Wikipedia is a tremendous source of info on The Wire, but if you're at say, season 2, episode 5 or something, you have to be careful not to catch any spoilers.

I generally would read the episode guides on Wikipedia after I viewed an episode. If I missed a term or someone's name and I missed a key plot point, the summaries would always fill me in.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 9:26 PM on May 16, 2008

Etherpeek is what my old school mac pals used to use to laugh at reading my email (I didn't know about switched ethernet back then).
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 5:17 PM on May 12, 2008

hmm, if I drag the Library over too, wouldn't I just re-introduce all the problems I'm trying to solve by cleaning up my system?

Actually, I have no qualms about reinstalling apps, I'm mostly just worried about iPhoto and iTunes so I'll just re-install then copy those folders over. Thanks!
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 1:33 PM on May 10, 2008

My stuff is already backed up to a second internal hard drive using time machine, but I've also got a mirror of the data uploaded to mozy.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 6:48 PM on May 10, 2008

I have a child and an extended family like that and we simply don't interact with them. It's ok to see your parents on your own terms (and it's ok that they're unhappy they don't get to see you more). I see my parents a couple times a year and I avoid the nastier members of the extended family completely. When my daughter is older and she asks about my cousins, I'll explain why they're not nice people but for now we spend most of our holidays with friends, at home, and sometimes with family... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 1:04 PM on May 6, 2008

Being in his 20s, he could probably pick up a term life insurance policy for up to a million dollars for probably just $200-300 a year, but as others have said, it only makes sense when you've got a mortgage and family to support (who would get the windfall if you died).
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 9:15 AM on May 6, 2008

If you're working on EST, that means you should be able to clock out early. If you're on the west coast and done at say 3pm each day, schedule an hour or two of exercise before dinner, from 3pm-5pm. Take a long walk, go to the gym, ride a bike, or do something else to get your blood moving and some calories burning. It should also help you sleep better at night if you exhaust yourself every afternoon.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 10:14 AM on May 3, 2008

My favorite class was one I took the last quarter, to fulfill some cross-cultural requirement that had absolutely nothing to do with my science degree, and it was a comparative history of world religions course. It was freaking amazing and I learned more about different religions and how they are similar than ever before.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 5:06 PM on April 25, 2008

Jesse, if you want an ipod, I'd be happy to send you one of my old ones.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 10:28 PM on April 18, 2008

Also have you tried out badfruit? It makes iTunes work with any music device.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 12:50 PM on April 19, 2008

Yeah, don't post fake blog comments, instead ask a few friends to help you make a good first impression on visitors by leaving a helpful and/or smart comment or two.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 11:23 AM on April 19, 2008

I've never worked in the credit industry, but from cursory glances at my credit rating once every year or two, I've noticed huge jumps when I successfully paid off large loans (cars and student loans). It doesn't sound like you'll be able to buy a house in the next year with bad credit and old bills to pay off -- remember that owning is like renting but you have to pay for everything that breaks or needs built and you'd be surprised at how something like a dog digging under a fence can turn into... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 10:06 AM on April 19, 2008

Couldn't you just use a blog to make a post scheduled at a certain time each day? Or do you mean the whole thing with forums, e-commerce, member accounts, and such?
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 7:22 AM on April 17, 2008

Metaphilter is a clone of MetaFilter, but it's pretty old and unsupported. I would second the suggestion of simply downloading wordpress, requiring everyone to have a login, then doing a private site with logged in accounts using that.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 9:14 AM on April 16, 2008

I went to a small local community college in the shadow of a larger UC school and the transfer process was super easy. The admissions people at UCLA will love people with proven track records (a GPA of 3.0 or higher) from SMC and you should get in pretty easily. Also, UCLA will be cheaper because you'll be a state resident after a year of SMC.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 9:30 PM on April 15, 2008

An anon comment from someone that wanted to add their 2 cents:Another stammerer here (one of crazyhorse's "rare females"), but posting anonymously as I don't want to be one on the internet - damnit, that's the whole point of text communication. Came to this late via the podcast.

I'm a mild, moderate or severe stammerer depending on the context. I don't have any problem with people saying the word I'm stuck on (finishing the whole sentence is going a bit far) as... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 2:43 PM on April 15, 2008

Are you using Hostgator as a proxy server? If so, can you kill the proxy settings and just route request directly to other sites?
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 5:50 AM on April 12, 2008

I have three ego searches setup that seem to catch everything. One is a technorati search for my personal blog URL, the next is Google Blog search for my URL, and lastly I have a bloglines citation search for my blog's URL.

At this point, 9 out of 10 links to my blog show up on all three within a two-hour period (technorati seems fastest) but that still leaves 10% only showing up on one service of the three.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 10:44 AM on April 8, 2008 marked best answer

Oh man, that's pretty good.

