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May 2000 Archives
May 31
My Winamp Locker appears to be a free online storage space for your music files, hosted by Winamp. At 3Gb, and the offer of sharing and listening to your songs anywhere, how on earth do they expect to A) make any money back from all the server hardware they'll buy to support this, and B) not get sued by the RIAA? I thought it'd be a great service to exploit for my personal 2-3Gb collection, but it turns out you have to upload your files one at a time. ugh.
posted by mathowie at 9:39 PM PST - 6 comments
A Scourge of Small Arms "The root causes of ethnic, religious and sectarian conflicts around the world are of course complex and varied, typically involving historical grievances, economic deprivation, demagogic leadership and an absence of democratic process. Although small arms and light weapons are not themselves a cause of conflict, their ready accessibility and low cost can prolong combat, encourage a violent rather than a peaceful resolution of differences, and generate greater insecurity throughout society--which in turn leads to a spiraling demand for, and use of, such weapons."
posted by Calebos at 6:45 PM PST - 7 comments
Motley disses Metallica Mister Sixx and pals give their response to Lars' crew, on the whole mp3/napster issue. Sounds like 2 groups of people are benefitting from all these lawsuits, lawyers and flash-cartoonists...
posted by nomisxid at 3:23 PM PST - 4 comments
Hmmm... perhaps I've been wrong. It would appear that the federal courts *have* been being strict about the 'militia' interpretation of the Second Amendment. That may change, however, thanks to a Federal Appeals Court judge from, no surprise, Texas.
posted by baylink at 3:22 PM PST - 18 comments
are webloggers male or female? i'm doing a poll to try and discover the gender distribution of webloggers. someone recently asked this of me, and i had no idea if anyone had gathered that info.
posted by brig at 2:59 PM PST - 22 comments
Huy Fong rules. In the IT department of the ad agency I'm freelancing for the boys use a bottle a week, putting it on dern near everything. Check out the
letters.
posted by Mo Nickels at 11:36 AM PST - 1 comments
Stupid new marketing word of the day: "Advertorial" (spotted on
this NY Times page).
Here's a screenshot - what exactly are they trying to say? Do their advertisements now contain editorial copy that should help shoppers make a more informed decision, or are they just trying to fool us into thinking these advertisements have more credibility because they are "editorialized"? (disclaimer: I hate marketing BS)
posted by mathowie at 10:12 AM PST - 14 comments
Does God exist? In a day and age where people are somewhat better educated (than say 500 years ago), we are taught to think freely and form our own opinions. As a result, it is no surprise that Christianity is nowhere near as strong as it was back in its glory days. Here are some
good debates between University professors over the existence of God. Very good arguments from both sides. Very thought-provoking stuff. I, for one, believe there are far too many people who blindly believe in a religion because it is the easy way out. Tell me what you think.
posted by PWA_BadBoy at 3:50 AM PST - 38 comments
Now this is really stupid. 14-year-old Francis Di Masi's petition to have his name legally changed to "Frank" because he gets teased mercilessly in school about it was rejected. The judge said in his decision that "Learning how to deal with these taunts [is] part of growing up."
My first name, family name and nicknames have always given other people trouble when it comes to spelling and pronounciation, so I know what it's like to grow up getting name-related grief every single day of your life; "tedious" doesn't even
begin to describe it.
So while I don't think "Francis" is altogether a
bad name, why shouldn't the kid get to legally call himself whatever he wants? I mean, if some moron can change his name to DotComGuy without a hitch, why not Frank?
posted by lia at 3:43 AM PST - 21 comments
May 30
Tahni reacts if you touch her or move her around the screen with your mouse. If you leave her alone, she will amuse herself and entertain you in the process. (Is there any way that doesn't sound dirty?)
posted by endquote at 9:58 PM PST - 3 comments
Zimbabwe is too important not to blog My pal, technical saviour, and usurper in the race toward pessimism and gloom
Luke Tymowski has quietly beavered away producing a Tomalak's Ream-esque daily digest of Zimbabwe news. Benighted Jakob Nielsen just finished saying that Web writing like this is the only way to go. Does he read Luke? He oughta. A lotta people oughta.
posted by joeclark at 9:04 PM PST - 4 comments
I'm giving $30 to some Metafilter user. I'm stealing this idea from the Shiny Thing giveaway that
usr/bin/girl held a while back. I liked her contest, but I would have liked it more if we got to see everything people asked for. So here goes.
I will buy one lucky Metafilter user something off of the Web of a $30 value or less (I will pay shipping and taxes).
To enter: add a comment to this post. The comment must link to the thing you want and provides a bit of contextualizing commentary. (I'd prefer it if the link pointed to something that has at least a semi-permanent home on the Web, no eBay please.) I will choose and announce a winner within (roughly) the next forty-eight hours.
This winner will be chosen based on a single criteria -- "coolness." Whatever item I find the most "cool" wins. I make no claim that my definition of what's "cool" will match any commonly socially-accepted definitions (or your own personal definition, for that matter). Decision of judge is final.
I set the bar here: in order to win, your item must be at least as cool as
this; otherwise I will declare myself the winner.
Have fun. Play fair.
posted by jbushnell at 7:11 PM PST - 62 comments
Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Lathe of Heaven" is being offered to local PBS stations in the month of June. It hasn't been broadcast in about 20 years. VHS tape and DVD due out in September. Both KQED (San Francisco) and KRCB (Rohnert Park-Cotati, CA) aren't going to broadcast it. I guess Suze Orman needs the airtime...
posted by paddbear at 4:20 PM PST - 2 comments
On the topic of cars , I've known about this city for awhile, and it looks like heaven. It's actually a law to have a picket fence, and there's no cars, because well, there's no roads! But, at around 500k at least for a house, I think it's a bit out of my league
posted by starduck at 4:20 PM PST - 9 comments
(close-up on my face, quickly zooming out to an overhead shot as I yell)
Noooooooooo!!!!! TicketWeb, one of the last places you could buy a ticket to a concert that wasn't Ticketmaster, just got
bought out by Ticketmaster. TicketWeb's slogan is "The Online Ticketing Alternative." Not anymore....hello, monopoly anyone?
posted by mathowie at 2:12 PM PST - 7 comments
Anyone else joined up for this? With all the grief that
ICANN &
NSI seem to be causing these days, I'm curious how many other people out there have joined the ICANN Member-At-Large program, and if anyone has posted any comments yet. To me, requiring someone to get 10% of the Asian region, to be self-nominated, seems most improbable.
posted by nomisxid at 1:39 PM PST - 4 comments
PDAs & the eye module... Do you have a PDA? What kind? Is it useful? If you have a Handspring, do you have an Eye Module? Would you recommend it? Or would you rather have a regular digital camera? Inquiring minds wanna know...
posted by wiremommy at 11:59 AM PST - 3 comments
THAT'S a speeding ticket... Scientists push light up to 300 times the SPEED OF LIGHT.
I just got a floaty-glowy feeling. Some interesting interesting stuff is happening in our world.
