Earlier today I rolled up all my RSS feeds in Bloglines, and "read" my backlog of unread posts. Not that I actually read them, I just made the thousands on thousands of unread posts disappear. A delightful feeling, actually. I highly recommend an occasional purge. After all, you're not really missing that much. The Internet will still go on.
| Bloglines | Productivity |
So last night, Debbie said "When are you going to build that Jukebox anyway?" "Tonight!" I foolishly replied. The Jukebo(Linu)x MP3 player / computer / stereo component / recorder / DVD player / blender, now nicknamed the far-more-pronouncable "Mikebox" by CMOM, is no longer a pile of spare parts. It's a mostly-assembled computer!
It actually wasn't too bad. mathew's instructions for the same case and motherboard were very helpful, although he left out a few steps -- for instance, connecting the front panel audio and the system fan, which caused some backtracking as I realized I no longer could reach the connectors in question. Silly me! The thing about the Nehemiah M10000 is that it's so small that connecting everything up is a bit like living in a Manhattan apartment: everytime you want to add something, it means you have to move something else. And it's crowded. Like, the soundcard is smackdab up against the DVD-R. I also had to make a few choices -- the firewire and one of the USB connectors on the front panel are disabled, for instance, and I decided to leave the card reader out of the floppy bay (I can always use it as a peripheral) so I wouldn't have to use up another on-board connection.
After lots of Tab A in Slot B, I plugged it in. Pushed the button. Nothing blew up. The "on" light turned green. The DVD player opens and closes. The only hardware thing left is the ATA cables -- the ribbon I had couldn't reach both drives, so I ordered a couple of round cables from Newegg.
And then, it's on to Phase III: OS and Software! Linux Ho!
Ubuntu? I like saying "Ubuntu."
| Mikebox |
Lynn sent this link to a fashionable holiday statement:
Cabela's Bridger Mountain Man Coyote Fur Hat
I have actually been to the Cabela's store in Pennsylvania. Picture a Costco-sized store completely devoted to hunting equipment. Then add another Costco-sized store on top of that. Put a fake mountain in the middle, covered by taxidermy. Add a massive aquarium of live fish -- next to the fishing equipment, of course. Throw in mullets. Stir.
| Taxidermy |
I thought this country was being run by a bunch of 8th graders...
"The White House has for the first time claimed ownership of an Iraq withdrawal plan, arguing that a troop pullout blueprint unveiled this past week by a Democratic senator was 'remarkably similar' to its own."
Turns out it's a bunch of 4th graders.
| Military |
Ruth M. Siems, Inventor of [Stove Top] Stuffing, Dies at 74 - New York Times
"As a mark of just how deeply inscribed on the American palate Ms. Siems's stuffing has become, there are several recipes, available on the Internet, that promise to reproduce the taste of Stove Top from scratch, using fresh ingredients."
| Thanksgiving | Food | Stuffing |
I eventually received back from a friend in Paris her view on the riots. Natch, it’s just one woman’s thoughts, but she’s a reasonable and intelligent person. (Reprinted without permission, hence without attribution.)
Rassure-toi! Paris n’est pas à feu et à sang! Il ne faut pas regarder Fox News ni même CNN! Les choses semblent se calmer maintenant mais le problème des banlieues demeure. Il existe depuis trente ans et aucun parti politique n’eu la volonté ferme et persévérante de le résoudre. Il s’agit de ségrégation sociale pure et simple, de ghettos où plus de 40% des jeunes n’ont pas de travail. Dans une société qui, globalement, s’enrichit mais où s’accentue le fossé entre riches et pauvres. Dans ces ghettos se retrouve évidemment une majorité de Français d’origine maghrébine ou africaine. D’où l’exploitation des événements par le parti d’extrême droite.
| Banlieues | Race | Class | France |
A review of Debbie's Darwin exhibit at the Museum of Natural History in today's Times.
| American Museum of Natural History |
Today's map brought to you via The Giving Blog: A map of where Katrina evacuees have ended up.
Bigger version, and more on the methodology, here: American diaspora - Katrina
| Disasters | Hurricane Katrina |
... to Thought Bubbles for my newest blog button:
|
The Ishbadiddle Internet Confessional -- my simple post about PostSecret that has now become a place for people to post their secrets -- has reached 100 comments. Probably the strangest chapter in the history of this blog. I hope it helps those of you who use it...
| Secrets | PostSecret |
The Globe and Mail: Ingram: Hey Sony - wake up:
Sony's EULA is like having a man appear at your door to sell you natural gas, and having him install a gas meter in your basement that unlocks your front door whenever the right code is entered -- either by the gas company or anyone else who knows how -- and fills your house with foul-smelling blue smoke if you try to remove it.
