stupid Oregon only allows 6 letters instead of 7. I always wanted to get MTAFLTR or something like that, but nothing works with just 6. Simply having MEFI is kind of boring.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 12:47 AM on August 21, 2008

Zach, no one is "picking on you". You challenged the moderators saying they were being too "politically incorrect" and they explained why your comment got deleted.

You've been on a tear the past few days and think it's time to take a break so I'm gonna pull your plug for 24 hours. Do try and reel in the fuckability jokes when you return.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 5:14 PM on August 20, 2008

Oh man, could you imagine the porn to be made from this technology?


(I guess the GTA guys have already done that somewhat with hot coffee.)
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 10:51 PM on August 19, 2008

This is great and something I've been following for some time. My father-in-law is an author of the original MIT/DoE report referenced in the older NYT articles and he's been telling me about this for a while.

The dream is that you'll basically turn anywhere on earth into Iceland -- a place where you can drill down anywhere and get loads of free energy from heat. Geothermal has been temporary, destructive, and only practiced near volcanic activity zones in the past, but... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 3:08 PM on August 19, 2008

Most of the writeups I saw were on twitter. There are at least 30 pages of stuff when searching for start08. There are a lot of blog posts about it, but Google's blogsearch is turning up mostly just twitter posts.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:31 AM on August 19, 2008

I think it's a bit of a joke, to say "yep, it's real gold all right!" and I seem to recall people doing it back to into the 60s and 70s at least.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 10:18 AM on August 19, 2008

#1 in any of these lists should be "make interesting websites that people will want to read and share with their friends" but no, they always miss the one big obvious one and instead focus on every little tiny 1% better trick, while ignoring the other 99% that makes a website awesome.

SEO people remind me of "weight weenies" in the bicycle world. Instead of focusing on training and riding and getting faster through practice, weight weenies obsess over how many grams... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 4:05 PM on August 18, 2008

Embedding is disabled on that video, so it won't play on other sites (like MetaFilter). You can see that embedding is disabled on the upper right info box next to the video.

We have no way to knowing ahead of time if someone set something to disable embedding, so you will find the occasional error message.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 9:22 AM on August 18, 2008

This seems more like the observance of the natural tendency of selfish, greedy people to be opportunistic and go for the quick buck by any means necessary.

I see it everywhere, all the time. In my local city council when one of the other members gets a DUI ("Vote for me, I'll bring respect back to the office of council member!"), I've seen it in college officials that had a ridiculous pet project on the backburner for 20 years and used the Virgina Tech... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 8:17 AM on August 17, 2008

They are not there because we're not trying to rebuild gmail, we just wanted a small simple lightweight message system. Building all those features would be a pain and we kind of stopped the moment it felt 1.0 enough to be considered a simple private mail system. I'm not really interested in replicating gmail so I like the stopping point we picked and think it serves us well, while at the same time not being a bear to maintain (maintaining a spellchecker carries with it just about the lowest... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 8:18 PM on August 16, 2008

Why is html stripped?

I seem to recall it was for the security reasons you stated in your original question. We didn't want a situation where someone figures out a way to route around our monster html regex cleaner and ends up mefi mailing everyone some hack (which could also affect your online mail clients if you have messages forwarded), so we just filter out all HTML so that never happens.

We auto-link URLs if you drop... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 11:06 PM on August 16, 2008

Timely: Talking to Pirates is one game developer's findings after chatting up everyone he could find that pirated his games.
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 1:17 PM on August 16, 2008

Cool stuff, what blog did it come from?
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 5:07 PM on August 15, 2008

also: burgertime, punchout, (dunno), tetris, dig-dug, donkey kong, (dunno), rampage, moon patrol, frogger.
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 5:10 PM on August 15, 2008

Looks like the work of Scott Campbell from the 8-bit art show in LA last night.
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 5:12 PM on August 15, 2008

Looks like this is Scott's site where the image is from.
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 5:14 PM on August 15, 2008

And according to reddit, it appears my missing ones are Ghosts and Goblins and Double Dragon.
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 5:15 PM on August 15, 2008

Please see the resolved tag thread. It's on the "answered" tab of Ask MeFi.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 11:22 PM on August 14, 2008

Is this something I would need to be British to understand?
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 5:02 PM on August 13, 2008

muxtape doesn't give you a "homepage" or user profile that lists all your muxtapes, so no, it's not like the other social sites listed. It's just a one-off playlist with a random name dot muxtape dot com.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 11:08 AM on August 13, 2008

I setup a new iphone a couple days ago and it worked. hmm.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 2:00 PM on August 12, 2008

Weird, the file exists, in the right place:
http://www.metafilter.com/apple-touch-icon.png

I guess I'll add a link pointer in the header to really force it.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 2:04 PM on August 12, 2008

Ok fixed, it works now (and yeah, it wasn't working before even though it should have).
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 2:07 PM on August 12, 2008

I think the first 404 for the server was "not found, yo" on a blank white page, and it came up when anything went wrong so yeah it was unhelpful and kind of annoying.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 1:28 PM on August 12, 2008

This shit is so good I want to get a video camera and direct a video for it.
posted to MeFi Music by mathowie at 10:03 PM on August 11, 2008

The weirdest thing I ever heard regarding Americans French-bashing is that Rush Limbaugh loves the French and thinks of Paris as the most beautiful city on earth. It was in that long bio about him a couple months ago -- his bedroom is an exact replica of a french hotel he likes to stay at.