My favorite quote from the article: "That is so fast that, under these peculiar circumstances, the main part of the pulse exits the far side of the chamber even before it enters at the near side. "
[Note: link is for NYT, free registration req'd]
posted by cCranium at 11:42 AM PST - 12 comments
May 29
Car-free Cities Would you like to live in a city where everything you need is within a five-minute walk? Where you can get from one side of a city of a million people to the other in less than thirty minutes? Where the air is clean, people are healthy, children and the elderly aren't dependent on others to get where they want to go, and life is beautiful? You can have it all--just ban cars.
posted by daveadams at 10:01 PM PST - 50 comments
Look! I got banned. And all for spite. I thought it'd be nice and irritating to download his stuff after he started a dispute. I did the same with Metallica. After hearing their music, I'm surprised they have the balls to defend such crap. It's like kicking a garbage can full of screaming monkeys down the stairs.
posted by madglee at 8:26 PM PST - 3 comments
Jeremy's CyberCafe and Beer Haus is up for sale, but what's really cool about it is that it is located just outside of Joshua Tree National Park in the Southern California desert, and they have a full T-1 line that they're selling along with the business. Hmm...T-1 access
plus nearby national park? Maybe we should take up a collection and buy it ourselves? :)
posted by mathowie at 11:20 AM PST - 2 comments
Discussion:
What's a reasonable amount of time, for you, to expect someone to reply to an email?
[More inside...]
posted by baylink at 9:59 AM PST - 38 comments
May 28
Your site in Chinese. I picked this one up out of my logs. Enter your URL, hit return, wheet, there it is, your site in simplified Chinese. Dunno how accurate it is, but goddamned, it's the coolest thing I've seen in, oh, almost 16 hours.
You need to be running a browser and OS that handles Chinese characters for this to work, by the way. Mac users can install the appropriate freebies off of their OS 9 or 8.6 disks; it's a custom install. Windows users can download some big software turd. At least Internet Explorer on both platforms will display Chinese characters correctly once the system extensions are installed.
posted by Mo Nickels at 8:59 PM PST - 1 comments
THE ROBINSON REPORT: "A Complete Report to the Citizens of the Commonwealth on the Personal Background of a Candidate for the United States Senate" -- written by the candidate, in the spirit of full discolsure. [more inside]
posted by palegirl at 1:14 PM PST - 6 comments
Apparently, there's a link between today's television programming and promiscuity in teenagers. I'd say its because overly-censored American tv is so boring that most teenagers would prefer to have sex rather than watch that crap.
posted by sammy at 12:07 PM PST - 1 comments
The open bookmark project Hi:
I have started a pitas site covering bookmarks. The goal of this project is to receive the bookmark and favorites files from people around the world and learn what sites he/she bookmarked and how they organized them.
posted by efader at 11:25 AM PST - 5 comments
The Spyware Infested Software List. All programs on this list surreptitiously report back to a server telling either what you've been doing or what is on your computer. It's quite a list.
I don't understand why Navigator isn't on there, though. Navigator's "What's Related" feature does exactly the same thing.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 10:55 AM PST - 7 comments
"our country has failed to make veterans, especially disabled veterans, a monetary urgency. Congress' attempt to honor and recognize our freedom fighters during their aged years must include the backing of the entire country."
posted by Mick at 8:29 AM PST - 1 comments
Where did CC go? Is it true the editorial cabal at the Aged have censored CC following postings on MeFi? It's Sunday night and she's not blogging ... Has Casey been exposed as a Rocky regular and management have dumped her? Did palegirl kidnap her? Bring back CC you bastards!
posted by beergirl at 5:54 AM PST - 2 comments
May 27
Freedom of Art Dept.:
In a previous topic, captain cursor said: "It's actually better to have a weak artistic piece when arguing aspects of law. Since the law should apply to all works, good or bad, you don't want to be distracted by the merits of the work.". So what happens when a very popular image is "censored"?
A commercial mural painter in L.A. wants to paint a big Statue of Libery on the side of a building (nobody's paying him to do it). Big murals need permits, the local city councilman doesn't like big murals, the painter starts painting without a permit, gets arrested,
puts up a web site. (At least he gives one page to
the councilman's reply.)
So, MeFi opinion leaders, is this painter a First Amendment hero, an opportunistic promoter or what?
posted by wendell at 4:18 PM PST - 7 comments
Advertising on Your GPS Reciever It looks like advertisers are already dreaming up new uses for the higher quality GPS signals.
"You're walking down the block, your phone goes off as you pass every store and tells you that there's a 50-percent-off sale."
Someone remind me why it was a good idea to deregulate the GPS?
posted by darainwa at 9:54 AM PST - 4 comments
A Word An iMac in Spanish Apple is finally getting with the program on localization (after ausgeficking badly in the last two years: cancelling English and Quebec French variants, for example; failing to upgrade system software in major languages like Spanish; considering Puerto Rico a foreign country; refusing to sell foreign-language keyboards even as aftermarket items) and selling iMacs
in Spanish in the U.S. (Hmm. What system version?) However, some unilingualists see it as symptomatic of the cancerous breakdown of their beloved Republic. You Americans.
posted by joeclark at 8:51 AM PST - 13 comments
May 26
Sweet mother of... I don't think it's the video games doing it folks, I think it's toy guns that need a tripod to hold steady...it's like a mobile hose...
posted by starduck at 4:06 PM PST - 7 comments
Internet Explorer too hard for you? Confused by all the choices in Netscape? Like AOL? Maybe this
this browser is more your speed.
posted by mathowie at 11:35 AM PST - 16 comments
Tim Burton rules... Tim Burton's latest directing gig is for Timex, and I'm thrilled to see that his dark mind isn't stifled in 30 seconds. The commercial is just as edgy and tasty as you'd expect.
posted by schmarley at 10:15 AM PST - 8 comments
May 25
the age weblog [via wetlog, of course]
it's pretty obvious she's reading MeFi [and memepool] -- but not linking to them.
posted by palegirl at 9:02 PM PST - 22 comments
queer by choice: "this web site exists in order to promote, condone, encourage and recruit individuals to explore their homosexuality. it is a site dedicated to thoughts and ideas not available in the mainstream of current thinking on homosexuality."
posted by palegirl at 8:48 PM PST - 11 comments
.ca slightly less tightarsed En tout cas, the Canadian domain administration has "streamlined" its application process (like an NSI manqué), but hasn't improved its Victorian-era rules (one domain per entity, hard to get a .ca, etc.).
But searches now only show if a domain is or isn't available, not who owns it. Ewww.
posted by joeclark at 5:25 PM PST - 2 comments
Salon Kvetch-o-Rama I admire Jim Romenesko and his now-famous
Medianews site. Tremendous conciseness, relevancy, good taste, apt use of <B>. (Glowing article in
New York not online. Spectacular accompanying photograph. In effect, Jim is paid $80,000 annually to blog for a living.) Jim actually covers the
Salon redesign of recent infamy (
here), and mentions it en passant on his homepage. I had alerted Jim to our discussion here, but it looks as like Medianews and Metafilter are parallel universes on this. I wonder if combining discussions would make sense here and elsewhere. (Was that less than 500 words?)
posted by joeclark at 5:21 PM PST - 3 comments
If it looks like a duck and it smells like a duck and it sounds like a duck it's a . . . .
