Links for December 2nd from 12:37 to 18:08

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Sometime between 12:37 and 18:08, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • App Store Lessons: Creating simple application links: Linktoapp offers a handy way to simplify [iTunes App Store] URLs by filtering them through iTunes' search engine. Developed by Arn of MacRumors, Linktoapp is basically TinyURL for the App Store.
  • Neil Gaiman’s Journal: Why defend freedom of icky speech?: Freedom to write, freedom to read, freedom to own material that you believe is worth defending means you're going to have to stand up for stuff you don't believe is worth defending, even stuff you find actively distasteful, because laws are big blunt instruments that do not differentiate between what you like and what you don't, because prosecutors are humans and bear grudges and fight for re-election, because one person's obscenity is another person's art. Because if you don't stand up for the stuff you don't like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you've already lost.
  • The Witches: Guillermo Del Toro Dances With Roald Dahl’s Witches: Yay! This could be very, very cool. My one hope is that he sticks with the original ending — my one complaint about the otherwise excellent earlier film adaptation of this story is that the ending is sweeter and less dark than the book.
  • Vampire Comedy Has Musicians Lining Up to Suck: Alice Cooper is about to make vampires more metal. The rocker joins Iggy Pop, Moby, and Malcolm McDowell in the upcoming horror comedy Suck. A cross-genre cast of musicians and a monster hunting, nyctophobic Malcolm McDowell star in this tale of a wannabe rock band who, after an encounter with a vampire, find that fame and immortality aren’t quite what they expected.
  • Does the broken windows theory hold online?: Much of the tone of discourse online is governed by the level of moderation and to what extent people are encouraged to "own" their words. When forums, message boards, and blog comment threads with more than a handful of participants are unmoderated, bad behavior follows. The appearance of one troll encourages others. Undeleted hateful or ad hominem comments are an indication that that sort of thing is allowable behavior and encourages more of the same.

Links for November 26th through December 2nd

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Sometime between November 26th and December 2nd, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • change.gov set free: Consistent with the values of any "open government," and with his strong leadership on "free debates" from the very start, the Obama team has modified the copyright notice on change.gov to embrace the freest CC license.
  • ’12 Days of Christmas’ items would cost $86,609: That's this year's cost, according to the annual "Christmas Price Index" compiled by PNC Wealth Management, which tallies the single partridge in a pear tree to the 12 drummers drumming, purchased repeatedly as the song suggests. The price is up $8,508 or 10.9 percent, from $78,100 last year.
  • Students lie, cheat, steal, but say they’re good: In the past year, 30 percent of U.S. high school students have stolen from a store and 64 percent have cheated on a test, according to a new, large-scale survey suggesting that Americans are too apathetic about ethical standards. One-fifth said they stole something from a friend; 23 percent said they stole something from a parent or other relative. Thirty-six percent said they used the Internet to plagiarize an assignment, up from 33 percent in 2004. Despite such responses, 93 percent of the students said they were satisfied with their personal ethics and character, and 77 percent affirmed that "when it comes to doing what is right, I am better than most people I know." (Prairie and I were talking about this study yesterday. It's like the current generation has grown up so coddled that they've never had to worry about consequences, and now we've raised a generation of psychopaths: they know the difference between right and wrong, they just don't care.)
  • Still going: Energizer Bunny enters his 20th year: The pink bunny, always pounding a drum, always wearing sunglasses and flip-flops, made his debut in an October 1989 ad in which he marched off the set as the stage manager implored, "Stop the bunny, please." The bunny soon showed up in a series of parody commercials for products such as wine, coffee and long-distance phone service, always banging the drum into the commercial to interrupt. Two decades later, he is still going strong.
  • Mashed in Plastic: The David Lynch mashup album.
  • GlimmerBlocker: The problem with other ad-blockers for Safari is that they are implemented as awful hacks: as an InputManager and/or ApplicationEnhancer. This compromises the stability of Safari and very often create problems when Apple releases a new version of Safari. GlimmerBlocker is implemented as an http proxy, so the stability of Safari isn't compromised because it doesn't use any hacks. It is even compatible with all other browsers. You'll always be able to upgrade Safari without breaking GlimmerBlocker (or waiting for a new release); and you'll be able to upgrade GlimmerBlocker without upgrading Safari. This makes it much easier to use the beta versions of Safari and especially the nightly builds of WebKit.

