Blog Jones

I got this in my email yesterday:

A cowboy walked into a bar and ordered a whisky. When the bartender delivered the drink, the cowboy asked, “Where is everybody?”

The bartender replied, “They’ve gone to the hanging.”

“Hanging? Who are they hanging?”

“Brown Paper Pete,” the bartender replied.

“What kind of a name is that?” the cowboy asked.

“Well,” said the bartender, “he wears a brown paper hat, brown paper shirt, brown paper trousers, and brown paper shoes.”

“How bizarre,” said the cowboy. “What are they hanging him for?”

Who are you?

An amusing children’s tale.

Blogged with Flock

The thing I least like about shopping in old-fashioned brick and mortar stores is my inability to easily comparison shop like I can online. When I buy a product online, I can go hit Pricegrabber or Amazon and find out if I’m getting the best possible price for what I want. But in the meatspace, I don’t have that ability.

Or at least, I didn’t until now. Yesterday, I discovered TicTap, a nifty service that lets you search Amazon via your cell phone. Just text-message their phone number (763-807-3927) with the UPC code (no dashes or spaces), ISBN number, or keyword that describes the product you want to search for. In a few moments, you’ll receive a response with the price on Amazon, the number of reviews it has received, and the average rating out of five stars that it has received from users.

It’s a free service, except for whatever your cell provider charges you for text messages.

(Via Lifehacker).

Blogged with Flock

I may have just discovered my new favorite browser. Flock, a browser built around blogging and social networking sites like del.icio.us (bookmarks sharing) and flickr (photo sharing), looks like it would make web publishing exceedingly easy. Right now, I’m typing this in Flock’s blog editor window, accessible via a toolbar button. I was able to upload the following photo to Flickr by dragging it from Explorer onto my Photos Toolbar.

The cool thing was that it popped up a window asking for description information (title, tags, description) and asked me if I wanted to resize it so that it wouldn’t take up so much of my 20MB/month upload limit. (The $25/year “premium” upgrade to Flickr is definitely going on the birthday list.)

It also integrates Flock’s bookmarks with the del.icio.us, which I’ve begun to use as my primary bookmarking site anyways. Flock even has pretty good integrated RSS reader that I need to play with for a while.

Perhaps best of all, it’s based on Firefox originally, so it’s got the security you can’t get from IE and extensibility that you can’t get from Opera (although Opera 9.0 is pretty neat with the integrated bittorrent).

I had played around with Flock a while ago when the first alpha versions were coming out, and it has come a long way since then. This is Beta 0.7, so it may still have some bugs, but it’s definitely worth a look when you have some time to play with it.

technorati tags:flock, review

Blogged with Flock

I am not normally a fan of car shows. I’m content with the car that I have, so long as it’s working, and I’ve never really gotten much of a thrill out of looking at other people’s cars. That said, I do have some appreciation for a well-cared for antique car.

So, I did enjoy visiting the Wings and Wheels airshow/antique car show in at the Spartanburg Memorial Airport this week. I took a number of pictures and added the best ones to flickr.

The most interesting part of the show for me wasn’t a car or plane at all. It was the street vendor who was selling fried Oreos. He dipped the Oreos in batter, fried them in oil, and sprinkled powdered sugar on top. It’s all warm and gooey on the inside when he’s done.

Because what the world needs is a less healthy Oreo.

Check out the rest of the photos in the set here

I’ve just uploaded a new bit of javascript that might make it easier for me to write. You should see some notes off to the side of this paragraph. The idea is that I can keep following my original point here and point out something of relevance that goes off in a different direction over there.

Yay! No more parentheses!The script comes from arc90 labs, via Brainwagon.

It’s 6/6/6 today, much to the delight of the superstitious. Enjoy whatever odd signs you may see today–pentagrams in goat’s blood on your front lawn, old hippies parading down the streets shouting “The End is Near!,” or what have you. It won’t happen again for another hundred years!