Holy Union?
posted by alan at 3:10 PM PST - 3 comments
CD sales down near college campuses? A new study shows that despite growing music sales overall, independent stores near the campuses of colleges that have banned Napster report a 7%
decline in sales over the past two years. [more inside...]
posted by daveadams at 6:23 AM PST - 10 comments
Deepleap.org is up. No one mentioned this yet, so I figured i would. Everyone go whine about the reload button not working.
posted by alan at 5:51 AM PST - 9 comments
May 24
The Poincaré Conjecture: If we stretch a rubber band around the surface of an apple, then we can shrink it down to a point by moving it slowly, without tearing it and without allowing it to leave the surface. On the other hand, if we imagine that the same rubber band has somehow been stretched in the appropriate direction around a doughnut, then there is no way of shrinking it to a point without breaking either the rubber band or the doughnut. We say the the surface of the apple is ‘simply connected,’ but that the surface of the doughnut is not. Poincaré, almost a hundred years ago, knew that a two dimensional sphere is essentially characterized by this property of simple connectivity, and asked the corresponding question for the three dimensional sphere (the set of points in four dimensional space at unit distance from the origin). This question turned out be be extraordinarily difficult, and mathematicians have been struggling with it ever since.
...but if you can prove it, [or any of six other '
millenium prize problems'] the
clay mathematics institute wants to line your pockets with $1M
posted by palegirl at 8:11 PM PST - 3 comments
So I stumbled upon
this Britney Spears Auction at Yahoo (yeah, right, just like I stumble upon episodes of Dawson's Creek or 90210 - I swear I was just flipping channels!) and there's two notable things up for sale.
This action figure/doll scares the bejesus out of me, there's something just plain wrong about a doll sporting a bare midriff, pigtails, and a short skirt (and did ya notice that she dots her "i" with heart? ugh.). Then
this outfit from the Saturday Night Live episode is kinda creepy too, what on earth would someone do with her outfit? Put it up on the wall or let people rent it out for halloween?
posted by mathowie at 4:55 PM PST - 11 comments
links open windows is a bookmarklet I wrote which evolved from my 'links open windows' checkbox. Drag this to your toolbar (like you did with
deepleap) and with a click you can cause the links on any page to spawn new windows. In a few cases (like the
Guardian weblog) you might want to do the opposite, and follow
links in one window. Enjoy.
posted by sudama at 1:19 PM PST - 11 comments
China, our new buddy It seems like history may be made today. I hope that if China does receive favorable trade status that it will go to improve human life in that nation and improve ties between our countries.
I'd like to buy China a Coke...
posted by Brilliantcrank at 9:57 AM PST - 7 comments
May 23
Discussion: I'm a blogger, he's a blogger, she's a blogger...
[ more inside... ]
posted by baylink at 3:24 PM PST - 25 comments
Mötley Crüe offers their new single "Hell On High Heels" as a free MP3 download...promoting their upcoming album "New Tattoo", hitting stores, June 20th.
See guys...*that's* how it should be done.
posted by EricBrooksDotCom at 3:07 PM PST - 8 comments
inside.com goes live. Inside.com is the latest attempt to have people pay for non-porn, non-financial information on the web. The site is currently in "Sneak Preview" mode and is the brainchild of Kurt Anderson (of Spy Magazine fame).
posted by icathing at 1:18 PM PST - 3 comments
Yet Another Domain Name Dispute Develops (YADNDD):
chunkymunky.com gets a Cease & Desist from
chunkymonkey.com. One is a windows software site, the other a fan site about a cartoon character. Is there any cause for confusion on the part of users wanting to visit either site (actually, one would have to misspell "monkey" in order to get to the windows site)? Should the chunkymunky.com site owner have taken down his/her site? Who is going to protect domain owners from future things like this happening?
posted by mathowie at 10:07 AM PST - 21 comments
Builder.com cosmetically improved? Builder.com refines their site with a better homepage and category pages... but as far as I can see, no change to the actual article layouts themselves. What do you think - anyone read Builder.com anymore?
posted by williamtry at 8:30 AM PST - 4 comments
Is it just me or has Roger Ebert gone fully looney? I was reading
his review of "Dinosaur" and came across this criticism:
"A dinosaur, even one that spoke English, would be unlikely to know what that line implies."
What? Do you mean.... uh.... What? The whole review is like that.
posted by y6y6y6 at 7:45 AM PST - 47 comments
Ever wondered how much it would cost to have your listing pop up on a particular MSN search? According to Micros~1's
keywords.com (as of a few minutes ago), you can get
sex for $795.20/month,
mp3 for $175.66, and
Bill Gates for a mere $8.96 a month!
posted by tregoweth at 1:48 AM PST - 3 comments
May 22
Flasher's get thier own blog and I'm not talking about raincoats. A blog all about Flash sites - something I needed now that I have DSL. Tell me, do all Flash sites have to use techno or house music - what ever happened to
polkas?
posted by DragonBoy at 9:37 PM PST - 3 comments
Ugly, ugly ugly. The Salon.com redesign is finally - and unfortunately - live. It's not a magazine - it's a portal!
Mignon Khargie - wherefore art thou?
Blegh.
posted by gsh at 8:50 PM PST - 55 comments
Damn, but this site is pretty. Nice, understated, good writing, not too much fluff, good copyediting (a weak spot on the web -- separates the women from the boys), and a design that fits on my monitor.
If you helped Free Willy, check OceanFutures out.
posted by baylink at 5:23 PM PST - 5 comments
"Real" has done it again. For the
third time they've embedded surreptitious monitoring capability into one of their programs.
"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." What do we do for the third time? (A tactical nuke seems indicated.)
posted by Steven Den Beste at 9:48 AM PST - 16 comments
May 21
Look at the silly boys with their cute little grindcore band names. Oooh! I'm threatened! I'm quivering! I'm shocked and saddened, saddened and shocked! So scary.
posted by Mo Nickels at 7:41 AM PST - 3 comments
Does anyone know what happened to
GirlText? Elizabeth was supercool, but for the last week or two, there's been a "denied access" page. Bummer.
posted by delfuego at 7:40 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
May 20
Camworld points to the [second page of] the Encyclopedia Brown piece (like everyone *else* who didn't actually *read* it; *Busted!* :-) and also to
Comma Separated Values Considered Harmful, a treatise that the vertical bar character ("|") is a better field separator in tabular text data files than the comma or even the tab.
