Links

Things I run across that I find to be interesting, but might not have the time or inclination to craft a fuller post around it. Generally, short little “go here, look at this, isn’t it neat?” posts.

Re-Meme (‘Michael is…’)

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There’s a meme going around the ‘net right now (I’ve seen it on at least seven different blogs over the past day or so, I’m not going to search them all out) where you do a Google search for “$yourname is” (where $yourname is your name, and including the quotation marks) and pick the best ten results to post.

Rather than join in, I’ll just point you to the post where I did this two and a quarter years ago. :)

iTunes “Calling All Angels” by Lang, K.D./Siberry, Jane from the album Until the End of the World (1991, 5:11).

Live Octopus Tentacle

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Okay, admittedly, I’m no fan of seafood — generally, I tend to limit my meat-eating to animals with legs that stay on land most of the time. However, even if I were more into seafood than I am, I still think that I’d be far too squicked out to try eating a dish of live octopus tentacles.

In every scenario I played out in my imagination as far as eating this dish was concerned, I predicted nothing more than a brief slimy struggle then stillness — the last words of an insignificant creature low on the food chain. Silly me. I could not have underestimated my dinner more because once in my mouth, the tentacle went into attack mode and aggressively suctioned on to my teeth, tongue and bottom lip making it nearly impossible for me to manipulate my mouth in order to eat it. My dinner was instinctively trying to preserve its own life while attempting to take mine by asphyxiating me. Needless to say, I was just a little mortified by all this. It was—how would you call it—bleepin’ freaky!!! And if that wasn’t enough, the tentacle then launched phase two of Operation Indigestion and began to whip itself about in a frenzy like it was krump dancing. In my mouth was the mollusk version of the Tasmanian Devil, ferociously flaying at the roof of my mouth and gums. I could not believe it. The feisty, little shit was kind of hurting me. Immediately, I snapped out of the absolute stunned trauma of having to fight with my food and attempted to regain control of the situation. Overpowering the tentacle with my tongue and with a little assist from my fingers, I pried the wicked thing from my gums and teeth. At last the tentacle became vulnerable to my molars. Without hesitating, I bit hard on it over and over and over again while mumbling “Die! Die! Die!” Before it could resurrect itself and do a surprise attack like some slasher movie villain, I swallowed deeply and gulped it down. “Get in my belly!” I gasped.

The dust finally settled. After all that, how does live octopus tentacle taste? A little like fury fused with fear. Spicy and garlicky because of the sauce. There is no aftertaste but there are aftereffects. (Just don’t think about what the tentacle might be doing in your stomach.) It certainly doesn’t taste like cooked squid and nowhere near fried calamari. It’s almost completely devoid of flavor. Texturally it’s highly viscous, more resembling mucous. As far as attitude, it’s the meanest and rudest piece of food I have ever brawled with. And this was only the first piece.

And if that’s not disgusting enough, here’s a video of the dish in question.

Oh. My. Lord.

Never.

(via Pharyngula)

iTunes “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy from the album Fear of a Black Planet (1990, 4:42).

We Are the Web

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This month’s Wired has what is likely not just the best article I’ve seen come out of Wired in a long time, but the best piece I’ve seen in ages on the Web, where it’s been, and where it may be headed in the future.

Not only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still don’t see it today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed into. And as a result of ignoring what the Web really is, we are likely to miss what it will grow into over the next 10 years. Any hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015 requires that we own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago.

Read more

Profile Pages

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In the course of updating my about page, I spent a little time cleaning up some of my profiles on other sites that I’ve picked up memberships in at one point or another over the years. Most of them I haven’t bothered to do much with after initially signing up, so it was interesting coming back to them and seeing the changes that have taken place.

The two most altered from what I remember are my Tribe.net and Yahoo! pages. Tribe has apparently undergone some rather major updates since I was there last, and Yahoo recently introduced their Yahoo 360 service. Amusingly, the two services now offer enough similar features that I’ve been able to nearly duplicate my profile on each one — everything from recent weblog posts to my del.icio.us links to my Flickr photos, all collected together on one page. Must admit, while I’m not likely to become a heavy user of either service, all the new fancybits are nice to see, and should be quite handy when connecting to other people who use them.

