Michael Hanscom

Enthusiastic ambivert. Geeky, liberal, friendly, curious, hopepunk; trying to be a good person. (he/him)

Links for November 14th through November 17th

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Sometime between November 14th and November 17th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Best Seat in the House | Election Night: The Seattle Times photography blog's experiences on Election Night 2008.
  • Timeline twins, music and movies: When I was a kid, "oldies" music and movies seemed ancient. Even though I'm now in my 30s, the entertainment that I watched and listened to in my youth still feels pretty recent to me. Raiders of the Lost Ark wasn't all that long ago, right? But comparing my distorted recall of childhood favorites to the oldies of the time jogs my memory in unpleasant ways. For example: Listening to Michael Jackson's Thriller today is equivalent to listening to Elvis Presley's first album (1956) at the time of Thriller's release in 1982. Elvis singles in 1956 included Blue Suede Shoes, Hound Dog, and Love Me Tender.
  • Obama’s Fascinating Interview with Cathleen Falsani: The most detailed and fascinating explication of Barack Obama's faith came in a 2004 interview he gave Chicago Sun Times columnist Cathleen Falsani when he was running for U.S. Senate in Illinois. The column she wrote about the interview has been quoted and misquoted many times over, but she'd never before published the full transcript in a major publication. Because of how controversial that interview became, Falsani has graciously allowed us to print the full conversation here.
  • Tube-side chat? Obama takes radio address online: President-elect Barack Obama is taping Saturday's weekly Democratic address not just for listeners, but for YouTube viewers, his office said Friday. And he plans to keep videotaping the radio addresses after taking the oath of office on Jan. 20. Before then, the videos will be posted on Obama's transition Web site.
  • unlibrarian: Journey: The secret behind the Obama logo…

Are We On? Tim Conway and Ernie Anderson

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A couple weeks ago, author, actor, and humorist John Hodgman was the guest on NPR’s “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!” As I listened to John and host Peter Sagal, John’s simple, polite, and deadpan delivery of often ludicrous responses to Peter’s questions reminded me very strongly of an old comedy album of my dad’s that I listened to time and time again growing up, where ABC television announcer Ernie Anderson plays straight man to comedian Tim Conway in a series of interviews.

Tim Conway and Ernie Anderson: Are We On?Here, then, is that album, recorded to .mp3 from the very album that I grew up listening to. You can listen to or download the tracks individually or grab the full album as a 47Mb .zip file. Enjoy! The whole album is quite funny and worth downloading, but if you want to sample, my particular favorites are “Do You Fly Much?”, “Boy”, and “The Baseball Coordinator”.

  1. Do You Fly Much? (3.8Mb .mp3)
  2. Boy (5.1Mb .mp3)
  3. Dr. Herford (6.3Mb .mp3)
  4. Matchmaker (5.8Mb .mp3)
  5. Race Car Driver (6.8Mb .mp3)
  6. King Anderson of Parma (4.7Mb .mp3)
  7. The Warden (5.1Mb .mp3)
  8. The Baseball Coordinator (4.7Mb .mp3)
  9. The Swiss Astronaut (4.8Mb .mp3)

As a bonus: this is one of the funniest Tim Conway bits I’ve ever seen. An outtake from the Carol Burnett Show, Tim won’t let the sketch go on until he’s done telling his elephant stories…

Liner notes for the ‘Are We On?’ album after the jump:

Read more

Links for November 12th through November 13th

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Sometime between November 12th and November 13th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • High quality YouTube video hack: By default all videos on YouTube and embedded on other sites load at normal quality, but there's a way to set your default viewing quality to high, link to high quality video, embed HQ video, and even save HQ videos for later viewing.
  • James Bond: 5 Things I Learned About Women From The James Bond Books: Did you know that James Bond has the power to turn lesbians straight? And that lesbians were only gay in the first place because they have the right to vote? We always knew the Bond movies were trashy exploitation fests, but it turns out they're Gloria Steinem sit-ins compared to Ian Fleming's original books. The books are a treasure trove of wisdom about female sexuality, explaining why women should only sleep around at the office, and why "No" means "Take me now." What important lessons did those politically correct movies leave out? Here's our list.
  • More evidence that Pushing Daisies is dying: Sad, but certainly no surprise. Prairie and I have said since it first debuted that there was no way PD would be around long-term — it was just too good, and quirky enough that most people "just wouldn't get it." We've been resigned to seeing it disappear for some time now, and are just enjoying what we get before they officially pull the plug. (Of course, if, by some miracle, it does get to continue, we'd be thrilled!)
  • Australian mistakenly surfs over big whale: "At first I thought it was the shadow from my kite. But I quickly realized it was a whale," said Sheridan, a 42-year-old high school teacher. "The whale kept coming up. … I did not know what to expect and I went over its back just past its fin," he said. "Next thing I felt was its tail come up and hit me on the back of the head."
  • D700 Field Report from Web 2.0 Summit: So how did it go? I won’t make you wait until the end of the post for the verdict. In a word, it rocked.
  • Disney on iTunes: There's a lot of classic, vintage Disney hidden in iTunes, and this page has a great roundup of what you can find.

Links for November 11th through November 12th

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Sometime between November 11th and November 12th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Roadside Attraction: The Alternate History Theme Park Where Dinosaurs Fought in the Civil War: Most speculative fiction surrounding the American Civil War imagines how the world would be different had the Confederacy won its independence. But roadside attraction creator Mark Cline has imagined an entirely different kind of Civil War science fiction. His fiberglass creations tell the tale of a group of Union soldiers who discover a lost valley of dinosaurs in Virginia and plot to use them as weapons against the South. (This is AWESOME and I'm so going if I'm ever in the area!)
  • Election windfall: Word spread quickly last week through Sto-Rox High School when students learned that the administrative offices were filled with Barack Obama paraphernalia. Students snapped up posters and stickers for their lockers, backpacks and bedroom walls, eager to commemorate the victory of the first African American to ascend to the nation's highest office. The enthusiasm excited administrators, but it's not what brought tears to the eyes of Jean Schmalzreid, the district's director of federal programs and special projects. That happened when she saw school facilities workers bring in dolly after dolly piled high with thousands of dollars worth of supplies donated from Obama campaign offices in Pittsburgh.
  • 10 Reasons for Zenfolio Account: One possible spot for trying to sell some of my photography.
  • Lonesome penguin cheered up by his new friend… a stuffed toy: The penguin – called Pingu – began to lose weight and appeared weak after its bigger relative regularly helped himself to all the fish on offer. Concerned keepers were forced to remove Pingu from the enclosure, but at just three-weeks-old the penguin was in desperate need of company. Staff bought a £3.99 toy penguin from the zoo shop which acts as a surrogate sibling to the chuffed chick – who cuddles up to its new friend all day.
  • First Full Image Of New Star Trek USS Enterprise: The moment everyone has been waiting for is here. In anticipation of the upcoming Star Trek trailer premiering this weekend, Paramount has released the first full image of the new USS Enterprise (NCC-1701, no bloody A, B, C or D). EW’s Popwatch blog got the exclusive first look at this beauty…

Links for November 9th through November 11th

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Sometime between November 9th and November 11th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Interview @MarsPhoenix: For over six months, Veronica McGregor has been Twittering from Mars. Of course, she's not living among the wind storms and dirt of the red planet herself, but she is the voice of MarsPhoenix, the strangely compelling, first-person, lonely robot Twitter feed that somehow became the official mouthpiece of NASA's Phoenix mission and has catalyzed an entirely new kind of public involvement in science.
  • Urban Dictionary: palin: 1. An applicant lacking even basic job skills 2. Someone supremely un-self-aware or lacking any relative sense of what he/she does or doesn't know.
  • Barack Obama: The 50 facts you might not know: He applied to appear in a black pin-up calendar while at Harvard but was rejected by the all-female committee.
  • First-family-to-be given code names: The Secret Service traditionally has given pithy, private names to those whose lives they protect. The monikers are a throwback to a time when electronic communications were not encrypted, and they no longer serve a security function. Still, they give an occasional peek at the players' personalities, in addition to serving as great trivia questions. (Renegade, Renaissance, Radiance and Rosebud)
  • Childhood Fears: Incredibly creepy horror photography (NSFW) by Joshua Hoffine. Also worth checking out his behind the scenes weblog which details how he sets up his shots. Cool!