I forgot to include a couple links. I found one mention of a guy doing very 7 second shots and making movies, but it's pretty complicated and I'm not really into tearing cameras apart or rigging up controllers. The photojojo site has a guide as well, but a tiny canon with hacked firmware sounds great. I'll have to see if the canon point and shoot I have can take the firmware and I'll test this out.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 10:19 AM on April 8, 2008

XM radio online is only $2.99 a month and has all the games.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 10:52 PM on April 7, 2008

This is like asking what to do with an empty fresh new sketchbook.

Ask yourself what you really love and love to do, then make a site about it.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 9:31 AM on April 6, 2008

I once heard someone that worked at an online photo site talk about the weirdness these fetishists have for printing. Because the people behind the scenes can not only know what people favorite, but also what people order for prints, he was saying that there were a few times where they noticed someone that favorited 1000s of pictures of casts, or panythose, or (ick, yeah) kids would order huge posters of some stranger's innocuous photo of their child.

They felt bad about... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 8:38 AM on April 6, 2008

You can do what I do with metafilter, and make a CNAME of * an alias for the main server. Most DNS setups can handle the * wildcard. Try it with metafilter, anythingatallyoucanthinkof.metafilter.com will open www.metafilter.com (I rewrite the URL now, since Google used to have hundreds of subdomains indexed).
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 11:46 PM on April 4, 2008

Get Rich Slowly recently had a post about long-term compound interest -- it simplifies the growth of the stock market to an annual average, but the point in me mentioning it is that if you go with something with less growth and less risk, you really lose out over the long term.

I'm redoing my investing right now and still sticking with the stock market for most growth, even though I know the next five years are going to suck.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 8:09 PM on April 4, 2008

Several years ago there was a paid campaign for some sort of chocolate drink (it was called something cow) and they wanted to hit a young audience so they paid some bloggers for ads linking to a fake blog written by a hip snowboarding indie rocking cow that sounded like something straight out of the Poochie episode of the Simpsons. It was so widely mocked in blogland that years later people would still saying "that totally looks like a (whatever, I forgot now the name) cow blog!" when... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 3:01 PM on April 3, 2008

Oh shit, I just remembered: raging cow!
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 3:02 PM on April 3, 2008 marked best answer

Another good one: a few years ago there was a Chevy ad for a new Suburban and they wanted to hit the youtube generation with the pitch that anyone could sign up and apply text and choose clips for a commercial and they would display thousands of user-generated commercials.

Of course, it went badly (it was linked on mefi and people went to town on it), with people making protest commercials mocking the low MPG and terrible environmental effects from everyone buying SUVs in America.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 3:04 PM on April 3, 2008 marked best answer

Same thing happened to me in my first Oregon house. Guys from BestBuy refused to actually hook up the washer and Sears fridge people did the same with the refrigerator.

I think the deal is appliances come with cheapish plastic hoses and for long-term safety, you should go to a home center and buy a nice steel-braided line that won't fail five years down the line and flood your house. So I would guess for liability reasons (don't want people saying their hose exploded... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 2:55 PM on April 3, 2008

bhance and others have it right, this is a wordpress RSS-to-blog spam engine, where they put in matching keywords they think will make money with adsense (in this case, "language") and they pull in any RSS content they can find to populate their site with content.

There are a few things you can do.

1. Contact the domain owner and tell him to stop syndicating your content immediately. Just because you offer a RSS file doesn't imply... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 11:43 PM on April 2, 2008 marked best answer

It's not exactly wrong, but I can't stand it when people use the word "utilize" when they really should use the word "use". It's a way of tarting up your language to sound all smart but it's pointless syllables that get in the way of clear writing/speaking. "I used yellow paint here to get the effect" is easy for everyone to understand while "I utilized yellow paint here to get the effect" sounds like a dork trying to sound important.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 7:37 PM on April 2, 2008

10mph is a movie of a segway ride across america. I watched bits and pieces of it -- it gets really interesting when they're around Chicago and a cop pulls them over and goes off on them all half-cocked.

My personal hope is Charlie and Ewan do another Longway down type movie where they ride from Alaska to the southern tip of South America.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 11:18 PM on March 31, 2008

I use Mozy for offsite backups and it works ok. Big file backups do fail periodically.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 8:47 PM on March 31, 2008

Does Traineo do more stuff?
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 3:00 PM on March 27, 2008 marked best answer

Bamboo plants should sit in soil that is fairly moist during their first year or two. In the bamboo I've planted (in the ground) in the past, I've watered them twice a day for extended periods with a drip line. Basically if you walk by and stick your finger in the soil near the plant, the dirt should not be completely dry, it should always be somewhat moistened. They shouldn't be sitting in mud but definitely not dried out dirt between waterings.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 1:06 PM on March 27, 2008 marked best answer

I would recommend the Ventana Inn near Big Sur as well. I camped there when I was in college and it was an incredible place and I've always wanted to go back and stay at the Inn there.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 9:14 AM on March 25, 2008

A lot of the SEO advice you describe sounds like garbage. Remind the client that there are two ways to get to the top of a google search result:

1) Have the definitive site about a subject with a great design, good photography, and a good honest voice that draws people to it as a resource. People will like it, enjoy it, get something out of it, and share it.

