The 140 Character Apocalypse

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Yesterday, Twitter was having a bit of a hiccup (which still seems to be hitting them on and off today) where most updates weren’t coming through. A few would sneak through from time to time, but it was mostly very, very quiet. Which led to an entertaining little bit of interaction with one of the few people whose updates were still appearing…

djwudi: Odd, no activity in my Twitter stream for the last hour. Is Twitter hiccuping, or are you all just really oddly quiet?

snail_5: It’s a mystery. :)

djwudi: It’s like being in some weird, 140-character sci-fi/horror movie. It’s quiet. Too quiet. All my contacts absorbed by pod people.
djwudi: Or zombies. A secret signal received, eyes glazed over, they rise from their ‘puters and shamble off into the world, hungry
djwudi: Like the signal in Steven King’s “The Cell,” only via Twitter. Hehe. That’s fun. The Twitter Zombie Apocalypse!

snail_5: o_O I do not support this plan. I don’t wanna be a zombie!
snail_5: Since I’m still talking to you maybe we’re both immune and will have to save humanity. :D

djwudi: Obviously, we either didn’t get the signal, or are immune. I’m hoping for the immunity. Either way, we’re still here…for now…!
djwudi: Better start scrounging to see what sort of weapons you can find. I should be able to make a mean rubberband paperclip shooter.

snail_5: I’m on the subway. If I’m not immune I’m screwed!
snail_5: I will outrun the zombies on my awesome rollerblades! If I can make it home I have a sword, and some plastic lightsabers

djwudi: Rollerblades are good! Speed may be of utmost importance. Hope your subway stop is soon, your ridemates sound questionable.

snail_5: No obvious zombies, but some showing preliminary symptoms. Listlessness, soulless eyes, a faint smell of decay

djwudi: Don’t jump to conclusions, though. “Listlessness, soulless eyes, a faint smell of decay” could describe many office workers.

snail_5: I’ll wait for more conclusive signs before I start bashing skulls. ^_^

Not long after that, things returned to normal. Apparently we managed to avoid the Twitter Zombie Apocalypse.

This time.

Links for January 30th through February 2nd

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Sometime between January 30th and February 2nd, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Its a Catastrophe for the Apostrophe in Britain: "On the streets of Birmingham, the queen's English is now the queens English. England's second-largest city has decided to drop apostrophes from all its street signs, saying they're confusing and old-fashioned. But some purists are downright possessive about the punctuation mark." Ugh…so instead of teaching proper usage, it's better to give up and drop apostrophes entirely? Horrid.
  • Getting Geeky With Twitterrific and AppleScript: I don't use Twitterrific (though perhaps it's time to take another look at it), but there's some fun Applescripty geekiness in here. Best bit of news out of the whole thing, though: The Talking Moose is on Twitter! If you understand why that's cool, then you know you've been using Macs a long time.
  • Hummer Drivers Get More Tickets. A Lot More.: "People who drive Hummers receive almost five times as many traffic tickets as the average driver, according to a new study. 'The sense of power that Hummer drivers derive from their vehicle may be directly correlated with the number of violations they incur, or perhaps Hummer drivers, by virtue of their driving position, are less likely to notice road hazards, signs, pedestrians and other drivers,' Raj Bhat, president of Quality Planning, said in a statement. Mark S. Foster, author of 'A Nation on Wheels: The Automobile Culture in America Since 1945,' was even more direct, essentially calling Hummer drivers colossal jerks. 'Hummer drivers feel like kings of the road because of their elevated driving positions,' he said. 'As these statistics show, they are leading the pack when it comes to violating the law, which may reflect their driving attitude.'"
  • Frozen in Indifference: Life Goes on Around Body Found in Vacant Warehouse: "This city has not always been a gentle place, but a series of events over the past few, frigid days causes one to wonder how cold the collective heart has grown. It starts with a phone call made by a man who said his friend found a dead body in the elevator shaft of an abandoned building on the city's west side. 'He's encased in ice, except his legs, which are sticking out like Popsicle sticks,' the caller phoned to tell this reporter. 'Why didn't your friend call the police?' 'He was trespassing and didn't want to get in trouble,' the caller replied."
  • Has the Viaduct Collapsed Yet?: Of particular importance to Seattleites. Via @slog and @paulbalcerak.

Social Networking Name Fail

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Y’know, I’m glad that Harry Potter fansite The Leaky Cauldron is doing well, and I applaud their efforts to find new and interesting ways to let fans worldwide connect with each other.