Is that really news? It wasn't to *me*...
posted by baylink at 10:20 PM PST - 13 comments
"
The ROMP is a freewheeling entertainment destination cut from the unruliness and irreverence of the Internet. Our no holds barred animations, videos, and games give voice to a new generation of artists both inside and outside Hollywood. The ROMP allows users to set the limits, break them, and get a good laugh out of it. But don't take our word for it." (i.e., they have a game where the object is to get laid.)
posted by endquote at 7:36 PM PST - 2 comments
byron smith of the current canadian everest expedition has made it to the summit! he was going to send a live broadcast from the summit, but unfortuantely the conditions have prevented that from taking place; so the team is going to descend to camp IV and try to broadcast from there. stay tuned for it, it should prove interesting. --
Everest 2000 - Daily Dispatchposted by palegirl at 6:34 PM PST - 3 comments
Guns save lives? (I suppose it's the bullets that kill people) The NRA today staged the "400 Man March" to show their support for guns and opposition to last week's Million Mom March. On CSPAN today, I also caught a bit of their convention, where they were openly talking about Bush being "
their president". I don't know what scares me more, seeing the speeches from their convention on TV, or someday going to
an NRA-themed restaurant ("I'll take the saturday night special please, with armor piercing sauce on the side.").
posted by mathowie at 11:57 AM PST - 57 comments
Even more proof... that your government is as dumb as you think it is. Anyone wanna start on the conspiracy theories concerning LoveBug 2?
posted by baylink at 10:24 AM PST - 1 comments
May 19
MS Cookie Patch Breaks Some Images - We noticed something odd today. Those of us with IE 5.0 who installed the patch to close the cookie security hole can no longer see many of the images on the
Washington Post site. People who installed the patch on IE4 still can; and IE5 users without the patch also can. [More inside thread...]
posted by julen at 4:07 PM PST - 6 comments
Can't believe we almost let
this annual event pass by without noticing...
(And can't believe the Pyrates haven't made an entry named "Blogger Frog"... Matt?)
Other possible pun-derful topics: DeepLeap, the Webbys, Microsoft NotePad, and a certain 5k Contest entry.
posted by wendell at 12:04 PM PST - 8 comments
Don't Panic! Did anyone else realize that The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy really existed? I don't know that I'd describe that font as "Large, friendly letters", but it is, indubitably, on the front cover.
posted by baylink at 8:45 AM PST - 6 comments
What hasn't been noted much on the DEN and boo.com closings is the high-bandwidth aspirations both sites trumpeted. No doubt this is why much of Metafilter's readership is privately reveling in these failures. They subtly reinforce the Web's "minimum" ideals -- keeping multimedia to a minimum, minimizing file sizes and download times, letting the minimalist purity of HTML reign supreme. Should this really make us happy, though? I'm a big supporter of fast browsing and markup-language standards, but aren't we missing the point when we secretly root for the bleeding edge to fail?
posted by werty at 7:17 AM PST - 17 comments
I have a question for Matt. I notice on the
Zeldman comment that someone also has the same username as me. I am
jay. There is also another
jay. I don't think anyone would want to impersonate me, but for some people on this list, this might be a problem. We could all become
mathowies, I even created my own
mathowie account to see if this really works and
it does.
posted by jay at 1:49 AM PST - 10 comments
May 18
Trey Anastasio (Phish) on Napster. I know we're all kind of sick of this now. The interesting thing is that I got an MP3 of "Heavy Things" (which is on their new album) this morning from Napster, listened 3 times and then called my local HMV to see if they had the album in yet. They did, and I'm off to buy it. (Feeling legit? You can get Liquid Audio versions of
two cuts from the new album, including the one mentioned.)
posted by sylloge at 1:04 PM PST - 5 comments
Life-sized Lara Croft Mannequin [from
fark]. Question: how do you make a life-sized object of something completely fictional? Don't try to answer, my brain popped when I saw the 3/4 life-size Seven Dwarfs lawn ornaments at
K-Mart years back.
posted by plinth at 11:36 AM PST - 3 comments
Aw crap. You *know* their Linux initiative is going to take the blame for this, right...?
posted by baylink at 10:09 AM PST - 12 comments
First Boo.com goes down, now DEN.
The Digital Entertainment Network is closing it's doors after running out of cash. After raising over 33 million dollars, they burned it at rate of up to $3 million per month, pulled their $75 million stock offering, and with no revenue model in place, they had to close up shop, with 150 people suddenly out of work.
posted by mathowie at 9:33 AM PST - 4 comments
Thus sayeth Zeldman: "Lately, well-meaning readers have informed us that the status bar is sacred, and JavaScript text messages are evil ... even when they include the domain name."
I, personally, prefer a brief description of where the link is going, rather than a long URL. Just curious, what do you think? As far as I'm concerned, there is no wrong answer or opinion on this.
posted by EricBrooksDotCom at 8:28 AM PST - 67 comments
Boo.com go bye bye! The oh-so-hip online fashion boutique burnt through
$120 million in 6 months. Now it's gone. Is this one of the first casualties of the dot-com rush? Is this the beginning of a trend, or is this an isolated incident?
posted by solistrato at 6:45 AM PST - 12 comments
I applaud President Clinton for taking
this stance. Unfortunately,
drug companies continue to have influence in some decisions. It's a wonder that greed doesn't ruin this whole world.
posted by da5id at 5:19 AM PST - 1 comments
May 17
Jargon Scout - In this age of web-building and domains of all sorts coming out the wazoo and email and new jargon all the time, there seems to be a lack of good jargon for emotional states. Two states that I think desperately need a word coined for them are: the anticipation for the propagation of and reticence to tell anyone about a newly registered domain; and the state where you get so starved for contact of any kind that you post your undisguised email to a half-dozen newsgroups and fanzines just so that there is something in your inbox. Anyone have any ideas for what these states should be called?
posted by Willy-Yam at 3:07 PM PST - 4 comments
Utterly Disgusting. I don't what made me more ill, the white stringy stuff, or the brown substance. Either or, it is just another example of how great government works... at any level.
posted by da5id at 10:26 AM PST - 4 comments
Microsoft's latest security loophole involves the much-hated animated paperclip "Office Assistant". Despite its ability to create or
delete files, someone chose to mark it as "safe for scripting", allowing it to be controlled by script on a web page.
posted by harmful at 7:09 AM PST - 2 comments
May 16
DotCom Guy is a Bore "The DotCom Guy gets loads of publicity just like this for being a zero." - Dallas Observer. Dallas, where I live, has many claims to "fame" but I'm not sure anyone really cares about this one. Is the rest of the world paying attention to him?
posted by thinkdink at 4:34 PM PST - 15 comments
Outraged web news site republishes naughty pictures so that all their readers can see what the fuss was about. Not just one picture. ALL of them. Except that from where I sit, they're not that naughty: she's fully dressed in some kind of Russian fur thing. Yes! We are outraged! At this one! and ... this one too! and that one there! See how outraged we are!
posted by dhartung at 12:34 PM PST - 4 comments
This house which I heard about from
captain cursor looks normal on the outside, but make sure you check out the
basement! It made me think of the
barn house that I once visited while growing up in Indiana. Though very different, they both are products of magnficent obscessions--as is the famous
Winchester Mystery House. It seems many people like to build and live in strange homes. Of course, there are people who are obscessed with
other things.posted by grumblebee at 7:30 AM PST - 2 comments
Disturbing. I don't know what is worse, that these people are trying to make a buck off this, or the fact that you can watch the
Real unedited version here. (Warning, 50megs)
posted by da5id at 6:31 AM PST - 5 comments
May 15
Shiver me timbers... Derek P becomes a
Pyrate. That "Meet the Beatles" cover will soon need to be replaced with one from Sly and the Family Web. Or Treasure Island.