Links for November 21st through November 25th

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Sometime between November 21st and November 25th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Otto the octopus wrecks havoc: "We knew that he was bored as the aquarium is closed for winter, and at two feet, seven inches Otto had discovered he was big enough to swing onto the edge of his tank and shoot out the 2000 Watt spot light above him with a carefully directed jet of water. Once we saw him juggling the hermit crabs in his tank, another time he threw stones against the glass damaging it. And from time to time he completely re-arranges his tank to make it suit his own taste better – much to the distress of his fellow tank inhabitants."
  • An Important Announcement About Gothic Charm School!: Exciting news, Snarklings! Coming to bookstores in June 2009, the Gothic Charm School book! Gothic Charm School – An Essential Guide For Goths and Those Who Love Them. As you might guess, the Lady of the Manners is giddy with excitement about the upcoming Gothic Charm School book, and hopes that all of you are too. Because you see, this book isn’t a mere collection of assorted columns from the history of this site, gracious no! The Gothic Charm School book is full of all sorts of new goodies and artwork by noted fantasy artist Pete Venters.
  • Miami judge rules against Florida gay adoption ban: Florida's strict law banning adoption of children by gay people was found unconstitutional Tuesday by a state judge who declared there was no legal or scientific reason for sexual orientation alone to prohibit anyone from adopting. Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman said the 31-year-old law violates equal protection rights for the children and their prospective gay parents, rejecting the state's arguments that there is "a supposed dark cloud hovering over homes of homosexuals and their children." She also noted that gay people are allowed to be foster parents in Florida.
  • seattlegothic: Clubbing 101: Don’t be a Douche-Nozzle: I've been a dj at the Mercury/MachineWerks for 12 years, and a nightclub patron for much longer. From my vantage point as a dj, I've seen both the best and worst of human social behavior. Most nights tick along nicely with a minimum of incident, but once in a while you get a night like last night where all kinds of crazy shit goes down, and you're reminded that it might be time for everyone to revisit the subject of club etiquette… After a long week of work, it's finally the weekend! You want to cut loose and have some fun! Here are some guidelines to help you have a safe and enjoyable experience in your Club of Choice.
  • Panda bites student seeking a hug: "Yang Yang was so cute and I just wanted to cuddle him. I didn't expect he would attack," the 20-year-old student, surnamed Liu, said in a local hospital, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
  • Rant: Twilight’s Hidden Morality Plays: Is the Twilight series pushing its own kind of morality along with its love story? I think so — and it is an element that parents and teachers need to be aware is in the books. The narrative suggests that it is better to submit and sublimate yourself to a superior being than to be your own person. Having a will of one's own is not conducive to Meyer's brand of love and living. Only heterosexual relationships are explored, and (married!) sex is always a power play with painful consequences. Plus it is preferable to be a teenage mother above all else, even if it kills you.

Seattle PI Getting Sued

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This isn’t much of a surprise:

An operator involved in a deadly Bellevue crane collapse has sued the Seattle P-I, saying the paper defamed him by printing details of his criminal history.

Warren Yeakey, the 36-year- old operator who was injured in the November 2006 collapse, filed the defamation suit in Pierce County Superior Court earlier this month. In court documents, Yeakey says the paper wrongly intimated that his arrests and convictions somehow contributed to the collapse.

“He felt like he was vilified falsely,” said Matt Renda, a Tacoma attorney representing Yeakey. The story, Renda added, “created an incorrect or false implication that operator error … was a contributing factor to the downing of the crane and the death of (Matthew) Ammond,” a Microsoft Corp. patent lawyer who was killed in the collapse.

