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March 2000 Archives
March 31
Yikes! Seems like
Pimp War is a rip-off of
Whore House, which has been around awhile, and is in its 9th season. The only problem?
Whore House requires an invitation to play, whereas
Pimp War is pretty much open to all, at least until the Beta is over.
However,
Whore House has a lot more options, (Infect, Arson, Pimp Unions, discpline whores, gambling, the ability to sell stuff, crack houses, paying off cops, and the ability to earn free turns.) I can see
Pimp War getting to that level, but it isn't just that intricate yet.
posted by da5id at 9:05 PM PST - 1 comments
News of the
Wonka remake. I think Nick Cage would suck as Wonka, but Dustin Hoffman...that's interesting.
posted by veruca at 9:08 AM PST - 6 comments
March 30
The web is not a publication. Web sites are not paper. Yet the current thinking of web design is that of the magazine, newspaper, book, or catalog. Visually, aesthetically, legally, the web is treated as a physical page upon which text and images are written.
The Shredder presents this global structure as a
chaotic, irrational, raucous collage. By altering the HTML code before the
browser reads it, the Shredder appropriates the data of the web,
transforming it into a parallel web. Content become abstraction. Text
becomes graphics. Information becomes art.
posted by tranquileye at 7:55 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Laying the smack down on some hoe has never been funner. Playing this turn-based game is even more enjoyable by the "real-time" aspect. You can be notified via ICQ when you are being attacked, and likewise for your victims. If you are bored at work, this game can ease your pain.
posted by da5id at 12:02 PM PST - 19 comments
Bored at work? Or maybe just tired of playing the game on your snazzy Nokia Cell.. needless to say I find time to play this every day. All praise "
The Snake Game". The only downside which makes Nokia's cellphone far superior, is unless you have a laptop and perhaps a wireless NIC at work, it is probably impossible to play the game while you sit in the bathroom.
posted by sikk at 10:55 AM PST - 5 comments
Parker Posey - Pussycat
She's going to be Alexandra in the live action Josey and the Pussycats with Rachel Leigh Cook. I'm not sure how I feel about a live action JatP, but Parker Posey is a fun choice.
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 10:00 AM PST - 2 comments
Tornado Pictures On Tuesday March 28th at 6:11 P.M. a tornado pummeled downtown Ft. Worth
leaving glass, office furniture, insulation, paperwork, and various other
materials littering a 12 block area of the city. The downtown streets were covered in
shattered glass from the many High-Rise building that were struck by the violent winds
and flying debris. I took some pictures from a 26th floor office window 1 block away
from the epicenter of the storms wrath. At the top of picture 3
you can see the Cash America building that they keep showing on the news - I don't have a
Telephoto lens or it would be a better pic, DOH! You can also see clean up crews
on the roofs of the buildings picking up debris.One of the windows I took the pictures
through was cracked by flying debris, you can see it in picture 2,3, and 6.
PICTURES: 1 2
3 4 5 6posted by Jeremy at 8:55 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
March 29
Yay! The flag burning amendment is dead , at least for another year. What offends me most is: why did 63 Senators vote for this? Second most: do these people actually believe themselves when they preach that people have fought and died for the flag? I *hope* that no soldiers have fought for the flag, per se; I would hope that our military fights for the ideals of which the flag is a nice, abstract representation.
I've put up
a short page with links to the official Congressional Record transcripts of the debate, for those who are interested. (It gives me reading for my plane ride tomorrow, if I can avoid the calling of my Sims family.)
posted by delfuego at 5:47 PM PST - 5 comments
Observe a startup. Some
startups use a combination of openness and secrecy and while they're getting their act together.
REMO (a quirky independent retailer who used to run a popular shop font in my hometown of Sydney) is letting the whole world see
everything while they make the transformation to a web-only up-market general store for the whole world.
posted by grestall at 4:56 PM PST - 5 comments
jon kats on "geek profiling": "W.A.V.E joins new sofware "security" programs ... being tested in public schools in America to compile and computerize information on students believed to be dangerous or potentially violent. This new rat-on-kids industry is an offshoot of the Geek Profiling anti-Net hysteria that broke out all across the United States after the Columbine High School killings, whose first anniversary is fast approaching. Despite the fact that horrific incidents like Columbine are extremely rare, and that the FBI and Justice Department have both reported that youth violence has dropped to its lowest levels in more than half a century, the belief persists in much of America that technologies like the Internet (and activities like computer gaming) are turning otherwise healthy school children into mass murderers."
posted by palegirl at 12:44 PM PST - 7 comments
Everyone screams for ice cream! I found out that
Edy's owns the icrecream.com domain. It's actually quite a nice site, and if anything, it has the certain level of childood simplicity one associates with ice cream. I especially like the
taster and was honestly disappointed that his tour schedule isn't posted.
