As if this site weren't already one big egotistical nightmare, IMDB lets you play one degree of Dan Lyke . (and Alex is wrong... I hate my mouse ).
Venice-based Genuflex introduces air conditioned confessional , complete with leather upholstery, walnut trim, and mood lighting.
Elton John criticised for male strippers dressed as cub scouts :
A spokesman for the Scout Association, Britain's best known boys' club, said: "We are disappointed a star of Elton John's caliber participated in something that was so lacking in taste."
But when I turn my monitor upside down and shake it... Online Etch A Sketch (requires Java).
Everyone's pointing to this Salon article on John Lions and source code as literature . If you're not a techie and don't see beauty in well crafted code it might be for you, but for those of us who've been around a while the article really doesn't add much new.
Are professional sports not cerebral enough for you? You might trying managing in The Fantasy Graphics League :
The concept is simple. You have 400 Quatloos. Instead of wagering it on the newcomer, you are to hire up to twelve computer graphics researchers to produce papers for SIGGRAPH 00 (000?). You have around 473 (well, exactly 473) previous SIGGRAPH authors to choose from; in fact, all SIGGRAPH technical paper authors from 1995 through 1999.
Matt points out the difference an "S" can make . My family is the one with neither "S" or the huge shipping company.
Ain't It Cool reviews Toy Story 2 :
This is a 5 star film in a 4 star world. This is the popcorn machine from which that Popcorn Tub is filled. This is the entire side of beef in that world of four doggie bones. This isn't two thumbs up, this is both hands raised to the sky while bowing on your hands and knees before all that I hold true and dear.
Remember Sarah Flannery, the 16 year old who built some encryption algorithms that were supposed to give the RSA algorithm a run for its money? The latest RISKS digest has an update, her paper is at http://cryptome.org/flannery-cp.htm
Toy Story 2 blows away the box office . $80.75M over the five day. Third biggest opening of any film ever, behind Fandom Menace and Geriatric Park: The Lost World. Go stock!
Marylaine takes on Norman Rockwell and other guiding myths in My Word's Worth
The moron aka gamequeen99_00 has struck again, this time trying to use "butterbly" at flutterby.com as their Yahoo! Games e-mail address. Nature isn't harsh enough if these folks are making it past puberty.
The Toy Story 2 reviews page has a lot more links. Summary, it totally rocks, visuals better than A Bug's Life and a story better than the first one. Go see it again and again.
Jay passes along Britney's Spheres .
There are lots of versions of that Harpers article on David Hahn I mentioned below on the web, unfortunately all of them appear to be truncated or otherwise incomplete. The full article on dead trees is worth it.
New Hampshire Magazine has an article on the IBOT 3000: Wheelchair of the future , capable of dealing with stairs and other irregular terrain, and able to elevate the user to normal human heights for access to shelves and counters and such. Unfortunately right now half of the battery capacity is devoted to running the three Pentiums which coordinate this thing.
Congratulations to the folks at OpenTV for their recent IPO.
A new Mouthorgan
My mom sent me an article from the November '98 Harper's Magazine about David Hahn, a high schooler in Golf Manor Michigan who got a good way towards building a breeder reactor in a shed in his mom's back yard. Track it down and read it.
QOTD, in the "yeah, what he said" category:
Thanks to all the people I knocked heads with this year. Every time that happens I work thru more of my own stuff, get more free, happier, and worry less about what's coming next.
--- Dave Winer on Scripting News , thanksgiving day 1999
Oh, if you're the moron who's using the handle "gamequeen99_00" at Yahoo games trying to register with a mail address of "butterfly" at this domain, I'm happy to work with people who give me prior notice that they're trying to use my domain for something, but you gotta talk to me *before* you try something stupid.
Reminder, Friday the 26th is International Buy Nothing Day
To be on Who Wants to be a Millionaire you have to be smart enough to dial a phone . Apparently many aren't:
"When dialing a 10-digit number, which do you dial first: A) 1 or B) nothing?"
