Eclecticism

Sometime between August 19th and August 20th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• FTC targets prerecorded telemarketing drivel: In the ongoing battle to let us eat dinner in peace without being interrupted by amazingly annoying telemarketer blather and in this case the even more infuriating recorded telemarketing drivel, the Federal Trade Commission today basically outlawed such calls. Specifically, the FTC changed its venerable Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR) to prohibit, as of Sept. 2009, telemarketing calls that deliver prerecorded messages, unless a consumer has agreed to accept such calls from a given caller/seller. Between now and 2009, telemarketers must provide an obvious, easy and quick way for consumers to opt-out of any call, the FTC said. Such an opt-out mechanism needs to be in place by December 1, 2008.
• Adobe Flash ads launching clipboard hijack attack: Malicious hackers are using booby-trapped Flash banner ads to hijack clipboards for use in rogue security software attacks. In the Web attacks, which target Mac, Windows and Linux users running Firefox, IE and Safari, hackers are seizing control of the machine’s clipboard and using a hard-to-delete URL that points to a fake anti-virus program. According to victims on several Web forums, the attack is coming from Adobe Flash-based advertising on legitimate sites — including Newsweek, Digg and MSNBC.com.

Sometime between 06:33 and 18:38, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• The Real Tr2n Trailer: Tron 2 Trailer Video Makes Pants Wet Worldwide: It's a tiny bootleg video, but I don't care. You can see that the 3D looks amazing, the new lightcycles are stunning (and move like real bikes), the world and the whole mood is Batman-like dark. And Jeff Bridges… well, he is Jeff Bridges. What can I say, he looks like a badass version of the Dude. "It's just a game!" he shouts. No, it's not. It's Tr2n. At last. (I'd completely missed that there's finally a sequel being worked on! Crossing my fingers that it's worthwhile….)
• Jack Cafferty: Is McCain another George W. Bush?: John McCain graduated 894th in a class of 899 at the Naval Academy at Annapolis. His father and grandfather were four star admirals in the Navy…that might have played a role in McCain being admitted. His academic record was awful. And it shows over and over again whenever McCain is called upon to think on his feet. He no longer allows reporters unfettered access to him aboard the "Straight Talk Express" for a reason. He simply makes too many mistakes. Unless he's reciting talking points or reading from notes or a TelePrompTer, John McCain is lost. He can drop bon mots at a bowling alley or diner — short glib responses that get a chuckle, but beyond that McCain gets in over his head very quickly. I am sick and tired of the president of the United States embarrassing me. The world we live in is too complex to entrust it to someone else whose idea of intellectual curiosity and grasp of foreign policy issues is to tell us he can look into Vladimir Putin's eyes and see into his soul.
• Why You Should Turn Gmail’s SSL Feature On Now: Because without it, anyone can easily hack someone’s account and in two weeks it is going to get even easier. Mike Perry, a reverse engineer from San Francisco, announced his intention to release his Gmail Account Hacking Tool to the public. According to a quote at Hacking Truths, Perry mentioned he was unimpressed with how Google presented the SSL feature as less-than-urgent. It is urgent, and here’s why. (I enabled SSL for my Gmail account today. If you're using Gmail, you should too.)
• Black & White Cheatsheet For Photoshop: Have you ever converted any image to black and white? If yes, do you remember how many different ways and settings are there? Photoshop itself has several ways (filters) how to make b&w images and each filter has many presets… Wouldn't it be great if you could have quick preview with different filters and presets? Well, You can.
• Olympics: Seeing More Than Medals: What is there besides the winners and the losers? What can I see beyond the peak action? Here's some of what I found… (Some nice photography a bit different than most of what's coming out of Beijing these days.)
• Three serious class acts:: When he died, Heath Ledger was working on Terrry Gilliam's next film, "The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus." Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law are stepping in to finish the scenes Heath hadn't filmed yet — each appearing as his character in a different dimension — and all three are donating their earnings to Heath's daughter Matilda. Terry Gilliam: "They came, they did the work, they allowed the movie to be finished, they didn’t take money – the money goes to Heath’s daughter. That’s extraordinary! I am so glad these guys are so humble. That’s why they make a great addition to the film. It will be bittersweet seeing this movie knowing he was filming it only days before he died. "
• How many atoms of Jesus do you eat every day?: Taking the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation into account, where the eucharist actually becomes the body and blood of Christ: 3.06*10^18 atoms of Jesus per day. Also, the earth's _entire_ biomass will be made of Jesus in approximately 4.91 billion years.

