03/31/08

How uncanny is her valley? Very. Never has one of those Flash move-your-mouse-around applets been this creepy. (link)

This a bit old but the dude that runs the stylish cameron i/ o site (who is coincidentially named Cameron) built a trumpet-like bell for the iPhone out of a used toilet paper tube. I wanted to listen to my music in the shower but the iPhone's speake ...

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 ...

adamrg : Cash-strapped Clinton fails to pay bills - If she had paid off the $8.7 million in unpaid bills she reported as debt and had not loaned her campaign $5 million, the cash she would have had available at the end of last month to spend on telev ...

deusx : Cafe Witness: 5 Tips for Freelancers - "Thus, please allow my failures to pave the way for your success -- and my own." Tags : freelance tips work

deusx : Charlie Jade Heads to SCI FI - Slice of SciFi - "SCI FI Channel has acquired the U.S. broadcast rights to the science-fiction series "Charlie Jade" from Park Entertainment." Tags : awesome charliejade scifi

Simon Willison : Google's excanvas only works in quirks mode for IE8 - Google's excanvas only works in quirks mode for IE8. IE8 in act-as-IE8 mode disables VML but doesn't implement canvas, so there's currently no 2D drawing method for that ...

Simon Willison : Exposing calendar events using iCalendar in Django - Exposing calendar events using iCalendar in Django. A simple abstraction around the vobject Python library.

hmm...

interesting...

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.

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)

Measuring †˜Completeness' to Encourage Action: David Gammel points out something I’ve always thought was brilliant. This strikes me as a very subtle yet effective way to get your users to provide more information about themselves in thei ...

(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 ...

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.

Jamie found a NYTimes op-ed by a grad student and a professor from Cornell, outlining some research they did into alternate baseball universes. The goal was to find out how unlikely in fact was Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak, played out in the ...

An anonymous reader sends us to ZeroPaid, which seems to be the only site in English to have picked up a story out of France involving Sony and piracy. Except this time the shoe is on the other foot. The small software company PointDev learned that S ...

The New Yorker is running a long and thoughtful piece by Eric Alterman on the death and life of the American newspaper. It's not news that newspapers are dying, but the acceleration of the process in the last few years is startling: "Independent, pub ...

Earlier this week, we discussed Adobe's beta launch of Photoshop Express, a free, online version of the popular image editing software. However, as a number of readers pointed out, the terms of use included language which granted Adobe a wide range o ...

LuckyLefty01 writes "I'm 21, going to college, and working part time doing odd jobs like math tutoring. In the past nine months or so, I've discovered and taken to programming (so far mostly C/ C++/ Obj-C). I am now looking seriously at something in ...

alphadogg points out a story about 11-year-old Jon Penn, who took over control of a 60-computer school network in Alabama after the old administrator suddenly left. Penn provides technical support, selects software, and teaches his classmates about c ...

In a possible turning point in the recent upsurge in violence, Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his Shiite militiamen off the streets Sunday but called on the government to stop its raids against his followers.

Debra Starks has heard the calls for Hillary Rodham Clinton to quit the presidential race, and she's not happy about it.

Dith Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from that country's murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979 became the subject of the award-winning film "The Killing Fields," died Sunday. He was ...

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.

Four days a week Todd Matthews earns $11.50 an hour working for an automotive parts supplier. He punches in at 4:15 a.m., punches out nearly 11 hours later, then drives half a mile to his little beige house on a hill where, in the distance, he can gl ...

Islam has surpassed Roman Catholicism as the world's largest religion, the Vatican newspaper said Sunday.

Studded tires work best on snowy and icy roads across the nation's snowbelt, but highway officials wince at the damage they cause when roads are dry. Promoters of a new type of winter tire believe they've solved the problem with some James Bond-style ...

Police say a pastor who was reported missing from his home in western New York has been found at an Ohio strip club.

William M. Bowen woke up after a night of drinking with friends and realized he was inside a commercial trash-collection truck full of waste.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Supporters of Barack Obama backed away on Sunday from calls for Hillary Clinton to drop out of the presidential race as Democrats faced a long summer of bitter fighting to win the party's White House nomination.

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 ...

Election observers in Zimbabwe warn that "delays" in announcing official results risk fuelling tension.

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 ...

And this we know: when you've got the word "Gigantic" on a porn boxcover, the consumer believes the adjective modifies body parts. This week's contest might be a little Mad Libs-y, but what is the most incongruous thing you can think of that would fo ...