--- Stan Kemper, hapless owner of the oneless number in Manhattan
Keith Knight discovers football
I've been finding less and less in Salon recently, but Susie Bright's exchange with an ex-bellhop about boffing the hotel staff is hilarious.
Clean Sheets is supposed to have updated today, but I can't get through to 'em.
Sorry if Flutterby is slow and derivative this week, I'm working on various projects and trying to get some code slung.
Via FactoVision comes this hard to believe note: Phone sex operator gets workers comp for RSI from masturbating . The unbelievable part is, of course, that she wasn't just doing the ironing.
I just got the upcoming list of events in the mail from The Crucible , if you're in the bay area (Berkeley/Emeryville, specifically) and into metal working or fire arts getting to one of their events is a must-do.
NTK 's Danny O'Brien says Beware the net ninjas in his gentle introduction to the Scary Devil Monastery.
Off to hear Philip Greenspun talk about web development today, hopefully this is his more technical talk so I'll click with it better than I did the last one.
My Word's Worth talks about that transition that happened growing up in the '50s.
So the news today is reporting that various engineering professors pointed out flaws in the Texas A&M bonfire structure that collapsed while others are protesting that it seemed safe. The others must be from the sociology department?
David Steinberg takes on Boys Don't Cry .
This is a little over the top even for me... http://www.photoon.com/sextoon/ANTZ.GIF
Added a bunch more linkes to the Toy Story 2 review page .
All you Need To Know is updated for the week.
Aaargh! Okay, if I get one more forwarded "missing little girl" e-mail, I'm gonna puke. Specifically, the Kelsey Brooke Jones is missing e-mail is a hoax , promulgated by what appears to be a mother who's gone around the bend. Especially if e-mail says "forward this to everyone you know", please don't.
Oh, with that Mouthorgan reference, I need to find a way to differentiate between Todds. There's the Todd who's the occasional author of rants in this forum, and with whom I go to Bay Area gatherings and have a couple of business prospects, and there's the other Todd who writes Mouthorgan .
In the new Mouthorgan Todd's pissed off about a whole raft of things.
Mary Kay Bergmen dead via suicide , among many voice-over credits, she was the voice of most of the female characters on South Park .
Tonight. 10:30 or so PST. If the skies are clear: http://www.leonidslive.com/
Tom Duff reports: Go to AltaVista , and type in "elvis presley" . Note the suggested spelling check.
Sony chooses PalmOS for handhelds
There's been a couple of threads in various forums (forii?) I read recently about how users call everything "Microsoft" or "Windows", be it the graphical shell, Office Word, Internet Explorer, or whatever. "What are you running?" "Windows 97." "Okay, that'd be Microsoft Office, then." It occurs to me that this is something like what happens to toddlers when they get into that single word answer (often a number) for every question. I wonder if we've really got that many adults who've never progressed beyond the intellectual development of a 4 year old.
There was a time when I questioned the belief that to meet attractive members of the appropriate sex one just had to do what one loved doing, then I came across a half naked European blonde in the middle of the woods in rural Northern California while hiking one day. But at the American Singles gathering in Silicon Valley it was shown that Silicon Valley men aren't terribly interested in desperate women. Or something. Apparently a gazillion women showed up and very few men, despite the fact that Santa Clara County has the largest concentration of unattached men of any metropolitan region in the country. Perhaps if they'd chosen a weekend other than the start of COMDEX?
If you're innovative, fear the vulture capitalists
Keith Knight on how cold it is in Boston .
Clean Sheets has new erotic fiction and poetry.
Last week Todd and I went into the city and I had fun talking to Paul Peczon , who's into motorcycles and other such stuff. His projects include the ultrahorn , 'three massive Army surplus 15" indoor/outdoor PA speakers wired up to a pair of cheap 500 watt power plate amplifiers...', with samples of squealing tires and barking dobermans:
"Errant busses are especially susceptible to the eighteen wheeler sound, I've noticed, because it sounds like something that might actually manage to crush enough of the bus to destroy the driver's compartment. There are just certain sounds that everyone knows, like the sound of a pump action shotgun loading an oversize 10 gauge shell into the chamber."