But good luck, and a very happy birthday for tomorrow... and if anyone even mentions the word beginning with C and rhyming with "babble", terminate with extreme prejudice.
posted by holgate at 6:06 PM PST - 35 comments
Forty-two billion dollars for conservation may soon be headed to the fifty states, if
a controversial environmental protection package passes the Senate. Election-minded lawmakers -- including at least one hundred Republicans -- have piled onto the Conservation and Reinvestment Act, which allows them to bring federal funds to their states while appearing to help the environment.
posted by palegirl at 12:51 PM PST - 1 comments
Age of the Customer : John Ellis articulates the current business climate of customer empowerment and highlights some companies (Coke and Time-Warner) who Just Don't Get It.
posted by wiremommy at 9:44 AM PST - 2 comments
May 14
Desktop Imperium is a related site to see for folks who think vir2l is cool. Among other things, the interface stumbles closely enough to being usable that you can figure out what's being presented -- free wallpapers, in an abstract,
Matrix meets
Tron meets Jackson Pollack mode.
posted by aurelian at 10:10 PM PST - 8 comments
Vatican Discloses 'Third Secret' of Fatima. Prophecies to shepherd children, conspiracy theories - this shit is old-school. It must be fun to be Catholic, living in a world that still has shadows and mist. I'm sick of this harsh, bright Enlightenment thinking.
posted by lbergstr at 12:48 PM PST - 9 comments
Internet VCR. You put in the shows you want to watch, come back, and watch it in Realplayer. Shady legally, cool geekwise.
posted by owillis at 11:26 AM PST - 8 comments
$50 dollars a year for a Web appliance and unlimited access. After three years, it's free. The only catch I can find is that if you cancel before three years, you have to pay a bazillion dollars. So who's going to make the
Virginconnect into a cheap Linux box?
posted by endquote at 9:15 AM PST - 7 comments
Amtrak is running one of the most bizarre promotions ever. Yesterday, I saw a bunch of billboards along the freeways saying "Do you have a face that can stop a train?" Below that was this URL:
winafacelift.com. How a train company and facelifts go together, I don't know. It's almost as if they want their slogan to be "when you're too ugly for plane travel, take a train."
posted by mathowie at 8:44 AM PST - 3 comments
May 13
bla-bla.com and grrl.com (a new chickclick style portal from
womensforum.com) are on the hunt for independent female sites to lump together and sell off to their advertisers. what have your experiences been with .commers? how do you feel about advertising on yr own site? what kind of money is actually earnt from being part of a portal (which seems to be their major selling point)?
what resources are available to independent site owners? perhaps another branch of the metafilter community could be dedicated to informing people about what does happen when a site signs on to a portal business, and what the alternatives are.
posted by gusset at 5:46 PM PST - 8 comments
I am not now, nor have I ever been... a resident of Los Alamos, NM. If you know someone who
is, you might want to check out
this web site, where the New Mexico Internet Professionals Association demonstrates that they did *so* learn something by watching the hams all those years...
posted by baylink at 4:33 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Farstar International is probably one of the best examples of bad Wed design ever, but obviously that's not the guy's bag. Apparently his bag is collecting really awesome pictures of galaxies and stars and other such spacey things. The shots aren't big enough for wallpapering, but might be neat source material for designy people. (The link isn't showing up in the preview, but here it is: http://www.cliffr.com/galaxies/banner.htm)
posted by endquote at 11:08 AM PST - 9 comments
Intel royally fucks over one of its best customers. We don't ordinarily get into hardware here, but what's important about this is that this has a damned good chance of putting ASUS out of business. (And just two weeks after I put an ASUS mobo into my computer, sob. Fortunately,
mine is not one of the ones involved.)
If Intel has any honor (or wants to maintain any kind of reputation) they're going to completely cover ASUS's losses on this, which could easily top a billion dollars. I wonder if they will.
Anyone want to lay odds on when the first lawsuit gets filed? (Or who will sue whom?)
posted by Steven Den Beste at 10:14 AM PST - 5 comments
May 12
McSweeney's suspends lifetime subscriptions.
Sure hope mine got in under the wire.posted by luke at 11:14 PM PST - 2 comments
interNIC lost my business!!! To take the heat (and any possible lawsuits) off of them, they have now changed thier policy to revoke anyone's domain name at their discretion.
Phil Sbarbaro, NSI's legal counsel, offered a parallel to summarize prevailing law: "You don't own a domain name any more than you own your phone number."
I don't know about you guys, but I am definitely finding another registrar to transfer my domain names to...ASAP!
posted by EricBrooksDotCom at 9:25 PM PST - 14 comments
The user who was selling Metallica's soul has been banned by EBay for bidding on another item he/she was selling. The strange part of all of this of course, is that I recognized their username when I read this story. Why can't we delete particular items in memory like we do with files on a computer?
posted by fooljay at 3:13 PM PST - 2 comments
Macintouch is reporting that Microsoft has disbanded the IE for Mac team and is discontinuing development of IE for Mac. So much for a 5 year commitment....
posted by faisal at 1:02 PM PST - 19 comments
May 11
Watch Jason Win Live! Which acceptance speech is he going to use? My bet is on
"I'm too drunk to cry..."
The awards are being given now... right now... go... quickly!
posted by Neale at 9:10 PM PST - 19 comments
Does "Battlefield Earth" make anyone else nervous? The film has a deep connection to the church of Scientology - an organization that has seen a certain amount of controversy (though I don't wish to belittle the belief system of anyone). This connection seems to have gone unnoticed. Is there cause for concern when a heavily marketed film is surreptiously tied to an organized religion?
posted by aladfar at 7:58 PM PST - 27 comments
Array is back and covering the fires in Los Alamos, NM, with pictures and links to sites where people who want to can help.
posted by davewiner at 6:21 PM PST - 3 comments
I'm just one in a billion! With the birth of a baby girl named Asha - 'Faith' in Hindi - India's population officially hit 1 billion today, an event marked with fanfare and concern over the nation's too-rapid growth. Astha was born to Anjana and Ashok Arora at 5:05 a.m. this morning, putting India in an exclusive club with China as the only nations with populations exceeding 1 billion.
Now if any country messes with us, all we have to do is jump at the same time to wipe out the enemy. :)
Source:
yahooposted by riffola at 1:43 PM PST - 3 comments
Even Gnutella's mention on the
Nullsoft site was removed. It now shows links to Winamp, Shoutcast, and a suspicous "and more... muhahaha!" Looks like MP3 trading will have to stay underground.
posted by sonic junkie at 9:35 AM PST - 1 comments
Microsoft does it, again. The company you love to hate is at it again, this time attacking
Slashdot users. Does MS really not get it this bad? I can't belive it...
ps. The Slashdot server seems to be slashdotted itself.
posted by jedrek at 8:25 AM PST - 24 comments
Napster throws Metallica a curveball. Napster has been pointing out to its kicked-off users a certain provision of the DMCA: If an ISP kicks a user off a service for violating copyright, that user may file a counternotification if they believe they were wrongly accused. The plaintiff (Metallica) then has 10 days to respond with a lawsuit directly against that user. If they choose not to respond, the ISP must restore the account. If enough users (among the 300,000 blocked) file counternotifications, Metallica may wish it had never begun this process.
posted by daveadams at 8:09 AM PST - 12 comments
May 10
Northpoint blows chunks - how they can prepare for new technologies is beyond me. forgive me if i'm bring up a dead or overtired subject but i'm new here... I'm on a personal campaign to let the world know how crappy Northpoint DSL is... I'll try to keep this as short as possible but basically we run a small business out of our house. We're developers. Working via modem isn't really an option (especially when you've got ancient, multiplexed phone lines). When our 1-up/1-down sDSL finally started working my roommate and I didn't leave the house for a week.
