Looking at that Google link makes me wonder if there's some database magic possible there. "Comments on 9522" isn't an especially descriptive title, and removing "RSS feed for this thread Subscribe" from the description could leave some room for better search engine text.

And those would be my suggestions for more user-friendly stuffs.
posted to MetaTalk by johnofjack at 1:39 PM on October 9, 2008

Oh, I'd forgotten that older posts didn't have titles.

Well I'm happy to help add some. Thanks, Jessamyn, for sending the link....
posted to MetaTalk by johnofjack at 5:58 PM on October 9, 2008

I discovered his work in 1998 when I went to Library West to check up on the recommendation, and found A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. I opened it to the front--the essay on tennis, tornadoes, and trigonometry--to see if it was any good, and looked up some time later feeling dazed and amazed, the essay done, a cramp in my back and arms from the way I'd sat on the floor in the aisle holding the book.

I'd like to say I'm surprised by his suicide but his essay... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by johnofjack at 1:54 PM on September 15, 2008

Not such a deep pick--one of the ones that did well on the charts IIRC--but I think his Pancho and Lefty CD with Merle Haggard is fantastic.

Since you're a fan of Spirit, you might want to check out Teatro as well. The music is less spare and more ambitious but the two strike me as spiritual brothers somehow.

With any of these, I'd recommend checking your local library first--no pain then if it's something that's really not your cup of tea.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 5:19 PM on September 8, 2008

The iPhone visits are all Matt coming to put out fires.

You get 6.3 million page views a month? Wow.
posted to MetaTalk by johnofjack at 3:21 PM on September 6, 2008

Yeah, I'm crap at math; sosumi.
posted to MetaTalk by johnofjack at 8:10 PM on September 6, 2008

Or the scene (one of many where the rules are tossed out) where a character puts the football under his jersey and goes running with it.
posted to MetaFilter by johnofjack at 11:00 AM on September 6, 2008

"san francisco lgbt hiking" turns up some results, including a list of gay and lesbian sports groups in and around San Francisco, which links to Gay and Lesbian Sierrans, a group of LGBT hikers which had a number of hikes in July and August. Though I couldn't find any scheduled for later this year, I'm sure they could tell you if there really aren't any or if the site simply needs an update.

Another way to expand your options is to go to the check out the San... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 7:35 AM on September 4, 2008

At first I thought that was a flippant answer, but then I realized I was making the assumption that all pre-installed fonts validated. Not all of them do.

Attempting to validate Times New Roman prompts a number of complaints, including contours with incorrect direction, intersecting coordinates, and quite a lot of off-curve extreme coordinates (though, to be fair, the font does have 1674 glyphs).

Arial doesn't validate either, reporting a long... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 7:30 PM on August 30, 2008

Thanks for the notice, Ryvar. I converted the characters that were throwing the error from composite to simple glyphs, and it turned out to be a rather simple and easy fix to join the contours. So now everything validates.
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 8:21 PM on September 1, 2008

You might need to check your joke detector, Blazecock.
posted to MetaTalk by johnofjack at 4:11 AM on May 17, 2008

She wasn't crying about Florida when it was time for us to vote, nor did she care about us enough to go against the DNC and campaign here, so I'm inclined to think that she's just being a self-serving hypocrite with $11 million at stake.
posted to MetaTalk by johnofjack at 6:18 PM on May 21, 2008

Thanks, pluckemin. I think you're right that the subject matter has something to do with how enjoyable the drawings are; I probably wouldn't enjoy the style as much if it were applied to illustrations of physical trauma or dirty dumpsters.

Maybe there isn't a name for this particular style of art, or any particular school or movement that Kitamura belongs to. If I find anything else especially interesting in the same vein I'll be happy to post it here and/or pass it... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 9:52 AM on May 17, 2008

Note that the discreet email to us saying "this looks hinky because..." is the nice thing. Making a big deal of it in thread not so ideal, particularly when it's based not on a rock-solid connection so much as a hunch.

Also, don't dash off a delirious ill-considered metatalk about it.
posted to MetaTalk by johnofjack at 4:04 PM on May 13, 2008

Sorry, davey_darling, I was mocking my own metatalk.
posted to MetaTalk by johnofjack at 8:22 AM on May 14, 2008

I'd like to recommend Clean, Shaven, which isn't usually considered a horror film but which is nonetheless disturbing in its subjective depictions of schizophrenia. Very much recommended if you go for slow/sedate/creepy/psychological horror at all or if you go for the occasional visceral body-mod horror scene like in Tetsuo.

Aside from his zombie films, George Romero has a slightly lesser-known horror/slice-of-life drama called Martin which is worth a look.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 4:22 PM on May 13, 2008

Oh, and since you love both Asian horror and ghost horror, is it safe to assume you've seen Kobayashi's Kwaidan?
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 4:23 PM on May 13, 2008

It also eliminates pretty much anything that requires subjective judgment (e.g., what are some good books....)

