Harrison's Ode to Joy
Yay! Hank's Ode to Joy. The little guy has come a long way. He's going to be playing piano in church for a long time to come...
« February 2006 | Main | April 2006 »
Yay! Hank's Ode to Joy. The little guy has come a long way. He's going to be playing piano in church for a long time to come...
Yo! All you haters out there! (This means you, Jenn and Pam.) I used my precious weekly AskMetafilter question to ask: Beach? Coast? Shore? Also: is the Puget Sound a part of the Ocean? I want my five dollars.
How to make vegan twinkies: "The biggest difference between these and regular Twinkies® is that these taste good."
Hack your brain with an iPod: "You can modify the electrical activity in your brain (the stuff that's picked up by EEG readings) by hearing sounds that mimic those waves."
Optimizing performance in Photoshop for Macintosh OS X. I have real trouble running Photoshop on my 512mb PowerBook G4: it's just too slow.
Damn interesting: the swirling vortex of doom. "Lake Peigneur is a shallow, now salt-water, lake near New Iberia, Louisiana that was the location of an unusual man-made catastrophe on 21 November 1980." [via mefi]
Delicious Days, a foodblog [via matt]
Sci-fi now: brain cells fused with computer chip. I still haven't given up my dream of immortality. It seems to me that the form this is most likely to take is something along these lines: a fusing of mind and machine, so that my consciousness lives on in a computer state. [via dave]
Maladies of the information age — I have all of these problems... [via josh]
Fun for English majors everywhere: Geoffery Chaucer hath a blog.
Awesome film re-enactments. A single guy performing classic scenes from The Shining, Willy Wonka, and more. This Princess Bride Battle of Wits scene is amazing.
The last record shop. This is a great story: this Ohio record store closed its doors in 1971, and for thirty-five years has sat untouched. What's it like to go inside now? Like walking into a time-machine.
The best sci-fi concept albums. I've been looking for science-fiction themed music lately. I'll have to check these out.
Polish science-fiction giant Stanislaw Lem died this morning. He was 84. Though Lem was not as well known as Asimov or Heinlein or any of the other "Masters", he was just as important to the genre. Lem was not a fan of traditonal science-fiction, and in his work tried to approach futuristic themes from a more humanistic, almost psychological, perspective. (And his books are funny!) His best-known work, Solaris, was twice made into a film, most recently in 2002. [Woefully out-of-date official site.]
KeepVid allows you to actually download those funny videos you find at YouTube or Google Video. Handy, eh?
Here's a confession: I love Pomme & Kelly, the two young women who are kicking ass in the finals of Google Idol. I love their enthusiasm. I love Pomme's name, though I don't know how to pronounce it. Fun stuff, if you haven't seen it yet.
Awesome solar calculator for determining the location of the sun at any given moment. (Useful for garden planning.)
US Copyright Office searchable database (primarily for works registered since 1978)
AskMe: What is Proust's longest sentence? I ♥ Proust. [via Macdaddy, who spotted this on a Friday afternoon, when I would have missed it]
Awesome! Tacqueria Nueve — read this not for the review, but for the story at the beginning of the entry. [via frykitty]
Barnes & Noble on-line buyback: sell your used books to Barnes & Noble by entereing ISBN, getting a quote, and then waiting for them to send packing information. Think I'll be using this? Damn straight, I will! I'll finally finish my book purge!
David Weinberger's NPR commentaries. Also: his "reading blogs is a time-consuming endeavor". [via rich]
The economic costs of the Iraq war: an appraisal three years after the beginning of the conflict [via gates]
Good grief — you guys have been sending me so many links lately that I don't have to do any surfing on my own. I'm just posting your stuff!
The world's longest Mad Lib [via sparky]
Apocalypse Now? Apocalypse Pooh! Disney's Winnie the Pooh with dialogue dubbed into Coppola's war masterpiece. [via lane]
Awesome! A MeFi post on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and the concept of flow. I'm already working on a weblog entry about this subject (which was introduced to me by Lisa).
Is this something we really need? Piss-controlled urinal-based games [via bb]
How to become and early riser — I'm a fairly early riser, when left to my own devices, but then so are most of the people I know
I quite like these bento boxes [via frykitty]
The Muppet Matrix [via geistweg]
Cancer can't stand the heat — Capsaicin, which makes peppers hot, can cause prostate cancer cells to kill themselves, US and Japanese researchers say. [via Dave]
Excessive Lawn Care? Writes Jeff (instead of coming into my office): "From the Lawn & Garden Tractor Forum [which he reads religiously]: Neighbor charged with shooting teen who walked on his grass
Rob's big World of Warcraft cheat sheet is an awesome resource. Too bad Joel and I are on hiatus from the game. [via airbag]
How to spot a baby conservative. This twenty-year study shows that children who were whiny and insecure tend to grow up to be conservatives and "confident, resilient, self-reliant" children tend to grow up to be liberals. [via kottke]
Google Finance is Google's stock tracking service
Downloadable D&D Cyclopedia costs $6. I just sold my physical copy on eBay. This is my single favorite version of any fantasy role-playing game. It's just sheer fun.
