Michael Hanscom

Sometime between October 11th and October 13th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Johnston speaks about Bristol Palin, Obama, baby: Sarah Palin's soon-to-be son-in-law and father of her teenage daughter's child is a high school dropout who didn't even bother to register to vote. Family values, abstinence-only sex ed, and political consciousness for the WIN!
• What the Troopergate Report Really Says: …the Branchflower report still makes for good reading, if only because it convincingly answers a question nobody had even thought to ask: Is the Palin administration shockingly amateurish? Yes, it is. Disturbingly so. The 263 pages of the report show a co-ordinated application of pressure on Monegan so transparent and ham-handed that it was almost certain to end in public embarrassment for the governor. The only surprise is that Troopergate is national news, not just a sorry piece of political gristle to be chewed on by Alaska politicos over steaks at Anchorage's Club Paris.
• The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama: An examination of legal documents and election filings, along with interviews with his acquaintances, revealed Mr. Martin, 62, to be a man with a history of scintillating if not always factual claims. He has left a trail of animosity — some of it provoked by anti-Jewish comments — among political leaders, lawyers and judges in three states over more than 30 years. He is a law school graduate, but his admission to the Illinois bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of “moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.” (via curt_m)
• Alien lizards set to invade ABC in ‘V’: …the new "V" will center on Erica Evans, a Homeland Security agent with an aimless son who’s got problems. When the aliens arrive, her son gloms on to them — causing tension within the family. As in the original "V," several storylines will unfold simultaneously. But even without the same storyline, the original "V’s" bones will remain: As in the ’80s version, the show will open with an enormous army of spaceships hovering over the world’s major cities. The visitors say they’ve come to help Earth, but their motives are nefarious (in the original, they wanted to steal the world’s water supply).
• Orbicule | Undercover: According to a recent FBI report, 97% of all stolen computers are never recovered. Many people we know have had their Macs stolen, often in 'safe' situations. That's why we developed Undercover: a unique theft-recovery application designed from the ground up for Mac OS X.

Sometime between 10:52 and 17:27, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Star Trek Trailer Coming in November: A source tells TrekMovie the theatrical trailer coming in November “is not a teaser, but a real trailer with footage from the film.” Edits are still being made, but it is expected to show the Enterprise exterior and the Enterprise bridge as well as dialog from movie. Which weekend in November the trailer will be released is still up in the air.
• Red Right Hand: THOUGHTS ON THE FIREFLY 7th SEASON PREMIERE: The end is nigh. The last season of Firefly started last night and if the season premiere is any indication, it comes a season too late.
• McCain Defends His Rabid Crowds: The McCain campaign is defending crowd members at its recent rallies who have called Obama a terrorist, accused him of treason and even screamed "kill him" when his association with former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers has been broached. (I was already bothered by McCain and Palin's habit of simply standing by and allowing the invectives to fly. The fact that their campaign is actually sending out press releases defending such outbursts, and trying to twist criticism of their silence into an attack on Obama, is truly, truly disturbing.)
• NY county sends ballots with Barack ‘Osama’: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's last name is spelled "Osama" on hundreds of absentee ballots mailed out this week to voters in Rensselaer County in upstate New York. The misspelling, which elections officials on both sides of the aisle insist was simply a typo, is causing embarrassment for the county.
• McCain campaign clears Palin in Troopergate ethics probe: "Trying to head off a potentially embarrassing state ethics report on Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, campaign officials released their own report Thursday that cleared her of wrongdoing." Well, that's nice of them. In that same vein, I'm about to release a report clearing myself of any wrongdoing as well. How convenient!

Sometime between October 8th and October 10th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Adeona: A Free, Open Source System for Helping Track and Recover Lost and Stolen Laptops: Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there's no need to rely on a single third party. What's more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner's choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop. (via MeFi)
• Kiss Penguins Goodbye if the Planet Warms 2 Degrees Celsius: According to a report from WWF if global warming increases temperatures by 2 degrees Celsius more than half of Antarctica's colonies of Emperor penguins could be wiped out.
• Under the Needle: A vote for beer over politics: What followed over the next 16 years not only made Rainier Washington's most popular beer once again, but also became a template for an entire industry. The wild Rainiers; the Jacques Cousteau parody; the Rainier croaking frogs — poorly aped in later years by Budweiser; and maybe the all-time most popular: motorcycle on a lonely country road Dopplering "RAAAAINIEEEER BEEEEEEEEEEER" as it shifts and speeds into the distance with the namesake mountain in the background. (I've long held that that motorcycle commercial was the best I've ever seen. Years later, and I still remember it clearly.)
• Bathtub III: Stop motion tilt-shift video. Making the real world look like miniatures.
• Take On Me: The Literal Version: Now it finally makes sense.