Via BoingBoing. The NYT picked up the Sony story in today's business section. I can't think of a corporate policy in recent memory that has backfired so spectacularly.
| EULA | Malware | Copyright | Copy Protection | DRM | Your Blank of the Day |
I've spent a couple of hours banging this out at work, so I figured I'd share. Here's the problem: we have a list of 3000+ donors given to us in an Excel spreadsheet. The names are in plain text. We need to split them into seperate cells, First Name, Middle Initial, Last Name, Suffix, so that we can do a proper mail merge. In effect, a reverse concatenation. (Is there a word for this?)
There may be an easier way to do this in Excel, but here's what I put together. The following forumulas assume that the name text is in column Z. The names can be in any of the following formats:
John Smith
John A. Smith
John Smith Jr.
John A. Smith Jr.
You'll have to get any commas (John A. Smith, Jr.) out of there. The tricky part is getting the spreadsheet to tell the difference between "John Smith Jr." and "John A. Smith" -- both are 3 words long, but the third word can be either the Last Name or the Suffix. We'll use a formula to get the spreadsheet to recognize Suffixes.
Update: You can get a sample spreadsheet here: Download file
Full formulae below the fold:
| How To | Concatenation |
| Geeks |
A full-page article on DonorsChoose is in today's New York Times "Giving" section (page 16 in the paper version, or click to read: Building Better Schools, One Glue Stick at a Time.)
| New York Times | Charity | Philanthropy |
And lots of other weird comic goodness at Stupid Comics. Via Boing Boing.
| Superman | TRS-80 |
In yesterday's mail we got a package from McSweeney's and one from the NSA!
| McSweeney's |
The physics of cow tipping. From boing boing.
| Cows | Weird Science |
Two articles today in the New York Times about exhibits that Debbie has worked on at the Museum of Natural History: One on the upcoming Darwin exhibit and another on "Voices from South of the Clouds", a Chinese photography exhibit that is now running. Go see it, it's very good, and I'm not just saying that because my wife edited the captions, wrote the introductory text, and helped put the exhibit together.
| Photography | Anthropology | American Museum of Natural History | Darwin |
8th Avenue in the 40s, 20 feet from a Starbucks:
Woman One: Can't we find a Starbucks somewhere?
Woman Two: There must be something like a Starbucks around here somewhere.
| New York City | Starbucks |
An imaginative staging, and an interesting interpretation -- is the whole play really the tale "of sprites and goblins" told by the young prince Mamillius? -- by the all-male Propeller troupe. Some of the performances are uneven, and it's a difficult play in many ways, but by all means go see it.
I smiled at this exchange early in the play, when the two kings talk about their relationships with their sons. It reminded me of our boys:
Leon. My brother,
Are you so fond of your young prince as we
Do seem to be of ours?
Pol. If at home, sir,
He’s all my exercise, my mirth, my matter,
Now my sworn friend and then mine enemy;
My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all:
He makes a July’s day short as December,
And with his varying childness cures in me
Thoughts that would thick my blood.Leon. So stands this squire
Offic’d with me.
| BAM |
That's nearly 7 million people in prison, jail, or on probation or parole.
| Jail | Crime | Law |
I'm at the point where I'm actively annoyed at all websites without RSS feeds. What, you expect me to actually remember to go and visit your site? Feedreaders are a great way to manage the information stream, and hence part of my overall Getting Things Done system.
I've been using Watch That Page as a service to ping me every time a site changes. It's a great service. However, what I really want is for it to notify me via RSS instead of email. The main advantages of getting the ping via RSS are: 1) it doesn't clog my email inbox, and 2) I can read a number of pings asynchronously -- that is, I can choose to read all the items in a particular feed at one swoop, even if it's a month's worth of stuff. (There are commercial services that will do this but I'm cheap.)
Since I'm a Bloglines user, there's a way to do this! (There might be a similar hack in other feedreaders; anyone out there using another reader who can tell me?)
1) Go to "Extras" (lower left corner) and hit "Create Email Subscriptions"
2) Name the Subscription with the name of the site you want to track. Copy the email address (it will be yourusername.lotsofnumbers@bloglines.com)
3) Go to Watch That Page and set up a new account using that email address.
4) Add the URL of the site you want to track.
Voila! Web site --> Watch That Page --> Email --> Bloglines
You could also set it up so that your RSS feed "watches" more than one site. For instance, you could make a "Friend's pages" list and add all your friend's sites that don't (yet) have feeds.
Hope this proves useful!
| Hacks | GTD | Productivity | How To | Organization | Bloglines |
Thudfactor reminds me that I, too, have been terribly remiss at flogging Kerim's documentary:
I’ve been terribly remiss in not letting people know about the upcoming documentary Hooch and Hamlet in Chharanagar, being produced and directed in part by P. Kerim Friedman of the Keywords weblog. This film will be about the Chhara tribe of India. It promises to be a very interesting film about oppression, imperialism, and freedom of speech issues, and I’m certainly looking forward to the full-length DVD.