Anyway, to make a long story a tad shorter, it's been down for three weeks now. we've lost several days and several thousand dollars worth of billable hours sitting on our butts waiting for technicians to show up whenever they please. I am NOT pleased, and what also really irks me is the fact that basically, Northpoint runs the DSL monopoly in my brooklyn neighborhood. We have no other choice. I'm also taking this to
dsl reports. I just really don't think DSL technology is that ready for the masses.
posted by cadence at 8:30 PM PST - 12 comments
RIAA backs new copyright law: "Instead of the rights to recordings reverting to the artists after 35 years, as current law states, recordings would be reclassified as "works for hire," with the record labels keeping the rights to them forever. " Let the flame-fest begin...
posted by novarese at 4:23 PM PST - 9 comments
Yet another threat to free speech under the guise of the
War On Drugs. Not to mention wholesale Internet censorship. And I quote "It says Internet providers and hosting services must remove any website within 48 hours after the government objects to it -- and no court order is necessary. What's next, filtering software for all data entering the United States?
posted by ambereden at 1:37 PM PST - 1 comments
Although this story doesn't sound like much, the FTC coming down on Time Warner, the effects could be great. Time Warner has agreed to ban their minimum pricing on featured new CDs, admitting that for the last seven years, these compact discs have been artificially overpriced. Do you think making CDs cheaper for the first time in years had anything to do with all the attention mp3s have been getting from consumers?
posted by mathowie at 11:50 AM PST - 5 comments
Maybe there's hope for our social lives after all. A new study (complete report
here) seems to directly contradict
February's study which claimed that the Internet makes people antisocial hermits. This new study is particularly focused on the habits of women who use the web but offers many interesting numbers that apply across gender lines,
i.e. "Nearly three-quarters of Internet users (72%) say they visited family or friends "yesterday," while 61% of nonusers report they had visited someone".
posted by Sapphireblue at 10:49 AM PST - 2 comments
Napster did it- blocked more than 317,000 names used by its subscribers, which have been identified by the hard rock band, Metallica, as allegedly infringing on the copyrights of the group's music.
posted by TuxHeDoh at 9:29 AM PST - 11 comments
May 9
Anyone know what happened to
Bloat? It went and disappeared today; the page sort of redirects to the main TheWebToday page ("sort of" because "/bloat/" stays in the URL). And the Bloat list isn't in the right-hand panel of the main page, either.
Has Sally Tenpenny gone and left? :(
posted by delfuego at 9:10 PM PST - 8 comments
Here's a follow-up to last week's thread about the whole Travolta-Kidman-Cruise-Scientology thing. Interesting counterpoint in some ways, although I think ALL the concerned parties have ulterior motives. Agenda, agenda, agenda.
posted by highindustrial at 8:38 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
The Great Blog-Off is coming- so far 8 bloggers will be madly competing for 24 hours to find the best links on the web on an as-yet-unknown topic. A lesson in futility or potentially dirty, self-absorbed fun? Discuss amongst yourselves.
posted by wisdom at 12:58 PM PST - 5 comments
(No link, but at least it's on topic :-)
Submitted for your approval: the recording industry has shot themselves in the head, forcing users to switch from Napster, which at least gave them a mechanism to charge people who wanted to pay, to the decentralized approach of Gnutella, et al, which makes that completely impossible. Opinions?
posted by baylink at 12:44 PM PST - 16 comments
Say goodbye to personal liberty if
this bill gets passed. A bill aimed at fighting drugs on and off line will limit your freedom of speech, allow police to enter your house with a warrant but not telling you what it's for. One step closer to the Police state. And one heck of a supreme court case in the wings.
posted by eljuanbobo at 12:15 PM PST - 3 comments
Cruel and unusual? "Expert witnesses testified that the brief delays give the body time to recover and increase the chance the person will feel pain."
What a crock... I wonder if the 3 year old baby he killed and dismembered felt any pain?
The punishment should fit the crime. Although the death penalty doesn't deter crime, if we punished those in the same manner that they commited the murder, then maybe criminals would think twice... then again, maybe not.
posted by da5id at 11:41 AM PST - 32 comments
Verizon Wireless is jumping on the copyright lawsuit bandwagon. This time they're picking on 2600. Me thinks they're playing with fire.
posted by Mick at 6:57 AM PST - 6 comments
May 8
Oh, ghod; here we go again. This is, so far, actually sounding promising: "News from the cross-platform deleting community". Whomever's running it, don't blow your cover.
Just add a link to me; 'k? ;-)
posted by baylink at 8:21 PM PST - 11 comments
A new era in movie piracy . These guys managed to hack Microsoft's MPEG 4 codec, and have provided a means of ripping DVD movies to this new format (check the readme file). The little program they have on their site will "update" your Windows Media Player to be able to play the new divx format.
The compression is comparable to current .avi and .mpg formats, but the image quality is near-DVD. Wow. I just watched "Disturbing Behaviour" in this new format and I must say I'm very impressed. No ugly chunky blocks like with MPEG. I dunno if I'd ever pay to see movies in the theatre again. Heh, sure sounds familiar eh? (*cough* MP3 *cough*) Looks like there might be some big new players joining the RIAA real soon. :)
posted by PWA_BadBoy at 7:01 PM PST - 4 comments
Unbelievable news nugget of the day: my friend Matt Lavallee has been slapped with a cease-and-desist order from
the Mattel Toy Corporation for his personal domain,
mattl.com. I guess no one with a name that sounds like a misspelled company is allowed to buy domains from now on? Something needs to be done, corporations do
not own the web.
posted by mathowie at 4:50 PM PST - 62 comments
In this sendmail.net piece, Greg Knauss (of Winerlog-when-it-was-good fame) asserts, among other things, that if a court subpoenas your email, and it's encrypted, that you can be tossed in jail for contempt if you don't give them the keys. Um, hello? 5th amendment? Does anyone have references either way on this one?
posted by baylink at 3:07 PM PST - 6 comments
Readers prefer text over graphics. In much more scientific news a new study by Stanford University indicates that visitors to your website are significantly more likely to read the text on your website (92%) than look at your photos (64%). What do you think? Will this change the way you design your site?
posted by shmuel at 2:51 PM PST - 4 comments
Does MySQL suck? That
isn't actually the topic of a thread at the OpenACS project site... but everyone sure *thinks* it is. :-)
OpenACS is a project to port the ArsDigita Community System off of Oracle onto PostgreSQL (of which, BTW, v7.0 ships this week). If this is your cuppa, check it out. [via /.]
posted by baylink at 12:54 PM PST - 8 comments
Is it me, or does
this smack of hypocrisy? I mean, on our money are the words "In God We Trust."