Maybe not as dynamic as
Ben And Jerry's, but appropriately sweet.
posted by plinth at 5:42 AM PST - 160 comments
March 28
Now this is something I just don't get. Getting worked up because some people are posting longer entries? Can someone explain this to me? So
Ben Brown mentioned that he prefers longer posts, and a few people responded to the idea favorably. But then there's
backlash to this idea? Can someone please explain to me how someone writing long posts is somehow wrong? Is anyone holding a gun to your head making you read anything on the web? If
Ben Brown's posts are too long, don't read them. If
Jack's or
Brig's are too long, don't read them. If I'm wrong here, please set me straight. I must not have read the weblog rulebook that states posts should be short and snarky, if anyone has a hyperlink to said rule book, please post that too.
posted by mathowie at 8:45 PM PST - 1614 comments
Cyber Patrol hacker sells out for one dollar < I made
my political point and just don't want further annoyance... ...Mattel initiated legal action in e-mail subpoenas in mid-March and Skala and Jansson removed cphack from their sites, but not before urging computer activists to copy and distribute it.... ...Nevertheless, some mirror site operators think open source software protections make the issue moot. The court cannot impose an Internet ban because cphack was released under the
GNU General Public License... > perhaps you've seen this--the final decision will be interesting with repect to free speech and the
GNU GPL. something to watch anyhow.
posted by greyscale at 8:12 PM PST - 3 comments
Harry Knowles takes on the Oscars in a surreal chat session with himself. Some great lines: "Angelina has a freaky boyfriend." "Dude, that guy was spazzing out." "DEAR GOD, DON'T TORTURE US WITH A BAD STREISAND MEMORY." But my favorite is Harry letting out his inner queen: "NOBODY SINGS THAT SONG BUT DOROTHY!!!"
posted by bjennings at 10:41 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
March 27
Not that I'm into that sort of thing, but
PillReports - apparently a spinoff of
BlueLight (wonder how much KMart offered for that one) - offers moderated discussion about
Ecstacy, so you might be able to get some idea of what that pill you just paid $20 for is likely to do to you. Things there aren't verified by actual lab tests like they are at
DanceSafe, but it's better than being
completely uninformed.
posted by endquote at 11:44 PM PST - 3 comments
POW! I found this while looking for something to illustrate the wrong way to pronounce Derek's name. I can't decide if Adam West is lampooning himself (in current Shatner style), or if he is still hanging onto his Glory Days with Julie Newmar... but I'm not sure it matters.
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 11:30 PM PST - 3 comments
Dear Lord, please forgive me for my shameless promotion of my friends' project, but I do hope all the metausers will enjoy the glory that is
Georgy Bush. I know I did, but I am biased. ;)
posted by veruca at 12:21 PM PST - 4 comments
NBC isn't to happy with
2600 Magazine registering the domain
www.fucknbc.com. They have
threatened legal action against 2600.
Is this fair, or is it another example of Big Business wanting to control other people's opinions and expressions?
posted by da5id at 12:13 PM PST - 3 comments
BARF - Yes this is completely useless, but it is just too much fun. My favorite topics? "New To Barf" and "kitty stomach problems and BARF".
posted by y6y6y6 at 11:29 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
March 26
Blame Phil Collins? We knew Blame Canada wouldn't win, and to be fair, Phil probably deserved it - my real question is "what did you think of the 'Blame Canada' production number?" It was the only reason I watched tonight (not being a big awards show guy), and I'm just curious to hear what other people thought of it. Did Robin Williams wreck it? What about the mounties chorus-line? Did anyone else think he was going to do the entire song with the tape over his mouth?
My only other Oscar observation: Angelina Jolie seemed thrilled and suprised to get Best Supporting Actress. Do you think that she would have gone with the Elvira look if she expected to win?
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 7:17 PM PST - 13 comments
Watch the Kingdome Fall.....must hurry I know some have posted it here before, but watching a stadium crumble starting at 11 a.m Eastern time would be something to tune into. This is the ESPN link that requires Real Player
posted by brent at 12:10 AM PST - 5 comments
I'm sure many of you have already seen this or are already familliar with it, but
this article talks about bandwidth that
really puts the pedal to the metal!
Amazing.
posted by lizardboy at 12:03 AM PST - 2 comments
March 25
I read this and felt like crying. That good little girl -- only two years old, yet she cared for the baby until help came. She even changed its diapers.
And her reward is to find out that her daddy is dead and won't ever be coming home again. Life's a
bitch sometimes.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 8:31 AM PST - 2 comments
Another Penatagon report indicates that there is no forseeable relief for gays in the military? When 85% of respondents (of the 71,500 U.S. military service personnel polled worldwide) state that they believe that anti-gay words and behavior is tolerated and 80% claim that they've heard an offensive remark (in the ranks) about homosexuals in the past year, is another onslaught of talking heads and pointless summits the answer? will it take another barry winchell to shake this administration into real action?
posted by jburr at 3:23 AM PST - 6 comments
Pike is an outliner that's been custom-fitted to plug into Manila sites. You can create and edit stories. You can use it to edit your home page. And you can also use it to edit the myriad of templates that define how a Manila site is rendered. It's both a writing and design tool. Free public beta.
posted by davewiner at 2:54 AM PST - 2 comments
March 24
So I just got a bizarre e-mail from a "Yustas Kotz-Gottlieb." Has anyone ever got one? I'll post the entire text as a comment. It appears to be an atrocious, perhaps Mad Lib-generated essay on an imaginary painting. Based on an AltaVista search for "Jaisini," I've concluded that this person posts the essay (and others) on random guestbooks and e-mails it to random people (like me).
