perhaps the largest apology I owe is to the numerous people I have rectalized over the past two weeks. You know who you are. Even more deserving of my guilt are those I had to perform multiple rectal exams on because of errors I made in the initial process. To the woman with a history of gastric ulcer who presented with melena, I'm sorry I didn't go deep enough the first time. To the nursing home paraplegic patient with colitis, I'm sorry that I accidentally smeared the sample on the wrong side of the guaiac card. To the young man with a Dieulafoy's ulcer, I'm sorry I failed to realize that there were no cards in the room until after I performed the exam. And to myself, I'm sorry that I took off my glove prematurely after my very first exam, and was holding the guaiac card in my bare hands asking an attending to confirm the negative result before he pointed out to me that I should wash my hands twenty times over. Again, that's disgusting. Additionally, I apologize for the fact that I can never remain completely silent during a rectal exam and instead either make an incredibly awkward comment ("This is why I became a doctor" or "This is less fun for me than it is for you") or make oochy-ouchy noises reminiscent of everyone's favorite gynecological surgeon.

All it needs are some dancing hamsters. Warning: link will bring you to a page with sound and ridiculousness.

Via Mike via Carey.

The wheels have been in motion for some time now, so yesterday kind of slipped by without me noticing. But congratulations are in order for various friends in our corner of the aspiring DC media conspiracy: Kyle, Heather and Sommer are all stepping into new roles at DCist, and I'm pretty excited about it. I'm looking forward to reading more music stuff from Kyle; to Heather having a larger hand in the site's direction; and to Sommer finally having access to the budget necessary to pay down her not-inconsiderable debt in promised milkshakes.

But of course I'm also very sad to see Ryan step down. I imagine Catherine and I will write some more weepy posts closer to his departure date, but for now, suffice it to say that the guy is pretty amazing. I think DCist has had an unbelievable string of luck with its editors. Rob and Mike's encyclopedic knowledge of the city, organizational skills and affability helped attract and sustain readers and writers. Then Martin and Ryan stepped in with a level of talent and dedication that bordered on masochism. Martin's sticking around (the knots seemed pretty secure, anyway), but Ryan's off to pursue his boyhood dreams of a PhD in economic history.

I have no doubt that Sommer is going to be great as an EIC, but we're all sad that Ryan won't be around to occasionally save us. The level of dedication the guy has shown is more than a little ridiculous (and a testament to Lisa's overwhelming patience). If a writer said, "I had a post saved on my hard drive, but my computer broke and I can't afford to fix it," I have no doubt that Ryan would immediately start figuring out how much blood plasma he had to sell to raise the money. Not that Sommer wouldn't do the same — but Ryan's taller, and therefore probably has more blood. That's an important trait for an editor.

Oh Jesus. So I've had a little trouble with certain folks from New York who handle the tech administration for a certain regional blog (site A) that I do some tech things for. And tonight I learn that at least some of these NY tech staffers are also affiliated with a public transport arrival time SMS service (site B) that invaded site A's comment section after I declined to cover site B, given that my own site A-branded public transport SMS service was about to debut. I chased their apparent spamminess out of site A's comment section with some testy replies.

Man. This kind of explains a lot of the intransigence I've experienced from the NYC gang. And it's kind of a pain in the ass. What a tangled web we weave, when first we write some PHP.

It's a little late by blogospheric standards, and nearly everyone who might read this has already heard my opinion on the matter. But I've gotta say: Superman Returns was pretty bad. Given my miserably lowbrow taste in movies and my superhero-related predispositions (I'm in favor of them), I should've been an easy mark for the film. I really liked Bryan Singer's take on the X-Men franchise, too. But this movie was badly conceived and badly executed. A horrendously long denoument (after a miserably crappy climax) didn't help matters, either. Spoilers follow.

we here are the #1 result for "too drunk at wedding."

it was actually a post about jason and corbin's wedding, though it could have applied to ryan and lisa's, or david and heather's. or, you know, ANY WEDDING I GO TO. two exceptions: tommy's cousin's wedding in vermont, because, you know, got to at least attempt to come off well for the relatives; and tommy's mormon friend's wedding. where there was a) no beer b) no dancing c) only rows and rows of bottled root beer. that was a fun one.

the northern virginia uva book club: saddest book club ever?

actual words emitting from anchor lady's mouth: "next up: more on kim jong-il. some say he's just crazy; some say he's crazy like a fox. stay tuned."

in other news, tommy and the weather gods must be in touch, because after driving home last night from having drinks with the ex who's in town for business, my little dodge neon and i were nearly EFFING WASHED AWAY. seriously, there was a poorly-drained intersection where i swear to god, i actually started to feel my car float. it was scary. so i hereby, from my 10 days' worth of living experience, deem atlanta the goddamn rainiest city in the world. its slogan should be: "atlanta! you don't think of it as a rainy city, but you should. also, you'll drown."

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.

i'm still here! in atlanta! and doing stuff! details below.

yay! i'm quoted in my second washington post article (and, as always, manage to sound ridiculously dumb). but boo! the article says i'm from atlanta! though i'm here now, i will always be from the d.c.