And when about to give testimony in court, we swear on the bible. I think some judges need to get their heads out of their a$$es.
posted by da5id at 11:50 AM PST - 15 comments
May 7
Digital Diaries is a photo journal of sorts, detailing the sex life of the author, Natacha Merritt. I haven't seen the book or anything, but what struck me as a little odd was the
interview they have with her on Salon. It seems like they purposefully tried to make her come off as completely ignorant with regard to photography and art in general.
posted by fil! at 3:18 PM PST - 12 comments
This has got to be the funniest thing I've ever seen from from a President. How in the
world did they get all of those people to do this and what in the hell was it for? There was no trailer on the end. Is it just a ad released to circulate among the populace to repair the lagacy of a disgraced President?
posted by fooljay at 10:15 AM PST - 9 comments
Is a woman to blame for the "ILOVEYOU" virus? Police said that the suspect was a young computer school student and apparently from a middle class family. GIRLPOWER. haha.
posted by tiaka at 9:12 AM PST - 5 comments
IMBOT is a nifty web app which lets you send a typed message to someone someone's phone. Basically a text-to-speech phone gateway.
posted by triptych at 7:52 AM PST - 6 comments
What does the MP3.com case have to do with online Music trading? Why can't the media ever actually try to understand a fairly simple issue before reporting on it. Beam-IT has nothing to do with music trading. Napster
has a website but Dre's music can only be found in the Napster application The "Love Bug virus" isn't. And "hackers" (in the non-media use of the word) aren't criminals. Ugh!!
posted by fooljay at 12:29 AM PST - 1 comments
Winerlog is dead. In an
email entitled "A serious note," sent to all editthispage members, Dave announced this evening that he is pulling the plug on the no longer funny
Winerlog:
"Today I have reached a decision that I would like you to know about and give some thought to.
... I have given this enough thought, and have decided that we're going to stop hosting the site tomorrow."
Zooooooooooom!!!!!!!posted by ericost at 12:28 AM PST - 19 comments
May 6
Written in 1982,
this sysop reminisces about the "Golden Ages" of BBS's Kind of ironic that I hear people say the same things today about the net.
If I had been smarter, I'd have used my brother's Amiga 500 to modem around a bit, but unfortunately, text files like this are about as close to that time as I can get. Amazingly enough, with everything that's online these days, these old text files are some of my favorite things to spend my time reading.
posted by lizardboy at 10:07 PM PST - 12 comments
Cybersex addiction? Here's an AP wire story that's a fairly thin re-write of a
BBC story on people becoming addicted to cybersex. Some interesting facts -- it's almost 50/50 women (how come *I* can never find them? :-). Fairly balanced, if you read the whole thing, but still a bit inflammatory.
posted by baylink at 8:35 PM PST - 7 comments
Uhoh! Leggo my napster! So I just tried to load up Napster, and it told me that my connection to the server was refused. None of the people I've talked to have been able to get on either. Could this be the end of Napster? Killed in the night while nobody was watching? The site doesn't say anything, but grrrr, I want my pirated music!
posted by benbrown at 6:19 PM PST - 14 comments
May 5
DeapLeap, Flyswat,
Octopus,
Backflip, and
Clip2 have all been out for a little while now. Personally I've checked each of them out, even used them for a day or two, but none stuck with me. Am I just old fashioned? Will these tools/sites catch on?
posted by chaz at 12:54 PM PST - 22 comments
Public embarrasment as a tool to stop child pornography trading.
The Wall of Shame highlights
Gnutella users searching and downloading kiddie porn, carrying this disclaimer: "
I'm all for freedom of data sharing but not when it comes to exploiting children. A secret gnutella server has bogus image files with very obvious names. If you search and download thesefiles from the server your IP, time of D/L and DNS will be logged.
You have been warned!"
posted by mathowie at 11:36 AM PST - 17 comments
"The Love Bug" destroys companies around the globe. Only it's NOT a bug (shaking fists at newspeople), but a virus.
posted by madglee at 9:16 AM PST - 13 comments
Personal Rant: Nationsbank (now Bank Of America) sucks. More inside.
posted by baylink at 7:44 AM PST - 31 comments
May 4
Winerlog really sucks these days. Don't you agree? I hope that the 'logger who told me he might be taking it over from the original editor, who *was* funny, has not, cause I'd hate to be dissing him. But I don't think it was him. Based on the number of clicks I've gotten from it before, and now, I guess no one *else* thinks it's funny anymore either...?
posted by baylink at 8:28 PM PST - 11 comments
The
winners of the 5K contest have been announced. Not all of my personal favorites made it into the top 10, but I think that they are all very strong entries, which is all one can hope for in contests like these.
posted by jkottke at 4:10 PM PST - 16 comments
Any of you rap? "Come up with lyrics explaining 'Why you support Napster', drop your lyrics to Public Enemy's 'Power to the People and the Beats' track, and have a chance to win $5000"
posted by ericost at 1:55 PM PST - 2 comments
Derek Powazek on Webbieworld: '[mc]: If you were starting to build a site right now with an unlimited budget, who would you ask to be on your team?'
'[dp]: Dream team? Michael Sippey on the business end, the Pyra gang doing the coding, Lance as the voice, Betty as mistress of misinformation, and those k10k baddies pushing pixels. Whoa, baby. I think my mouth just watered.'
Obvious question - who would your 'dream team' be?
posted by Markb at 9:33 AM PST - 36 comments
Metallica and Napster: The Chat. My favorite quote: "For the doubters out there, Metallica will carry on for the next 20 years," Ulrich said. "Whether you're around for the ride or not, that's your problem, not ours."
Oh,
really?
posted by baylink at 9:20 AM PST - 9 comments
Just wanted to warn everyone (no link yet) - came into work this morning and a new virus has infected our server, and we've had many of our customers call in that have already been infected. It's subject line is "iloveyou". Attached to it is a VB Script- but I assume that most of the readership here would be smart enough to not open attachments like that. But figured it warrented a warning.
posted by TuxHeDoh at 7:24 AM PST - 23 comments
May 3
GiveQuick! I'm not sure what triggered the thought, but I realized that MetaFilter - and many of the sites of MetaFilter users - weren't around when GiveQuick began, and so I thought it might be nice to (re)introduce the idea. The premise? Affiliate fees from your own site can easily be redirected to nonprofit organizations - with absolutely no administrative costs deducted from those fees. You might also consider making online purchases through a participating GiveQuick site. Just a thought.
posted by judith at 8:21 PM PST - 1 comments
"MP3.com Bands Dis Disclosure" So they're telling the world how much bread artists make . . . can someone come up with anything resembling a rational reason for this?
"'MP3.com is creating a New Music Economy. We want to illustrate the viability of this new music economy by showing the world that artists can make money via Internet distribution of music,' the company's 'Artist Support Team' wrote to complaining bands."
Sounds as if they just got out of a "power-lunch" with the boys in Redmond or something . . . .
posted by mrpalomar at 7:45 PM PST - 4 comments
The fans have spoken and Lucas has listened. Seems that Episode I is coming out on DVD after all. And Lucas says the web campaign on various sites encourage him to change his mind. How does this affect popular politics on a grander scale? And when will politicians jump on board the bandwagon?
posted by eljuanbobo at 4:03 PM PST - 3 comments
"Theft in Hollywood"... I'm strangely fascinated by this insane site. This gentleman believes that innovative ideas like "cloud", "corridor", and "storm" were stolen from his unproduced screenplay, and used in countless movies and commercials. And that's only the surface weirdness. There's much more where that came from, including secret coded messages in fortune cookies from the FBI...
posted by wiremommy at 2:12 PM PST - 1 comments
I simply don't know what to say about this site. I'm not one for theosophical discussions, but I thought that maybe somebody here would find this ... "interesting." Yeah, that's the word. Interesting. Here's a small excerpt:
You maybe academically retarded.