Feel free to check out my profiles and add me if you use either of the services. Or not. Y’know…whichever. ;)

iTunes “Da’Ale Da’Ale (Remix)” by Haza, Ofra from the album Just Say Mao (1989, 6:05).

What’s your funny?

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Another online quiz — though this one (unlike many others), actually gave me a result that seemed pretty accurate: the three-variable funny test.

The Wit

(60% dark, 30% spontaneous, 22% vulgar)

your humor style: CLEAN | COMPLEX | DARK

You like things edgy, subtle, and smart. I guess that means you’re probably an intellectual, but don’t take that to mean you’re pretentious. You realize ‘dumb’ can be witty–after all isn’t that ‘the Simpsons’ philosophy?–but rudeness for its own sake, ‘gross-out’ humor and most other things found in a fraternity leave you totally flat. I guess you just have a more cerebral approach than most. You have the perfect mindset for a joke writer or staff writer. Your sense of humor takes the most effort to appreciate, but it’s also the best, in my opinion.

Also, you probably loved The Office. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check it out here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice/.

PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Jon Stewart – Woody Allen – Ricky Gervais

Humor Test Result Graph

My test tracked 3 variables. How you compared to other people your age and gender:

   
You scored higher than 54% on dark
   
You scored higher than 0% on spontaneous
   
You scored higher than 9% on vulgar

Link: The 3 Variable Funny Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid

(via James)

(And, once again, I’m driven up the wall by the mind-boggling horrible HTML code that these quizes generate. I just don’t have the time to clean it up any more than I already have right now…grrr!)

AdSense for Feeds

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Looks like the inevitable intrusion of advertising into RSS feeds just gained a major player, as Google‘s Adsense for Feeds program has just been announced.

On the one hand, I can kind of see where quite a few people might be happy about this. As more and more people read their news through RSS feeds, fewer people are as likely to visit a website and see their ads, and revenue drops.

At the same time — hey, that’s one of the things I like about RSS feeds. While I’ve not yet unsubscribed from a feed because it started carrying advertising, it is a little bit annoying. Not very, at this stage, as so far all the ads are at the tail end of each post and can easily be ignored, but I’d still be happier without ads.

So, while I do use Google’s AdSense program on my site (as unobtrusively as possible while still allowing for the occasional check to hit my mailbox), I’ll not be dropping ads into any of my RSS feeds. The way I figure it, the miniscule amount of extra revenue it might generate isn’t at all offset by the annoyance it could cause my readers (and since the ads annoy me, I’ll work on the assumption that they probably annoy others, too).

iTunes “Lords of the Rhymes (Kool-Aid Brothers)” by Lords of the Rhymes (2003, 5:03).

Seattlest

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Something I meant to mention a bit ago, but spaced — I’ve recently become one of the contributing authors to Seattlest, the Seattle-centric group weblog run by the Gothamist empire.

I’m tracking any posts I toss onto Seattlest on my del.icio.us account for quick access, and my posts can also be found via this listing on the Seattlest site. Lastly, here’s my author bio.

Getting involved was actually pretty flattering, as I was actually invited in, thanks to one of the local editors reading Eclecticism and keeping an eye on my Flickr photostream. Hard to say “no” to an invitation like that!

iTunes “Silo, No. 5 – Three” by User, The from the album Abandon (2003, 2:31).

Flickr’s on a roll

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Okay, so maybe this whole brouhaha about Flickr being purchased by Yahoo wasn’t such a bad thing after all. They’ve been on a pretty good roll recently, as evidenced by their news page (which I’m quoting liberally from here, as they don’t seem to have permalinks)…

10th May, 2005

Remember the 5MB limit per photo for your uploads? That was the olden days! Now pro account users can upload photos of up to 10MB each (while, perhaps, cursing their ISP for the slow upload connection – in this age of the two web, why the asynchronousness, o ISPs?)