I've seen some of those answered wrong, where someone read the front page text and leapt to a recommendation without reading any of the inside (e.g. "not looking for this / with the aspect of this / dealing with this topic from this point of view" etc.).
posted to MetaTalk by johnofjack at 9:26 AM on May 5, 2008

I've seen some of those answered wrong, where someone read the front page text and leapt to a recommendation without reading any of the inside (e.g. "not looking for this / with the aspect of this / dealing with this topic from this point of view" etc.).
Huh. But if a "wrong answer" is just an unhelpful one, or one that ignores the poster's wishes, then any question can have wrong answers.
Well, I'm not sure I want to debate that, but I think the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by johnofjack at 5:11 PM on May 5, 2008

There is more than one space in several of the data fields.

Manually editing the data is not a workable solution, since there are 3 100+ page pdfs of several columns of data.

Regex hadn't occurred to me, but it might be a solution; maybe one of the computer gurus here will know.

I'll post one of the pdfs when I get home in a few hours.
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 12:40 PM on April 10, 2008

Ok, nevermind; I uploaded it to box.net and set it to shared: http://www.box.net/shared/c3q7gce0ww

flabdablet, if you (or anyone else!) would like to take a look at it to see what I'm talking about and the problems faced, that would be great.
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 1:02 PM on April 10, 2008

On my home computer I tried pdftotext and a couple of other freeware titles, but to no good result.

Unfortunately I don't have access to the original reports in a different format, though I can see how regenerating them as something else, even HTML, would be much better.

Last night it occurred to me that maybe I could open these pdfs in other Adobe programs. Pagemaker wouldn't open them and Photoshop rasterized them. So neither was a solution.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 10:04 AM on April 11, 2008

prodevel, that Adobe link was a great idea but unfortunately the tool converts big chunks of the file into images and Adobe doesn't even make them available, so you get about 3 lines from each page followed by a big broken image. (Amazing, really.)

I'll ask tomorrow if we have a full copy of Acrobat; probably either Systems or the Art and/or PR department does. The OCR option's on the back burner for now; I can't help wondering if correcting typos would be as... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 9:02 PM on April 11, 2008

flabdablet, that sounds great. I'd thought of using OpenOffice for it but I've got some setting toggled wrong; it keeps dumping them as an indecipherable mess into Office Writer instead of Calc. I'll have to look into that; it's heartening to know it works.

Thanks for all your work on this; I do appreciate it.
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 10:31 AM on April 12, 2008

Sorry for the delay; I was off Sunday and yesterday.

Silly question: how do you do this part about CDing into the directory in terminal? I'm using WinXP at work and having some trouble with both finding the terminal (not HyperTerminal) and getting "run" to do anything other than open the folder.

And I've updated my profile just now, because I realized "programming" might seem to refer to PHP, Perl, etc. when what... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 10:57 AM on April 15, 2008

That script worked beautifully for Glen Springs but resulted in a list of titles the exact same size as the list of discards for the other two schools who sent (years ago) the pdfs, with a 0-byte csv file for each.

The distinction between tab-spacing and pixel-precise placing is an important one; I wish that Adobe would expand its Reader capabilities to include more useful export options (though I can see how they might want people to pay up for those features).... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 12:59 PM on April 16, 2008

Thanks for explaining that, flabdablet; it makes a lot of sense now that Acrobat isn't handling it so well.

The other two pdfs are at http://www.box.net/shared/0slrb46os4 and http://www.box.net/shared/j92bgwm8gs

FWIW, your script's handling of pdftotext's output on the first file does a much better job of parsing the file than the full version of Acrobat does.
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 5:57 PM on April 16, 2008

Right. I'd just like to thank you all again for your work and to recommend that you stop. :-) You've done far more than I could have asked for, especially for free, and rather graciously at that.

I think the point to be taken from all this is that PDF is not the file format you need when bringing things into a spreadsheet, and that if that's what you're stuck with then your best bet is to try to get the file regenerated as .xls or .csv.

The... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 9:27 AM on April 18, 2008

It's all right, all the catalogs are printed on locally grown fair-trade hemp paper with ink made from past-their-sell-by-date organic beets.

I'm pretty far left too, but a lot of what I see in progressive causes is fingerpointing and grandstanding, and a terminal aversion to fun, light-heartedness, or most other good things I can think of (including, in some lefty circles, sex).

Seriousness is not automatically responsible, nor is fun... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by johnofjack at 9:45 AM on April 13, 2008

Well, I see I'm late to the party but Demco and Gaylord are, as exceptinsects says, the go-to places for library supplies (including shelf labels, book ends, display modules, that pebbly grey shelf tape, etc.)