Here's a piece of software I can't use, but want to: ColorBurn is a 'widget' for Macintosh that displays a new color palette every day.
AskMe: How do I interview somebody? I've been wanting to interview aging family members, to get their life history, but I have no idea how to go about it.
Battle for Wesnoth is a free, turn-based strategy game with a fantasy theme for multiple platforms, including Mac.
The story of Banker John is a terrific anecdote, a little gem from AskMe.
BioBrite, sunlight clocks — I want one of these
iDupe is designed to process duplicates and dead tracks in iTunes in a smart way.
Awesome reference: Website Layout Cookbook — an illustrated reference of website layouts for web designers
Simple CSS image switcher, for future web designs
A quick mow after two days of cool, dry weather. It took me 01h 12m to mow the lawn as I listened to Motown tunes. There's slightly less lawn to mow now that we've tilled up new garden space. Also, the mower ran out of gas before I could finish the last patch; I figured it wasn't worth the trouble to finish. (Last mow: February 10th.)
"The final word is hooray!" — remembering the Iraq Invasion's Pollyana pundits
SXSW to MPAA: STFU — the battle over copyrights is in full-swing and there's a huge cognitive disconnect between consumers and the multimedia behemoths that own most of the work
Babble is an internet-wide 24-hour long boggle game, similar to the Iron Sudoku game I posted earlier [via bb]
Strange new products — there are some real gems here.
Roger Ebert's excellent commentary on the idiotic rantings of those who think Brokeback Mountain lost Best Picture because Crash was "safe". "Crash was a better film." (I checked imdb yesterday: Crash had a rating of 8.4, Brokeback had a rating of 8.0.) Both were good films, but the sour grapes attitude of the Brokeback camp is asinine.
One Bag — the art and science of travelling light. "Overpacking easily heads the list of biggest travel mistakes. Thus this Web site, offering exhaustive (some might say exhausting) detail on the art of travelling light, living for an indefinite period of time out of a single (carryon-sized) bag." [via frykitty]
U.S. eliminated from World Baseball Classic. The final four: Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Japan, and Korea (which still has not lost a game).
This in from Lynn: Denise gave birth today. Baby Chase arrived at 8lb 2oz and 21 inches long. He has all his fingers and toes and is healthy and happy to be out. Ryan is still adjusting and isn't sure what he thinks, though. Congratulations, Denise!
Iron Sudoku: competitive web-based social sudoku.
Excuse the geekiness: PHP for Beginners and a recommended PHP reading list.
The contest to boot Windows XP on the Mac is over. The winners will receive $13,854. [via the whole damn internet]
Best TV show idea EVER: Who wants to be a superhero? [via Andrew P.]
Real-Life Crash [via mefi]
For my wife: My eyeball just fell out of its socket, what should I do? Ewwww, gross!
Read the numbers on your fruit — they may be trying to tell you something.
WARNING! Rotation of the Earth plunges entire North American continent into darkness! A sign of the End Times?
Hand-made all-natural thin-mint cookies, like those sold by Girl Scouts but without the bad stuff... [via AmyJo]
Vegan (the consumer, not the alien life-form): Vee-gun or vay-gun? Veh-jun? Answer: the coiner says vee-gun, as do most vegans. Most non-vegans say vay-gun, like the alien life-form.
From RealClimate ("climate science for climate scientists") comes this debunking of Michael Crichton's anti-environmentalism crusade: Michael Crichton's State of Confusion.
Dark portrait of a 'painter of light'. What a surprise! It turns out that Thomas Kincade not only creates foul 'art', but he's an asshole, too. [via scrubbles]
One Good Thing: "It is your responsibility, as a man, to protect those who can not protect themselves. If you fail at this, you have failed as a human being. It is your duty, even when refusing to protect, or even causing the harm yourself, has no visible consequences for you ... [T]he police won't arrest you if you hurt ... kittens. But the job of human beings is to safeguard those who are smaller and do not have the rights and privileges that you yourself have. If you do harm to ... kittens, you are a failure." [via mefi]
Oscarlicious, the best Oscar party ever!
Hey! All you breeders! Here's Trixie Tracker, web-based software to track your baby's health. How often does she eat? Sleep? Poop? Track it with technology...
The single man's guide to TV dinners rates all sorts of frozen foods, finding the best so that you don't have to experience the worst.
