MetaFilter

If the Postal Service was a private sector business, it would have filed for bankruptcy and utilized the reorganization process to restructure its labor agreements to reflect the new financial reality

If the Postal Service was a private sector business, people in rural Montana wouldn't have mail delivery. It's not a private sector business. We demand things of it that we would never demand of private sector businesses, because it provides things that are necessary and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by craichead at 5:24 PM on August 11, 2011

"There is no right or wrong answer, the purpose of the work is the processes the two participants go through to understand each other’s perceptions and to work together to find a state of agreement."
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:27 PM on August 9, 2011

what is this i don't even

*waves*

Every so often I try to find a BeBox and hit the site from it just to make pb all smiley.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:35 PM on August 3, 2011

I'd be down for an early-evening beverage some time this week. Wednesday or Friday would be my personal preferences, but don't let that deter you from selecting another evening that works better for other folks. Other than that, some suggestions for your trip. Higher-end foodie stuff in Portland: Le Pigeon is fucking fantastic, and rightfully has a national reputation for it. It's sort of french-meets-local-northwest, with an emphasis on non-traditional meats, especially in the... [more]
posted to MeFi IRL by dersins at 12:41 PM on July 18, 2011

Once in a while I'll remove an obvious double front page post

And when you do I bet you're all "Fuck yeah! update threads set deleted = 't', reason = 'HA HA HA DOUBLE LOLZ' where id = 123456;"

I'm jealous.
posted to MetaTalk by A dead Quaker at 5:22 PM on July 15, 2011

No, I will beg pb for bitcoins.

And someone did, no shit, steal my bucket the other day. It's the bucket we use to water our young tree in the front yard median strip; it has holes in the bottom for the water to trickle out of.

Someone stole my bucket that has holes in it.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 11:48 AM on July 15, 2011

I'm struggling how to add to the wiki but I'll read up and suggest over there.

You'll need to do a few things, none of which are too complicated though they can seem that way sometimes.

- register for an account
- go to this page once you are logged in
- you will see a little "edit" tab at the top of the page, but it will probably be easier to go to the specific section which you can also... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:27 AM on June 29, 2011

Oregonian, born and raised (Corvallis, to be precise). Western Oregonians are just as prejudiced against Californians as Eastern Oregonians are, just for different reasons. In Eastern Oregon, they hate Californians because they're hippies. Here in the Willamette Valley, we hate Californians because they're rich shallow yuppies who have abandoned their hippie principles.

Really, the antipathy mostly comes from the huge wave of Californian retirees that moved up here in... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by dialetheia at 6:30 PM on June 27, 2011

It appears that running MetaFilter involves mostly riding bikes and eating lunch.
posted to MetaTalk by SomeTrickPony at 10:37 AM on June 27, 2011

thecjm: If he thought that digitizing something was transformative enough to qualify for fair use, why did he bother licensing the chiptune tracks?

The U.S. Copyright Act of 1909 allows anyone the right to record a cover song, as long as you pay a standard mechanical license, which I happily did; the "fair use" doctrine simply doesn't apply at all. I didn't try to license the photo, because I never believed (and still... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by waxpancake at 10:46 AM on June 23, 2011

Newsfilter: Panic Seizes London, Birmingham, Carlisle, Dublin, Dundee, Humberside; Reports of DJ Hangings.
posted to MetaTalk by Admiral Haddock at 8:26 AM on June 22, 2011

Also, it's grow. Grow a brain.

YES, COOP! IT SURE DOES LOOK LIKE RAIN!
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:49 PM on June 14, 2011

shakespeherian: "For the record, it turns out that every flag has to be manually cleared by Team Mod in a process that I can only assume involves arcane machinations, which is why overflagging is annoying."

♫ Every flag is sacred,
Every flag is great.
If a flag is wasted,
The Mods get quite irate..... ♪
posted to MetaTalk by zarq at 7:24 AM on June 14, 2011

Why do only things that are wrong get repeated?

