March 2005 Archives
Check out Consumating's page of tags to see in a glance.
I found Eo-Geo on Kerim's blog Keywords. It's a visual guide to global news:
What you're looking at is the current state of affairs. The redder a country is, the more of a news spike there is in that country. It scans news items for mentions of each country. It's not showing the total amount of news referencing each country; otherwise the US would probably be always red. Rather it compares the number of references to a 5-day moving average. So here we see that Zimbabwe has a news spike, because of the elections there. (Clicking on that country brings up an RSS feed of the news items, unfortunately not linked to their source.) Indonesia, on the other hand, is green, because although there's a lot of news coming out of there because of the earthquake, that story is "old" and so the current level of news is about average.
As Kerim points out, the news counter is "dumb" -- it makes no distinction between an article about North Korea's soccer team and its nuclear weapons. But if I were building a war room, I'd totally have this up on a big screen.
Qiu has kick-ass sword in MMORPG. Qiu lends virtual sword to Zhu. Zhu sells virtual sword for real money. Qiu goes to real cops, who tell him they can't arrest Zhu for stealing something that's not real. Qiu, enraged, stabs Zhu to death with real blade. Cyber-sabre provokes real death.
The New York Post cries: "Enough!"
Previously seen on the cover of the New York Post:
M&M's characters go to the 'dark side'
I will totally go over to the dark side for dark chocolate M&Ms! I mean, how can the "Jedi Mix" compete?
As for the M&M's themselves, the special edition "Darth Mix" features the following new colors: black, maroon, purple, dark blue and silver. The classic milk chocolate flavor is found in the "Jedi Mix" with its new colors: beige, cream, pastel green, gold and "light-saber blue" M&M's.
In other words, Jedis get the namby-pamby Easter colors. Bah!
Found on Pop Culture Junk Mail.
...she'd be an internet addict," Wright deadpanned, "and she'd probably have a really amazing blog." The Emily Dickinson Video Game Challenge!
Lina Wertmüller's first movie with both Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato (General Kala to you Flash Gordon fans). It's wonderful to watch the two of them fall in love. But the political content (the "Seduction" of the title is Giannini's political temptation to reject the Left and join the Establishment) doesn't age well.
Remember those books that were kinda popular at one time where if you solved the puzzle in the book you won thousands of dollars, or maybe nothing, because solving the puzzle involved going to some remote shire in England and digging where the puzzle clues told you to?
Well, Coudal Partners has something like that, called The Trail. Looks to me like it could be really interesting, but I just haven’t the time. (Plus I’m scared I would be intellectually smacked-down.)
Plug: Computers for Youth, the nonprofit where I work, is having a celebrity auction on eBay. Some cool stuff there, including a script signed by the cast of the Sopranos, and this guitar signed by Lenny Kravitz:
The auction runs until this Thursday. Go forth and bid!
"Exterminate! Exterminate!" By the by, the new Dr. Who is really good.
If Edward Gorey had re-written "Really Rosie", and thrown in some Punch & Judy, and the love child of Riff Raff and the Emcee from "Cabaret" and the ghost of Jacob Marley was the Emcee, and it was set to the music of the Tiger Lillies, it might be something like this. Or not. But go see it. Now.
OK, so the soliders were of the small plastic variety. Still, the Solar Death Ray is pretty cool. Via Gadgetopia.
get your war on takes on the Terry Schiavo case
"My wife and I made out our living wills last night. Mine says that if I fall into a persistent vegetative state, and Tom DeLay comes within a hundred miles of me, I am to turn into a zombie and rip his fucking head off. The can’t prosecute the undead for manslaughter, can they?"
Thanks to pesky' for the tip.
A request to our readers and posters -- I'll be redoing our link section soon. What sites would you like to see added? What RSS feeds are you reading that we should promote?
I am a shameless Star Wars lover. I use the force. I try not - I do, or do not (there is no 'try'). I have a bad feeling about things. I find your lack of faith disturbing. I let the Wookie win. You get the idea.
And, like so many thirty-somethings, I have shaken my head in sorrow at the first two installments of the second trilogy (I mean, really the first triology, because, you see, Star Wars is really the fourth movie and the first of the second trilogy, even though it was made first. And it is really called "A New Hope." And there were going to be nine they say but . . . hey, why are you backing away from me? Come back! Come ba-a-a-a-ck!).
But there is a true legacy to the Star Wars saga. A tale worthy of the Star Wars name. It is sanctioned by Lucasfilms, covers the period between Episodes II and III is called "The Clone Wars." If you missed the first twenty chapters, you missed Star Wars gold. Shown in three-minute "micro-episodes" (complete with a <1 second long 'preview' of the next installment), it was the best four weeks on television last fall, and had me glued to my television between 8:01 and 8:04 p.m. for a month. It is everything Star Wars should be (meaning "no kissing" and "lots of lightsabers").
Chapters 21-25 air this week at 7:00 p.m. The installments are a little longer (which actually hurts some of the charm), but it is a good, good watch. And you can get the first 20 episodes on DVD.