This is the closest I can find to a cogent explanation, but I'm still bumfuzzled as to the point. Fake essays as performance art? It's like
McSweeney's, as guest-edited by Kafka.
posted by luke at 4:00 PM PST - 2 comments
Maybe I should learn VB or whatever's required to make a browser widget that blinks whenever I'm at a site owned by
AOL/
TimeWarner. There are tons of them, and I bet the thing would be blinking all the time, what with all the wholly owned subsidiaries of this and that. Of course, it would be built on an open architecture, so we could add Microsoft (where's their list?), and anyone else that needs watching.
posted by endquote at 3:09 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Metafilter is going down at 12 noon, PST (about 3 hours from now), and should be back up around 8pm. I just signed up this machine at
TZO.com, so this site should be reachable at
http://metafilter.tzo.com/ once I get it back up. TZO is actually a cool service, I've been running it for almost a year on my home cable modem, which changes IP addresses once a month or so (but thanks to TZO, I can always find it).
posted by mathowie at 8:57 AM PST - 1 comments
I make this hompage as business card he said... The more I look at it, the more I'm puzzled...
Is this er... site...
a) a very clumsy but very sincere homepage, made by someone whos has a lot to learn or...
b) a very well-done, veru tongue in cheek fake website made by someone who clearly had a lot of fun polishing this extreme pastiche...
Anyway, expect a lot of pop-up windows and have one of these airline vomit bag handy in case of a sudden sea sickness
posted by Baud at 3:20 AM PST - 6 comments
March 23
IMDB follows Microsoft's lead: every
new version makes it harder and harder to see the actual content you're looking for. I figure two more times around and they'll be down to three words per page that
aren't navigation.
posted by mrmorgan at 7:07 PM PST - 1 comments
Man there's a lotta links today. I'd like to add one, and continue the profanity thing. Everyone say "fuck" one more time. And now, "ass." That's also a good word. Both are used liberally at
BlowTheDotOutYourAss.com, which appears to be some kind of guerrilla advertising group, similar to that whole
Andre thing. They provide templates for printing out
stickers that say things like ButIdon'tNeedMyToothpastDelivered.com, and IJustHadARectalExamOnline.com. Good fun for the whole family.
posted by endquote at 3:14 PM PST - 3 comments
The latest TV craze to hit Europe is coming to the UK. After the ratings success of Shipwrecked (18 volunteers living on an island) we have a kind of Truman Show but with volunteers.
posted by Markb at 12:28 AM PST - 6 comments
March 22
Warner-Lambert Withdraws Diabetes Pill Rezulin Imagine how it feels hearing this news about six hours after my doctor told me "After looking at your latest liver test, you'd better stop taking the Rezulin, and come in for more tests."
For the record, I was aware of the potential risks before I & my doc started it, and have been doing regular liver tests all along; before my last test, I had noted to doc that I was getting more symptoms of out-of-control diabetes, even though frequent monitoring showed the blood sugar numbers were always IN control, and I was ready to ask for a change to one of the newer drugs... when my latest refill runs out. I'd always assumed that by the time the FDA acts on it it'll be too late, and I am very interested in the official FDA non-position on the safety of the newer drugs... posted by wendell at 10:53 PM PST - 2 comments
Capitol Idea: Matt believes "all government capitols look phallic to somehow signify that the most important 'man'
lives here." Having lived in the shadow of Florida's capitol for a few years, I have a better theory. These buildings are phallic because government's primary function is to screw people.
posted by mikewas at 4:15 PM PST - 3 comments
I don't know why, but I can't get enough of Brazillian music (realvideo stream). Not that I can understand a word of it, but damn that's smooth. Note to self: buy more
Gilberto Gil records.
This person thinks
this disc is one of his best, and you can even download digital versions of it from cdnow, although I wonder why each cut is $2.49. Why on earth should digital music cost
more? There's no shipping, no customer service hassles, no media to stock in a warehouse. Make the entire disc $5 in digital format, and I'll buy his entire collection (and save from adding to my already loaded down cd rack at home).
posted by mathowie at 12:23 PM PST - 2 comments
Dubya is all talk, yes indeed. Did I mention that I hate my governor?
posted by veruca at 10:57 AM PST - 12 comments
And in other news, Indiana University
announced today that they're developing jointly with
Napster a solution to the congestion problem the MP3-sharing program can cause (which has led to Napster being blocked by campuses nationwide). Access to Napster will be reinstated on campus for a two-week period starting March 25 to test this new method. This new method will soon be made available for web developers at
http://bestpath.iu.edu. Yippee. I get to download
*NSync tunes again.
posted by hit-or-miss at 10:34 AM PST - 1 comments
The Supreme Court ruled today that
university student fees may go to controversial groups in order to create a "marketplace of ideas". As a member of a university student funding board (and as a member of "controversial" student groups, i.e. GLBT groups), I've been eagerly awaiting this ruling all semester. The case began in 1996 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where three students challenged the use of mandatory student fees to fund campus organizations that they had politically and idealogically objections to. For the full text of the Supremem Court decision, visit
campusspeech.org.
posted by hit-or-miss at 10:32 AM PST - 1 comments
eHolster! I don't need the whole harness action (although there's a "lets play geek-spy" little kid inside me that wants it), but the cross draw
eBeltSnap would totally work for me.
