Links

Again, in no particular order, bits and pieces from my ‘technology’ grouping in NetNewsWire…

• Mark Pilgrim’s online magnetic poetry generator is one of the coolest online wastes of time I’ve seen yet. It randomly grabs words from a webpage and turns them into ‘magnetic poetry’ to play with. Click the link and have fun.

• I used to use some of the free fonts from Dinc when I was making flyers for the clubs I worked at. Now all of their fonts are free. Good stuff there. (Via Jeffrey Zeldman)

• A veritable corucopia of excellent free fonts can also be found at The Lab (warning: loud embedded audio). Lots of drool-worth text toys here…now I’m wishing I was still doing flyer work. Maybe I’ll just start playing at some point. (Via ScriptyGoddess)

• ESPN has become the second major site that I know of (but then, I’m not really tracking these things) to move to an all-CSS layout. Good work, too — seeing sites like that remind me why I’m not a designer. (Also via Jeffrey Zeldman)

• Phil Ulrich pointed to someone’s experiment with shoehorning a G4 and a PC into a single box, calling it the “world’s first schizophrenic computer”. To that, I humbly present the circa-1994 PowerMac 6100 PC Compatible, with both a 60Mhz PowerPC 601 and a 66Mhz 486DX/2 processor! Rather bizarre machines to play with, actually.

• Phil’s also released EspressoBlog 2.1.1, a very nice weblog posting program that I use for posting to this weblog. As a bonus, he managed to implement every single idea I tossed his way in an e-mail conversation last week, even a couple that I wasn’t sure would be possible. Damn cool. And I love the hat.

• Aaron paints an optimistic — and very plausible — picture of the wireless future. One of these days I’ll have to jump on the wireless bandwagon. All things with time, though.

• The 10 habits of highly annoying bloggers. Eight of these I think I’m safe on, but numbers 2 and 8 (each of which can be summarized as “not enough really original content”) I’m still working on. Too much of this blog is of the link/comment style, and I keep meaning to do add more originality. Even I like it when I do manage to come up with something, so I should do it more often.

• A good caveat regarding Amazon Associate links from Jason Kottke. I know that there’s quite a few of my links that fall into the ‘won’t work’ category — maybe it’s a good thing that nobody every buys anything from my Amazon links!

• MovableType 2.63 is released, soon to be installed here.

• Ready.gov gets Fark’ed (warning: image heavy, broadband recommended). Hilarious. (Via Phil Ulrich)

I’m skimming over a lot of stuff in my newsreader (758 new items after being out of touch for a week!), but in no particular order, here’s some of the stuff that caught my eye…

• Snowmen are good, but snowwomen — at least those with breasts — are bad! (Via Jodi)

• Bush: “Thanks for letting me kill your husband — mind if I make sure your kid is an idiot, too?” Apparently, children of military families don’t need a good education, according to the powers that be. (Via Paul Hoffman)

• Heaven forbid someone not agree with the U.S.! Since Germany has expressed a dissenting opinion about the push for war with Iraq, the U.S. is planning (at the behest of Rumsfeld) to withdraw all American troops and bases from German in order to “harm the German economy to make an example of the country for what US hawks see as Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s ‘treachery’.” (Also via Paul Hoffman)

And that’s it for now, I’ve gotta head to work. More tonight, I’m sure.

Yikes. After going through my ‘Technology’ grouping in NetNewsWire, which includes RSS feeds for 34 different weblogs and news sites, every link that I called up as ‘probably worth babbling about’ was from Robert Scoble.

I think I want his job. This has nothing to do with what his job actually is (he works at NEC, but I don’t know anything other than that), it’s just that he’s easily one of the most prolific bloggers I read, to a point that I assume his job must be incredibly low-stress and low-responsibility, since it obviously doesn’t interfere with his blogging time. ;)

Anyway, in no particular order…

• Erik Barzeski calls Scoble a ‘Microsoft Slut’. Scoble returns the jab. Me, I feel like I’m whoring myself out every time I use a Windows PC instead of my Mac. No real point to any of this, except for the amusement factor.

• Scoble: “Is there any way to stop Microsoft? I think the answer is getting clear: no.” Kind of a scary statement, but (as befits a ‘MS Slut’ [now there’s a product name we need to see…]) he keeps mentioning all the cool stuff he saw that he can’t talk about, so I suppose it’s a definite possibility. Of course, he also admits that he’s “…too drunk with the Microsoft wine to really be objective,” and he even occasionally says some good things about Apple’s future too, so I’ll cut him a break.

• Scoble: “It wouldn’t be the first time that Microsoft does something innovative by acquiring another company. Oh, where do you think FrontPage, Hotmail, PowerPoint, Excel, Internet Explorer, DOS, etc came from?” Where’s the innovation in acquiring another company? All of these were innovations before Microsoft got their hands on them — all Microsoft did was recognize a good thing and assimilate it (though I’d personally never put FrontPage in a “good thing” category, there are a depressingly high number of people who use it, so it must be making MS some amount of money, and this is beside-the-point rambling anyway). I’m willing to accept the argument that Microsoft has actually innovated in the past, and may do so again in the future (though I’m hard pressed to come up with any examples), but I don’t think that ‘innovation’ and ‘acquisition’ are compatible.

• Scoble recommends Watching Microsoft Like A Hawk as a good site for MS info, news, and scuttlebutt. Looks like it is. Unfortunately, I can’t find an RSS feed, so I’ll probably forget to check up on them. Bummer.

