03/29/08

The top five reasons why "the customer is always right" is wrong. I like the idea that a company should be as ready to fire bad customers as they are to fire bad employees. (link)

Video of Charlie Rose's conversation with chef Thomas Keller the other night. Good stuff as always, although I'm disappointed about how completely he's embraced the idea of the chef as empire-tender rather than as a person who cooks. I realized the ...

Philippe Starck says that design is dead and that he's retiring. Says Starck: I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact. Everything I designed was unnecessary. I will definitely give up in two years' time. I want to do something ...

A solar furnace is a structure used to harness the rays of the sun in order to produce high temperatures. This is achieved by using a curved mirror (or an array of mirrors) acting as a parabolic reflector to concentrate light (Insolation) on to a foc ...

Related to yesterday's post about online media archives, Footnote is compiling an gigantic archive of historical documents and photos and invites you to do the same...your shoebox + the world's archives = let's make history together. For example, the ...

Greg Storey : Love. - You guys don't understand, the Astley card had to be played. Tags : Meme

Greg Storey : Hillary in the House. - Who's the lead singer? I thought Lucille Ball was dead? Tags : Politics

wearehugh : sneetchalizer | code | unix stuff | badcomputer Tags : audio flac mp3 tools

deusx : Alkulukuja Paskova Karhu - "The Prime Number Shitting Bear" Tags : bears math primenumbers

deusx : delicious lj glue - "I am developing a page that will allow LJ users to better take advantage of the del.icio.us daily posting feature" Tags : delicious hacks livejournal metablogging

cool

Matt's moving on...

"If I had a man around the house, I bet I could find all sorts of opportunities to masturbate." Heh.

"We will send your friend or enemy a healthy helping of some of the nastiest, stinkiest, fresh shit packages you have ever seen. We have several varieties of shit that we can send, including a special shit of the month."

"I still don’t see what adding video brings to Flickr."

The Sorting Algorithm Demo (495)

Easy Photo Wall on a Shoestringwire Budget » Curbly | DIY Design Community « Keywords: photos, home, decoration, wall (226)

Lifehacker, the Productivity and Software Guide (221)

(Note: this post exists in both written and audio form. They’re more or less the same thing, so take your pick. I elaborate a bit more in the audio, since I have a tendency to ramble, but I used the written post as an outline for the audio po ...

SaveTheDevelopers.org :: Making The Web A Better Place: Dear God, please save us. Say no to IE 6! Our current campaign focuses on assisting users in upgrading their Internet Explorer 6 web browser. This campaign will result in former IE 6 users h ...

Slate V and MediaCurves.com played the latest video from Internet star Obama Girl for 440 voters and recorded their real-time reactions. It seems Barack's No. 1 fan may not be helping him very much.

It seems like not too long ago The Sims 2 came out. I loved the series back in The Sims 1, but The Sims 2 never really felt the same.

StealMyWiFi writes "C-NET.co.uk has a lighthearted look at ten of the best obsolete ports. The biggest surprise is that C-NET claims Firewire is obsolete, which will come as a surprise to the millions of people worldwide who are still using it, espec ...

NewScientist is reporting that while the strength of the tether has long been considered the main problem in building a space elevator, a new study suggests that a dangerous wobbling problem may also be a serious obstacle. "Previous studies have note ...

tonyreadsnews writes "Usually, 'thinking of the children' is a starting point to impose limitations on video games and internet in general. For once, a study requested by UK's Prime Minister seems to be a bit more objective then most. In the Executiv ...

Chris Blanc writes "Mozilla Lab's push is to blur the edges of the browser, to make it both more tightly integrated with the computer it's running on, and also more hooked into Web services. So extended, the browser becomes an even more powerful and ...

stonyandcher writes to share that the Church of Scientology has come under fire for some items on their recently launched video channel. Most notably, claims have been leveled that dignitaries in one of their videos were faked and at least one of the ...

sean_nestor writes to mention that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz took a bit of time recently to comment on last week's announcement that Sun Microsystems would be partnering closely with the NSA for security research surrounding OpenSolaris. Rather than ...