[props to Laurel from
windowseat for the link]
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 9:23 AM PST - 4 comments
Speaking of Prozac... Did Prozac and Ritalin cause the Columbine disaster? Are these drugs causing kids to kill? The people of "A White Rose" seem to think so. You be the judge.
posted by SuperGoat at 9:20 AM PST - 3 comments
can states have a foreign policy? the Supreme Court today will review whether state and local governments can protest human rights in other nations by restricting purchases from companies that operate in those countries. the court will decide whether states, by restricting purchases, are making foreign trade policy, which, under the Constitution, is the duty of the federal government.
posted by palegirl at 8:46 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Medicate 'em! No time to bond with your children. Work leave you drained and the kids just will not listen? Let Prozac help. The kids, not you.
posted by Mick at 8:16 AM PST - 3 comments
Why the Future Doesn't Need Us is the cover story in this month's 'Wired'. It was written by Bill Joy, chief scientist at Sun. In it he makes a very convincing case for strict regulation of genetics, nanotech, and robotics, given that any of these could cause the extinction of the human species in the next 30 years. What do you think?
posted by Sean Meade at 7:43 AM PST - 8 comments
March 21
I have seen the future of advertising, and it is
PP * blog. My ultra-top-secret advertising scheme is finally let out of the box. Okay, so it might not be the future of advertising, but it IS a sleezy scheme on my part to help get both me AND you more visibility in the weblog dept.
posted by premiumpolar at 3:54 PM PST - 8 comments
Offshore pharmacy sites selling prescription drugs to US customers were shut down this week. I wonder if the cat is already out of the bag on this one, will there ever be a way to regulate prescription drug traffic on the web? There's no worldwide organization to watch over things like this, nor are there laws that every country can agree on. Something tells me that getting steroids and "date rape" pills online is going to be a problem that's never going away.
posted by mathowie at 1:44 PM PST - 1 comments
a newly released u.n. population study suggests that because the birth rates in wealthy countries is low and declining, the worker-retired ratio will not be able to support current social programs. "The report found that Japan would need 10 million immigrants every year for the next 50 years to maintain the current working-age to retirement-age ratio. Without migration, figures show it would be necessary to raise the retirement age to 77 to maintain the ratio."
posted by palegirl at 7:45 AM PST - 8 comments
Napster Is this the best thing ever? What's the future of this software?
posted by chaz at 3:29 AM PST - 8 comments
March 20
Remember Gabocorp? Hailed as the king of flash, one-man company Gabocorp's site carried a 'back early 2000' message for most of 1999.
But what's happening now? ('There is no entry in Apache for the Account you are looking for...' @ 4.50 GMT +1)
posted by prolific at 7:56 AM PST - 4 comments
Get the petition. They need one million signatures before April 20 to get it back on the November ballot. If you're in California, print out the petition and start drumming up support today. It's not so often you get a second chance like this. Show the country that California does indeed, rock.
posted by veruca at 3:31 AM PST - 9 comments
March 19
March 18
Smithereens? On whose blog did I find a link last week about Pat DiNizio, late of the
Smithereens, (a) running for New York senate and (b) whoring himself out to anyone who wants him to perform in their living room, assuming you find 100 people paying $25 each and hand over 80% of that cash to Pat?
As I now know all too well, browsers, including (in this case) MSIE 4 for Windows, do a lousy job of remembering all the pages you've visited, forcing us to resort to the hackneyed "Did anybody read that article, and if so where?" technique straight out of a Howard Hawks film. Any help appreciated.
posted by joeclark at 7:39 PM PST - 3 comments
One of the worst economic miscalculations of all time ends not with a bang, but with a whimper. Over
5 BILLION dollars was poured into Iridium (and $2 billion of that came from Motorola), and most of it is going to burn up in the atmosphere over the next two years as they deorbit their 60 satellites. (They have to bring them down so that they aren't a traffic hazard.)
Next time someone tries to tell you that capitalism can do no wrong, ask them about Iridium.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 2:32 PM PST - 7 comments
The United Killers of Benetton It seems that the italian clothing company
Benetton recently used death row inmates in a rather distasteful
ad campaign that featured death row inmates and thier clothing. Check it out. Quite a groundswell of protest is mounting against this. The matter seems to be equally offending to both pro and anti death sentence folks.
posted by Dean_Paxton at 9:44 AM PST - 20 comments
Everyone's favorite search engine
Google has opened their
GoogleStore. They've got shirts, mugs, and bags, some with the "I'm feeling lucky" slogan, but the strangest thing for sale? That'd have to be the
Exercise Ball, which I suspect secretly carries
Happy Fun Ball-style disclaimers.
When not in use, Google Exercise Ball should be returned to its special container
and kept under refrigeration. Do not taunt Google Exercise Ball. [thanks
RasterWeb]
posted by mathowie at 9:18 AM PST - 4 comments
March 17
Soulbath.com . I'm glad I came across this, I needed a good scrubing. The ambient soundtrack helps sooth the anger over being sober at 3pm on St. Paddy's Day.
posted by Mick at 12:09 PM PST - 1 comments
Wired News Redesign: What do you think to the WiredNews new-look? They've returned to using more black and a chunkier navigation bar. I thought there really was nothing wrong with the old version (and the improvements are indeed a step backwards) ?
posted by williamtry at 12:02 PM PST - 6 comments
Hey, throw the high school honor students out on the streets. Then they can join there peers in
public mayhem (via
obscurestore)
Is it just me, or does zero tolerance in the schools make less and less sense
every waking moment?posted by mrmorgan at 9:36 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Excelsior True Believers! I have to hand it to that old bastard. Marvel's been a bit late in the game and they're still rather overboard design-wise, but Stan Lee's little hole in the wall on the 'Net ain't none too shabby. 7th Portal is just as cheesy as Stan Lee's always been, and just as heartwarming for an old comic bum like me. Anyone else like 7th Portal? Or am I the only one who has a copy of "Contest of Champions" 1-3?