Because nothing short enough and assertive enough to make for a punchy soundbite has room for the kind of qualifying and on-the-other-handing that a balanced explanation of a complex topic requires, and the sociophsychological bias toward conciseness (an indirect result of the constraints of e.g. human short term memory and information processing facilities) excuses and even encourages imperfect but... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 6:58 AM on May 18, 2011

Cornvalley for Corvallis, OR
posted to Ask MetaFilter by illenion at 11:20 AM on April 18, 2011

I'm hard at work on beta2. Feedback welcome.

I figure the MeFi crowd will be more interested than others in the genesis of the colors.

I had both the yellow and blue key hues in mind when I began this months ago. The blue is beautiful and terrifying to me when I use it at about 96% opacity. I have a very strong, long term fear of death by drowning and this correlates to what I imagine is the green blue of deep ocean water, filled with the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by i blame your mother at 7:59 PM on April 13, 2011

the Great Taters Mystery.

Now is as good a time to mention this as any. I got an email a while back from the gal who posted that anon thread. I've paraphrased a little bit but not much. The "taters" thing was, I guess, kind of like a code word my husband used "porn". He was emailing me from work the day I asked the question and didn't want his IT department flagging his email for any reason. His wife (me) was having a what we now know was a panic... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:11 PM on April 14, 2011

Note at self: to appear clever, change the preposition.
posted to MetaTalk by maudlin at 12:00 PM on April 1, 2011

I've argued that the ultimate endpoint for DRM is the pay-per-swing hammer.

This isn't as unlikely as it seems. Ball bearings in the hammer could be arranged, via electromagnetism, to configurations which either take away much of the force of the blow or leave it somehow off-center, or a dead-on impact. Ubiquitous wireless access will finally mean that microtransactions are more feasible. Press your fob against the hammer and, once your account has been verified, we... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by adipocere at 5:46 AM on February 26, 2011

Will future generations actually give a damn about a show that is (20, 50, whatever) years old?

Show an 10yr old boy Abbott and Costello's "Who's On First". That the A&C routine is close to 80 yrs old, and it is descended from an earlier comedy routine that was a staple on the burlesque circuit in the 19th century.

That said, old TV shows are not watchable as comedies but rather as artifacts of culture that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Pastabagel at 6:59 AM on March 9, 2011

The . key loads more comments in the "new" Twitter. Here at work, it takes a second or two to work. I swear I saw that written somewhere, but I can't find it now in the help documentation.
posted to MetaTalk by ctmf at 9:37 AM on February 25, 2011

I've secretly spent the last 8 years of my life carefully etching MetaFilter into stone tablets in Hittite Cuneiform complete with an intentional Rosetta stone as a key and translation guide, but then I hit thread 9622 and that infamous mushroom thread.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to etch an animated GIF of a pissing elephant into a stone tablet?
posted to MetaTalk by loquacious at 7:59 PM on February 17, 2011

The sky is the most interesting color of blue today.

Wait, where are you? Here the sky is the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
posted to MetaTalk by XMLicious at 2:55 PM on February 12, 2011

It was us. We broke MeFi. The domain was manually upgraded to Enterprise level service and we didn't flip a few switches in the database (i.e. "start serving DNS on this domain *now*)

MeFi should now be carried on 4 anycast constellations spread over 25 nameservers worldwide (used to be on 9).

easyDNS apologizes profusely for breaking metafilter.

- mark (easyDNS guy)
posted to MetaTalk by StuntPope at 3:21 PM on February 12, 2011

Yeah, if my Bugzilla-fu is correct, this is bug #231389 which has been open since 2004 and should finally be fixed in the upcoming Firefox 4. Good to know there's a workaround for older versions.
posted to MetaTalk by teraflop at 10:56 AM on February 10, 2011

I learned that some people stand up to wipe.

Also, over the past ten years or so MeFi has proven to be more generally valuable to me, from an educational and informative standpoint, than the twelve semesters I spent on campus.
posted to MetaTalk by carsonb at 11:57 AM on February 8, 2011

Okie doke, here we go:

A list of things linked to on Amazon in AskMe comments. 7MB html file.