President Bush declared on Friday that Iraq stands at a defining moment as it struggles to put down heavily armed Shiite militias in new flare-ups of violence that threaten to undercut security gains and sway his decision about U.S. troop drawdowns.

Barack Obama got a surprise boost in the last big state of the long Democratic campaign Friday with an endorsement from Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey Jr., while another Obama supporter sought to nudge Hillary Rodham Clinton out of the race.

U.S. forces stepped deeper Friday into the Iraqi government's fight to cripple Shiite militias, launching airstrikes in the southern city of Basra and firing a missile into the main Shiite stronghold in Baghdad.

Warning lights hover over the snoozing patients in Riley Hospital for Children's neonatal intensive care unit, ready to flash whenever sound levels creep beyond normal conversation.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey warned Friday that the huge profits generated from piracy and counterfeiting are increasingly flowing into the coffers of terrorist groups.

Tiffany Rubin had all but given up hope of ever seeing her abducted child again when she received an anonymous tip through her MySpace page. Someone had spotted her 7-year-old son and her ex-boyfriend in South Korea.

Petra the black swan has been reunited with her beloved swan-shaped paddleboat after a failed romance with a real bird.

A man nearly crushed inside a garbage truck told police he can't recall how he ended up inside a trash bin — and then the truck — after a night of drinking with friends.

A fast-food cook and Seattle Seahawks fan has been accused of spitting on a hamburger ordered by a man wearing Pittsburgh Steelers attire.

HAMMOND, Indiana (Reuters) - Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton on Friday vowed to stay in the White House race, rejecting a fellow senator's suggestion that she pull out to improve their party's chances in November.

This is an e-mail that I wrote to my friend, Hollywood animator Sari Gennis. I wrote it while I was a graduate student in Physics at UC Santa Cruz, and was also working as a programmer. I was manic when I wrote this - I meant to write just a ...

The US president calls the fight between Iraqi forces and militias in Basra "a defining moment" for Iraq.

I’m delighted to say that online bookstores are shipping copies of Here Comes Everybody today, and that it has gotten several terrific notices in the blogosphere: Cory Doctorow:Clay’s book makes sense of the way that groups are using the ...

We found several clips today from the early '90s porn artifact "County Line," and even though they all seem to be related to each other a quick glance at the evidence shows a complete lack of coherence or narrative flow. So it's just like watching th ...

Omnisio lets you paste in the URL of a YouTube video (among other video sites) and then crop the time slider to a specific part. You can then add more videos if you want, and publish the result to show to others -- without even registering at the sit ...

Google has this bit in their terms of service: You may not use the Services [defined as "Google's products, software, services and web sites"] and may not accept the Terms if ... you are not of legal age to form a binding contract with Google ...

The top five reasons why "the customer is always right" is wrong. I like the idea that a company should be as ready to fire bad customers as they are to fire bad employees. (link)

No entries this week. I've had a miserable flu since Sunday that's made it impossible to think straight. I'll see you Monday, Internet.

Milk Gone Wild! From the fine folks at PETA. Be sure to watch the video (it's possibly NSFW, definitely weird).

Jim Copp and Ed Brown "conjured a lunatic land" for children in the late 50s and early 60s using three Ampex mono recorders, a large group of instruments (music and singing by Copp), their own voices, and hundreds of pieces of recording tap ...

Inspired by this earlier post, I thought it was time to formally introduce people to Rocky's Boots. Created in 1982 by Warren Robinett, Rocky's Boots was intended to teach digital logic to elementary-school kids. It was a sort of spiritual sequel (i ...

Kamikase Squirrels / Mission Impossible Squirrel / Pope Squirrel / Twirl a Squirrel / Drunk Squirrel / Dead Squirrel

I agree that it'd be good to have someone with some clue about urban issues, and not just for the sake of cities. A lot of city stuff is really everywhere stuff but it just becomes acutely obvious in densely populated urban areas, while elsewhere de ...

I know I shouldn't disagree with the mothership, but they're operating under this delusion that money spent on war should actually count or something.