posted by ZachsMind at 7:57 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
March 16
Google reminds me of elementary school in a way. Every time there was a holiday, Ms. Capp would put up colorful decorations on the walls, windows, and doors of our classroom. Perhaps my 3rd grade teacher took a job as a designer at Google, because they're continuing the tradition just as she would have.
posted by mathowie at 10:36 PM PST - 9 comments
March 15
Swanky finally relaunches after months of teaser homepages and t-shirt offers. Don't expect the old Swanky though: they admit "we might as well be selling vacuum cleaners, it is that different. "
posted by geoff at 12:22 PM PST - 5 comments
Freeserve relaunched today: Considering that the vast majority of UK internet users have this set as their homepage, what's your opinion on the new-look Freeserve homepage. (it's like MSN - no?)
posted by williamtry at 11:42 AM PST - 1 comments
March 14
First it was safety scissors. Now we can all sleep safer knowing we are safe from
dangerous words.
Weren't schools rewarding honor students at some point, or is my memory bad? (via
obscurestore)
posted by mrmorgan at 7:41 PM PST - 4 comments
Here in Seattle, we have a thing for
big, ugly buildings. Sports fans, in particular, have a thing for building expensive, retractable roofed
stadiums. So in order to make room for another one, the city is
imploding the Kingdome.
Bad news for
Martini Design, seeing as how they're located across the street. Or good news, maybe, since they're probably getting a lot of trafic from their
implosion site, with the
streaming webcam, and the Flash game, "
The Imploder." I still haven't been able to tear the thing down without taking a few innocent buildings down with it.
posted by endquote at 6:12 PM PST - 1 comments
Worth has
a great story on how easy it would be for Goto.com to exploit its paying customers. (There may be some registration issues with this link; if it fails, go to the
Worth home page and click on "The Easy Way to Get Rich Click.")
posted by luke at 5:53 PM PST - 1 comments
A
poll on same-sex marriage at
ivillage.com. I'm always shocked by how many people
oppose it! What's wrong with this country?
posted by veruca at 2:06 PM PST - 43 comments
Got Beer? Well, this is the most offensively stupid article I've seen in quite some time. [stolen from
Ars]
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (
PETA) is promoting the benefits of drinking beer instead of milk. Of course, there isn't one word about impairment of motor functions, alcoholism, or liver damage.
posted by harmful at 6:58 AM PST - 9 comments
March 13
RIDING THE BULLET by Stephen King E-books are here to stay or lastest of the internet crazes?
Stephen King is letting his lastest book all 1600 word or 66 pages of it out for a small $2.50 from
Simonsay.com
Paperless world, mmm...
How without a laptop or you going to be able to read this in the bath tub or "reading room"?
Try also the
Stephenking.com For more information on the great writer's life and future.
posted by Max's Daddy at 11:28 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Napigator -Your Navigator to internet audio- Napigator lets you see real-time server statistics and ping times. Allowing you to make the decision of which server you connect to based upon the number of users, files, gigabytes, and network lag.
posted by TuxHeDoh at 10:48 AM PST - 1 comments
March 12
Blogger: The relaunch verdict? Blogger.com relauched their site with a funky new look and still more kewl features, do they still rock?
I had teething troubles in getting the remote editing to work. But after all that, it now works and in my opinion
of course Blogger still rocks!
posted by williamtry at 5:29 AM PST - 20 comments
March 11
Here's a worthy way to spend your time: wait around on this site and see if it's true that an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of keyboards would produce Shakespeare's complete works. But don't get too excited if you start seeing "To," "Be," "or," "Not," "to," and "Be" in suspiciously close proximity: it's rigged.
posted by Annabel.Gill at 10:17 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
almost.org , featuring "tales of near-sex experiences", is now live (after much thematically-appropriate hinting and teasing from
Don). I have a suspicion this is a site that won't
ever be wanting for content.
posted by Sapphireblue at 10:01 PM PST - 2 comments
Can you help a brother out with a little money laundering?
So, I was thinking about this otherwise unremarkable spam while cleaning out my inbox when it dawned on me how familiar it was. I have seen this letter (with slight modifications to suit the contemporary political news from Nigeria) three times in my life. The first one I remember was over
10 years ago (on oniony paper, soft brown fibery envelope, red mock-official stamp). And I was wondering: how many of you have seen a postal version of this letter? Did I just fluke out, or is this letter so common that it is some obscure junk mail counterpart to
Coca-cola, Princess Diana & Baywatch? I kind of like to think of it as the fraudspam equivalent of the nervous
Don Knotts.
posted by sylloge at 2:59 AM PST - 1 comments
March 10
Internet decency commission has no money. Seems Congress neglected to include any funding when it was set up. How serious
were they about this, anyway?
