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October 30
October 29
Pursuitwatch.com is a typical American piece of fecal matter. It's a news service dealing totally in high speed chases. And now, one can get chase news sent directly to one's alphanumeric pager. It's a symbol of the general rise of 'dumbth'. If you don't know what dumbth is, I cover it a little in my
column for the thirtieth of October. The article is really about some crazy stuff going on in Britain, but it's a good read.
MattDabrowski.com is better than Pursuitwatch.com any day.
posted by tdecius at 8:53 PM PST - 1 comments
Today is Friday, the day I get paid, which also happens to be impulse buying day! A few minutes ago, I bought a couple cool things for my palm pilot. Concept Kitchen has a
rubber bumper-type case for the palm, which should be arriving next week. The other impulse buy was
SimCity for the Palm. Thanks to Atelier's cool downloadable distribution, I'm playing SimCity right now.
posted by mathowie at 4:14 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
If you haven't heard of Napster yet, check it out.
This is a killer tool, a combination mp3 player and file transfer client/server. While you play mp3s, other users can download songs from your library, while you do the same from their libraries. This is a great idea but must be a nightmare for the recording industry. This could be a really cool community tool, if everyone is generous with their music.
posted by mathowie at 2:28 PM PST - 1 comments
October 28
Get inspiration for your next web project...
Coolhomepages.com is a gem of a site. It presents 'cool' sites based on different categories, like 'ultra hip' or 'clean' and displays the sites with thumnail images so you can scan for a site of your liking. I find it very useful in jumpstarting the creative juices when you are re-designing your own site for the 100th time :)
posted by triptych at 11:16 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Salon is running a piece on how the internet has ruined San Francisco.
I have to say I agree 100%. I've lived in Southern California all my life and S.F. has historically been a much cooler, mellower place that I looked forward to visiting. But over the past couple of years, I've found myself travelling up there once every couple months, and every time I go it's busier, more crowded, and everyone is in a bigger hurry. For me, the mystique of S.F. is totally gone. The dotcom riches have ruined the place. [found at
Camworld]
posted by mathowie at 2:07 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Responsive Face
'The eventual goal of this research is to give computer/human interfaces the ability to represent the subtleties we take for granted in face to face communication, so that they can function as agents for an emotional point of view.'
Addictive and fascinating.
posted by davewiner at 7:38 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
October 27
October 26
The Hamster Dance may be fun, but I like the
Jesus Dance. The background sound is amusing, 'My Plastic Jesus'.
posted by tdecius at 10:15 AM PST - 2 comments
If you don't know about the
iPic server, you should. And if you do, you should check out the site again. The iPic server is the world's smallest Web server. It contains a few files on a chip the size of a nickel. If this isn't sassy, I don't know what is.
posted by tdecius at 10:14 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
October 25
October 24
So much for paying for voice mail.
FoneICQ is an awesome service. You just call their number, 1-800-FONEICQ, punch in the UIN of your message's recipient, and they get a Real Audio sound clip in their e-mail within 10 minutes.
posted by tdecius at 6:43 PM PST - 1 comments
October 22
I'm saying this from experience: avoid Interland.com's web hosting at all costs. These guys are one of the nation's largest web hosting operations and every minute I've had to deal with them has been painful. Their uptime is terrible, their NT servers are so unreliable that your site may be down more than it is up on an average day, and when I asked their tech support staff about it, they basically said '
if you want better uptime, upgrade to a higher account.' That type of arrogance and customer disservice shouldn't be rewarded by new customers. Avoid these people at all costs.
posted by mathowie at 12:56 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Do you *really* want to ask Tech Support a stupid question?
I've heard my fair share of silly, stupid questions, and most of the tech support questions I've been asked could have been answered by the user reading the manual. Apparently this tech support guy couldn't take it anymore and stabbed his coworker for asking a question, then was shot by police. Nuts.
posted by mathowie at 12:46 PM PST - 1 comments
October 21
October 20
A few months ago, I told a friend I discovered a band called
Moxy Fruvous through some mp3s on a hotline server. I'd never heard them on the radio in this country and was suprised to find out they had
6 recent albums. Well this week my friend said 'hey remember that obscure band you like? They're playing he
Troubador next week.' To which I replied: 'They're not obscure, they're Canadian!'
posted by mathowie at 1:16 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
October 19
PIXELTIME is neat, albeit hard to understand quickly. Basically, it's a gallery of icon art, i.e. art made from those very small images of Windows fame. There are some neat things up here.
posted by tdecius at 5:04 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Wow, never pay more than necessary for anything!
This is a nutty little app, it automatically queries dozens of ecommerce sites while you surf. The downside is someone might be convinced to buy a book after reading several reviews at Amazon, but their RUSure app would tell them that it's 2 bucks cheaper at
Buy.com, so they'd get it there. Before a shopper had to do this deliberately, now it's done automatically. This app could be as big as ICQ, since the founders of both companies are family.
posted by mathowie at 1:00 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
October 18
I went to Catholic high school for two years, and being the incredibly geeky type, I wondered, given the Pope is the Bishop of Rome, how he ran the whole church and his provincial diocese. This
site is a good snippet that answers the question, for those people like me who have academic interests in theology.
posted by tdecius at 12:49 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Recently, MTV had a special on 'hackers'
(scroll down to last weeks show), but apparently the people they contacted for background info didn't give them an interesting enough story.