A couple of psychology links: un-demoralize, defeating defeatism; and theories about friendship from changingminds.org. [both are from an AskMe thread I've lost...]
Kevin Kelly's excellent overview of consensus web-filters, from which a lot of this flotch is drawn.
A do-it-yourself bookbinding wiki. I've been intrigued by the notion of binding some magazines and comics, but reluctant to pay the big bucks to have it done for me. [via lifehacker]
Nice flash-based super-breakout game
A Hoist to the Heavens — "A space elevator could be the biggest thing to happen since the Stone Age, but can we build one?" I love it when science fiction creeps into real life. [via bb]
Nasty Toes — Kris and Jeff could both be on this site.
Best welbog ever: Dogs Barking in Cars. It's just videos of dogs barking in cars. Brilliant!
Trailer for the upcoming Robert Altman film, A Prairie Home Companion (in wide release 09 June 2006). Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, John C. Reilly, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, and Garrison Keillor himself. Am I there? You betcha.
Funny Wal-Mart parody: Thrall-Mart. [via barger]
How to have sex with dolphins. Words fail me. I think this is in earnest. [via barger]
Hall of mirror for cats, designed to torture the poor felines. [via bb]
Entrepreneurial proberbs — nuggets of wisdom about staring a business. I've been thinking about these topics lately, believe it or not. [via haughey]
The Aural Times — we sing the news so you don't have to [via waxy]
Oscar nominees you didn't see — In watching a film before the hype, critics get a very different picture [via kottke]
A handy chart of when U.S. works pass into the public domain
William S. Burroughs: The Now. An outgrowth of this AskMe discussion of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow (which Lisa introduced to me).
From boiling to frozen, instantaneously. This is what happens when you toss a pot of (recently) boiling water into -40c air...
Oh yeah: I forgot to mention that this year, the biggest Oscar travesty was that the mundane March of the Penguins beat out much worthier opponents (such as Murderball) for Best Documentary. Puh-lease.
MeFi: Ascaris lumbricoides — According to estimates, about 1.5 billion people — about a quarter of the earth's population — are hosts to the Ascaris lumbricoides parasitic worm.
Holy cats! Crash won best picture! Crash won best picture! You should have seen the Roth-Gates household erupt in shock. We'd written it off as Brokeback Mountain all the way. Kris sat up and gasped. I whipped around in my chair, stunned. All the nominees were great (though we haven't seen Munich yet), but we liked Crash an awful lot.
It's asinine that the Oscar acceptance speeches are trimmed to near nothingness. They're not what causes the show to run long. It's all the stupid montages. It's the constant commercial breaks. Let the winners speak! I wanted to hear the South Africa guy...
Fantastic real-life Simpsons intro [via waxy]
Pay off your credit card debt, raise a terrorist flag. This is just mind-boggling. What? Terrorists are running around paying off debt? And why the hell does Homeland Security need to know how much we're paying on our credit cards. [via Kris]
Sorry about the site issues over the past day. My webhost replace the server (pernod) on which this site is hosted, but forgot to unplug the old server or something. To quote them: "Sorry about the problems you've been having, we finally figured out that old-pernod had risen from it's grave as a zombie-server and was trying to eat the brains of new pernod. We sent an admin into the data center with some silver bullets around 3:35am this morning and he put old-pernod down for good."
This is a fun site — a list of scenes cut from Star Wars films (link is to page for original film)
Where hamburger comes from (auf Deutsch)
Two cool science-ish pages: The Oxford University Natural History Museum Charles Darwin home page and The Salt Institute (yes, it's a site about salt) [via lookit]
Theatrically released feature films with
major characters who are Mormons — because everyone wants to know. [via lookit]
I suppose most of you saw the funny Chuck Norris facts that went around the internet a few weeks ago. Even funnier are these anti-Chuck Norris facts!
Brad Pitt to star in film adaptation of Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow? I'm not sure this is a good idea.
A showdown I've been waiting for: Andy at waxy has been served a cease-and-desist from Bill Cosby's lawayers for hosting House of Cosbys, a series of fan-made parody shorts. Andy has the balls and the brains to not just roll over, and he plans to fight this. In this age of psycho-IP laws and enforcement, this is the sort of thing we need to see. Go Andy!
I am a benevolent experiencer. Fine, fine: I get it already. I am an extrovert. I will quit claiming to be an introvert. Sheesh. (You can take the personal DNA test here.)
Advice to students: write by hand. I think this is good advice for everyone.
Video: Lazy Muncie, a take-off on SNL's "Lazy Monday"
Video: Sarah Vowell on The Daily Show. Vowell, regarding Bush's inauguration: "The failure of my pessimistic imagination at that moment boggles my mind."