Not very, it seems. The commission is operating on an extension. It was supposed to report last October, but they never bothered nominating any members for it until two days before the previous deadline.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 3:49 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
It's been pointed out a lot lately (especially after Prop 22) that gays are the one minority that it is still safe to discriminate against. I agree, except that
they are not the only ones.And yes, I must admit, I resemble that remark.
posted by wendell at 10:48 AM PST - 8 comments
Epinions looks like they are ready to start kicking ass and taking names. They've got themselves a new logo (which I dig) and some
television commercials that they will soon be airing nationally. If you do nothing else today, look at the
Breast Pump one. (thanks to
ariana for finding this)
posted by jkottke at 10:36 AM PST - 4 comments
March 9
This really hurt me, but it's all worth it for the Panda joke (#316). In fact, you really only need to read the first two sentences for it to be funny. Well, it made
me laugh, anyway.
posted by Annabel.Gill at 4:28 PM PST - 4 comments
I have to say, the smurfalizer is the smurfiest site I've smurfed all day. I wonder if I can find the
Taxi Driver script online, just to see "Did you smurf my wife? What? How can you ask me something like that? You heard me! Did you smurf my wife!?!"
posted by mathowie at 12:56 PM PST - 2 comments
A Webring for WebLoggers by Jish for all of us. Lets face it, we all like having traffic to our sites, makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I joined and got plenty more hits on my site than I was getting before, its worth the time.
posted by Mr_Muffin at 3:25 AM PST - 6 comments
March 8
Mark your calendars: April 7th, 8th, and 9th. Gas prices are getting too astronomically high up here in Alaska, which is retarded since most oil in the U.S. comes from Alaska (actually I don't know about "most", but I know "alot"), and I know that they're getting outrageous in the rest of the world too, so stage a "GAS OUT" (I hope you didn't get this emailed to you already... It actually was a spam I got. But it's a worthy spam if there ever was one) on those dates, to lower the prices. BUY NO GAS ON THOSE DATES! (Oh yeah, um... sorry I linked to my web site. I would've linked to another person's web site if I could find one that had information on the national gas out day, but I couldn't. Plus, my site wasn't getting enough traffic. Maybe if you guys would link to me for once. Sheesh :)
posted by premiumpolar at 6:41 PM PST - 16 comments
american prospect's demo[graph]ics: Whenever there's a dollop of election news that might tip the scales between liberalism and conservatism they plot the progress on an (admittedly unscientific) graph. Since TAP Online is unabashedly liberal, the line will edge up when candidates with liberal ideas score points (or conservatives stumble). When the conservatives strike a chord (or liberals get flummoxed), the line will point down. This feature is intended as a quirky measure of political strategy.
posted by palegirl at 3:44 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
the annual 8 day orange throwing festival in italy is ending today. [
BBC News real video report] -- great footage, they explain the bizarre tradition, show it, and show the aftermath [which includes some bloody injuries] -- if you saw a segment about this on bbc world news last week, this is the same.
posted by palegirl at 3:35 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Is Webloglog trying to snake
m3tacubed's niche? Will I be forced to create a site that cherrypicks the best links from sites like
weblognation just to stay ahead of the crowd at staying away from the content? Meta-Meta-Meta-Comedy is hard enough, I'm afraid that if I go one more level out I'll end up screwing up time-space continuum... Tacky-on.net? No? Trust me, you loved it next month.
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 3:03 PM PST - 18 comments
The Corporatization of Weblogs Has Begun, it is decreed The current
Editor & Publisher introduces blogging to its newspaper-editor audience and points out two blogs actually written by newspaper columnists. I do indeed agree that Weblogging is a viable new medium of expression for dead-tree media, and agree even more strongly that special-interest journalistic blogs are in desperate need. (I'm planning one myself, and wouldn't it be great to read dueling blogs on the same topic from rival newspapers?) I just worry that the column will have an
illocutionary effect, i.e., it will cause something to happen just by uttering words, rather like "I now pronounce you married." In this case the words I worry about are "The corporatization of Weblogs has begun." I can hear Rushkoff griping about the good old days already. And I'd gripe along with him.
posted by joeclark at 3:03 PM PST - 3 comments
Why, yes, I like being stupid, but now I don't have to be. How silly of me to have failed to recognize that the earth is a Time Cube, with four simultaneous days. (But if God
were queer, I'd think this whole gay marriage rights mess would never have happened...)
posted by jason at 7:37 AM PST - 12 comments
March 7
Clerks: The Animated Series is coming to ABC in May (here's
a preview in quicktime format). How far will ABC let slacking, smoking, cursing vandals go? Are they gunning for SouthPark? I can't imagine a watered-down version of Clerks being very funny at all, the whole point of Clerks the movie was the absurdity of the dialogue and jokes. Don't get me wrong, I used to be an über Kevin Smith fan, but I just can't imagine enjoying a kid-friendly version of the New Jersey universe.
posted by mathowie at 1:01 AM PST - 9 comments
March 6
Looks like Haptek is going to give
Ananova a run for her money. Haptek is working on a virtual newscaster. The difference is Ananova get's built on the server and streamed like a tv show. Haptek renders the character on your machine. Which is better? We'll see.
posted by triptych at 11:53 PM PST - 3 comments
Oh my, talk about your imperfect applications of technology. I'm searching for an image of one of those "Hello my name is..." badges for a little joke, so I tried out
Lycos' image search engine. After about five pages into the search for images containing "hello", a porn image would pop up on almost every search page. "Hello" is a generic term, so there's pictures of babies and kids right next to some gnarly stuff. Here's
an example of a kid and a hello kitty image juxtaposed between some interesting images.