Something Awful eschews humor in this week's Comedy Goldmine for gibbering madness. "I know you were coming here expecting to laugh at the Comedy Goldmine this week. Well, you're screwed....

"It's the Bizaro Ethel Merman." "She's like a garbage bag full of fighting Muppets back from the dentist." "It's like the little exorcist girl stung by bees." "The first time...

A short film in which a Paris Hilton-esque socialite is revealed to be the architect of her own loopy attempts at notoriety, and who will go as far as she...

It was a friendly meeting today, but not without the usual competitive spirit between the Mozilla camp and the Microsoft camp. — — Mozilla engineering VP, Mike Schroepfer explained that Microsoft tends to implement technology already app ...

Here's how old Scripting News is, in years. — — double (clock.now () - date ("4/ 1/ 97")) / (60*60*24*365.25) — — 10.98654578 — — Pretty close to 11! — — Hot dam. — —

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You're about to see the mother of all flamewars on internet groups where web developers hang out. It'll make the Battle of Stalingrad look like that time your sister-in-law stormed out of afternoon tea at your grandmother's and wrapped the Must ...

The summer internships at Fog Creek are already full, but Seth Godin, my marketing rebbe, has marketing internships. Paid! “The idea is to find a diverse group of motivated young people who want to join together to create a few really neat proj ...

look just like mommy, and grandma!  

one note: they're all relative instead of absolute numbers  

amazing that he can stand still long enough to blow glass  

one of my favorite new sites just got better; looks robust  

hypnotic video of immersion baptisms  

great journalism, completely debunks last week's Puffy/ Tupac expose  

this Gawker article captured all the photos before they were pulled  

Dustin sez, "This is a great picture of an old radiator cap taken in 1938. Looks like the car may belong to one of Coop's long lost relatives." Link (Thanks, Dustin!)...

Wil sez, "My friend's wife made this awesome Cthulhu cake that was so awesome, I had to share it with BB readers. Also, awesome. Cake fhtagn!" Here is Cthulhu rising from the oceans, using a convenient little island with a tower on it to climb up. Th ...

Julio Diaz, a social worker, was robbed at knifepoint by a teenaged mugger in the Bronx. Instead of getting angry or scared, he offered the kid his coat, and struck up a friendship: As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, "Hey, wait a minute. ...

This is a request from the CC team. If you've got any stories, please let us know!Flickr Re-Use Stories Calling all Flickr photographers and CC-licensors - we are compiling a list of interesting and/ or unique stories of re-use of CC-licensed photos ...

I'm at the Berkman-Annenberg Media Re:Public conference. Manuel Castells (AKA The Manual Castells) leads off. [Note: Live blogging. In fact, I'm doing this while on stage as one of the presenters who follows Manuel. Reader beware. I get lots of thin ...

Usually we opt to pitch you funny blankets from Etsy, but today we thought we'd present a product for the perusal of our readership with, how shall we say this politely, a job more expendable income. By Danish manufacturer Kvadrat, the Pixel Couch (t ...

You think the Army of Two demo is coming April 1st? Hahahaha. Fooled you! But seriously, the Army of Two demo really is coming April 1st to Xbox 360 (sorry PS3 owners) and it will include both the training tutorial and the entire first level of the g ...

Red, yellow and blue cars are on their way in a hurry to the Brooklyn side of the bridge.

AFP

Solar thermal really does seem to be enjoying a major renaissance right now – from $1.24 billion plants in Spain, to claims that the technology could provide 90% of US electricy needs around the clock, it's not hard to see why folks might be inte ...

Come back, Dennis Kucinich, all is forgiven and we need you. At least you had a grasp of the true nature of coal and did not pander to anyone about it. Hillary is running off about mountaintop removal and now promising coal plants: Right away I have ...

As Mozilla prepares to celebrate its tenth anniversary on Monday, March 31st, Wired.com spoke with one of the browser maker's longest-term employees. Community development director Asa Dotzler tells us how Firefox was born, how the tough decisions ab ...