11th May, 2005

IPTC support (finally)! Friends, today there’s another good thing in Flickrland, and that’s support for IPTC data embedded into your photos. Keywords become tags! Captions become descriptions! Marvel as one framework’s terminology is swapped for another! Smile as the location fields in IPTC become Flickr tags!

12th May, 2005

We’ll we’ve gone and done it. In answer to countless requests, photo pages no longer use a Macromedia Flash wrapper to display photos; instead we are using an old technology called “DHTML.”

In addition, the “Send to Group,” “Add to Set,” and “Blog This” buttons above photos now allow you to perform relevant actions right there on the page!

And also, links now work in notes! (And we’ll soon be adding some more cool auto-linking features when the links point to Flickr pages.)

Also rolled into this release are a whole lot of little tweaks and fixes that should make your photo page viewing more enjoyable all around.

Pretty nifty! Poking around with it, I like the changes they’ve made (especially being able to put links within notes), and there have been hints dropped that there might be more goodies coming up. Bring ’em on!

iTunes “If Your Kisses Can’t Hold the Man You Love” by Rasputina from the album Frustration Plantation (2004, 3:07).

Microsoft reconsiders, supports anti-discrimination laws

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Via Scoble, Ballmer’s e-mail announcing Microsoft’s re-committing to support anti-discrimination legislation covering sexual orientation.

After looking at the question from all sides, I’ve concluded that diversity in the workplace is such an important issue for our business that it should be included in our legislative agenda. Since our beginning nearly 30 years ago, Microsoft has had a strong business interest in recruiting and retaining the best and brightest and most diverse workforce possible. I’m proud of Microsoft’s commitment to non-discrimination in our internal policies and benefits, but our policies can’t cover the range of housing, education, financial and similar services that our people and their partners and families need. Therefore, it’s appropriate for the company to support legislation that will promote and protect diversity in the workplace.

Accordingly, Microsoft will continue to join other leading companies in supporting federal legislation that would prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation – adding sexual orientation to the existing law that already covers race, sex, national origin, religion, age and disability. Given the importance of diversity to our business, it is appropriate for the company to endorse legislation that prohibits employment discrimination on all of these grounds. Obviously, the Washington State legislative session has concluded for this year, but if legislation similar to HB 1515 is introduced in future sessions, we will support it.

Good to see.

Update: Here’s the Seattle Times’ story.

Random bits

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Just some of the stuff that’s been catching my eye lately as I try desperately to get caught up in my reading before the weekend hits.

One step forward…

Connecticut on Wednesday became the second state to offer civil unions to gay couples — and the first to do so without being forced by the courts.

About an hour after the state Senate sent her the legislation, Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell signed into law a bill that will afford same-sex couples in Connecticut many of the rights and privileges of married couples.

“The vote we cast today will reverberate around the country and it will send a wave of hope to many people, to thousands of people across the country,” said Sen. Andrew McDonald, who is gay.

…two steps back.

Step one:

Texas could become the only state to bar gays from becoming foster parents under legislation passed Wednesday by the House.

“It is our responsibility to make sure that we protect our most vulnerable children, and I don’t think we are doing that if we allow a foster parent that is homosexual or bisexual,” said Republican Rep. Robert Talton, who introduced the amendment.

Under the Texas bill, anyone who applies to be a foster parent or a foster parent whose performance is being evaluated must say whether he or she is homosexual or bisexual. Anyone who answers yes would be barred from serving as a foster parent. If the person is already a foster parent, the child would be removed from the home.

Step two:

Republican Alabama lawmaker Gerald Allen says homosexuality is an unacceptable lifestyle. As CBS News Correspondent Mark Strassmann reports, under his bill, public school libraries could no longer buy new copies of plays or books by gay authors, or about gay characters.

“I don’t look at it as censorship,” says State Representative Gerald Allen. “I look at it as protecting the hearts and souls and minds of our children.”

Books by any gay author would have to go: Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. Alice Walker’s novel “The Color Purple” has lesbian characters.

Allen originally wanted to ban even some Shakespeare. After criticism, he narrowed his bill to exempt the classics, although he still can’t define what a classic is.

“