Month: October 2006
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US to North Korea: Don’t Mess with Our Currency, Assholes!
After scanning the North Korea headlines in the major media, I’m convinced that everybody is missing the true problem in North Korea: how should the US punish currency counterfeiters? Selig Harrison writes: The financial sanctions are very severe. The United States has in effect asked all banks in the world not to deal with North…
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Roach Secrets
I’ve finally figured out what roaches crave: cheddar cheese!
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Remember the Frogs!
Amidst the tensions of the North Korean nuclear detonation, Georgia blocking Russia’s ascension into the WTO and all sorts of other international crisis, don’t forget the real crisis of the week: climate change is disrupting the habitats of frogs and other species. Before you go crazy about the North Korea issue, remember that the Bush…
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Down with Background Music on Webpages
Seomoz offers reasons why background music sucks on webpages: Having music playing in the background can interrupt whatever is currently coming through the users speakers. Many people use their computers as media stations that play music and video. Having this suddenly interrupted is the equivalent of having a newspaper that jumps off the table and…
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Sitcoms Overseas
I’m almost proud of how little I’ve been blogging recently. I was a big fan of NBC’s show Joey starring one of the actors from Friends. It was predictable fluff (much like Friends), but the acting and the writing was firstrate. And Matt LeBlanc who plays Joey is just one of the funniest sitcom actors…
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Things I have Learned
Today I figured out why it’s so difficult to find lowcost plone CMS hosting: it uses buttloads more RAM than PHP CMS’s I also learned why it’s possible for digital cameras to become so cheap: they offer 90 day warranties instead of 1 year warranties! (Btw, warranty information is often missing on the product spec…
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Amazon S3 backup: pros and cons
Jay Ruby on design decisions behind casinos. Jeremy Zawodny on Amazon S3 backup (with lots of helpful comments). IN a nutshell, people think S3 is cool and cheap, although many think dreamhost.com backup service is better. See also the legal issues htdw recovering passwords by Elinor Mills (thanks to Jim Thompson) Analysts say: youtube is…
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Lossless Codecs
Hydrogenaudio comparison chart on lossless codecs Very handy. David Rothman realizes why people dislike DRM: “Why should my choice of operating systems influence what books I can read?”
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Reasons for watching a videoblog?
Following a digg thread about this weathergirl’s avatar, I have started listening/watching her videoblog, which is zany and entertaining. Besides being very pretty, she’s hilarious and fun to listen to. Is that what videoblogging is all about: just listening to gorgeous intelligent people ramble about things in good stream-of-consciousness style? This reminds me of a…
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Picking at Clinton’s Foibles
Mark Foley condemns the sexual obsessiveness of President Bill Clinton. Liberals express their indifference to the scandal. Erotica writer Susie Bright (NSFW) fears an anti-gay backlash. Matt Yglesias thinks we shouldn’t overuse the phrase pedophilia when talking about attraction to 16 year olds.
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A kind of Revenge
There is a particularly loathsome TV commercial featuring the image of Audrey Hepburn trotting merrily away to a heavy metal song. It might have been cute once, but I even found nothing redeeming in simply pushing nostalgia buttons to make us salivate for consumer products. That was the first time. Now the commercial is blanketing…
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Email vs. Content Management
Seth Gottlieb has a nice weblog about content management, open source and ploney things. (Another good one is Content Wrangler). Here’s his post about Smart Folders and plone (don’t know how I missed this one). Smart Folders (previously called Topics) are something worth getting familiar with. Places to start: Using Topics in plone 2.1 Here’s…
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Iran & Uzbekistan
An article by ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE includes thoughts by military expert Sam Gardiner about why attacking Iran remains a very real possibility: Here’s a description in Gardiner’s own words. Craig Murray on the depths the US will go to secure a military base in Uzbekistan.
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Tortured Teens at Gitmo
Here’s a Rolling Stone article by Jeff Tietz on a Gitmo prisoner, a teenager caught at 15 who actually did have some involvement with Bin Laden. The article details the conditions and abuse he suffered by Gitmo guards. It included some discussion about guilt/innocence. Although the article is not about Abdurahman Khadr (but a teenage…
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2 Conferences for me this October
I’ll be attending two conferences this October. Digital Textual Studies, Oct 19-21. College Station, TX Plone Conference, Seattle, WA
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Go, Mantras!
After looking through dating profiles at match.com, I have decided I just hate gratuitious exclamations of fidelity to some sort of athletic team. So, I’m supposed to be impressed that a)you follow a sport and b)have some kind of preference about which multimillion dollar sports franchise you prefer? Hey, maybe sports…just isn’t that important? Henceforth,…