Given Fox News and Bill O'Reilly's hatred of all things French, it always struck me as weird that the king of right wing radio was the complete opposite.
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 8:33 PM on August 11, 2008

Yeah, this must be the bagillionth time Thomas Hawk has been "wronged" and is complaining about it on his blog. I hate that he operates this way (Bill O'Reilly is famous for inciting lynchmobs in the same cowardly way) and called him on it when he went apeshit over Tim O'Reilly many years ago, and Hawk ended up apologizing for it, but he didn't appear to learn any lessons.
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 5:31 PM on August 11, 2008

I just updated the file on the podcast server with the levelated one by Pronoiac. Maybe I'll just fire up a virtual windows session and use that app from now on. Thanks Pronoiac!
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 8:45 PM on August 10, 2008

Honestly, I don't think that it's the "customer is king!" that drives me to wonder why someone couldn't get ice on their coffee, it's that generally in the US, no one cares about their job enough to care what crazy request a customer makes. If someone asks for ketchup on their fruit, or peanut butter on their salad or whatever else crazy thing someone might ask for, you'll generally find people working somewhere will just shrug their shoulders and say "well, that sounds crazy but... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 7:39 AM on August 11, 2008

Holy crap, congrats!
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 8:59 PM on August 10, 2008

Eideteker, we'll be adding motorcycles next week!
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 9:33 AM on August 8, 2008

I'm glad to see this. I worked on that talk for like two months and then maybe 20 people showed up to the talk? I felt like it was a lot of work for little payoff, so I'm glad to see it was recorded at least.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 3:17 PM on August 6, 2008

This feels like you started with a conclusion, then hand-picked five or six of the worst advice comments you could to support it. I don't think you've touched on any real trend in Ask MetaFilter.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 6:30 AM on August 6, 2008

We don't even record that, so even we have no way of knowing.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 12:34 PM on August 5, 2008

What? What?! Where will they go?! They've never left the Shire before!
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 11:03 PM on August 4, 2008

That's actually cheap by Bend standards. I think the avg home price is something like $550k these days (or they were, a year or two ago).
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 12:03 AM on August 5, 2008

Single Link You Tube

People use it as a pre-emptive warning that yeah, their entire post hinges on a video you have to watch, but hopefully they provide enough of a description and reason why you'd want to devote time to watching it to make it worthwhile.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:40 AM on August 4, 2008

I watched the hour long video a couple nights ago myself, and I too found it moving and poignant. It's totally worth the length (which flew by) and renewed my faith in the internet to change lives.
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 7:49 AM on August 4, 2008

You could just apply images from Firefox like a PC. Find a desktop image online, then right click it and say "set as desktop background"
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 7:26 AM on August 4, 2008

whoa, those are awesome!
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 4:51 PM on August 3, 2008

Someone wrote in the following:

To get 2003 server to work with the VPN connection, put the IP address of the VPN in the WAN Miniport (L2TP).

Voila, you have a connections as per doing the same thing on an XP machine.

posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 10:05 AM on August 3, 2008

huh, man. Looking at the question it seems totally innocuous (and one I've had myself at one point in my life). I agree there are some pretty weird answers that assume way too much about infidelity and divorce and child support in a thread that doesn't seem like it would even need to cover those issues.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 4:17 PM on August 2, 2008

"shouldn't feel required to give up his reproductive rights"

Doesn't that seem like reading too far into it? I can see how it is technically true we are discussing his reproductive rights, but to even go that far is to imply that there may be a pregnancy, and they may not want it, and they may fight about it, and they may break up over it, and yes, if you take it to that level, she can legally chose to keep the baby and legally force him to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 5:02 PM on August 2, 2008

I still think people are reading too much into things and taking their hypotheticals way too far. It seems akin to someone asking about which car to drive on a long road trip, and seeing the majority of comments discussed the weight of the vehicle in high-speed head-on collisions. As if there weren't dozens of less-doomsday aspects to discuss.

I guess I'll chalk up "male reproductive rights" up there with cat declawing, SUVs, and obesity discussions on mefi.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 9:06 PM on August 2, 2008

James here had a good point: the person quoted in the article has posted nothing else on Yahoo Message Boards, ever. It could very well be an entirely manufactured quote from the reporter herself. I'd sure love to see Yahoo check the posting IPs on those originals.
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 4:34 PM on August 2, 2008

MetaMan has been banned after being given several timeouts in the past for him vs. the site hillary/obama fighting, so no need to continue to feed the troll
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 4:55 PM on August 2, 2008

Thanks everyone for the advice. I ended up using the PDF of bike-friendly streets map to plan my routes and I ended up doing a few coastal rides along favored roads mentioned.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 4:29 PM on August 2, 2008

I don't see how this is an abuse of Ask MeFi or worthy of a callout, frankly.

I saw a tech friend's photo on flickr a couple months ago, where they went out to a nice dinner on an African trip and he took a photo of the receipt in Zimbabwe because it was really odd to see so many zeros and commas and a huge price for something like $20 worth of food.

I am guessing the poster of the question saw or read about similar things and thought "I'd... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:57 AM on July 31, 2008

Holy shit, there's a more major mention of Ask Mefi in this USA Today story about a book that sprang from an anon ask mefi question:

Traffic got into gear after that merging epiphany in New Jersey. Vanderbilt posted an anonymous inquiry on Ask MetaFilter, a website designed to tap into an audience of what he calls "overeducated and over-opinionated geeks."

posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 9:22 PM on July 28, 2008

I added dianetics.org to the ad-block list.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 11:26 PM on July 26, 2008