Simpsons fans, click here now. 🙂
(via digg)
live action simpson intro
art
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Mar 042006
Mar 032006
Spaceguard UK – Latest News: “The rock, 2004 VD17, is about 500 metres (yards) long and has a mass of nearly a billion tonnes, which — if it were to impact — would deliver 10,000 megatonnes of energy, equivalent to all the world’s nuclear weapons.
Spotted on November 27 2004, VD 17 was swiftly identified as rock that potentially crossed Earth’s orbit, with a 1 in 3,000 risk of collision on May 4 2102.
Further observations and calculations have prompted the risk on that day to be upgraded to ‘a bit less than 1 in 1,000,’ said NASA Near-Earth Object (NEO) expert David Morrison in an emailed circular.”
One in a thousand just isn’t that remote of a chance, given an impact (no pun intended) of that magnitude. The generation currently toddling around may still be alive … heck, if Ray Kurzweil is right, we may still be alive.
(Via Warren Ellis.)
and here’s another (4) thing(s)
miscellany
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Feb 282006
I’m as surprised as the next that I seem to be the first of Garrett’s tagees to succumb to this chain-bloggery calling itself a meme.
I feel like a hungover conventioneer on a Las Vegas morning when I say “I usually don’t do that sort of thing”, but here goes:
4 jobs I’ve had:
- illicit chewing gum retail (middle school)
- subway wage slave (before it had the “sandwich artist” cachet)
- busboy in a fancy restaurant (a very worthwhile experience)
- teaching assistant
4 movies I can watch repeatedly:
4 TV shows I enjoy (love is too strong):
- Twin Peaks (“she’s dead! wrapped in plastic”)
- The Simpsons (Due to a long period of complete TV ignorance following the Twin Peaks cancellation, I didn’t get on board until around season six, but I’ve made up for it in the intervening decade.)
- The Sopranos
- Six Feet Under
4 places I’ve vacationed:
4 of my favorite dishes:
Oh, this is hard. I like eating…
- seafood stews of most varieties (clam chowder, bouillabaisse, Tutto Pasta‘s spaghetti alla frutti di mare)
- risotto with sage, gorgonzola, and tomato (this is much more a favorite of Amy’s, but it has grown on me)
- thanksgiving dinner (the food is pretty unremarkable, but the meal shared with friends is what makes the eating worthwhile)
- good thin-crust pizza (ideally with tomatoes, mushrooms, peppers, and pepperoni)
4 sites I visit daily:
4 places I’d rather be right now:
- graduate school (really? I’m not sure…)
- Italy (on vacation. soon.)
- “the hills” (in general. this is the code A and I share for anyplace where this isn’t considered news and this doesn’t pass for entertainment)
- (I’m actually pretty happy with things, at least those things I could change.)
4 others to join in with their sets o’ four:
- stealth-blogging Amy (now outed!)
- Rich (I dare you to answer via dashblog entries…)
- Josh Friess (ask Josh how I “stopped” him from retiring early on the entrepreneurial brilliance of hosted blogging <grin>)
- the blogless Matt D. O. (you know who you are. Answer in someone’s comment field…)
if there is any justice, Herb Powell is owed royalties
miscellany, tech
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Feb 032006
The “Why Cry Baby” crying baby analyzer is mentioned in Salon’s piece on insanely mega-yuppie new parent nutjobs, via Babygadget.
I love kids, gadgets, kids with gadgets, and gadgets for kids. I’ll confess, I did imagine trying to prototype something like this when the little guy was really little. But come on… this needs feedback and some sort of training mechanism to really work…. 😉 [well, at least to be interesting… this thing doesn’t even have a USB interface!].
Olivo Barbieri’s ’tilt-shift lens’ aerial photos are neat.
art
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Jan 242006
The picture at the right is the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas, as seen through Olivo Barbieri’s lens. He uses a helicopter and a tilt-shift lens (I don’t fully understand how that works, but some of you might).
The result is very cool, and quite other-worldly, like a quiet calm doppleganger of our reality. More.
Via Futurismic.
Jan 202006
Google’s new “mobilizer” application, found here, presents a clutter-free version of any URL you give it. The idea is to make sites more viewable on mobile devices, and it looks promising.
To test, I grabbed the last page I could recall that had been really impossible to usefully access from my treo. I’ve just this week ended an epic support issue with my local telco (TDS Metrocom) — the long story short: I called on Dec 29 2005 to report that the access panel outside my house had no dial tone on one of my lines, and after countless calls on my part and failed promises on theirs, finally had a working line on Jan 16, 2006. In the early part of that time (before I’d basically given up any hope of timely resolution), I found myself out on a Saturday adventure with the family, but wanting to call their tech support for an update. After about 15 minutes, I gave up trying to get their tech support phone number from their website via my phone.
Without a doubt, this sort of inaccessibility severely indicts the design quality of the target website. Regardless, it’s hardly uncommon. So, back to the subject at hand: how would my attempt have faired with google mobilizer?
| via mobilizer | native | |
|---|---|---|
| main page: | 0.47KB | 21.98KB |
| forms: | 1 | 1 |
| links: | 21 | 49 |
| images: | 12 | 20 |
Obviously this doesn’t solve all of the potential problems one encounters on a limited browser platform — for example, I’m not sure that the phone number I needed is actually on their website. Still, the improvement is marked, and at worst this would’ve let me give up and get back to watching trains with my toddler more quickly.
Nov 142005
Drudge reports that Honeywell is developing an unmanned aerial drone for domestic law enforcement use.
Robot helicopters have been mentioned here before, and in an admittedly positive light. Those were cool robot helicopters, though; using them for law enforcement raises entirely different questions … 🙂
“Police shut down a suburban shopping mall for several hours Saturday after screaming fans of the boy band B5 rushed the stage during a free concert.
Five people suffered minor injuries, police said.
More than 2,000 fans, mostly teenage girls, had converged on Brookdale Center mall for the show, sponsored by the local Radio Disney station, KDIZ-AM. The band had only made it to the second song when the chaos broke out and girls began rushing the stage.”
Seventy police responded. Order was restored. Minnesota is safe.
(photo credit due to crazyfrog.org)
Nov 122005
Nov 122005
Former Phish bassist Mike Gordon has a new album with guitarist Leo Kottke. Sixty-Six Steps is really nice — even if you weren’t much of a phish fan, I’d recommend giving it a listen.
My favorite surprise is a great Yamar. One of my bigger dissapointments after 19 or so phish concerts is never getting to see them play Yamar (including one frustratingly close call in which it opened a show to which we arrived late). This is some consolation, at least.
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