Here's another: doll, doll, people screwing each other's brains out, hello kitty mouse....
posted by mathowie at 8:58 PM PST - 4 comments
One of the holy grails of the infosaturated overworking computer professionals like myself is a single food capable of giving all the nutrients you'd need for a meal, and be as easy as possible to prepare and eat. Some friends used to call this dream creation "food paste" or "foodstuff capsules" or most simply "fuel." I never thought my
Jetsonian dream would ever come true, but now there's the
Dilberito, with
100% of 23 vitamins and
Jamba Juice's Smoothies. Why do I mention Jamba? Because I saw
this poster in the SFO airport last night, and they even go so far as to answer the question "
can I get too much Jamba?"
posted by mathowie at 5:36 PM PST - 7 comments
Did anyone catch the post-TV GUIDE AWARDS interview with Amy Brenneman? This morning on the news they showed her talking about how she reads all the comments from
the website, and how she is obsessively drawn to the 10% or so that are negative. Then she laughed, held up her award, and said "Screw You!" to the people who said negative things about her - only she didn't say "screw"... You seldom see people getting bleeped in non-music award show interviews.
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 3:12 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Scary calculation of the day: I spend about $750/mo. on rent in LA, and while I was checking the price range on
apartments in San Francisco, what I wanted was about $2500 per month. So in LA, I spend $9,000 per year on rent (actually it's half that, since I split it with my girlfriend), but in SF, it'd be $30,000 (!!!). For that cost, I could pay for a house in just a handful of years in any other state.
Maybe Salon is right, or
maybe they aren't.
posted by mathowie at 11:36 AM PST - 18 comments
History lesson time. With all the Amazon patent hubbub, I thought it'd be nice to remind people that the same thing happened in the beginning of the automobile industry. (6th paragraph)
Let's hope history repeats itself again, and a few large corporations are put in cha . . oh wait.
posted by alan at 2:48 AM PST - 2 comments
Good God, does the Fuji Film website suck. I run tall windows on my monitors, typically 700-800 pixels wide, but around a thousand pixels long, and over half my screen is blank on the Fuji site. Why on earth did they force everything to 500 pixels or so of height? I've never seen a consumer site like this do that before. The other peeve is I bought their
smart media floppy adapter, and I wanted to know if there were new Windows2000 drivers for it (it came with Win9x drivers on one disk, and NT drivers on the other). Their support area only lists phone numbers of service centers, no mention of software driver downloads or knowledge bases, or even a FAQ about products. This company does *not* get the web, wake up Fuji Film, it's the 21st century now.
posted by mathowie at 1:00 AM PST - 9 comments
March 5
Finally, a site that lets you send dog shit anonymously to anyone in the world, wrapped up in elegant packaging with a nice label affixed to it with the greeting of your choice. I'll be ordering the PooPoo Grande.
posted by premiumpolar at 6:24 PM PST - 3 comments
SiegeSoft is a company that makes an anonymous web browser for surfing sites without getting any cookies, without recording your IP address, and without leaving a trace of where you went on your browser. I don't know how much use this would be (besides, say, looking at porn sites at work or something), but the most amazing part of this is the programming was done by 15-year old and 16-year old kids, who are
now worth at least $750,000.
posted by mathowie at 1:07 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Folks, this one's not a joke. The major software publishers are trying to make an end-run around the copyright laws. If this passes
anywhere we're all potentially going to be bound by it. All they have to do is stick a clause in the license that says "This shall be governed by the laws of the state of Virginia."
They're also trying to make an end-run around the First Amendment. If this passes it will be illegal for you to write a review about any software package, or to reveal any information about bugs you find.
Finally, they're trying to make an end-run around property law. If it passes, you won't
own the software you purchase, you'll be
leasing it, and you won't be protected by state laws on commercial purchase.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 7:20 AM PST - 5 comments
March 4
Cat Detecto Software? It's software that detects cat-typing then blocks keyboard input while emitting "a sound that annoys cats." I wonder if this could be modified to prevent co-workers from using my computer to browse porn while I'm at lunch...
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 10:56 PM PST - 1 comments
One of the things I like best about the internet is the inherent asynchronousness of communication. I could never come up with a witty comeback about
string theory off the top of my head.
Of course, before I was on the internet, I never had a
reason to make a witty comeback about string theory...
[special thanks to Matt for his
dictionary.com bookmarklet]
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 9:48 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
I bought 3 Quick Picks for the Lottery this week, thinking that if there were any balance in the universe I'd be due for a big payoff...
If SuperLotto was High/Low, I'd have nailed it. I got
one number.
ONE.
5 number for lotto x 3 quick picks = 15 potential correct numbers. I got
ONE.
On the upside, I'm still
due. Touch me now, I'm jam packed full of luck potentiality...
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 8:08 PM PST - 5 comments
March 3
MetaTalk is now live. I've been talking about it for a while, and now it's here. The addition of it and the
Changelog does crowd up the menus a bit more, but a redesign is in the works so consider this a temporary inconvenience
posted by mathowie at 6:55 PM PST - 1 comments
Variety Should be posting the story any time now - Angelina Jolie just signed to do Tomb Raider. For all of you guys who have been waiting to put a human face to your digital fantasy,
there it is.