Everyone's noting that Transmeta has changed their web site. For those not up on the latest gossip, they're the company that hired Linus Torvalds and a bunch o' other high profile folks. The rumor has been that they're doing some sort of butt-kicking processor. From the comments of the source to the web page:
<!---Yes, there is a secret message, and this is it: Transmeta's policy has been to remain silent about its plans until it had something to demonstrate to the world. On January 19th, 2000, Transmeta is going to announce and demonstrate what Crusoe processors can do.
Simultaneously, all of the details will go up on this Web site for everyone on the Internet to see.
Crusoe will be cool hardware and software for mobile applications. Crusoe will be unconventional, which is why we wanted to let you know in advance to come look at the entire Web site in January, so that you can get the full story and have access to all of the real details as soon as they are available. --->
Great /. article on why you shouldn't trust TRUSTe .
On Saturday, Susie Bright tackled Polyamory .
Via /. , judge makes it a felony for one man to post to rec.skiing.alpine . The free speech implications are tremendous, I don't know the full story but this slant on it certainly makes the complainant sound like an incompetent who couldn't figure out filtering.
Brad totally destroys my resolve to be 100% Mahir free: Welcome to my homepage! I PECK YOU !!!!!
Back from Yosemite, did some nice wandering, saw a wolf, had dinner at the Awanee, didn't have a bear break into the car. Life is wonderful. I missed Need To Know on Friday. Only two of those sentences are correlated.
In My Word's Worth Marylaine complains about subsidies for western ranchers.
I'm out of town to spend a few days at Yosemite to try to get my mind back (and to hang out in some totally cool granite). Don't get caught doing anything I wouldn't get caught doing while I'm gone!
A new Mouthorgan tackles celibacy.
I hadn't realized that Literary Machines is still in print! If you play with hypertext or information design it's a must read, there's a discussion on discuss.scripting.com about Ted Nelson's critique of embedded markup that wouldn't be happening if any of those rambling on and on had actually read the work that made me (and many others) see both the promise of the WWW and the failures made by inherent design decisions in both HTML and HTTP.
Scary Devil Monastery thinking outside the box: Matt Mcleod and Ben Pfaff suggest setting /bin/rm as the helper app for the PowerPoint and Excel MIME types...
Must read: Salon interviews Thomas Sowell :
"Liberals tend to describe what they want in terms of goals rather than processes, and not to be overly concerned with the observable consequences."
Ya know, saying "Microsoft is a security risk" is getting repetitive: If you're one of those drooling idiots who has to carry around a spare handkerchief to wipe the spittle off your shoes and who still uses Microsoft products, here's the Seinfeld/Bubblebpy virus, a good reason to ditch Outlook Express .
Clean Sheets updated today.
Sorry 'bout the lack of updates yesterday, and the mass of updates this morning. More issues with ricochet. Sigh.
Meta: A note on the changes to my Nibelung ring : I've moved a bunch of sites to the inactive side of the list. If you're on the moved sites, don't despair, I'm experimenting with what I read how, and I'll be creating some bots to do some of my browsing for me. And some of the pulled sites I pulled because I actually check them multiple times per day. I'll probably end up pulling the link from my headlines.
Did you know that you can opt out of Doubleclick's tracking ?
The answer to software bloat: A version of true for Intel/ELF in 45 bytes , pretty impressive given that one ELF header entry and one program header table entry total 84 bytes...
So I'm afraid George W. Bush is right when he says "America understands that a guy doesn't know the name of every single foreign leader. That's not what Americans are making their choices on about who's going to be the president," but while he's whining that he is too smart enough to be president , I thought a small education for my readers might be in order. It also occurs to me that when he flunked the question his press secretary should have been immediately on the phone to every person likely to be fingered as a potential advisor to GW on foreign affairs and given them the following names:
I was just thinking that this'd be a cool project, and now Nasa's done an animated GIF of the moon cycle . Someone tell Jorn so he can tie these images to his phases of the moon archival system.
