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….)

Links for November 5th from 10:26 to 15:23

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Sometime between 10:26 and 15:23, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • MPAA Already Lobbying Obama: Perhaps Glickman, a former congressman, wants to get an early foot in the door to help the new administration choose the nation's first copyright czar. Or Glickman might be cuddling up to the next president because Obama has said he wants (.pdf) to reform the nation's intellectual property laws "to promote civic discourse, innovation and investment while ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated." (Very serious question: is there any way for us to nominate Lawrence Lessig for the post?)
  • Yes We Can: I ride the 7 bus to work those mornings I can’t face my bicycle. It comes up from south Seattle and traverses rich and poor neighborhoods, the International District, Pioneer square and Downtown. Usually, it is a hateful, loud, messy conglomeration of tired people. This morning, an older black man sat with a grin on his face. He was dressed for construction work. Out of the blue, he shouted, “YES, we can!” It was completely infectious- people responded in a chorus of “Yes, we can,” and there was clapping, and there were grins, ear to ear. And we rode on together.
  • The next President of the United States: In a vote of historic proportions yesterday, Senator Barack Obama became President-Elect of the United States of America with a 52% majority in the popular vote, and more than 349 electoral votes. Over two years of campaigning was resolved with a record voter turnout, as the Republican candidate John McCain conceded graciously at 11:20 pm eastern last night. With such a high level of interest and attention, there have been millions of words written and photographs taken of the candidates over the past year. Here is a collection of some of the best photos of President-Elect Barack Obama over the past several months.
  • Simon Pegg on why the undead should never be allowed to run: I know it is absurd to debate the rules of a reality that does not exist, but this genuinely irks me. You cannot kill a vampire with an MDF stake; werewolves can't fly; zombies do not run. It's a misconception, a bastardisation that diminishes a classic movie monster. The best phantasmagoria uses reality to render the inconceivable conceivable. The speedy zombie seems implausible to me, even within the fantastic realm it inhabits. A biological agent, I'll buy. Some sort of super-virus? Sure, why not. But death? Death is a disability, not a superpower. It's hard to run with a cold, let alone the most debilitating malady of them all.
  • Barack Obama: How He Did It: A team of NEWSWEEK reporters reveals the secret battles and private fears behind an epic election. (It looks like only 1 of 8 chapters is online, it's unclear whether that's going to change after the print edition appears.)
  • Highlights: Newsweek’s Special Election Project: Palin's shopping spree at high-end department stores was more extensive than previously reported. While publicly supporting Palin, McCain's top advisers privately fumed at what they regarded as her outrageous profligacy. One aide estimated that she spent "tens of thousands" more than the reported $150,000, and that $20,000 to $40,000 went to buy clothes for her husband. Some articles of clothing have apparently been lost. An angry aide characterized the shopping spree as "Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast," and said the truth will eventually come out when the Republican Party audits its books.
  • Palin faces questions, different landscape when she returns to Alaska: Can Sarah Palin go home again? In the 68 days since Alaska's governor began her run for vice president, things have changed on the home front. Some of her former allies are fuming, and former enemies are lying in wait. Public perceptions of the governor have also changed. Has the governor changed as well?

Links for November 4th through November 5th

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Sometime between November 4th and November 5th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • What the Hell’s Wrong with Alaska?: Okay, I don't know what to say. But the Anchorage Daily News is saying Rep. Don Young (R-AK), who wasn't satisfied with breaking laws but actually violated the constitution, is probably going to get reelected. And it's looking like his fellow scofflaw and now convicted felon Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) might be on his way to victory too.
  • Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source: The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it. Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, "It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can't catch a break."
  • Kenya declares holiday for Obama: Kenya has declared Thursday a public holiday to celebrate the election of Barack Obama to the US presidency. Mr Obama's father was from Kenya and his victory has prompted jubilation across the country. "We the Kenyan people are immensely proud of your Kenyan roots," President Mwai Kibaki said.
  • Bostonian Men’s Hanscom Shoe: Shoes with our family name. Don't look bad, either. Maybe I need some new dress shoes? (via Dad)
  • A Wonkacious View of Your Vote-Processing Factory: We’re down at King County Election Headquarters in Renton, where about 500 people are working feverishly to count your absentee votes. According to Bobbie Egan, the spokeswoman giving us a tour, King County receives the second most absentee ballots of any county in the nation (beat only by L.A. County). This is your vote-processing factory. It’s a new building (opened Dec. 1, 2007) tricked out with 59 security cameras, a high-security inner area, and an outer perimeter loop where anyone can come and watch.