Notes:

- As far as I can tell, amazon products are identified by a ten-digit alphanumeric string. I searched for links that contained "amazon" and a string matching "/[A-Z0-9]/". Hopefully, this caught all the legit product links while excluding chaff like search results and such.

-... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 6:50 PM on January 31, 2011

"He looks like a shriner snowman!"

For years I was obsessed and confused by the Japanese version of the snowman: always with a red fez on top. Why in the name of Tarvu were Japanese snowmen shriners?

Eventually, after much discussion with a friend in Japan, the truth came out: that's not a fez, that's a fire bucket.

Apparently most Japanese homes and neighborhoods have red fire buckets lying... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cabel at 5:07 PM on October 11, 2008

Mobile Safari is the new IE.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:23 AM on January 27, 2011

One handy thing to note is it's possible to add javascript “bookmarklets” as bookmarks on the iPhone, the process of adding a “reload page” bookmarklet is a little complicated but not too bad, it isn't possibly simply add the bookmark directly so the procedure is as follows:
Note: These instructions are for iOS but the same process should work in any mobile browser that allows javascript bookmarks.

On your phone add a new bookmark, to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by nfg at 10:00 AM on January 9, 2011

Here's the story of where I learned to love customer service.

It was 2004 and I was going to SXSW. Having recently moved to Oregon, there were no direct flights from Portland to Austin, but I found various choices of cities to stopover in. I picked out SF knowing the chances were very high that I would know half a dozen people on the flight if I passed through there compared to say, Denver or Houston.

My first leg was uneventful and as soon as I... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 3:40 PM on January 6, 2011

hexatron: "So think of the end of delicious as an early Christmas present from the Past-Is-Dead fairy."

Absolutely correct, if by past you mean future, and by fairy you mean witch.

jfuller sums up my sentiments: Delicious is the only aggregator of things-strangers-find-interesting (other than Metafilter, I guess) that ever held my interest after the first couple of weeks. Plus, I have some friends who... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by mullingitover at 8:01 PM on December 16, 2010

me: pb, I am out of gas money. Can you please fix that?
pb: ok, your gas tank is full now but I teleported you just in case.
me: I'm single.
pb: ok, you should have a spouse now.

*wakes up from dream*
posted to MetaTalk by special-k at 10:20 PM on December 14, 2010

This is what I pictured when I read "IRL alerts".


FADE IN

INT. DESK IN CUBICLE

A man sits at a keyboard. He is working
diligently, but not particularly passionately.

INT. ELEVATOR DOORS

Elevator doors open, revealing Jessamyn

INT. GENERIC CUBICLE FARM

Jessamyn walks between the cubicles.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Plutor at 12:44 PM on December 9, 2010

Productive during insomnia much?
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 12:36 PM on December 8, 2010

This is a suboptimal solution to an already solved problem: Nobody is going to memorize a list of popular names for use in an anonymous post, and using arbitrary names just confuses everybody. You need to make like a cryptologist, and use canonical person variables, the well-known Alice and Bob.
posted to MetaTalk by Dr Dracator at 3:40 AM on December 7, 2010

So I've gone ahead and done a little anonymous data dump of how the gender field is used on metafilter. Here's the data.

Presentation is very simple: I sorted everything by how often it occurred, stripping case out so we didn't end up with separate counts for e.g. "Male" vs. "male", but otherwise the data is untouched. File presents the various answers people provided in order of how often they were used, so you've got all the relatively common ones... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:55 AM on November 30, 2010

I decided to come clean with the food bank.

My email: You guys are my local charity this year. Someone on the internet asked if I would do a dramatic [and to them, amusing] reading of a web page full of insults [nominally funny nicknames you have for your friends that are sort of nicknames and sort of insults] and they'd make a donation to my favorite charity. I did the reading and recorded it and then a lot of other people decided to make donations as well, as thanks.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:49 PM on November 17, 2010

This is the best post ever. :)
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 9:20 AM on November 8, 2010

Ooh, do tell!