A fifteen minute short, Acting Like a Thief, is available from the Hooch and Hamlet site so you can see what it is all about. And as they are looking for additional funding for their project, this is also an opportunity for you to support independent filmmaking.
Plus, a great title.
| India | P. Kerim Friedman |
I recently ate a piece of your Glow-In-The-Dark Snickers® FunSize® candy. At first I was disappointed that the candy itself did not glow in the dark. Then I was pleased to see that the "glow in the dark" actually referred to the answers to the Star Wars trivia printed on the wrapper.
However, I was SHOCKED to see the question on my wrapper was "Who's Home Planet Is Dagobah?" That is GRAMMATICALLY INCORRECT as it means "Who Is Home Planet Is Dagobah?". It should read "Whose Home Planet Is Dagobah?"
Since children are undoubtedly the main target market for this product, the grammatical error is a serious blow to our nation's educational prospects. Please issue an immediate recall.
Incidentally, Yoda's homeworld is NOT Dagobah -- he is exiled on Dagobah. His homeworld is UNKNOWN. See http://www.starwars.com/databank/character/yoda/
Sincerely,
Mike Everett-Lane
Update: Their reply:
In response to your email regarding SNICKERS BAR
Thank you for your email.
We appreciate your feedback and will share your comments with our Marketing Associates. Have a great day!
Your Friends at Masterfoods USA
A Division of Mars, IncorporatedMM/cl 006596455A
| Snickers | Grammar | Snacks | Candy | Packaging | Language | Trivia |
Merseyside Police told the community on Monday to "stop grieving, it's only a chicken".
| Chickens | Your Blank of the Day |
I have Luc Devroye's "latest font links" on my watch list. Always a great source of new fonts and typeface news -- for a free-font junkie like me, it's a goldmine.
Prof. Devroye has an axe to grind about companies that claim copyright protection for fonts that are based on historical typefaces. Some choice examples:
Font.com: free
Another joke page by the white collar gang at Fonts.com (ex-Agfa, now Monotype Imaging): the URL says http://www.font.com/free, so you'd expect free fonts. Click on the link and you are transported to the real Fonts.com (with an s, without "free"), where you can indeed download the fonts, but for a price. Misleading advertising, some would say. A crime, in my book. By not taking action now, all those in supervisor positions at that company should be held responsible.
MyFont.com
As far as we can reconstruct, Linotype bought the MyFont.com domain name in April 2005 (see here), in all likelihood to mimic outfits like Agfa to redirect web traffic to Linotype. Shame on them for using the name MyFont.com. The real MyFonts.com probably complained, but we are not sure about that. In any case, this sure looks like a panicky move considering the success of MyFonts.com. No, sleazy is the word: this is the same company that protects the trademark Helvetica against names such as HelvAssim, but it sees no problem in the name MyFont.com when MyFonts.com exists.KDA: Keep Design Alive
"Keep Design Alive" is a 2005 campaign by Monotype Imaging against piracy. Statements include: If you share or copy a font you are stealing another designer's work [Monotype not only copied Palatino, but also is still selling it as Book Antiqua against the designer's wishes. Also, fear mongering aside, how can one steal from Garamond or Didot, I would like to know.], You and your company could be at risk of prosecution by your customer if you have created work for them using unlicensed font software [Fear campaigns have been used by all great dictators past and present], Without an income font designers will cease to exist. That means less diversity of fonts, less ability for graphic designers and others to differentiate their work [More doomsday scenarios, and quite hypodritical, as if Monotype Imaging cares about its font designers---when you buy a copy of Book Antiqua, not a dime goes to Zapf; Goudy's descendants also do not receive compensation; Plantin's descendants are in the same boat], Help us make font piracy history in the creative community. Register your company's support here and receive our KDA PACK [Creation of an old boys club--if you are not with us, you are against us]. The hypocrisy has no limits--it is at the level of the Exxon and BP ads for a greener world.Gary Godby
This guy vectorizes anything under the sun. At Letterhead he created Brien (inspired by the Clive Barker "Imajica" book cover by lettering artist Iskra Johnson) and Tyler (inspired by a typeface by E.L. Brown from the late 1800's, in his own words). He has also "created" a script font called Monika which is being sold by SignDNA. He complains heavily to archivers who have a copy of a modified (and free) version of Monika created by HypoTypo. Here is where it gets interesting! Just as with his fonts, Gary himself makes a living copying images from century-old catalogs and selling vectorized versions. You have to admire guys who take royalty-free pictures, live off them and then complain when others rip off their own rip-offs.
There's a long and sordid history of pirates renaming fonts and repackaging them. But what if those fonts are based on public domain letterforms? How much work must go into the creation of a font to trigger copyright? There's some interesting considerations of the law in this essay by Paul F. Schaffner. Some fonts are, apparently, covered by a "design patent", which I don't understand at all.
| Typography | Luc Devroye | Copyright | Law | Monotype | Linotype | Design |