However, when deciding on a name for their new social networking site, was MyLeaky really the best they could come up with? It sounds like a support site for incontinence sufferers.

Links for January 29th through January 30th

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Sometime between January 29th and January 30th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Do Humanlike Machines Deserve Human Rights?: "This question is starting to get debated by robot designers and toymakers. With advanced robotics becoming cheaper and more commonplace, the challenge isn't how we learn to accept robots–but whether we should care when they're mistreated. And if we start caring about robot ethics, might we then go one insane step further and grant them rights?"
  • On the Flickr support in iPhoto ‘09: From Fraser Speirs, author of the excellent Flickr Export plugin for iPhoto and Aperture: "I acquired my copy of iLife ‘09 yesterday and decided to dive deep on how Apple have implemented Flickr integration in iPhoto ‘09. Here are the results of my investigation. Be aware as you read that this is the result of a morning’s click-around investigation and not months of serious use. I will do my best to give an honest assessment of what is in iPhoto ‘09, and you’ve already read my full disclosure in the previous paragraph."
  • Google School: Find Images by Exact Dimensions, Make Wallpaper Search a Breeze: "Weblog Design Live uncovers the undocumented search operator (that's also new to us) and demonstrates how to use it. Just use the imagesize operator followed by the WidthXHeight in pixels." For instance, imagesize:320×480 goth finds iPhone/iPod Touch wallpaper ready 'goth' images (for a potentially odd interpretation of 'goth', that is).
  • White House Unbuttons Formal Dress Code: "The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket. There was, however, a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat. 'He's from Hawaii, O.K.?' said Mr. Obama's senior adviser, David Axelrod, who occupies the small but strategically located office next door to his boss. 'He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there.'"
  • Create Your Own Original Star Trek Story: The original Star Trek only managed to make 80 episodes before running out of Dilithium. Not enough! So we mixed up the show's most frequent plot twists, to create a foolproof Trek story generator.

Links for January 27th through January 28th

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Sometime between January 27th and January 28th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Babies Know – a Little Dirt Is Good for You: "'What a child is doing when he puts things in his mouth is allowing his immune response to explore his environment,' Mary Ruebush, a microbiology and immunology instructor, wrote in her new book, 'Why Dirt Is Good' (Kaplan). 'Not only does this allow for 'practice' of immune responses, which will be necessary for protection, but it also plays a critical role in teaching the immature immune response what is best ignored.' One leading researcher, Dr. Joel V. Weinstock, said in an interview that the immune system at birth 'is like an unprogrammed computer. It needs instruction.' He said that public health measures like cleaning up contaminated water and food have saved the lives of countless children, but they 'also eliminated exposure to many organisms that are probably good for us. Children raised in an ultraclean environment,' he added, 'are not being exposed to organisms that help them develop appropriate immune regulatory circuits.'"
  • Feb. 17 Digital TV Conversion Is Still on After House Vote: "Bucking the Obama administration, House Republicans on Wednesday defeated a bill to postpone the upcoming transition from analog to digital television broadcasting to June 12 — leaving the current Feb. 17 deadline intact for now." A very welcome bookend to my grousing the other day. The Feb. 17 date has been trumpeted for a few years now, delaying it would just cause more problems and more confusion. Just flip the switch and get it done with already.
  • Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance—Now With Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!: "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton–and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers–and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead."
  • Graffiti Removal – City of Kent, Washington: "Immediate removal within 24-48 hours is the key to successful graffiti prevention. Property owners can take back their neighborhoods by helping to clean up graffiti. Any effort to remove graffiti makes a big difference. Remove graffiti immediately and work with your neighbors to ensure your neighborhood remains clean. If you have been the victim of graffiti vandalism, you may complete a case report by utilizing the Kent Police Department's online reporting system."

Everything But Marriage

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I happen to be of the opinion that we should remove marriage from the secular system entirely — that is, courts would merely deal with civil unions, which would be identical and impart identical rights to any couple, straight or gay — and let the churches handle marriage ceremonies for people who want them. If God doesn’t want same-sex couples to marry, then fine, let the churches bar their doors. But there is absolutely no reason why same-sex couples shouldn’t get all the same legal rights and privileges that heterosexual couples do.

Barring that solution, however, this is a good step forward:

State lawmakers are getting ready to introduce a bill allowing same-sex couples all the rights and benefits afforded to heterosexual married couples.

