There is nothing I hate more.

Nothing?? What about the sitcom plot when someone thinks her friends forgot her birthday when they were really just planning a surprise party? ("Surprise!!")
posted to MetaTalk by salvia at 9:48 AM on September 28, 2008

Sadly, the climate is not good for an IPO this week.
posted to MetaFilter by b1tr0t at 7:35 PM on September 17, 2008

wow, hadjiboy, too bad there's not a thread where people were talking about that very subject.

oh.
posted to MetaTalk by niles at 11:02 PM on September 13, 2008

This is probably not true in your case, but speaking from experience in my own past, sometimes the advice that makes me the most angry, that seems to strike a nerve, that would make me grit my teeth, is the advice that most hits home. It's because consciously, or unconsciously even, I would recognize that the advisor was absolutely right which meant that I would have to change. Recognizing that change within ourselves is the true path to problem resolution is hard because it takes effort to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by netbros at 12:57 AM on September 14, 2008

This is shitty, shitty news. As a teen I loved Infinite Jest like a fat kid loves Heinlein. And A Supposedly Fun Thing made me actually consider a cruise. Awful.¹



[1] I refuse to let him go out with a dot, so here's a footnote.
posted to MetaFilter by bonaldi at 5:53 PM on September 13, 2008

I just saw this last night: Seth MacFarlane takes on Super Mario Brothers.
posted to MetaFilter by callmejay at 3:03 PM on September 11, 2008

I need to re-read "The Whore of Mensa."
posted to MetaFilter by potsmokinghippieoverlord at 2:05 PM on September 7, 2008

GROW A HIDE.
posted to MetaTalk by loquacious at 5:04 PM on August 24, 2008

I vote in favor of "$0 Freeloaders" and "$5 Suckers", respectively.
posted to MetaTalk by Malor at 9:39 AM on August 24, 2008

I've found Google's APIs to be lacking. (Flickr's API is far groovier. e.g. This JSON and jquery example is so elegant.)

The flash app you linked to actually just runs the query on Google (well actually, on a cache of the google page) which returns a big hunk of javascript and HTML.

The flash app just searches for the string "dyn.Img" and then extracts the components of the javascript. e.g. on the "tourist" question, this came... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by kamelhoecker at 7:07 AM on August 11, 2008 marked best answer

And all the threads it leads you to are winding.
And all the links that light the way are blinding.
There are many things that I would like to post to blue,
But I don't know how

I said maybe
You're gonna be the one who faves me?
But overall -
Always wonderful.
posted to MetaTalk by UbuRoivas at 6:59 PM on July 28, 2008

De.liciou.s shines for discovery. Once you tag a page, you can see how other people have described it, and expand out from there to find other related sites.

The great irony of Yahoo swallowing d.elicious. was that Yahoo started out as a human-managed set of links before abandoning all to the mighty spider. .delicious then (effectively) became a crowdsourced version of the original Yahoo, providing the quality filter that was lacking from their own search offering. I'm... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by davemee at 11:30 PM on July 31, 2008

NOOOOOO

(seven points)
posted to MetaFilter by The Card Cheat at 8:08 AM on July 29, 2008

Critical Mass was one of the things that got me back into cycling, having put down my racer of teenage years almost as soon as I got myself a drivers licence.

Initially, it seemed like a fun way to indulge in a leftie protest against more motorways & cars (despite having a licence & a car, I would walk or take public transport 95% of the time), and riding through city streets safely amongst a bunch of cyclists was an exhilarating experience. I used to actually... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by UbuRoivas at 5:56 PM on July 29, 2008

At every single Critical Mass ride I've ever seen (dozens), going back ten years in DC and elsewhere (though I haven't been to one in SF or NYC), the same thing happens.

That guy shows up. He is loud and bossy. He exploits the anarchic non-organization to his own ends, he takes over. He steers the course of the ride, with his megaphone if he is prepared: he uses it to start inane chants and to yell at people (cyclists and motorists both) for perceived... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by blasdelf at 6:27 PM on July 29, 2008

tits mcgee writes "Wait, we're talking about $8.34 here, Orthogonality. You'd deny the people of Kansas a shot at decent representation just because Cory Doctorow linked to Mr. Tevis' website?"

Yes. Cory Doctorow represents all that is wrong with the internets, and contemporary science fiction. Free Violet Blue, man!

Why should I care more about educating the children of Kansas about science,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by orthogonality at 5:43 PM on July 16, 2008

HAI GUYZ I GOT SOME HOT GRIZTS RIGHT HER
posted to MetaFilter by cavalier at 4:21 AM on July 25, 2008

IT'S A TRIP!
posted to MetaFilter by anthill at 5:51 AM on July 25, 2008

It is time now to talk about The Wheel.