Meta: I realize I've been lousy about e-mail, if you feel like you're being ignored ping me again and I'll move you up the queue. I'm also dissatisfied with my Nibelung ring , my daily routine was set up back in the days of a very few blogs and now many of the sites on my list have views on the world that are a little too similar, and either I've changed, or they've changed, cause some sites I no longer find anything worth pursuing at. Input on blogs that I'd find interesting (not necessarily those that I'd agree with!) is appreciated.
a.t-s.r QOTD:
"For that matter, Childproofing just means that the kids who don't get into the Drano get into other crap when they are older, and sometimes take more intelligent people with them."
--- Vicky Dunbar
In /. , TRUSTe decides its own fate . What happens when the certifying authority is a bunch of bumbling ignoramii?
Salon chronicles the rise of cheap porn , how John Stagliano brought handheld video and faltering pick-up lines to the mainstream.
In My Word's Worth this week Marylaine talks about celebrating the life of her sister.
What's next, referring to Boris Yeltsin as "that commie dude"? Bush was unable to identify leaders of Chechnya, Pakistan or India . I saw a great quote from a PR flack about how "he wasn't a contender on Jeopardy, after all" yesterday, but I'll just fall back on this one:
"When Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes attempted to defend her boss following the Hiller interview, she said that neither the Bush campaign's senior foreign policy advisor, Josh Bolton, nor foreign policy advisor Joel Shinn could name all four of these world leaders."
Peter Merholz says that usability engineers lack empathy, that they see users as subjects, not people. A cynical smartass, not that I'd ever be one, might suggest that the problem is that they do see users as people.
Microsoft found to be a monopoly .
New Need To Know
A new Topping the News .
The fantasies of a computer geek are many and varied:
So then she feeds me some quince jam (which I've never had but it sounds cool) and toast and tea, and dabs the moisture from my lower lip with the cloth napkin. And then she wraps her warm, lithe, muscular body around me and says breathily, "How was work today?" So I explain this problem I had with an AIX supercomputing complex I deal with, and she says, "That sounds awful. Which level of PSSP do you run?"
Unclear on the concept: http://www.sysadminsrus.com/ has been spamming based on addresses culled from the Scary Devil Monastery. As Jeff Gostin said: "Stupid, STUPID lusers... you DO NOT comb SDM for addresses. Nagasaki was a candle, by comparison." My first shot was fired today via a message to the ToysRUs legal department. giggle.
I'd heard this on the local news, but now Stuffed Dog points to an article about Larry Ellison protesting the San Jose airport curfew . Larry's being a real asshole about teh whole thing, which is understandable, but I think that fair's fair: Any of the guys from Survival Research Labs wanna let us borrow their V-2 engine for an evening and we can tool down some exclusive residential streets at 2 AM? [giggle]
Frank passes along: a patent for a Y2K solution which will completely destroy your faith in the IP system in the U.S.
If it wasn't already destroyed.
Littlest Billy presents The Fountainhead with Skull Force action figures .
Meta: Hilarious review of weblogs , I'm disappointed to have been left out.
NETFUTURE #97 examines the sloth.
Via /. : Yowza! AOL is being sued by the National Federation of the Blind based on the Americans with Disabilities Act because AOL's web site is almost impossible for blind people to use . I'm trying to stand by my libertarian principles, but a good portion of me is screaming "woo hoo, now there's legal recourse against incompetent 'web designers'!" It's kinda like the Microsoft anti-trust case.
In the new Risks Digest 20.64 there's an interesting note on increasing development environment complexity that's worth a look.
Does anyone have any experience with DeepXposure.com , an online adult soap opera supposedly targeted towards women? This press release on DeepXposure.com includes a temporary password good for November.
