Links for June 21st through June 23rd

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Sometime between June 21st and June 23rd, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

Links for June 18th through June 19th

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Sometime between June 18th and June 19th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

Links for June 18th from 12:39 to 13:07

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(Note: Normally, these will show up sometime after or around midnight-ish each day. I just wanted to make sure the system was working correctly, so this one’s a bit early. The joys of bug testing!)

Sometime between 12:39 and 13:07, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Wall.E : Pixar animation: [Sound designer Ben] Burtt has spent much of the past two years holed up on his own in a concrete bunker at Pixar's studios, recording the sounds made by toothbrushes, household appliances, miniature jet planes, army tanks and his own voice.
  • Exits: Stewart Butterfield’s bizarre resignation letter to Yahoo: I'm also told that this email is classic Butterfield, and that his employees at Flickr would stage dramatic readings of some of his better missives at Flickr's San Francisco headquarters…
  • in vestimentis ursum: Surely the robot hiding in the bear's clothing, vestimentis ursum, is impressive. So: armed with my childish curiousity and the spurious excuse of 'product design research,' I set out to discover what, exactly, these creatures are hiding.
  • Requiem For A Day Off: Absolutely incredible re-cut trailer, setting Ferris Bueller's Day Off to music from Requiem For a Dream.
  • Takei Marriage License Big News [UPDATED]: George Takei (Star Trek's Sulu) and his partner Brad Altman get California's first same-sex marriage license. Congratulations!

Website Tweaks

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One of the projects I’d like to tackle over the summer is redesigning my weblog. I’ve been using this design for a couple years now, and I’ve been thinking that I’m about ready for a change to something a bit cleaner and sparse.

However, as the major project over the next few weeks here at home needs to be packing things up and preparing for a move, I’ve settled for doing a bit of minor tweaking here and there to streamline things where I can.

To that end, here’s a quick rundown of the changes I’ve implemented:

  • Upgraded to the most current version of WordPress. Admittedly, a behind-the-scenes change that won’t really make a difference to visitors, but it was time.

  • The About page has been cleaned up a bit, removing the incomplete bulleted list of other places on the ‘net to find me with a simple in-paragraph listing that’s far more complete. I belong to far too many different networking websites.

  • Rather than listing my tweets in a sidebar box, Twitter Tools and AsideShop will now be displaying them inline with weblog posts using their own lightweight display style. In order to keep my RSS feeds from getting too cluttered up, Advanced Category Excluder prevents tweets from showing up in syndication feeds.

  • iWPhone has been installed so that iPhone/iPod Touch users will automatically get an optimized, lightweight layout.

  • LiveJournal Crossposter has been upgraded, which should (I hope) fix the odd problem I was having with crossposts not appearing in LJ Friends pages. It’s also configured not to crosspost tweets, as they’re already crossposted by Ping.fm.

  • Postalicious will be automatically posting my del.icio.us bookmarks daily around midnight, as long as there are five or more unposted and ready to go, otherwise it will wait until the next day. This allowed me to drop the (huge) ‘eclinkticism’ box out of the sidebar.

  • In another behind-the-scenes change, the WPhone Admin Plugin gives me an iPhone/iPod Touch optimized administration interface, in case I ever need to do any posting or tweaking while on the go.

Graduation Weekend

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Well, it’s official (aside from actually receiving the certificate in the mail): I can now, if I wish, sign my name ‘Michael Hanscom, AA’. It’s a little silly to do so, so I’m not going to, but I can.

Short updates have been appearing semi-regularly on…well, everywhere, if you happen to be following me on the web (Twitter, Plurk, LiveJournal, and a number of others, thanks to the multi-site-update magic of Ping.com), but let’s see if I can back up a bit and fill in a few more details (photos from each day’s festivities are linked to on the day’s name).

Read more

Graduating on Friday

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Oh, by the way…I graduate this Friday. I’ll be marking the end of my tenure at NSCC and receiving my Associate of Arts transfer degree. My parents are driving down from Anchorage to Seattle, should be about midway through the trip by now, and are expecting to show up in Seattle sometime on Thursday or Friday morning…we think.

While this has been mentioned briefly here and there, I figured I might as well take a moment to make it explicit. I’m graduating! :)

Bonehead

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After class this morning, I wandered across the street to the bus stop. I was a little annoyed at myself for leaving my bus pass at home, but since I had a few ones, it didn’t matter too much. I got on the 75 and picked up a transfer, rode to the Northgate Transit Center, waited there for about ten minutes, and then took the 41 to our apartment. As I waited for the bus to roll to a stop, I peeked out the windows and scanned our parking lot for the car to see if Prairie was back from her morning jaunt with Hope. The car wasn’t in the lot…

…oh, wait. Crap.

I drove to school this morning.

Prairie hasn’t been able to stop giggling for the past half hour.

On the bright side, I didn’t have to catch the bus back to school, as Prairie was able to call Hope and have her drive us up to the school to rescue the car. Which I’d forgotten. Left behind.

I am such a dork.

The Threat of Photography

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Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We’ve been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.

Except that it’s nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren’t being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn’t known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about — the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 — no photography.

Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don’t seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets? Why are our fears so great that we have no choice but to be suspicious of any photographer?

Because it’s a movie-plot threat.

Photographing the Police

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…is perfectly legal. Not that this should be a big surprise, but after the City of Seattle settled a lawsuit with a photographer last year to the tune of $8,000, the Seattle Police Department is clarifying its policies.

The Seattle Police Department this week plans to issue a new policy clarifying when bystanders are within their rights to observe and document officer conduct and when they’re interfering with officers’ law enforcement duties, a department official told the City Council’s Public Safety Committee during a briefing Tuesday.

The new policy clearly reminds officers that bystanders have a right to watch or film officers making an arrest, as long as they don’t interfere or threaten their safety….

It also emphasizes that police can’t simply seize someone’s camera for video evidence without cause or court order and suggests alternative means of negotiating with the witness.

(via Seattlest)