Links

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

• Olympic opening uses girl’s voice, not face: A 7-year-old Chinese girl was not good-looking enough for the Olympics opening ceremony, so another little girl with a pixie smile lip-synched "Ode to the Motherland," a ceremony official said – the latest example of the lengths Beijing took for a perfect start to the Summer Games.
• Deconstructing Dr. Horrible: This post contains mad spoilers. I also warn that I am going to take a funny, silly, amusing show and be boringly, depressingly serious about it. If your response to these sorts of nitpicks is 'durr it's just a show' — you're right. So don't click.
• Part of Olympic display altered in broadcast: Part of the elaborate Olympics fireworks show broadcast to the world in the opening ceremony was altered, done digitally in 3-D computer graphics, according to several news reports. While the dramatic display [of giant footsteps 'walking' across the city] actually happened as portrayed on television, members of the Beijing Olympic Committee said it was necessary to replace live video with computer-generated imagery because the city’s hazy, smoggy skies made it too difficult to see, according to The Beijing Times, which first reported the story.
• Olympic Fail: Blue Screen of Death Strikes Bird’s Nest During Opening Ceremonies Torch Lighting: Okay, so this really isn't a major thing: the BSOD was on one obscure section of the Birds Nest for less than a second and was barely visible. Still, it's good for a little bit of nerdy amusement.
• Turn your change into apps (or music): Coinstar's change-counting machines now offer Gift Certificate options that don't charge the 9% counting fee — and one of the options is for Apple's iTunes Music Store. Dig in your couch, find those pennies, and turn 'em into music or iPhone/iPod Touch applications.

Sometime between August 7th and August 11th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Famed Utah rock arch collapses: The arch is along Devils Garden Trail, one of the most popular in the park. For years, the arch has been a favorite stopping point for photographers. Henderson said the arch was claimed by forces that will eventually destroy others in the park: gravity and erosion. "They all let go after a while," he said Friday.
• Internet Memes: A slick timeline of Internet memes and in-jokes. I'm pretty impressed with how far back it goes.
• Watch the Olympics Online: The 2008 Beijing Olympics will happen while most Americans are sleeping. While NBC, the games' official media outlet in the United States, will be providing thousands of hours of content on the web, the only way to truly ensure you won't miss too many record-breaking moments is to spread yourself across the web and take advantage of the many video outlets online.
• I made it longer because I have not had the opportunity to make it shorter.: This bookmark's for me — the original French and a translation of a passage by Pascal in 1657 that all to often applies to my own writing…enough so that before my weblog was titled 'eclecticism,' it was 'The Long Letter.'
• Bremerton baristas banned from wearing pasties: I'm trying to decide if this headline is clumsy or inspired, given that it appears to say that the baristas will now be going completely topless!

Sometime between August 6th and August 7th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Olympics | You can get Games fix on TV, Web: The hype for NBC — which paid a tidy $900 million for the right to station 106 commentators in Beijing this month — is all about total hours: 3,600 in all. That's more coverage, the network likes to point out, than the combined total of all previous Olympic Games up to this point. It's three times the amount of Athens coverage in 2004. We'll take their word for it. But the vast majority of those hours are events broadcast either on NBC's broad palette of cable stations, or on the Internet, where a whopping 2,400 of those 3,600 hours translate to streaming on nbcolympics.com.
• Wash. letter carrier going full kilt ahead: A 6-foot-tall, 250-pound letter carrier is campaigning for the right to take off his pants. Dean Peterson wants the U.S. Postal Service to add kilts as a uniform option for men. (He's certainly got my support! Wouldn't mind mounting a campaign like this myself, but at almost one full week into my new job, I think it's a bit early to rock that particular boat.)
• Greyhound pulls ‘bus rage’ ads: Greyhound Canada said Tuesday that it is in the process of pulling a series of ads in an extensive, cross-country campaign featuring the slogan, "There's a reason you've never heard of bus rage." The company made the move in response to last week's gruesome beheading murder on an eastbound Greyhound bus near Portage la Prairie, Man., which claimed the life of Tim McLean, 22. (I'm sure I shouldn't think this is funny, but — at least in my mind — there's a certain amount of dark humor in it.)
• Beta beat: Pukka 1.7: An update to Pukka (which I use for posting most of my daily "neat stuff" links when I'm on my home 'puter) to add some new features and deal with the update to Delicious (including descriptions up to 1000 characters!).
• Best Seat in the House | Olympics: Planning, Packing, And Panicking.: Neat rundown by the Seattle Times' photographer for the Olympics of the gear he's bringing. Man, would it be fun to have some of those toys…esp. the three Nikon D3 bodies!