Sometime between 06:39 and 13:58, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Nebraska law lets parents abandon teens: Frustrated parents are dumping their teenagers at Nebraska hospitals — even crossing state lines to do it — and the state Legislature has scheduled a special hearing to try to stem the tide. Nebraska's "safe haven" law, intended to allow parents to anonymously hand over an infant to a hospital without being prosecuted, isn't working out as planned. Of the 17 children relinquished since the law took effect in July, only four are younger than 10 — and…on Tuesday, a 14-year-old girl from Council Bluffs, Iowa, was abandoned…. (I'm going to hell, but I find this horrifying and amusing — due to the badly written law — at the same time.) (via macanima)
• NY Times Editorial – Politics of Attack: It is a sorry fact of American political life that campaigns get ugly, often in their final weeks. But Senator John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin have been running one of the most appalling campaigns we can remember. They have gone far beyond the usual fare of quotes taken out of context and distortions of an opponent’s record — into the dark territory of race-baiting and xenophobia. Senator Barack Obama has taken some cheap shots at Mr. McCain, but there is no comparison.
• Stitch yourself a thinner depth-of-field: The picture above should be completely impossible to take with a 35mm-sized camera. It has the frame-of-view of about a 45mm lens, but the depth-of-field of shooting that lens at an impossibly fast f/0.8 (ish). But I shot it on a plain ol' DSLR with a plain ol' lens. How? Read on.
• Erecting The Needle Pt. 1: The Space Needle started construction in April of 1961. As digging began, the 120-foot by 12-foot (depth 30 feet) hole slowly filled with 5850 tons of concrete and steel. Anchoring the massive Space Needle, there would be more weight underground than in the tower itself.
• Palin’s future, according to Garrison Keillor: It was dishonest, cynical men who put forward a clueless young woman for national office, hoping to juice up the ticket, hoping she could skate through two months of chaperoned campaigning, but the truth emerges: The lady is talking freely about matters she has never thought about. The American people have an ear for B.S. They can tell when someone's mouth is moving and the clutch is not engaged.
• How to use Photoshop’s Lens Blur tool for tilt-shift fakery (Part 1 of 2): We all know Photoshop is a powerful tool. In two tutorials, I'll take you through how to use Photoshop CS3's Lens Blur filter to do two things: today, we'll make images look like they were shot with a tilt-shift lens. Tomorrow, we'll create clipping masks for objects that aren't entirely in focus.
• Why McCain can’t stop saying “my friends.”: This is the discomfort of "my friends": Although it hopes to evoke amici's wave of the arm over the agora, on the stump it remains a phrase that demands fealty when, in fact, that relationship has not yet been granted to the candidate. It feels faintly bullying—an unpleasant echo of the singular menace of my friend.

Sometime between 09:19 and 17:24, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Anne Hathaway in ‘Wonderland’: Hollywood starlet Anne Hathaway is to star in Tim Burton's movie adaptation of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland," entertainment industry press reported Tuesday.
• New in Labs: Stop sending mail you later regret: Sometimes I send messages I shouldn't send. Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message. Or the time I sent that late night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together. Gmail can't always prevent you from sending messages you might later regret, but today we're launching a new Labs feature I wrote called Mail Goggles which may help. When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email.
• John McCain’s racist remark very troubling: On his campaign bus [during his first Presidential run in 2000], Sen. John McCain told reporters, "I hated the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live." I'd not seen this before, but it's coming back into prominence apparently thanks to a YouTube video titled "John McCain's Racism and Why It Matters" that I've not watched yet, but is all the rage on Twitter right now.
• Washington breaks voter registration record: Washington has just set a new record for voter registrations, topping the 3.5 million figure set in the hotly competitive 2004 election year. The latest number, reported by the Elections Division of the Secretary of State’s Office on Tuesday, is 3,515,393. The tally will grow each day as crews process registration applications that were submitted by the major deadline last Saturday.
• Unleashed, Palin Makes a Pit Bull Look Tame …: Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000…. Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy." […] Palin, speaking to a sea of "Palin Power" and "Sarahcuda" T-shirts, tried to link Obama to the 1960s Weather Underground. […] "Kill him!" proposed one man in the audience. (via Twitter)

Sometime between 09:07 and 18:54, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Weird Al: Forefather of the YouTube Spoof: To make matters more complicated, whereas Yankovic could once mine such inexhaustible icons as Jackson and Nirvana for laughs, he now has to contend with the likes of Jessica Simpson or Kevin Federline—celebrities who are more or less already self-parodies. Being a music satirist in 2008 is a bit like being a political cartoonist after the Harding administration: too many easy targets, too few sacred idols.
• The New Yorker: The Choice: At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.
• Harmony® 510 Advanced Universal Remote: Your coffee table has five remotes. You have a special drawer where you keep them. Wouldn't it be easier to just have one remote? You can. Replace all your remotes with Harmony.
• It’s up to parents to see the writing on the walls: So far there have been 170 graffiti incidents in Kent this year. Wood figures graffiti costs the city more than $50,000 annually. That figure doesn't measure other costs, including the toll it takes on property values, community pride and the community's sense of public safety. "When there's graffiti the perception is there's crime and people feel less safe," Wood says. "We're trying to make people feel safe where they live and do business. There's no area where it's more prevalent. It happens on the East Hill, on the West Hill, downtown." (I wouldn't mind seeing some cleanup under this bridge — Prairie and I walk there pretty frequently, and it's covered in graffiti.)
• Make-Believe Maverick: A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty: This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather. (via Twitter)