Academia Retards By Fact Earth Has 1 Day When Dead Still, And 4 Days Within 1 Earth Rotation, losing 3 days retards humanity.
Are you stupid and evil?
If you are ignorant of natures harmonic time cube creation, then you were taught to be stupid and evil.
Quite an interesting way to try to gain believers, no?
posted by lizardboy at 1:42 PM PST - 8 comments
And from the "No Shit, Sherlock!" file comes today's entry:
Inadequate wiring of logs and weak oversight of the building of a "complex and dangerous structure" were factors to blame for the deadly bonfire collapse at Texas A&M University last fall, an investigation commission said Tuesday.
Funny, I thought space aliens had done it, working with Elvis and Bigfoot.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 6:59 AM PST - 3 comments
Rich to get richer thanks to new technology.
The wealth of "high net-worth individuals" is set to leap by an annual 12 percent to $44.9 trillion by 2004 with technology windfalls pushing more people into the "ultra-rich" category, a Merrill Lynch and Gemini Consulting survey showed on Tuesday. posted by sonofsamiam at 5:43 AM PST - 2 comments
May 2
Bubbling Bliss - With all the heated debate and red-faced reactions around this place, I thought I'd offer a link to help calm you restless souls...
posted by Jeremy at 8:34 PM PST - 12 comments
Autobloggatio I had a good laugh not once but twice at the
bitch-slapping I underwent for the putative sin of blogging myself on Metafilter. I had a laugh even though I thought the intent was to ridicule, slag, and deride.
En tout cas, I blogged myself two different ways. On a couple of occasions, I pointed to pages I'd developed as a service to netters and bloggers
Xenoblogs (list of un-American blogs) and the
Buyer's Guide to Alternadomains. One makes no apologies for providing pages as a public service and making them known to the public.
The other case involved ruminations on love at first sight. Lacking a discussion mechanism at my blog and knowing that people would have knowledge on the topic I had no access to (breeders, for example), I posted on Metafilter. IMHO this reveals
an unserved need: Blogger et al. may make it possible to update your Weblog from any browser, but what we need is a way to automate discussion on topics blogged on individual pages.
As it stands, bloggers are like home-office workers who have to meet clients at cafés: They have to go out of house. Is it possible that, for blogging to work at a level beyond howling at the moon or a tree falling in the wilderness, we need automated tools for dialogue
at our own sites? Should Metafilter and (to a lesser degree) Webqueeries be the only collaborative Weblogs?
Clearly this would blur the distinction between blogs and mailing lists, but so what? Among mailing lists, blogs, Yahoo clubs, and instant messaging, we already have a fractured set of media of two-way and multi-way communication. A bit more fracturing ain't gonna hurt; the horse has long since bolted from the stable.
(Aside: Guestbooks work poorly in my experience. Even
Zeldman's.
Mine is a joke. In the immortal words of Bad Religion, there's no substance. A blog gives visitors
something to talk about beyond "How do you like my page?")
posted by joeclark at 4:23 PM PST - 33 comments
I wish that this page had the
complete transcript of Oprah's interview with Janet Reno, since at the very end, she said that she hoped Reno could take a little time off "and maybe not shake so much." Seeing as Reno has Parkinson's Disease, that's a pretty offensive thing to say; if Oprah didn't know this, then she should do a little more homework on her guests, and if she did, then she should be asked sometime in a live interview if she'll get a chance "to maybe stuff a little less food into her overeating mouth."
posted by delfuego at 1:34 PM PST - 4 comments
Video killed the weblogging star. Turns out ABC is casting for a tv show about the fast-moving world of online zines. But don't they know that webzines are oh-so September 1996, and weblogs are where it's at these days?
Doesn't somebody around here think it's time to migrate the weblog genre over to television? Any of you crazy New York based webloggers thinking about making the move over to a different medium?
posted by monstro at 10:21 AM PST - 30 comments
Pyra - a company built to flip? Sippey makes the most important statement and one that I have posted here before...
Both Blogger, and Pyra are great products but where is the BUSINESS MODEL.
Matt do not censor this please... it is a very valid point whether you like it or not...
posted by efader at 9:06 AM PST - 47 comments
Google appears to be
telling a story with their logo. Is this a fun and creative way to "extend their brand" (as the marcom kids like to say) or do they need to stop letting their engineers handle their logo design?
posted by jkottke at 7:45 AM PST - 22 comments
May 1
Napster users are named in the latest battle Some have admitted to being a criminal while others say who cares? Metallica sure doesn't seem like it is going to back down. The article says Metallica is scheduled to chat with fans online at the Artistsdirect.com Web site to explain its fight against Napster. So is any action going to be taken against the fans who want the music?
posted by brent at 10:53 PM PST - 4 comments
Orangina is the new orange All right, I tried to blog this and keep finding dead ends. Can someone please point me to permanent bookmarks of conversations (i.e., monologues) on A-list blogs like powazek.com and
n-list ones like psionic.nu declaring that "[colour] is the new
orange"? ¶ (At the Toronto bloggeur f2f, we engaged in ironic
discussion of the fact that our blogs are not on the A-list and never will be, though I argued that merely contributing to Metafilter gives us exposure among the A-list crowd in effect, a social-climber/arriviste argument for which I do not apologize. Miss
Emmajane wasn't present for the ironic part, however. I am familiar with the argument that one who blogs as a ploy for readership is a failure. I agree. But blogging and being the only reader is, frankly, onanistic. I speak as someone whose blog is linked to by a grand total of three others. I'm not sure there are ten people on earth who regularly read what I write. I'm OK with that, but I'd love to be more...
popular! Discuss. But give me the
orange link first.)
posted by joeclark at 9:13 PM PST - 23 comments
Next up for bid, the damn raft. That's right, the top item for sale is the
raft that Elian survived on while traveling to the United States from Cuba. Although six days are left in the auction, 112 bids have already been placed on it, with the high bid now at $10 million.
posted by bvanveen at 1:25 PM PST - 7 comments
The WTO protests... Remeber those? Well, I knew about this rumor on Friday, but didn't want to post it until I got more verification. All the police lining Wall Street and the downtown area pretty much did that this morning. It seems that the 'organizations' loosely formed to protest any kind of world economic model have decided to cause civil unrest in downtown New York; try to gain access to the NYSE and AMEX and so forth.
First, I find this whole 'movement' short sighted, and under-thought. Also, I think now participants are just trying to get into the news. Second, are these people idiots? Seattle and Washington were cheese puffs. Downtown New York is trained for terrorism. Do they really think they can operate under the radar of the security down here? I'll just say that I better be able to get in and out for lunch or I'll be pretty pissed off.
posted by rich at 6:10 AM PST - 10 comments