[…]

The measure makes changes to all remaining areas of state law where currently only married couples are addressed.

The bill would add same-sex domestic partners to state statutes ranging from labor and employment to criminal law, to pensions and other public employee benefits.

Print Stylesheets Return

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One of my website pet peeves is the lack of attention to how a site behaves when printed. All too often, there’s either an assumption that we live in a truly online-only world, or simply a lack of thought about how any given page will look when printed. Consequently, there are a lot of websites that look like crud when printed: navigation links and ads all over the page taking up unnecessary space, content crammed into a narrow column, an extra half page of junk after the actual content ends, etc.

Some sites give a ‘print view’ link that produces a print-optimized version of the page, but I’d be willing to bet that a lot of people never see that — especially given the number of times I’ve had to actively hunt for such a link, and found it shoved off in some corner, not obviously tied to the content at all. Besides, having a specialized page seems like unnecessary overhead on the server when better solutions exist.

To that end — and this is a project that I’ve been meaning to do for a while (I never even got around to it with my last design) — I’ve resurrected the print stylesheet for my site. Admittedly, I have no idea how often people print something they find here (and I would guess that it’s not very often at all), but at least now I know that if they do, they’ll get something useful.

There’s an older, but still relevant, more detailed look at the techniques I use in this post from 2003, but here’s a rundown of the results:

  1. No navigation links below the website title.
  2. No sidebar at all.
  3. No comment entry form.
  4. No Google ads.
  5. The content fills the page, with a wider left-hand margin to allow room for binding.
  6. Rather than coloring links (useless on a printed page), the URLs display after the linked text, using Markdown style formatting.

The only issue I’m having is the same issue I had the first time I set up a print stylesheet: the code that inserts URLs after linked items borks up the clean display of inline images (for an example, try printing this post). I’m (still) stumped on how to exclude images from the link insertion code, though, so for now, I’m just going with what I’ve got.

Links for January 26th through January 27th

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Sometime between January 26th and January 27th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Gods and Monsters Is 99 Cents Jan. 27th, 2009 Thru Feb. 03rd, 2009 at iTunes US: For those of you with broadband connections and Apple's iTunes, Gods and Monsters is only a 99 cent rental this week. It's an excellent drama, with Sir Ian McKellan and Brendan Frasier (in one of his few non-action, actually acting roles), looking at the relationship between original Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein director James Whale and his gardener. Definitely worth the rent!
  • Obama Tells Arabic Network US Is ‘Not Your Enemy’: "President Barack Obama chose an Arabic satellite TV network for his first formal television interview as president, part of a concerted effort to repair relations with the Muslim world that were damaged under the previous administration. Obama cited his Muslim background and relatives, practically a taboo issue during the U.S. presidential campaign, and said in the interview, which aired Tuesday, that one of his main tasks was to communicate to Muslims 'that the Americans are not your enemy.' The interview on the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya news channel aired as Obama's new envoy to the region, former Sen. George J. Mitchell, arrived in Egypt on Tuesday for a visit that will also take him to Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. 'What I told [Mitchell] is start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating,' Obama told the interviewer."
  • 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read: Science Fiction & Fantasy: "It is sometimes assumed that science fiction, fantasy and horror must mean spaceships, elves and vampires – and indeed, you'll find Iain M Banks, Tolkien and Bram Stoker on our list of mind-expanding reads. Yet these three genres have a tradition as venerable as the novel itself. Fiction works through metamorphosis: in every era authors explore the concerns of their times by mapping them on to invented worlds, whether they be political dystopias, fabulous kingdoms or supernatural dimensions. Every truly original writer must, by definition, create a new world. Here is a whole galaxy of worlds to explore."
  • Layers | Screen Forensics: "Capture your displays as a Photoshop layered image. Don't waste time capturing each window separately, importing them in your favorite PSD editor, naming the layers, positioning the images, etc. Do it with Layers in no time! Press the capture hotkey or customize your capture in the inspector. You'll obtain a full fledged PSD file with one layer per window, including menu and desktop icons, dock and menubar. " I've been quite happily using Snapz Pro X for my screenshots for years, but this looks like a very tempting competitor. Looking forward to giving it a try!
  • Pope Outrages Jews Over Holocaust Denier: "Jewish officials in Israel and abroad are outraged that Pope Benedict XVI has decided to lift the excommunication of a British bishop who denies that Jews were killed in Nazi gas chambers. The church's decision to lift the excommunication comes a few days after a Swedish television aired an interview with Williamson in which the 68-year-old claimed the Nazis did not use gas chambers. 'I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against — is hugely against — 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler,' he said in the interview, which appeared on various Web sites since its broadcast. 'I believe there were no gas chambers,' he added."