Secrets of the 2008 Campaign eBook

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Over the course of the week, Newsweek has published a fascinating seven-part series called Secrets of the 2008 Campaign, an “in-depth look behind the scenes of the campaign, consisting of exclusive behind-the-scenes reporting from the McCain and Obama camps assembled by a special team of reporters who were granted year-long access on the condition that none of their findings appear until after Election Day.”

Since I wanted to read the whole thing, but have also been experimenting with reading eBooks on my iPod Touch, I figured this was as good a time as any to play with seeing what it would take to create an eBook. As it turns out, it’s not terribly difficult at all, at least as far as the .epub format goes. After some time with this tutorial and a little bit of minor troubleshooting, I had it all set up.

If you have an eBook reader that supports .epub files and would like to take a peek, here it is. It’s been working fine for me in both the desktop and iPhone versions of Stanza, but I can’t at this point vouch for any other eBook reader.

Obviously, seeing as how the only thing keeping me from breaking copyright criminally (rather than simply flagrantly, which is were I stand now) is that I’m not charging for this, so should Newsweek decide to give me the smackdown, this will be disappearing faster than Sarah Palin leaving the stage after McCain’s concession speech.

Still, it was a fun exercise in figuring out eBooks.

Links for November 5th through November 7th

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Sometime between November 5th and November 7th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • HPLHS Prop Fonts: On the endless and insane quest for authenticity, we have created more than 50 custom fonts to use in props. Typographical fashions change, and since the digital age overtook typesetting and graphic design, many of the fonts common in the time of Lovecraft have fallen into disuse. We've revived many of them from vintage sources, including the 1923 American Type Founder's specimen book and the Mergenthaler Linotype catalog from the mid-1930s. Many of these fonts have slightly rough edges or irregular shapes, to capture the feel of old lead type and bygone printing technologies.
  • Election maps: Maps and cartograms of the 2008 Election results.
  • CNN’s holograms not really holograms: I thought so! Election night, I tweeted, "Checking out CNN's hologram bit via YouTube: http://xrl.us/owbjg I want to know more. Does Wolf actually see her, or is she inserted for TV?" Turns out my hunch was right: Wolf was just speaking to empty space, while the 'hologram' was digitally inserted into the broadcasted video feed. Something said in the interview about "synchronized camera movements" tipped me off (if it was truly a hologram, there'd be no need to synchronize cameras at the two locations). While it's impressive looking technology, it's a long way away from being the "Star Wars"-style holograms that it was hyped up to be. Makes me wonder how silly Wolf felt, pretending that he could see his interview subject in front of him…and I'm a bit disappointed that CNN was less than honest about what they were doing.
  • .epub eBooks Tutorial: The .epub is a standard for eBooks created by the International Digital Publishing Forum. It consists of basic XHTML for the book content, XML for descriptions, and a re-named zip file to hold it all in. Anyone can make these eBooks, and since they're essentially just XHTML, anyone can read them.
  • D-Link DIR-655 Firmware 1.21 Hijacks Your Internet Connection: I noticed when trying to go to Google that my router was hijacking DNS and sent me to a website trying to sell me a software subscription. After upgrading your D-link DIR-655 router to the latest firmware you'll see that D-link does this, and calls the hijacking a 'feature.'" (Sounds a lot like the Belkin incident five years ago — looks like I can add D-Link to the list of companies I won't be buying from.)

Principles in Campaigning

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To me, this demanded more than just a short grab buried in the midst of a bunch of other links: When Your Best Speech is Your Concession, What’s Wrong?

John McCain’s concession speech was by far his best of the campaign. He was, convincing, generous, and passionate. It brought to mind Hillary Clinton’s concession speech last summer, which was also widely heralded as her best.