I was fortunate enough in college to find a handful of professors whom I would follow anywhere and from whom I would take any class, because the energy and love of knowledge that they brought to task could make any subject interesting and instructive. One of these professors was in the media studies department, a youngish guy who used to teach creative writing before moving on to film and communications. It was from him that I learned... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by shakespeherian at 7:26 AM on November 5, 2010

Here is my tea-related anecdote:

I was at a music festival last year and Fleet Foxes were headlining the second day. Partway through the set they pause to retune, and, this being the kind of music festival where the only things you can buy from the "shop" are organic locally sourced ale and copies of The Guardian, a gentle, respectful silence falls over the crowd.

Now, Robin Pecknold has brought with him onstage a... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by fight or flight at 4:00 PM on October 25, 2010

I spent the entirety of my adolescence on forums. In 2003, when I joined my first forum (the sadly departed rpg2knet), I was 13 and not yet out of middle school. Before the Internet I'd mainly stuck to fantasy/SF novels, video games, and Dungeons & Dragons. Escapism. If you're reading this you probably know why.

I joined 2knet because I wanted to learn how to make video games. But I think I realized pretty quickly I cared more about the forum than I cared about the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Rory Marinich at 12:06 AM on October 21, 2010

Failure to employ William Carlos Williams meter. Flag on the play.

SIGH. I'll take a do-over.

THIS IS JUST TO SAY

I have eaten
the cheeks
that were on
the babyface

and which
you were probably
saving
for Christmas card photos

Forgive me
they were delicious
so smooshy
and so nom nom nom
posted to MetaTalk by padraigin at 11:38 AM on October 4, 2010

Here's The Deck's Jim Coudal talking with John Gruber about how their advertising works. It's not really based on click-throughs as other systems are.
posted to MetaTalk by mikepop at 10:44 AM on October 1, 2010

Via e-mail, I would just ignore it completely; act as though you never received it at all. If she calls looking for her shawl/money, you could pull out an old Miss Manners favorite- I"m sorry, that won't be possible".
posted to Ask MetaFilter by ThePinkSuperhero at 8:46 AM on September 27, 2010

In his journals in 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:I hold that a wise man will write nothing but that which is known only to himself and that he will not produce his truth until it is imperatively demanded by the exigencies of the conversation which has arrived at that point. So is the shrine and pedestal ready, so he produces his statue and fills the eye.That 1912 edition of the journals, edited by Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes glosses this as "Write What You Know" in... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Jahaza at 10:10 AM on September 24, 2010 marked best answer

Wait, wait, wait. The total hardware used in delivering to us our beloved MetaFilter includes a whole lot more than just the MetaFilter infrastructure itself.

I mean first we have these massive continent-spanning power grids with hundreds or even thousands of enormous generators spinning 24x7, all perfectly synchronized and controlled to keep the whole system stable, in turn powered by everything from windmills to nuclear reactions.

And then you... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by FishBike at 6:04 PM on September 22, 2010

Bond was a character that people in his era could identify with:

Think about how that works in the post war era. The office dwelling accountant/lawyer/ad man/salesman has an expense account. This covers some lunches at counters with clients , or maybe a few nice dinners. He flirts with the secretaries and receptionists and sometimes sleeps with them. He travels on business, perhaps from his suburb into Chicago, or from Chicago to Cleveland, or San Francisco to LA.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by wuwei at 1:27 AM on July 7, 2010

those scripts help because they make the interface simple, clean, and lets me do what I want to do without the stress of too much information

Yup. It's really great they exist.

A little pushback, though: While the subjectivity of experiences (what's clean, what's simple, what's too much) are what make the feed reading space interesting it also made it very difficult to design for well. One person's clean is another's "I... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by massless at 5:51 PM on September 11, 2010

There was a BBC series adapted from All Creatures Great and Small, though qualifying that as "sitcom" is a bit of a stretch.

The DoS thing is weird. The business plan responsible for fucking up the site this morning is something like this:

1. Startup (a place called 80legs) charges clients for targeted, aggressive custom crawling jobs.
2. 80legs pays another company, Plura Processing, to handle their crawling work.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:50 PM on August 4, 2010