Links for January 21st through January 26th

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Sometime between January 21st and January 26th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Improved Del.Icio.Us Posting Bookmarklet (With Gruber’s Title Case Goodness): "For a while, I used the del.icio.us Complete Firefox extension, but it's one of those few abandonware extensions that didn't make the trip to Firefox 3. So I switched back to my bookmarklet, as it can do everything the extension does and more — and with keyconfig and a handy reference, it can be triggered by a keystroke just as the extension was, so I'm all good."
  • Time Machine backups on network shares in Leopard: A guide to setting up Time Machine backups over a network without springing for Apple's Time Capsule device.
  • Obama signs order to close Guantanamo in a year: President Barack Obama began overhauling U.S. treatment of terror suspects Thursday, signing orders to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, shut down secret overseas CIA prisons, review military war crimes trials and ban the harshest interrogation methods.
  • The Obameter: Tracking Barack Obama’s Campaign Promises: PolitiFact has compiled about 500 promises that Barack Obama made during the campaign and is tracking their progress on our Obameter. We rate their status as No Action, In the Works or Stalled. Once we find action is completed, we rate them Promise Kept, Compromise or Promise Broken. (So far: 6 kept, 1 stalled, 14 in progress)
  • US Democracy Server: Patch Day: * Leadership: Will now scale properly to national crises. Intelligence was not being properly applied. * A bug has been fixed that allowed the President to ignore the effects of debuffs applied by the Legislative classes. * Drain Treasury: There appears to be a bug that allowed loot to be transferred from the treasury to anyone on the President’s friends list, or in the President’s party. We are investigating. * Messages to and from the President will now be correctly saved to the chat log. * Messages originating from the President were being misclassified as originating from The American People. * A rendering error that frequently caused the President to appear wrapped in the American Flag texture has been addressed.

Pacific Science Center’s Lucy Exhibit Stumbling

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In some ways one of the most famous women ever to walk the Earth, Lucy died around 3.2 million years ago. Her partial skeleton, discovered in 1974, has become one of the most significant anthropological finds ever. Starting in 2007, Lucy went on what was planned to be a six-year, 10-city United States tour — her first time outside of Ethiopia — and began with an engagement in Houston so successful that her stay was extended for an extra five months.

Her second stop on the tour is at Seattle’s Pacific Science Center, where her exhibit is running from October through March 8th. Unfortunately, this could very well be her last stop before heading home to Ethiopia. Apparently, not enough people are bothering to see the exhibit.

Facing up to a half-million-dollar loss on the exhibit, the center laid off 8 percent of its staff and froze wages, President and CEO Bryce Seidl said Friday. Workers are taking unpaid days off, and the nonprofit organization suspended matching funds for individual retirement accounts.

It’s a disappointing outcome for an exhibit that was intended to be a blockbuster for the Seattle museum and a public-relations coup for Lucy’s homeland of Ethiopia, Seidl said.

[…]

The exhibit cost about $2.25 million to mount, Seidl estimated. That includes a $500,000 fee to the government of Ethiopia, which plans to use the money raised during Lucy’s U.S. tour for cultural and scientific programs.

The science center had hoped 250,000 people would visit during the exhibit’s five-month run, which ends March 8. But attendance, so far, is only 60,000.

[…]

Other museums around the U.S. have been tracking Lucy’s poor showing in Seattle, and none has yet agreed to be the next stop on what was meant to be a six-year, 10-city tour. Chicago’s Field Museum backed out of plans to host the exhibit because of the cost. Controversy over whether the irreplaceable fossil should be transported around the globe led the Denver Museum of Nature & Science not to follow through on early discussions.

“Lucy may not be anywhere other than Ethiopia after Seattle,” Seidl said.

Just sad. Prairie and I had already been discussing going, and this cements our plans. We’re thinking that we’ll probably be heading down on Valentine’s Day weekend and spend a day seeing the Lucy exhibit and wandering around the PacSci.

You should head down and give Lucy a visit as well (on your own schedule, of course, but don’t wait too long, she’s only here until early March). It’s an incredibly important bit of history and science, and it’s sad to hear that so few people are showing up.