Sometime between July 31st and August 6th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Trading Places: The demographic inversion of the American city.: In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be "demographic inversion." Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city–Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center–some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white–are those who can afford to do so.
• The ORIGINAL Illustrated Catalog Of ACME Products: ACME is a worldwide leader of many manufactured goods. From its humble beginnings providing corks and flypaper to bug collectors to its heyday in the American Southwest supplying a certain coyote…ACME has set the standard for excellence.
• Canada bus passenger stabs, decapitates seat mate: A traveler aboard a Greyhound bus repeatedly stabbed and then decapitated his seat mate, pausing during the savage attack in central Canada to display the head to passengers who had fled in horror, witnesses and officials said Thursday.
• EW Previews Star Trek Comic Con Posters – With First Cast Photos: The first official images of Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), Uhura (Zoë Saldana), and Nero (Eric Bana). By the way, look closely at the eyes. (Yes, I'm two weeks behind. But wow does Quinto look perfect for Spock!)
• Ballantine Books to Publish Book Inspired by the Webcomic Garfield Minus Garfield: The full-color book format will give readers the experience of having both the original and doctored Garfield strips together on the same page for comparison. (Jim Davis gets a lot of cool points in my book for allowing this to happen.)

Sometime between 13:09 and 13:51, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• A Word for That:: grawlix, n. A string of typographical symbols used (especially in comic strips) to represent an obscenity or swear word.
• A twist in high-flying mystery: In the Northwest's most enduring mystery — who was D.B. Cooper? — about the only thing we've ever been certain of is that the legendary skyjacker was a he. What if he wasn't?
• Register to Vote in Washington State: In theory, you can update your address online, but that's not working right now. Meh.
• Robin Williams comedy filming in Wallingford: The new independent comedy is "World's Greatest Dad," in which Williams plays a high school poetry teacher who finds his son dead under embarrassing circumstances involving a "freak masturbation accident." (Um…this is a comedy? Sounds hilarious so far.)
• NASA/JPL Climate Time Machine: This series of visualizations show how some of the key indicators of climate change, such as temperature, sea ice extent and carbon dioxide concentrations, have changed in Earth's recent history.

Sometime between July 14th and July 16th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Recent Volcanic Activity – The Big Picture – Boston.com: Some days it's hard not to link to every post at this weblog. Gorgeous shots of recent volcanic eruptions, including some incredible photos of Alaska's Mt. Augustine (the 8th photo on the page looks like something out of a fantasy movie).
• July 16, 1945: Trinity Blast Opens Atomic Age: The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description.
• Joss Whedon Waxes Dr. Horrible: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, a direct-to-the-web musical from Joss Whedon, tells the story of an evil wannabe villain who vlogs, bungles experiments and takes regular lessons from a voice coach to finesse his evil cackle.
• Aurora Feint: One of the best iPhone/iPod Touch games I've seen yet, and it's completely free! This is going to suck up a lot of my free time….
• Cube Runner: My favorite iPhone/iPod Touch game yet. Temporarily offline at the Apple Store, but should reappear soon.

Sometime between 11:50 and 17:00, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Blackbird that can mimic the sound of ambulance’s siren makes family’s life hell: He can ring like a mobile phone, peal like a car alarm, wolf-whistle and every morning as the sun rises he lets out a wail that sounds exactly like an ambulance siren.
• Citizen Camera: Neat idea: tie disposable cameras to a few different locations with a note telling people to have fun, then walk away. Pick up the cameras a few hours later, and see what's on 'em.
• McCain encourages adoption, unless you’re gay.: Mr. McCain, who with his wife, Cindy, has an adopted daughter, said flatly that he opposed allowing gay couples to adopt. “I think that we’ve proven that both parents are important in the success of a family so, no, I don’t believe in gay adoption.
• Building demolition based on old Japanese game: Kajima Corporation, a Japanese construction company, demolishes high-rise buildings from the bottom up. They install giant hydraulic jacks on the first floor, break up all the building material on that floor, then lower the jacks and repeat the process.
• FoxTrot does Webcomics: I recognized all three of the webcomics in this FoxTrot strip, and currently read three of them.

Sometime between July 9th and July 14th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• The Greatest Sideshow Video Ever Made: The Greatest Sideshow Video Ever Made was shot at the Moore theater in Seattle in 1992. The oddball cousin of Seattle's grunge music scene, the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow mixed vintage sideshow acts with novel stunts never before seen.
• A Web of Geeks, Every One of Which Knows a Lot about Something: Vegging Out vs. Geeking Out. Romance as the MSG of film. The bifurcated careers of Lucy Lawless, Sigourney Weaver, and Hugo Weaving. Characters making smart decisions vs. stupid decisions. Neal Stephenson discusses Sci-Fi/Speculative Fiction…
• iPhone BookShelf: BookShelf is an easy to use electronic book reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Available through the AppStore, BookShelf installs easily on your mobile device.
• Snack Foods That Sound Like Sex Acts: Immature, yes. Really damn funny, though.
• Wonderlic Test: I'd never heard of this before, but just took it yesterday. The average score is 24. I don't remember exactly, but I'm very sure my score was at least a 36, perhaps as high as 40. Apparently I'm a smarty-pants! ;)