Sometime between 06:12 and 14:58, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Sports: 25 world records broken at Beijing’s Water Cube | swimming, world, record, phelps, lzr – OCRegister.com: [During this Olympics, the] Water Cube pool has produced 25 world records, the most at any Olympics since Montreal in 1976. Six world records were broken Wednesday, equaling the record for most global marks set in a single day at the Olympics. The Beijing Games were so fast that 14 times in eight events an athlete or relay team swam under the existing world record and didn't win gold. (This article's just about swimming, but it touches on something I've been curious about: is there a World Record for most World Records set at a single Olympiad? It seems like we're seeing new records set in nearly every event we watch.)
• On your marks, get set, Lego! Welcome to the Olympics where everyone’s quick off the blocks: As the world watches the Beijing Games, enthusiasts from Hong Kong have unveiled their own Olympics — built entirely from Lego. More than 300,000 Lego bricks and 4,500 Lego people were used to create the display, by the Hong Kong Lego User Group.
• 7 Astounding Yet True Facts About Say Anything…: FACT: The boombox scene gets all the attention, but according to Ione Skye, if she hadn't been dating Anthony Kiedis and Cusack hadn't been in love with someone else, they would've gone home together after they filmed the sequence where Lloyd teaches Diane how to drive. Ah, the romance of stick shift.
• Glenn Miller Orchestra – “Do You Wanna Dance?”: Wedding the Miller big band style and DeFranco’s top-notch soloing to go-go dance rhythms, lush easy-listening atmospherics and Command’s trademark high-tech aural experience, the album is no mere nostalgia trip for aging jitterbuggers. Rock fans will delight as this august organization tackles such teenage hits as “Cinnamon,” “Sunny,” “For Once In My Life” and “Love Child.” Naturally, the ubiquitous McCartney-Lennon catalog is represented, not once but twice, with “Hey Jude” and “A Little Help From My Friends.” In fact, there’s not a MOR track anywhere to be found on this album — it’s all strictly Top Forty. Do YOU wanna dance?
• Telstar Logistics: Flight Report: Airborne in an Emirates A380 at SFO: It was the kind of offer Telstar Logistics cannot refuse: "Please join us for an exclusive opportunity to experience and fly on Emirates’ cutting-edge A380 aircraft during a two hour ‘demo flight’ and reception," they said.  So we said, "Sure! Sign us up!"

Sometime between August 14th and August 18th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Sunday Morning’s Lightning Storm: Video from King 5 of the lightning over Auburn and Kent that woke Prairie and me up on Saturday night/Sunday morning.
• Now Diving: Sir Isaac Newton: High-tech televisual bells and whistles have carried couch-based Olympic watching way beyond the mere reality of being here. Thousands of cameras are catching the action in China — every one of them high-definition. Yet for a feat of engineering magic that dazzles as it baffles, nothing beats the DiveCam.
• The Phelps-Cavic Photo Finish [UPDATED]: On the one hand, we're getting tired of Phelps and the hype. On the other hand, this really was an incredible moment to watch.
• Bigfoot Hunters Fail to Produce Creature’s Corpse: The trio now say the body is in Biscardi's possession in an "undisclosed location," pending scientific tests. Biscardi named two scientists he's contacted regarding his find: Curt Nelson of the University of Minnesota, and Richard Klein, a paleontologist at Stanford University. "There's also an Igor and a Dmitri coming from Russia," Biscardi said. "They're very prominent in the Bigfoot world."
• Trying to figure out the scoring of gymnastics could make you crazy: Here's all you need to know: A perfect "10" (remember Nadia?) is now a perfect 16.9 — or somewhere thereabouts; The old "10" standard is gone, retired, locked up and hidden away…in its place is a two-pronged scoring system which is, at least theoretically, open-ended, meaning there is no limit to what you can earn — a score that might be truly ginormous; A gymnast's "A" score begins at zero, you get different fractions of a point for various maneuvers, ranging from the common hair-flip/giggle (.1) to the flaming-sword-swallowing-full-frontal-fakie-double-half-caff-three-hitch dismount (.7), and you get more fractions of points awarded for the maneuvers performed in various combinations. It's believed that the most "A" score points a gymnast could possibly cram into a program, given current time limits — and current points at which a gymnast's body would actually explode, or perhaps break in two — is about 7.0.

Sometime between August 12th and August 13th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• His own Olympic trial: 24 hours of viewing: Starting at midnight Tuesday morning, and going until midnight this morning, I plopped down in front of the TV with my laptop for a marathon session of sports. Just me and the Games, with no regard for sleep, fresh air or proper hygiene. One would think that such a masochistic task ultimately must lead to a decent into madness. But there's really only one way to find out.
• Unsubstantiated but interesting info on what Return of the Jedi might have been: Ah, obviously you haven't heard the back story of Return of the Jedi. No, I don't mean the bit where it was called Revenge of the Jedi. There's more. I'll cite nothing because I have no idea where this information leaked from, and you can take it with a grain of salt because I heard it years ago. But apparently the original story for Jedi worked like this…
• Young Guns: A new brand of gangster grows up in a killing culture: "Seattle's gang problem is small, compared to other cities, but it definitely holds its own," he said. "It's a bunch of teenagers – I would call them delinquents – that have adopted a gang name or identity, and that identity automatically falls into a structure of rivalries that those members must participate in. To these young people, their identity as a Sureño or a Crip or a Blood is as serious as someone else's identity conflict over religion. Like the Shiites and the Sunnis – that's an identity conflict. The irony is, they're all the same. They're all Muslims. You're all young people from Seattle."
• Maperture: Combining the power of Aperture and Google Maps (the mapping engine you know and love), Maperture is a powerful, new edit plug-in that makes geotagging your photos a snap.
• The Anchorpoint Essays: Welcome to the largest and most comprehensive look into the biology and behavior
  of Internecivus Raptus: the deadliest Xenomorph that human-kind has ever encountered. (This is, by far, my favorite site relating to the Alien franchise. Lots of incredibly detailed and well thought out essays about the aliens' biology and physiology. I was afraid it had been abandoned a couple years back, but it's still up and under active development. Awesome!)
• Why Apple doesn’t do “Concept Products”: Kontra’s law: A commercial company’s ability to innovate is inversely proportional to its proclivity to publicly release conceptual products.

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!