A new Mouthorgan takes on Susan Faludi, consumerism and masculinity.
QOTD: "The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the world."
-- Drakmere
I've been trying to not steal links, but Medley had these outtakes from Zagat restaurant reviews that were quite funny: "So romantic that wives feel like mistresses and vice- versa."
Tom Duff asked himself how good a rule that old "I before E except after C..." was:
According to Webster's 2nd International Dictionary, not very:
3678 words have i before e, 2444 have e before i, except after c, when 256 words have i before e and 156 have e before i.
So the rule is right 60% of the time, except after c, when it's only right 38% of the time.
A query: So Todd and I were talking about my bad attitude about XML-RPC, and he asked if I thought procedure discovery methods, ala SOAP and the COM Interface interface, were a good idea. And I didn't come up with any counterexamples on the spur of the moment, but aside for some possible issues with interactive environments I'm having trouble coming up with good reasons for them. Can anyone help? E-mail me.
David Steinberg interviews Susie Bright (current/index.htmll/davids/cnsb.html). Back in September I wrote about going to see Susie speak . I never did finish Full Exposure as it seems a little bit too aimed at mainstream America. It started fairly strong, but just dribbled off.
Much like recumbent bicycles were banned at cycling races for being too fast, Perl was banned at a UCLA programming competition for being too good .
All the overpriced parties and supersaturated colors won't actually make your web site useable. Salon points out stupid web sites trying to be hip .
Also in Salon , Keith Knight tackles voting .
A new Clean Sheets
Y'ain't had a run-in with a bank 'til you've had a loan aqent tell you to sell a kidney .
I've found nothing worthy of comment in my early morning meanderings. I'm pondering a rant about the decline and death of the physical form of books, and have been mulling over another about rationalizing magic for quite a while, but nothing's flowing. Don't expect much today.
I'm also in "one of those moods". I've seen a couple of news stories of people trying for patents on things that I've thought were obvious and just haven't had the time over the past year or two to implement. And I'm not sure that the upcoming hiatus is scheduled sparsely enough that I'll be able to build all the stuff I'm thinking about.
A new Scarlet Letters does sex with a futuristic bent.
I'm gonna miss the next one, and their web site sucks bowling balls through garden hose ("alt" tags and entrance tunnel), but the last TechOakland mixer was fun, especially because it was more racially and socially mixed than your average SOMA gathering with geeky white guys and long-legged marketing chicks. It was also fun to hear Jerry Brown imply that for the right cash offering all zoning laws were malleable. The next one's November 12th.
Frank passes along another sad example of the havoc that years of inbreeding and mad cow disease are doing to England: Chancellor of the Exchequer claims Britain invented the 'net .
My friend Eric is looking for an excuse to come out and look around the Bay area come January or February. Anybody got leads on cool conferences or what-have-you happening 'round that time that'd help him make it deductible? Anybody need a general purpose geek who's done things from games coding in C to Oracle admin stuff so we can get him to come play in the big leagues?
RealJukebox gathers customer preference information and ships it back to RealNetworks , who claim that they don't store it. The clincher is that they don't mention this fact in their privacy statement or the license agreement. In their defence, RealNetworks officials:
"...said that users could skip the registration and still use the program and that RealJukebox would stop prompting users to register after five attempts. Some customers, they said, had stumbled on this fact and had declined to register."
Reminder: This Thursday, Terrence Masson (yes, that Terrence, the one after whom the character in the South Park movie was named), will be hawking his book CG 101: A Computer Graphics Industry Reference at Borders in San Rafael, starting about 7:30. Those of us who do Scotch Night at the Baltic in Point Richmond beforehand will wander over to heckle him. See some of ya there?
Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet appears to be back, but the site seems riddled with all sorts of over-design now. Perhaps Peter's forgotten who his fans are?
My Word's Worth talks about frivolity for its own sake.
Archives of neat sites posted to Flutterby , notes to webmaster@flutterby.com