[via
KROQ Radio]
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 3:26 PM PST - 8 comments
Holy Schnikies! Broadband video that doesn't look too bad. I don't know what they're using for the tech behind this (besides some shockwave 7 and a plugin of their own design), but the video is compression-free and clear (well, if you ignore the stupid scanlines). If you're on a fast line, by all means check it out, pretty amazing stuff (now they just need to stream some good content, like the simpsons :).
posted by mathowie at 1:10 PM PST - 3 comments
I found these FUTURE JOES (GI Joe 2010 series) while following a
link from
Rebecca Blood's site for the
Navajo Code Talker GI Joes. Perhaps it's showing my age, but I really want one. Of course, I also want some of the
Nisei soldiers so that I can reenact those POW camp scenarios that I used to subject my GI Joe to as a kid.
I know where the bodies are buried.
Hey, how come
The Grim Reaper Site didn't have questions about GI Joe?
Was your GI Joe a) home on leave when you were concieved b) 12" c) 12" with lifelike hair and beard and realistic scar d) 12" with Kung Fu Grip e) really an Action Man f) a little pussy 3" action figure g) $50 and from the "Collectible Collection"? h) dolls are for girls.
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 10:34 AM PST - 9 comments
5k gets wired the
.ultimate design kontest gets notived by wired.
the result is a comment by a despaired
jason...
Hey, man, don't be too sad, there is far too much good webdesigners that will compete already :)
i just can't think of the shame i would have experienced after watching veen's, jason's, alice's... or granp-pa Zeldie's entries.
What makes me wonder is :: can k10k's team win ?
i'm curious to see what they can do with accessibilty and low-fat in mind, it would definitely bury the 'ala affair' that made some hot-talks weeks ago in some dark areas of the web.
another interrogation, will judges be cruel enougth to view them through some
funky toy...
posted by deboute at 6:32 AM PST - 8 comments
Camille Paglia in full flow at
Salon:
"In the three weeks since my last column, Hillary Rodham Clinton has been up hill and down dale, beating the bushes in upstate New York to try to convince someone somewhere that she is a woman of substance rather than a raisin-eyed, carrot-nosed, twig-armed, straw-stuffed mannequin trundled in on a go-cart by the mentally bereft powerbrokers of the state Democratic Party."
posted by Markb at 1:25 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
March 2
The new
google bookmarklets are amazingly simple and useful. I've been wanting to do
something like this for a while, and after seeing them, I decided to rework the code to make the web-based spellchecker I always wanted. If you bookmark this:
Dictionary.com bookmarklet, highlight a word on a web page, and hit the bookmark for it, it will load that word into dictionary.com's site. It's IE-only, but I'll redo the Netscape one too.
posted by mathowie at 10:35 PM PST - 7 comments
Sad but True. For me its a toss up between Hessian #5's vulnerable charm, and Hessian #6's straight-forward honesty.
posted by Awol at 5:33 PM PST - 6 comments
Just when you thought it was safe to go back on the web. Now it turns out that the damned ad companies can inadvertantly learn a LOT about you that you didn't realize you were telling them.
You know, I'm really glad I use AtGuard and have closed off DoubleClick and FocaLink and all those other guys in my firewall by blocking their IPs. (It's now part of the Norton Internet Security 2000 package, and I recommend it highly.)
From me, they learn nothing because they never even see the requests.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 9:44 AM PST - 17 comments
Indie Planet 's design is impressive, though a little overbearing and CPU-intensive (and somehow, "next page" takes me to the "top of the page"). Its humor section features some McSweeney's writers, including
Neal Pollack, who I learned to love from his work at the
Chicago Reader.
The site launches next week, and I'm not sure who is behind or what exactly its motives are.
Its manifesto says it's all about "freethinking individuals," but since creating a
"storefront" is giving the same weight as creating a
"home page," I guess it's more about "selling" "stuff." How indie.
posted by luke at 1:12 AM PST - 2 comments
March 1
Stickin' it to the man has just been made easier, thanks to the wonderful Internet. This PR dude's site
TellThemNow.com is basically going to act as an anonymous gateway to industry movers and shakers... letting you tell them
exactly how you feel. Kickass. Someone tell
Ev to get his Dell gripe ready. :)
posted by othermatt at 10:45 PM PST - 1 comments
You couldn't plan a funnier headline than this. This is another keeper quote "[one of the employees] said she resented being treated like a sexual object." Treated like a sexual object in a strip club? Who would have thought that'd happen? I'm sorry, I'm all for worker's rights, but in a strip club? You gotta draw the line somewhere.
posted by mathowie at 10:16 PM PST - 29 comments
Not even canines are safe from road rage. God I hate San Jose. Even if the guy's from Virginia, there's just something about this place that turns people into monsters, and not the good kind like mummies and werewolves.
posted by luke at 7:43 PM PST - 2 comments
I think ICANN, I think ICANN... I'm one of
2600 North Americanskis to apply for an "@large" membership in the first 5 days (but they're using snail mail to send me a PIN number I need to access memberstuff
in addition to a password they e-mailed me... )
Will joining give me a chance to get my voice heard? Or a feeling of webgeek belonging? Or just something to put on the resume to impress the internet-clueless?
Is this an example of (cliche #1)"keeping your friends close and your enemies closer"? Or (cliche #2) "I wouldn't want to join any club that would have me as a member"? Do I have any idea what I'm talking about?
posted by wendell at 10:07 AM PST - 1 comments
Whoa! Computer consultants working hourly or as temp workers in California are
now required by law to be paid overtime when working more than 8 hours per day. This is good news for workers, but I'm sure businesses will find a loophole soon.
posted by mathowie at 9:43 AM PST - 1 comments