2) Have a highly tuned and optimized site loaded dense with keywords, important text... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 9:42 AM on March 23, 2008 marked best answer

I would guess that bamboo plants from NYC nurseries would be really expensive, so you should probably look for a bamboo farm online that sells them by mail. Even my local nursery sells single bamboo plants in five gallon containers for up to $100 or more, and I can get the same plants online for $30-50 each. I get all my hardy outdoor (non-invasive) bamboo from a farm that sells online from Southern Oregon (I'm in NW Oregon) and they can ship whole plants in a box just fine. I know there are... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 10:10 AM on March 21, 2008 marked best answer

I was just coming here from my RSS reader to suggest exactly what judith already has -- the north part of Kauai sounds perfect and Flickr is awesome for searching for beaches and places to stay. You can drop all the little town names into flickr's search (like say "Princeville") and get shots of everything you might want to see. I just spent a week on the west side of Kauai which was great and relaxing, but pretty far from everything. The north had a lot more resorts and beaches worth... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 11:16 PM on March 20, 2008

Yeah, always claim all income, 1099 or no. Sucks, but it's the law.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 10:35 AM on March 20, 2008

I went there (and visited gardens) just this past January and everything was blooming. There aren't really seasons there (it was sunny and summer-like temps the whole time)
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 10:02 PM on March 16, 2008

From the original poster:

The apartment is located in Florida. The crime happened out of state and was of a sexual nature with an adult. It would be listed as being of a sexual nature rather than of non-sexual nature. It did not result in being added to a sex offender registry.

posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 9:08 PM on March 13, 2008

If you want a quirky place to stay, my mother-in-law stayed at the Railroad Park Inn, near Shasta. They slept in a caboose car converted into a hotel room and she couldn't stop raving about it for weeks afterward. It was like she was six years old, not 66, when retelling the tale of the night she got to sleep inside a caboose.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 8:21 PM on March 10, 2008

Yeah, I understand that, but I swear I've been to events where I saw the same guys on rollers for an hour or so. At some point it seems like a lot of effort wasted in a parking lot going nowhere before a real race.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 3:33 PM on March 3, 2008

COD, I don't think that is what the asker is asking.

These spam blogs basically just pull in the RSS from blogs with any keywords related to their spamming. So they copied the posts from the asker's blog when the blog was active. It no longer is active, and worse yet, the deleted posts live on in a spam blog. The asker wrote the posts and still has full copyright on their writings.

If you contact Google/Blogger about it, they will request that... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 9:41 AM on March 1, 2008

The ps3 is a fine DVD/blu-ray player, but it does make a heck of a lot more noise than a simple DVD player. Even in my vented cabinet, if I don't leave the door to the rack open for maximum airflow, it will overheat and the fan will kick into hairdryer mode, drowning out most of the sound.

If you want a slim silent piece of home theater equipment, I'd say wait for blu-ray 2.0 players to come out and get one of those instead. If you don't mind a little noise and like to... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 10:22 PM on February 25, 2008

My dad hasn't lost his leg (yet, but definitely could happen soon due to his diabetes), but I'm betting my dad's adjusting to life confined in a wheelchair suddenly due to stroke is similar.

If I could look at the last few post-stroke years for my dad and point out the biggest mistakes, I'd say do everything you can to make their home accessible to someone in a wheelchair. My parents are cheap and also lazy, so in the weeks that followed the stroke they sold their old... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 9:13 AM on February 23, 2008

Back when I was running marathons and doing 40min 10k runs, I would occasionally have a cigar at the campus bar once a week. I noticed my overall speed went down considerably for a couple days after, and it wasn't until months later when I fully quit doing it that I got my minutes/mile time down further to something faster.

Why not try taking a couple weeks off it and seeing how your ultimate/5k performance changes?
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 8:27 PM on February 17, 2008

The whole "how to pitch your company" section of Venture Blog is probably what you want. I haven't seen too many accounts from the flipside, where company owners talk about what VC meetings are like.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 4:27 PM on February 16, 2008 marked best answer

I'll just say join a usenet file service like giganews or easynews and say nothing more. Trust me, it's worth every penny.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 9:09 PM on February 15, 2008

You're probably hitting the cookie limits in Firefox. It happens to me too. I have to re-login to my own blog about 3x a week.
posted to Ask Metafilter by mathowie at 11:33 PM on February 12, 2008