Highsmith and SchoolSpecialty are both good catalogs for school supplies, with some overlap with Demco and Gaylord (media/library supplies) but they also carry stack desks, dry erase boards, rugs for childrens' areas, hand puppets, and so on.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 9:07 AM on April 12, 2008

In profiles that state a location which is not a lat/long value, clicking on the globe icon makes Google Maps go "whaaaaa?"
posted by jamaro at 9:39 PM on April 10 [+] [!]

What he said. Even if you type in, say, "Gainesville FL" and get the map and take the lat/long from the URL, it fails.
posted to MetaTalk by johnofjack at 9:22 PM on April 11, 2008

Or she. Oh hai, this isn't Spanish.
posted to MetaTalk by johnofjack at 9:23 PM on April 11, 2008

People just don't understand Opera, and forget to code for it appropriately, is all.

The idea of having web standards is that you don't have to go around adding if/thens and browser hacks to get the page to look right in any specific browser (whether by a huge corporation or anyone else).

Though, to be fair, it's entirely possible you're seeing HTML or CSS written for a broken browser with a huge market share.
posted to MetaTalk by johnofjack at 5:05 AM on March 29, 2008

I get the feeling Artw makes a lot of powerpoint presentations.
posted to MetaTalk by johnofjack at 2:48 PM on March 25, 2008

I'm not sure Jessamyn needs a hug, but this thread is not a hug.

Also, folgers crystals, you're out of line, mister.
posted to MetaTalk by johnofjack at 5:48 PM on March 17, 2008

Under 3,000 now.
posted to MetaTalk by johnofjack at 10:34 PM on March 11, 2008

7513 posts tagged with brokenlink.

Ephemera, thy name is internet.
posted to MetaTalk by johnofjack at 8:42 AM on March 15, 2008

Are there really 769 banned users, or does that include all the various self-closed accounts?
posted to MetaTalk by johnofjack at 3:46 AM on March 9, 2008

I like to think of myself as the John Irving of Bethel Vermont actually.

Well, you need more bears in your comments.
posted to MetaTalk by johnofjack at 3:51 AM on March 11, 2008

Awesome.
posted to MetaFilter by johnofjack at 3:55 AM on March 10, 2008

Well, it dulled the bitterness and also most of the good taste. I don't suppose there's any specific anti-bitter ingredient likely to be lying about, safe to add to a broth?
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 3:48 PM on March 8, 2008

I still have the broth and am going to experiment with it today to see what works. I'm intrigued by the soy sauce and vinegar suggestions but will give them all a shot (in small samples, as with the water dilution). (Well, almost all--I like spontaneous combustion in theory but in practice find it problematic.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 3:49 AM on March 9, 2008

Salt works. I'm currently reheating it and gradually adding more salt, testing it along the way to make sure it's not too much.

The small sample was actually a good broth once the bitterness was gone.
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 9:02 AM on March 9, 2008

Salt was the first of the suggestions I tried, and it worked for me so I stopped there and didn't try the rest.

Sorry it didn't work for you, gembackwards--it was a careful addition, and I could see there'd be a very narrow window where it was no longer bitter but wasn't yet too salty.

A consequence of stopping at the first workable solution is that it left the rest of these suggestions untried. Thanks to all the contributors for taking the time.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 3:06 PM on March 9, 2008

Was Henry VIII a practicer of polyamory?

Serial monogamist, I thought.
posted to MetaTalk by johnofjack at 8:21 AM on March 7, 2008

Bobbie Sue took the money and run.

Your friend and mine, Steve Miller.
posted by ScarletSpectrum

And, in that same song, rhyming "Texas" with "facts is."
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 6:04 AM on March 5, 2008

And you didn't tag it "Star Dust" or songbook or music, or or or...?
posted to MetaFilter by johnofjack at 4:36 PM on March 4, 2008

Have you checked EatMe for this? There are a number of AskMe threads listed there, including ones on pantry planning, that might help you figure out most useful staples and perishables.

As for the expense, I'd suggest buying spices in bulk if at all possible; I can get the same amount of cinnamon that would cost $4 for just over $1 by buying bulk and refilling an old container. Also, I think you'll find that there's an initial expense to many spice purchases that is... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 7:54 PM on March 3, 2008

Hm, it's either a rounding error or the miracle of compound interest, but using a1 = 100000
; b1 = 0.000153 ; c1 = a1 + (a1*b1) ; and a2 = c1 puts the total $9 off over the course of a year. Still, I'm not a bank and this doesn't distress me greatly; it's close enough to get a good idea of the long-term results of small immediate actions. Thanks, iminurmefi (answrn ur ax).
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 4:44 PM on February 28, 2008

Ah, thanks for the suggestions. chrisamiller, I replaced the percentage with =(1.0575)^(1/365) and then changed C2 to =A2*B2 and that took care of it.

45moore45, that looks like a very thorough site but the calculators don't show up for me. Maybe it's because I've turned off Java (the computer's slow enough already)...
posted to Ask Metafilter by johnofjack at 4:54 AM on February 29, 2008