Growing up, my parents had obviously read all the studies about praise and punishment and their effect on a developing child. My father came from a distant, reserved family and was the middle of three brothers. My mother grew up in a close-knit, church going family as an older sister. He went to gradschool for plasma physics and she was the secretary that typed up his thesis.

They obviously disagreed on how... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by robocop is bleeding at 9:15 AM on February 13, 2007

Maybe you cant hack sex.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:58 PM on June 27, 2008

Sigh… Here you go, TheOnlyCoolTim (or maybe cortex or WPW).
posted to MetaTalk by hattifattener at 3:17 PM on June 28, 2008

I want to buy one of these prints. I'm going to send him a check for $21,320,000.00 (Twenty-one million, three hundred and twenty thousand U.S. dollars), to be held in escrow while he sends me the print and the remaining balance.
posted to MetaFilter by optovox at 5:44 PM on June 27, 2008

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
To: Jim Allchin; Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH); Steve Jobs (FUXXOR); Mom
Subject: FW: FW: FW: FW: Bill Gates Is Sharing His Fortune!

I am forwarding this because the person who sent it to me is a good friend and does not send me junk. Microsoft and AOL are now the largest Internet company and in an... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by katillathehun at 3:35 PM on June 26, 2008

Another fantastic bit of Bill Gates lore -- Bill Gates and Petals Around the Rose:It was June 1977, the very early days of the microcomputer industry. The founders of Microsoft, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, were amongst those heading home to Albuquerque from the National Computer Conference in Dallas. In the September/October 1977 edition of "Personal Computing" magazine, Henry Gilroy provided the following report on the introduction of the Petals Around the Rose... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by peeedro at 8:32 PM on June 26, 2008

Twitter is yet another way people fail to come to grips with the fact that the universe really doesn't care about what you're doing right now.
posted to MetaFilter by Justinian at 10:34 PM on June 24, 2008

this
doesn't
WORK AT ALL
posted to MetaFilter by swift at 1:03 PM on June 22, 2008

Oh you think YOU'RE hardcore? I currently have suitcase pre-processing 40,000 fonts I just purchased, Acrobat is batch outputting a 12 page brochure with 25 localization versions, Renamer4Mac is renaming 135,000 stock image files and tagging them by color scheme, Illustrator is pathfinder->subtracting 8 150MB+ vector image files at once, FireFox is downloading about 1,000 hi res screen caps from a Croatian video game development house (FTP client? Thpptt! YouSendIt!), Quicken is downloading... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Brocktoon at 5:58 PM on June 8, 2008

Could we have a button at the top of obit threads that people could click instead of leaving a "." in the thread? Then we could easily tally them and see who wins the most popular dead person award.
posted to MetaTalk by blue_beetle at 9:20 PM on June 13, 2008

With apologies to the Black Eyed Peas

Hey, how's about apologizing to us?
posted to MetaFilter by dersins at 4:01 PM on June 13, 2008

Fuck. That's it.

NO ONE ON THE INTERNET CAN EVER USE THAT NIEMÖLLER BIT EVER AGAIN. IT'S PLAYED. IT'S THROUGH. FUCKING STOP IT, OR I'LL MOTHERFUCKING COME FOR YOU.
posted to MetaFilter by mr_roboto at 7:36 PM on June 12, 2008

Being strongly vaginal bothers some men. The word itself makes some men uncomfortable.

Vagina. They don't like hearing it and find it difficult to say whereas without batting an eye a man will refer to his dick or his rod or his Johnson.
posted to MetaFilter by rokusan at 1:54 AM on June 9, 2008

Well, my Treo 650 did actually cure AIDS, but it didn't do it with a lot of panache, so...

Yes, I'll be making the Switch.
posted to MetaFilter by LordSludge at 3:01 PM on June 9, 2008

Defect Report:

Steps to Reproduce:
Pollute the teachings of Jesus Christ with centuries of agenda-based interpretation.

Intended Result:
"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone"

Actual Result:
Pious I-Told-You-So pay service to torment the unsaved.
posted to MetaFilter by CynicalKnight at 10:30 AM on June 3, 2008

The reason for this mess is that the the method for making mp3's is patented in the US. As such, anyone distributing a program that converts sound files like wav to mp3 in the US has to pay the patent holder a fee for every copy distributed.

As such, the program that does the actual maths behind the scene creating an mp3, LAME, has to be hosted outside the US, separate to any US hosted program that does the rest of the interface. It's also one of the reasons windows can... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by ArkhanJG at 2:30 PM on June 2, 2008

I don't want to tackle a learning curve on an obselete or soon-to-be-obsolete language. There's Delphi...

Some people might disagree with me but I think Delphi's time has passed. It was always kind of a niche language to begin with, and from what I can tell most people have moved on.

Compiler/interpreter should be reasonably fast, as I intend to code some heavy processing functions. Unless VB has changed in the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by burnmp3s at 2:43 PM on May 31, 2008

You forgot another possible scenario. Sometimes identical twins are born and the parents divorce soom thereafter and each takes one of the twins and raises her without knowledge of the other. It's happened twice to my knowledge.