I knew at the time of the collapse that the reporting of the accident was not the PI’s finest hour.

…when a crane collapsed in Bellevue last November, I was disgusted by the PI’s response: an immediate front-page article digging up and detailing five-year-old accounts of the past drug use of the poor guy operating the crane that day. As if this guy’s day wasn’t bad enough — he goes to work, climbs to the top of a tower crane, and then rides the thing down as it collapses into nearby apartment buildings — he then has to endure the ingominy and public humiliation of having his past transgressions dug up, splashed across the front page of the newspaper, and implicitly blamed as the cause of the accident. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t had a drug conviction in five years, nor that his employer required drug tests that he had reliably passed, nor that there was no indication of drug use at the time of the accident. What mattered was that he was guilty! Guilty, guilty, guilty!

I wonder if the PI would be getting sued if they’d printed some form of apology or retraction at the time?

To Blu or Not To Blu?

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For Christmas this year, Prairie and I have decided to treat ourselves and upgrade our TV set from the one I bought when I moved to Seattle seven and a half years ago (!!!!!). It’s a nice enough TV (a Sony Wega 27-inch), but it’s huge, heavy, and while still in good shape, it’s old tech. The original plan was to wait until it died, but between Sony’s generally good longevity (my parents had a little Sony 13″ TV that went for almost thirty years) and my geeky techno-lust, Prairie surprised me by suggesting that we go ahead and upgrade to the new hotness.

So, the hunt is in progress. At this point, I’m pretty much decided on a 32″ Samsung, most likely either the LN32A550 or the LN32A650, depending on where prices land in the weeks between Black Friday and Christmas.

Of course, with the jump to an HDTV comes the jump to HD programming. Day-to-day entertainment will come courtesy of Comcast — we’re already getting our cable through them, so we’ll just upgrade that to the minimum possible digital/HD package. For movies, though, we’re doing a bit of back-and-forth (though, to be honest, Prairie’s on the “back” — that is, staying with what we have — while I’m on the “forth” side of the discussion).

My movie-loving, technology-geeking little heart tends to go all a-pitter-pat at upgrading to Blu-Ray. I jumped onto the DVD bandwagon as soon as it dropped into the realm of affordability, loved the jump in video and audio quality from my old VHS tapes, and have been looking forward to the next step forward.

Prairie, however, doesn’t really see what all the fuss is about, and her approach is one that I’m having an amusingly tough time arguing against: if we can see the show and enjoy the story, than what’s the big deal? She never saw a big difference between VHS and DVD, doesn’t really care about surround sound (a moot point at the moment, as living in an apartment building means that standard stereo at reasonable levels is far more realistic than full surround and gut-thumping subwoofers — something we really wish our neighbors would realize…), and just doesn’t see the point in adding another piece of electronics and another remote to the stack we have to keep track of already.

I’ve gotta admit, it’s hard to really say, “But…it’s better!” without realizing just how foolish that sounds.

Not that I don’t try. I’d have my geek card revoked if I didn’t at least try.

(And on a not-unrelated-at-all side note, I think it works wonderfully that our respective geek levels generally balance out into reasonable end results. I don’t know how couples made of dual übergeeks can manage!)

In any case, I think part of the conversation is simply the fact that we don’t really know how much of a change we’re going to see when we upgrade. Sure, I’ve looked at all the numbers and can see the mathmatical difference between SD 640×480 and FullHD 1920×1080, I’ve done simple little experiments looking at resolution increases, and I’ve been working with digital photography long enough that I can get a feel for the difference betweeen a .3 megapixel image and a 2 megapixel image (the approximate difference between SD and FullHD). But running numbers and reading webpages is no substitute for actually seeing what happens when we plug it all together.