Did I mention it was a cartoon?
Watch The Clone Wars and you will have taken your first step into a larger world.
I was supposed to be looking for a new job today, but I wandered onto one of the political blogs I follow (Daily Kos) and got embroiled in my own brain (mmmm.... embroiled brain).
Anyway, I decided that shame was not going to be an effective tool in dealing with the degradation of culture in general and our out-of-control ministers of governance in specific. Rather, to persuade the world that reason is king, we have to demonstrate that it's a better way to fight our fundamental human insecurities. Or something.
So, jah. It's not tight, but here's the post and I offer it up to the ongoing rekindling of our beloved 'badiddle.
While Ish was down for the count, the kind folks at Happy Robot allowed me to post items to the Robot Filter. I am reposting it here for your edification and amusement.
Yes, you know they're out there, but it's refreshing to actually stumble across one. A work-related Google search led me to THE HISTORY OF THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST TOBACCO, Carol A.S. Thompson's violently pro-smoking screed. And I mean violent.
"See how the bloodsucker-controlled media never utter the slightest squeak of protest against anti-smokers rationalizing acts of naked aggression, tyranny and plunder against their innocent fellow citizens!"
I think she, um, really needs a cig.
SNIF, or Social Networking in Fur, is a project from John Maeda's Physical Language Workshop at the MIT Media Lab. The idea is built on the age old notion of petworking-- meeting people through your pets. In their own words: "SNIF presents a hardware/software architecture that aims to capture pet social networks and other pet-related information as pets and their owners explore their communities."
I'm just waiting for the day when your dog can spread fleas and computer viruses.
I've been obsessed with my own breasts lately. No, I haven't been inspiring people to make cupcakes out of them , and neither am I calling for the FCC to crack down on our beloved Ish. But I am going to do something mildly controversial here. I'm Going to Discuss Breastfeeding. In Public.
See, I have a beautiful baby girl. She's 6 1/2 months old, barely. Since she was born, I've been nursing her between 7 and 10 times a day. A couple of weeks ago, she started to expand her repetoire to oatmeal, prunes, apples, and pears, but she's still largely a dairy girl.
#14 should be "designers who put the pull quote in the wrong place." /snark
As in Pimp My Ride, not actual pimps. (Speaking of which, did you know the DOJ has a 66-page guide to street prostitution?) Some excellent Firefox extensions here. Thanks to robotfilter for the link.
The first thing I did when I got a camera phone was spell a message to
a friend by photographing words on local signs. Now Kastner the genius
Flickrscripter has automated the
process. Kowabunga!
His "on-body" kit and his desk and car kits are something to behold. And I thought I was being paranoid with the stuff I carry in my bag post-9/11....
Cory Doctorow on email spam, DRM, and Trusted Computing
Yes, I once had a dream of changing the world with three simple words: Agreement. Commitment. Justification.
But Del Close has left us. I am a Marketing Executive at a Very Important Law Firm. And my dream is being mocked by the Onion.
My Dream has, like the website for which the phrase is named, Jumped the Shark.
My new dream shall be to own an SUV.
rounded corners without images
Thanks to all the tech-sweat that went into bringing us back our Ish. Allow me to get this mofo started once again with this effing fantastic piece of agitprop. I cannot overstate how awesome this is. MP3, 3.4MB, 128kpbs.
Freedom, fear, God, and the Devil....
See you 'round the ranch.
Attack of the Spambots!
We're back! A month of forced sabbatical was brought on by blog comment spammers who, in their attempt to boost the Google rank of their particular site hawking pharmaceuticals, p0rn, casinos, etc., hijacked our comments. We here at Ish: Tech Central have been taking various anti-spam measures to try and keep them at bay. But our best defense, MT Blacklist, turned out to be our undoing. Blacklist checks every link in a comment against a list of known spammers. In theory, it works fine, and as more spammers attempt to comment, the longer the list grows. But as the list grows, it takes more and more processing power to check every link against it. When it's one person commenting, that just means a long wait. But when spambots attack with hundreds of comments at once, it's a huge drain on the host's server. Trip has the skinny on what happened. Basically, our host Wowrack decided to pull the plug on Triptronix.net because we were taking down their server. The medicine cured the disease but killed the patient.
So, props to Trip -- make that mad props -- for overseeing our move to a new host, Fluid Hosting, and re-installing Movable Type. As for the comment spam, we've installed a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart), provided by James Seng. Everytime you leave a comment, you'll have to enter an ever-changing security code. I've been resisting this change since, if you can't read the code on your screen, you're shut out of commenting. But it seems to be the only method thus far that's bot-proof. Faced with the choice of accessiblity and functionality, I'm going with functionality. You can't say we didn't try! If anyone wants to leave a comment but can't, email me at ishbadiddle -at- triptronix.net and I'll post it for you.
I've been tweaking the code to try and restore all the bells and whistles, but do let me know if there's something that's not working any more.
Ish seems to be available again. No comments for now, as the comment file's been removed and will not be put back until it is properly protected. More from Ish at some point.