So the guys made one up. The guy behind it all says he was just trying to make MTV's journalists look bad, but that's restating the obvious. Of course MTV is clueless and goes to any length to create a story. The worst part is that MTV isn't alone in this, every news outlet does this. The nightly news looks the way it does for the same reasons, it's all about entertainment.
posted by mathowie at 10:32 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
October 17
October 15
October 14
It looks like maybe this eBooks thing is going to be for real.
Microsoft is jumping on the bandwagon for eBooks including the release of a reader that utilizes the ClearType technology. Personally, I've converted a few novels from the Gutenburg project over to the Palm format and read them on my pilot. It's ok, but gets tiresome after a while (only 4 or 5 words fit in a single line of the palm text readers)
posted by mathowie at 3:52 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
October 13
Although this is dated,
it is still interesting. The long-story-short is someone left some spam out on a plate to see if would ever decompose. This person also left out other items for comparison. Check out the archived experiments for past projects and notes.
posted by mathowie at 12:29 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Jeez,
these people need to get a clue. Children should be encouraged to read anything they want, and as much as they please. So what if Harry Potter books have wizards and witches in them? Even kids can tell fact from fiction...when are the adults going to figure that out?
posted by mathowie at 12:24 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
October 12
If one wants to register a domain, one should go to
Joker. No, that price, twenty bucks a year, isn't a joke, nor are their any more catches than with InterNIC. And you thought ICANN and de-regulation wouldn't do anything good.
posted by tdecius at 1:15 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
October 11
Find the distance between two American telephone exchanges with the
Interoffice Mileage Calculator. Find the distance between any two cities in the world with
How Far Is It?. The latter also has a full database of American and Canadian towns, so I know that my hometown is 4864 miles from Athens, Greece, and 768 miles from Athens, Georgia.
posted by tdecius at 9:32 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
The world's oldest corporation, the
Hudson's Bay Company, has a great introduction to its three-hundred seventy years of history on the site. Once hailed as the largest colonial power other than Russia, England, and the U.S., the Bay has generally left furs and is now the Sears of Canada.
posted by tdecius at 9:28 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Any red-blooded American who has taken high school chemistry in the last fifteen years or so, or any red-blooded American who watchs public television, has heard of the august Professor
Roald Hoffmann and his
World of Chemistry television series. Professor Hoffmann does theoretical chemistry at Cornell, and is a damn cool guy.
posted by tdecius at 9:21 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
October 10
October 9
Those who have read Neal Stephenson's
Cryptonomicon may know about
Counterpane They're the company that Neal consulted about the crypto in the book, including the now famous solitaire code.
posted by tdecius at 11:13 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
This new inforrmational site
actually looks like an interesting place to read about all sorts of topics, BUT they told me about through multiple copies of spam. When are companies going to get it? Spam is worse than a telemarketer waking you up at 6am on a Saturday! Oh yeah, they're also destined to fail because they are charging for their information (*cough* Slate.com *cough*). Good luck infostry!
posted by mathowie at 9:22 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
October 8
Affinia seems like a cool dot-com. They're making money setting up storefronts from other people, and matching vendors with affiliate sites.
posted by tdecius at 6:50 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
October 7
I suppose it was only a matter of time until someone built the
Internet Adult Film Database. It's actually pretty funny, you can search by title (sadly, they didn't have an entry for 'Jurassic Pork') or you can search for any specific person. The db will even tell you how many tatoos and piercings each performer has. Wacky stuff.
posted by mathowie at 3:56 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
October 6
Slate did a neat
survey of beers, in attempt to get the best beer for one's buck. This should be required material in every American high school. ;)
posted by tdecius at 4:18 PM PST - 2 comments
BetaNews is an interesting resource. It keeps track of beta releases.
I love the beta testing. I wear my Dr. Solomon's shirt all the time. :)
posted by tdecius at 4:16 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
October 5
APB Online is also interesting if one's into that kind of think. When I'm feeling blue, I just stop here, and think of how lucky I am to live in a middle class town.
posted by tdecius at 8:19 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
October 4
Holy crap! Check out Adobe's new redesign.
I love the dhtml, it looks a lot like a flash-based site, but without requiring a plugin. Although their sloppy coding creates a sideways scrollbar when they don't really need one. I like the navigation and love how selected areas "pop out" of the nav bar to indicate where you are in the site.
posted by mathowie at 2:23 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
October 3
October 1
Today, I was searching for some stock art photos at
photodisc. I needed an image of someone programming a computer, and in that search
I found this picture. The words associated with it were all variations of 'hacker' but I was surprised that I didn't see 'leather and flashlight fetish' in the keywords. And by the way, don't you think a hacker would know how to type correctly?
posted by mathowie at 3:50 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