• “Apple has some cool stuff coming this year to be sure — including some desktop machines that are outperforming current Intel stuff.” Damn, but I wish I could see some of the stuff that he’s seen. Now I just have to wait and see if Apple will introduce what he’s hinting at before or (more likely) just after I finally am able to plunk down money on a new machine.

[![APD on 6th Ave.]]

[APD on 6th Ave.]: https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/graphics/2003/02/graphics/apdon6thave-thumb.jpg {width=”150″ height=”67″}
Dad pointed out an article in the Anchorage Daily News about a teen dance that “erupted into what officials are calling a riot.”

Saturday’s event was the annual Fur Ball, a \$10-a-ticket dance for teens age 14 to 19 that’s part of Fur Rendezvous. In all, 1,352 teens got in, according to a ticket count, said Jay Savell, Egan operations manager. The event had a fire marshal-approved capacity of 1,500, he said.

Police said they were told that the dance was oversold. Not so, Savell said.

Some teens with tickets didn’t get in because the center knew it was approaching capacity. By the time Egan staffers finished counting tickets, the dance was shutting down.

Teens waiting outside grew impatient and tried to break the center’s glass windows, police said.

Inside, fights broke out when kids flashed gang signs and showed gang colors, police and teens said. Four or five on-duty police officers, 14 Egan security workers, a dozen other Egan staffers and 10 volunteers from Elmendorf Air Force Base were working security. But police thought the situation was getting out of hand.

Pretty disturbing, but I have to say that after working in teen dance clubs for as long as I did in Anchorage and having watched the shift in attitudes and behavior in the years, I’m not at all surprised that something like this finally happened.

I want to say more, but I’m tired and brain dead at the moment, and can’t coax much more out of me. Bleah. Maybe I’ll revisit this later on.

Actually, I’m not out to be a boyfriend right now — pretty happy staying single for the foreseeable future — but I can think of plenty of times when I wouldn’t have minded getting a recommendation on greatboyfriends.com! It’s a really clever idea, too —

DOLLS! We all have charming male friends…smart, noble, successful, honest, good-looking guys who’re between girlfriends…or who’re just a tad shy…or who’ve had bad luck with women.

Here’s the open-hearted place where we women can write-up recommendations of these wonderful fellows, show their pictures and vouch for them. And here’s the delicious part. If you want to FIND a great boyfriend, Darling, you have all these lovely men to choose from!

(Via Jeremy Zawodny)

Just a little “Wüdi love” from me to my readers, in honor of the coming Valentine’s Day.

Yeah, even I can get a little mushy from time to time. Who knew?

If you want some cheap and fairly risque amusment, take a look at this list of recently created hearts. Some of them are pretty predictable, but some of them amuse me to no end. Just don’t expect them all to be lovey-dovey. Consider yourself warned.

(Thanks to the ACME Heart Maker, via Jeremy Zawodny)

I’ve seen this all over the ‘net, but had yet to make a link to it. As it’s far past time I did so, here it is: Why Al says that ‘E’ is the same as ‘MC^2^’, as told so that each word has four jots or less.

So, have a seat. Put your feet up. This may take some time. Can I get you some tea? Earl Grey? You got it.

Okay. How do I want to do this? He did so much. It’s hard to just dive in. You know? You pick a spot to go from, but soon you have to back up and and go over this or that item, and you get done with that only to see that you have to back up some more. So if you feel like I’m off to the side of the tale half the time, well, this is why. Just bear with me, and we’ll get to the end in good time. Okay?

Okay. Let’s see….

On a side note, do you have any idea how hard it is to type like this? Lots of hits to this site for help, I tell you! I stand even more in awe of the man who was able to set this down this way — and do it well — than ere I sat down to dash off this post!

(Via MeFi)

Oh, and if any of you fine folk who read my site want to talk back on this post, I urge you to do your best to use this vein also. It will sure put that grey mass in your head to the test!

The two finalists for the project to rebuild on the site of the World Trade Center have been announced.

Of the two, I’m partial to the Think proposals, especially the World Cultural Center. I wasn’t entirely sold on it until I watched the flyover animation of the entire structure, but I have to admit, that’s a very impressive concept. I also liked the effect of the lit ‘towers’ at night (seen at the end of the animation) — in my mind, they tie in very nicely to the Towers of Light spotlights that took the place of the towers for a time.

Daniel Libeskind’s proposal, on the other hand, just doesn’t grab me as much. It doesn’t have quite the same striking visual aspect to it — aside from the spire reaching skyward, for the most part it just comes across to me as one more big building in the middle of New York. Maybe it would work better once realized, but from the pictures shown here, I’d go for the Think towers, myself.

So — which is your choice?

Well, it shouldn’t take long for all the various conspiracy theory buffs to start jumping all over this one —

A San Francisco amateur astronomer who photographs the space shuttles whenever their orbits carry them over the Bay Area has captured five strange and provocative images of the shuttle Columbia just as it was re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere before dawn Saturday.

The pictures, taken with a Nikon-880 digital camera on a tripod, reveal what appear to be bright electrical phenomena flashing around the track of the shuttle’s passage, but the photographer, who asked not to be identified, will not make them public immediately.

I think the thing that bugs me the most about this is that even though NASA has set up a page for people to upload images and video that they may have taken during the shuttle disaster, rather than do that (or, to give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe in addition to that), this guy decided to run to the media and stir up a little controversy. \<grumble>I guess everyone needs their fifteen minutes of fame, deserved or not.\</grumble>