What is it with these politicians that [they] can only give a good speech after they have lost?

[…]

One could hardly miss the fact that in order to be gracious in defeat, McCain had to contradict much of his own campaign. Clinton’s concession speech left her in the same dilemma: in order to be gracious in defeat, she had to contradict much of what she had said over the preceding months.

If Obama had lost either the nomination or the general election, he could have given a gracious concession speech without contradicting anything he had said during the campaign. One might counter by arguing that it is easy to be principled when you are the front runner. But Barack Obama entered this race not as a frontrunner but a long shot. In fact, much of Obama’s extraordinary rise to prominence was rooted in his self-evident commitment to politics that are principled in this sense. A sizable chunk of the American electorate responded to that in a powerful way.

This would be a good measure with which to distinguish “principled” politics from “unprincipled”: a principled politician can concede graciously [without] having to take back his or her campaign.

[…]

This is the issue the media swings at but misses with all the talk of “negative campaigning” and “attack ads.” Principled and unprincipled attacks get lumped together in a absurd measure of “going negative” that suggests a good candidate never criticizes his or her opponent. Instead of “negative campaigning” we need to talk about unprincipled politicians.

Star Trek Original Series DVD Choices Suck

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Prompted in no small part by the upcoming movie, I’ve been on a complete Star Trek kick lately. I’ve been reading Star Trek novels like they’re going out of style (check out my library sorted by what I’ve read most recently for an idea), I’ve been jonesing to watch the movies, one by one, in order (though I don’t know when I’m going to manage that, as Prairie is decidedly not of a mind to do any such thing…the things she has to put up with, living with a geek…), and I’m really noticing a pretty glaring gap in my DVD collection. While I’ve got the entirety of TNG and DS9 on DVD, I don’t have the ones I grew up with. I don’t have the original series.

And, sadly, I don’t think I will anytime soon, because the current choices…well, they aren’t good.

When Star Trek was first being released to DVD, the ‘season set’ trend hadn’t kicked in, so they were initially being released on the same model of the old VHS collections: two episodes per DVD, with two DVDs released every few months. Slow going, and expensive. I made it about halfway through Season One when those were first being released, then gave up, and eventually sold the DVDs off.

The second stab was a bit better, collecting an entire season in a set. In all honesty, these are the sets I’d like to have. However, they’re out of production, and I remember them being priced pretty high. No matter what they were priced originally, they’re rather ridiculously priced now: Amazon has the full three seasons for $199.99 used — that’s $67 per season! If I actually wanted a new set, it’d be $400! I like Trek, but I’m not that dedicated. Even eBay only brings the full collection down to the $150 range…better (but not great), if the price doesn’t get pushed up too high, if the seller doesn’t ship you scratched, crappy disks, and if you’re willing to take the risk of eBay — which I’m not.

Then there’s the current releases. They’re all overpriced, at around $80 each, or $200 for the full three seasons (come on, most TV season sets are now in the $30 range, and even the full 40-disc 7-season Buffy set is under $200), Season One is a weird hybrid normal DVD and HD-DVD (which is unplayable for me) that would keep me from accessing all the special features…and to top it all off, they’re the new “remastered” versions. Now, I’ve heard good things about the work done on the remastered episodes, and I wouldn’t really mind owning those versions…if the originals were included as well (gee, does this sound familiar, Star Wars fans?).

I don’t want my only option to be the new, George Lucas inspired, “we’ve got to put new special effects in or noone will want to watch this show anymore, even though it’s been consistently popular for forty years” versions. I want the show that my dad introduced me to. The show that had me pointing excitedly somewhere behind me and over my shoulder, exclaiming “Speeeeshhh!” as the Enterprise flew by in the opening credits. The show I grew up with, that I watched whenever I had the chance, that Royce and I would quote lines at each other from, that influenced my ongoing love of science fiction. The show that got me to my first ‘con, many, many years ago in Anchorage.

And right now, I can’t get it.

And I’m annoyed.

Meh.

(On the bright side, at least I’m not posting about politics….)