So I tried a little experiment today, and tossed out two questions on Twitter…

You who’ve moved from “old school” TV to a new HDTV (pref. w/some form of HD feed): is it really that big of a difference? Turned up to 11?

Same question, part 2: Along the same lines, how about the DVD to Blu-Ray transition? Again, is it that much visibly better?

…and got the following responses:

  • axsdeny: DVD to Blu-Ray: yes. If you have even a 720p TV you can tell the difference. It’s beautiful.
  • lyracole: i don’t notice the difference between my standard and hd, but sir does. also, fuck blu-ray.
  • stoppableforce: w/r/t the difference between SDTV and HDTV: YES. YES. DEAR GOD YES. The difference in clarity is A-FUCKIN’-MAZING.
  • stoppableforce: w/r/t the DVD-to-Blu-Ray thing: Not so much. We’ve got both, Blu-Ray looks slightly better, not enough to make me buy a PS3 yet.
  • mellzah: I hate to admit it, but blu-ray looks great. DVDs don’t look sharp on my TV– non-HD projection 50ish inch–but Blu-Ray movies do!
  • skyler: Huge difference. I attribute most of it to HDMI, actually. Clearer interference free signal. Xbox 360 + 1080p is great w/DVDs.
  • antifuse: short answer? Yes. Longer answer? Depends what you watch. Plain DVDs upscaled by Blu ray look fab, and many shows look great too.
  • wnalyd: Finally answering your HDTV question: Heck yeah there’s a difference bwtn HD + SD. Turned up to 17. Wouldn’t go back.

So the final consensus (admittedly, since I used Twitter, drawing from a very weighted sample of at least somewhat geeky-type people), while not clear-cut across the board, seems to be that yes, there is a difference, ranging from “better” to “A-FUCKIN’-MAZING”. We’ll just have to wait and see where we fall along that spectrum with the equipment we have (we’ll have the HDTV and HD cable from Comcast for the pretty pretty pixels, and a non-upconverting DVD/VHS combo deck for movies), and maybe see if I can find anyone with a Blu-Ray player for us to borrow for a night to help us decide if we want to add that piece, too (of course, if the Blu-Ray players don’t drop into affordability, that’ll make the whole point moot as well).

Did I miss anything?

Links for November 20th through November 21st

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Sometime between November 20th and November 21st, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Pushing Daisies: ABC ”Cancels” Beloved Fantasy TV Show: As a result, ABC has opted not to order any additional episodes. The network has avoided saying that it’s actually cancelled the show. The series could possibly return at a later date but, considering Daisies’ ratings track record, that is highly unlikely. More likely, the network is trying to avoid backlash from devoted and disappointed fans. (Pity that there are enough "devoted and disappointed fans" that ABC may be trying to avoid backlash, but that's still not seen as enough reason to keep the show around. I'm going to miss this one.)
  • Row over altered US Army photo: The Pentagon has become embroiled in a row after the US Army released a photo of a general to the media which was found to have been digitally altered. Ann Dunwoody was shown in front of the US flag but it later emerged that this background had been added. The Associated Press (AP) news agency subsequently suspended the use of US Department of Defense photos.
  • MPR: Challenged ballots: You be the judge: Representatives from the campaigns of Sen. Norm Coleman and Al Franken have been challenging ballots across the state. It's your turn to play election judge. Tell us how you would rule in the case of these challenged ballots.
  • Free to Be… You and Me: the 35 Anniversary Edition: the book every kid needs: If you were to distill the messages that every kid needs to hear to grow up to be a confident, loving individual who does what's right even when society sneers, if you were to turn them into great songs, funny poems, without a hint of preachiness or condescension, it would be this book and CD. Every kid needs this book — and the organization that publishes it is every bit as great as the book itself.
  • Digital Youth Project: If you care about kids and want to understand how they use technology and why, this is a must-read: The Digital Youth Project, a MacArthur-funded three year, 22 case study, $3.3 million ethnographic study of what kids are doing online, has wound up and published its results. The project was undertaken by the eminent sociologist Mimi Ito and her talented colleagues (including the incomparable danah boyd) and is the largest and most comprehensive study of young peoples' internet use ever undertaken in the US.
    The conclusions are sane, compassionate, and compelling: in a nutshell, the "serious" stuff we all hope kids will do online (researching papers and so on) are only possible within a framework of "hanging out, messing around and geeking out." That is to say, all the "time-wasting" social stuff kids do online are key to their explorations and education online.