Google China has a new homepage, as the screenshot illustrates, showing more discoverable icons similar to other Google homepages in Asia. However, I don't know if this new one is the default for Chinese users at google.cn (where I don't see it), or ...

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 ...

How uncanny is her valley? Very. Never has one of those Flash move-your-mouse-around applets been this creepy. (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.

He laughs and leaves. I sit alone in the room, staring at the walls, just about every inch of which is covered with more memorabilia: a photo of him with Lennon, a photo of the Beatles circa 1965, a photo of Muddy Waters.... After maybe five minutes, ...

Odd Crop Prices Defy Economics. For finance and economics geeks: Could a drugstore sell two identical tubes of toothpaste, and charge 50 cents more for one of them? Of course not. But, in effect, exactly that has been happening, repeatedly and myste ...

Samurai-Sword Maker's Reactor Monopoly May Cool Nuclear Revival There stands the only plant in the world...capable of producing the central part of a nuclear reactor's containment vessel in a single piece, reducing the risk of a radiation leak. From ...

Longtime MAD magazine artist Al Jaffee (now 87 years old!) created the fold-in as a unique contribution to the MAD-style of satirical humor. Now the NYT has the comprehensive history online in interactive form.

I could really use the gift of freedom fries right about now.

I assume this is excellent news for Rudy Giuliani.BAGHDAD, March 30 -- Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr Sunday ordered his armed militia to get off the streets in Basra and to cooperate with the government to restore security. In exchange, he asked the ...

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...

Over on Twitter I am unceremoniously blocking all tech industry superdelegates. — — Let me explain. — — Imagine if the tech industry was the Democratic Party, then the insider's insiders would be the superdelegates. The people ...

Like everyone else (or so it seems) I have been following the Democratic nominating process, even though we're in hiatus now between the early March primaries and the Pennsylvania primary in mid-late April. — — I'm an Obama supporter, so ...

.... Officially tired of airports # 15:19 Another plane # 20:29 Luggage taking forever to unload. Couple standing next to me needs to get a room. They look sweet though. # 20:44 Finally on the shuttle to go home. # 22:14 Home. Watching Lilo & ...

.... The links provided are to assist in the integration of Web 2.0 skills and SMART Boards in your classroom.   Authored by oneminutetech. Hosted by Edublogs. / / addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Foneminutetech.edublogs.org%2F2008%2F03%2F29 ...

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  

BB pal Vann Hall spotted this great headline at The Register. It's no joke, either. Walter L Wagner and Luis Sancho fear that firing up the new Large Hadron Collider could create a black hole that might suck the Earth into a parallel universe. So the ...

There are many things to like about this 1972 Ideal toy commercial: 1. The Jean-Jacques Perrey background music. 2. The black set. 3. The announcer's voice. 4. The name of the toy: Bing Bang Boing. 5. The toy itself, which is a brightly-colorted DIY ...

I've got no idea what the story is with this awesome CGI Flash woman, except that she appears to have been created by a Brazilian design firm, and that she has made every person I've shown her to say, "Oh. My. God." Link (via Kottke)...

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 ...

Paul Gillin has posted draft chapters of his new book, Secrets of Social Marketing, for our enjoyment and, more important, our commentary. I haven't taken a look at them yet, but I like to see people practicing what they preach, and Paul's The New In ...

On the heels of Leigh Alexander musing about the potential for 'a Wii for grownups', Jack Patrick Rodgers takes on the Wii's online functionality (or lack thereof, in his estimation). It's clunky, he says, and while he wouldn't expect Xbox Live-esqu ...

All of us have our stories about game-related interactions with non-gamers, some of them undoubtedly on the negative side of things ('I hate video games,' someone rather snottily told me at a party a few weeks ago, and that's certainly on the mild en ...

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

AFP

After pointing out the bizarre, "eco-friendly" claims of businesses trying to rent college books to students via the internet, I recently came across a site which does, in fact, make eco-sense. It's not geared specifically towards college book ...

James Howard Kunstler tells it like it is. (Image courtesy of Dean Terry via Flickr.) Never short on biting critique, James Howard Kunstler is one of the more outrageous commentators on the American built environment. Since authoring the seminal boo ...

French filmmaker Freres-Hueon creates an homage to the light cycle sequence in Tron, the '82 sci-fi cult classic that follows the adventures of a computer programmer who gets digitized by a laser.