Luckily they are usually reunited at camp.
posted to MetaFilter by Bonzai at 7:26 AM on June 2, 2008

When filling in the hole in the garden, they should bury a laminated note that starts, "So you've decided to put in a pond, have you?"
posted to MetaFilter by steef at 6:24 PM on May 31, 2008

God, I would love to have some wannabe rock star singer do background vocals for me like this. Just day to day stuff, like being in a meeting:

Me: Yeah, I think if we implement these changes, we will cut our call volume considerably.

Röck Dude: ♫ Cut down those calls through ♪chan-gezzz♪ Woo!♫

Me: We are going to need to establish a some new training classes for some of the existing employees.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by quin at 7:45 AM on May 29, 2008

If you lived in sin with your partner for years outside of the holy bonds of matrimony, I don't think you should judge everyone else in the country as being some sort of deviant. To a large number of the populace, you're as much a sinner as the rest of us - fornication is fornication.

Now that we have that out of the way, let me tell you that yes: there are young people in America who care about "lasting commitment and relationship values.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Optimus Chyme at 1:29 AM on May 28, 2008

There were no "good old days". People everywhere are obsessed with sex, just as they have always been; there are famous rakes and debauched women, bawdy houses and sexually explicit entertainments, just as there have always been; young men of every social class discuss women in vulgar terms, and girls compete for their attention with sexual favors - and there's always been someone scandalized and horrified by all of it. There have been cyclical "free love" movements since the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by nicwolff at 1:57 AM on May 28, 2008 marked best answer

I just don't get the fixed gear thing at all. It took me all of 10 minutes to read in the manual about how to adjust the derailleur on my 21 speed and I rode it for 2 years pretty much every day without having to mess with it again. It really isn't hard. And as far as "fixed gear culture", I'm reading the Sheldon Brown's site and shit like " When you ride a fixed gear, you feel a closer communion with your bike and with the road. There is a purity and simplicity to the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by c13 at 10:11 PM on May 25, 2008

Re: The coolness of bike messengers.

I did this for a bit. It sucked. It's cool to earn money by riding my bicycle around the city, but IT'S HARD WORK RIDING FROM 9AM TO 5PM and I ended up amazingly dirty and too tired to go to hip rock and roll shows like cool kids. Aside from hipsters, no one really appreciates bike messengers even though they keep the lame fashion industry and the lame stock market industry and the lame legal system and the lame real estate market... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by fuq at 10:26 PM on May 25, 2008

Maybe now I can finally figure out how to actually play E.T. Oh wait. No, I can't.
posted to MetaFilter by SemioticRobotic at 6:42 AM on May 26, 2008

Oh what you need a new flag just to protect your precious feelings from "trolls"? I guess that is fine if you are too sensitive to man up and have a conversation with the grown folks. Let me guess, you are a woman right?

Hold on. I've got to run. I am getting my baby circumcised and I have to drop the cat off for declawing on my way there.

Also fat people need to stop eating so much pie, Bush is great, accept Jesus or go to hell where... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by ND¢ at 12:06 PM on May 22, 2008

We tell people we met on eharmony, but we really met on bondage.com. Now we're getting married.

He is not Bruce Lee or Antonio Banderas, and I am no supermodel. He's above-average attractiveness but not GQ material, and I'm average at best. Unless YOU are setting your sights exclusively on really hot women, as an average looking guy you should have little trouble at least getting dates, if not meeting Ms. Right.
posted to Ask Metafilter by desjardins at 6:18 PM on May 17, 2008

I'd just like to express my joy at the dozens of people who paid $5 to have the right to express their opinion that it's silly to waste $10 on the internets.
posted to MetaFilter by Project F at 10:29 AM on May 12, 2008

This fixes Youtube.
posted to MetaTalk by dmd at 12:44 PM on March 25, 2008

"THE SITE YOU HAVE JUST LINKED TO IS CRACKED.COM - YOU ARE NOW BANNED FROM METAFILTER FOREVER."
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 10:56 AM on March 25, 2008

It's whatever you want it to be.

It's everything and nothing.

It says, "I love this post!" or "This made me laugh!"

It says, "This is so ignorant and irritating I will mark it so I can show all my friends how stupid it is."

It says, "Here's where I left off so I can go back and read the rest later."

It giveth and it taketh away.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Fuzzy Skinner at 5:37 AM on March 24, 2008

Were the five passengers a brain, a beauty, a jock, a criminal, and a basketcase? And, despite their various backgrounds and prejudices, did they come to appreciate each others' perspectives and break free from their preconceptions? Did any of them fall in love?

If so, you can hardly call the flight a waste.
posted to MetaFilter by Iridic at 4:58 PM on March 6, 2008