The Answer is Probably “Yes”

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I’m trying to decide if I’m a hypocrite for being unsure about how I feel about Kid Rock’s new single “All Summer Long” — which, though catchy, is little more than new lyrics on top of the riff from Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” — when I’m sitting on a 10.79 GB collection of 1,462 mashups.

(Update: Y’know, after watching the video, even if I am on the hypocritical side of things, I’m feeling less guilty about it, based solely on the fact that Kid Rock is incredibly skeezy. Ick. I feel dirtier just having watched that.)

(Second update: The worst part is, the song is damn catchy, though that says far less about Kid Rock than it does for Warren Zevon and Lynyrd Skynyrd, whose “Sweet Home Alabama” is also sampled.)

Links for November 17th through November 20th

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Sometime between November 17th and November 20th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Race in D&D: I do not want to spend too much time beating a dead war-horse, but your average D&D game consists of a group of white players acting out how their white characters encounter and destroy orcs and goblins, who are, as a race evil, uncivilized, and dark-skinned. To quote Steve Sumner’s essay again, “Unless played very carefully, Dungeons & Dragons could easily become a proxy race war….” I would argue with/ Sumner’s use of the phrase “could become,” and say that unless played very carefully, D&D usually becomes a proxy race war. Any adventurer knows that if you see an orc, you kill it. You don’t talk to it, you don’t ask what it’s doing there – you kill it, since it’s life is worth less than the treasure it carries and the experience points you’ll get from the kill. If filmed, your average D&D campaign would look something like Birth of a Nation set in Greyhawk.
  • Stevens loses Alaska Senate race: Sen. Ted Stevens, the longest serving Republican in Senate history, narrowly lost his re-election bid Tuesday, marking the downfall of a Washington political power and Alaska icon who couldn't survive a conviction on federal corruption charges. (Hooray! My old home state isn't completely wackadoodle after all! Mostly, sure…but not completely!)
  • Thieves Target Pay Parking Stations And Rip Off Thousands From City: "The City believes the criminals used something to cut the units from the bolts cemented in the ground, and then used a truck with a wench to hoist them out." Emphasis mine — apparently, the lead suspect in this crime is the Society for Creative Anachronism….
  • Fireweed 7 slashes price of movie tickets to $3: Wow. This is the theater I worked in, slinging popcorn, for about a year and a half when I was 18/19 years old. The Fireweed has quite a history of Anchorage movie-going, from being a drive-in (many years ago) to having one of the largest single auditoriums around. Dolby Digital was installed when I was working there, and at the time, Theater #1 was the largest DD and THX certified screen on the West Coast. I got to sit in on the demo reel that was screened for the press just after the installation which had short clips from a few movies, including the first Tim Burton Batman. The scene shown was whe the bats fly out of the cave and past the camera, and at the time, the difference in audio clarity between standard (optically read) Dolby Surround and the new, all-digital, multichannel Dolby Digital was mindblowing. In a way, it's sad to see such a storied theater turn into a second-run cheap-seat house…but at the same time, what a great second-run theater!
  • How to process photos really, really quickly: I take a lot of photos — I'm on pace to have taken more than 150,000 photos in 2008. Not bad, since I'm not a sports-shooter and very rarely mash down the shutter button for continuous shooting. The good news of the digital era is that I didn't have to spring for more than 4,000 rolls of film. The bad news is that I have to process each of these photos myself. As you might imagine, I've streamlined the process a bit.

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:

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