• Democratic Peace: Ten Heuristics of Life and Learning
  Ten basic rules of thumb for life
  (tags: life reference lifehacks jobhunting)
• Get Rich Slowly » Healthy Food on an Unhealthy Budget
  They say that poor people are obese because they can’t afford heathy food. But that’s not true–take a look at this collection of healthy, cheap food.
  (tags: food health money cooking home recipes reference)
• MAKE: Blog: Zasterisk - Play Zork over the phone!
  Play Zork on your phone with voice commands!
  (tags: text interactivefiction game fun phone asterisk)
• DigsMagazine.com | for the post-college, pre-parenthood, quasi-adult generation
  “DigsMagazine is an online home and living magazine aimed at the post-college, pre-parenthood quasi-adult set. Understanding both the excitement of setting up house in your first real home, and the frustration of trying to live in style on oftentimes smal
  (tags: home diy design food lifehacks shopping decorating)

• alexking.org: Software > WordPress Themes
  A large collection of themes for WordPress
  (tags: blog wordpress customization design webdesign free)
• EepyBird.com–Coke + Mentos = Fun!
  These guys made a video of what happens when you combine 200 liters of coke with 500 mentos candies: hilarity.
  (tags: fun video humor)
• PocketMod: The Free Disposable Personal Organizer
  Make a little booklet out of a single sheet of paper. Pretty neat little toy.
  (tags: lifehacks gtd tool diy paper utilities free pocketmod)
• Bicycam - A simple camera mount for bikes
  Mount a camera on your bicycle–could make for some interesting photography/videography
  (tags: camera photography diy bicycle)
• The New Yorker: The Critics: A Critic At Large
  A long and interesting essay about C.S. Lewis, both his writing and his faith
  (tags: C.S.Lewis books christianity fiction religion people culture)
• RPS - 25
  Play rock-paper-scissors with 25 different hand signs, including dynamite, alien, wolf, devil, man, woman, and sponge.
  (tags: fun games humor cool gestures)

This looks fun: play rock-paper-scissors with a total of twenty-five possible hand signals and 300 different outcomes. Clearly, someone has too much time on their hands.

Ya know, the daily links thing sounded interesting at first, but then I realized that you probably won’t care about a lot of the stuff I tag in del.icio.us. So, I think I’ll turn off that feature and just tell you about stuff that I think will be more interesting.

• MonkeyGTD - gtd inspired task manager powered by tiddlywiki
  How to make a PocketMod out of a TiddlyWiki
  (tags: tiddlywiki gtd pocketmod pdf cool tutorial howto)
• How to back up del.icio.us bookmarks on your blog - Lifehacker
  This ought to up my blog’s post count–Send links from del.icio.us to your blog every day.
  (tags: del.icio.us lifehacks blog howto tutorial tips wordpress)

Del.icio.us, the social bookmarks manager, has a feature which allows me to set up a Daily Blog Posting which will copy over all of the links that I’ve tagged for the day to my blog. I’m going to try it out here; you’ll be able to find all of my bookmarks in the Daily Links category, or else you can try my del.icio.us page for older links.

UPDATE:Never mind

Everything should be up and running now. Well, that’s a qualified everything. Some of my plug-ins didn’t survive the upgrade, most notably the spell-checker plugin, which the author has little interest in updating.

I also decided not to update my own personal themes for now; I’m not really thrilled with how they look at this point. I may or may not put together a new theme sometime, but for now I’m sticking with the default theme.

I’m telling you though, they really did a nice job updating the admin side of the WordPress interface. It looks wonderful and it’s very easy to use. For one thing, adding categories can be done without switching from the Write Post page, so I’ll probably be adding more categories in the future. It’s very slick and AJAX-y. I like it.

If you see anything that looks out of place out there, please let me know. Thanks!

Fair Warning: The site will act funny for the next few minutes as I upgrade to a new version of WordPress. Cross your fingers.

I’m glad that I didn’t grow up in Seattle. I managed to avoid some of their ridiculous attempts to indoctrinate kids with racist teachings. Let me show you what I mean. The public school system defines cultural racism as follows, with the more egregious parts of the definition in bold:

Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as ‘other,’ different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers

Now, I happened to take a couple of international business classes, and one of the things we learned about was Hofstede’s Model for defining cultures. This model rates countries on five basic cultural indicators: Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Masculinity, Long-Term Orientation, Individualism/Collectivism. Seattle public schools, in their definition of cultural racism, demonstrates that they themselves are culturally racist: They rate having a future time orientation and individualism as somehow inferior to their alternatives.

Happily, however, this incident has generated enough press to get the school to pull down the definition from their website. Hopefully, all the attention will cause the school board to reevaluate their choice of leaders for their schools.

If you’re interested in finding out more, such as how this incident is an argument for school choice, check out these links from Samizdata.net.

Would you like a complete computer that could fit in a standard wall socket? Of course you would. It’s also energy-efficient: it can be powered by a network cable. Of course, the downside is that the computer isn’t very powerful. The idea is to plug a screen, keyboard, mouse, and speakers into it, then connect to a central server that does all the hard work of processing your files. But still, quite cool.

Story number two: How would you like to wear this thing?

It’s a jet pack. They’re finally here!

Finally: A 65-year-old woman, standing in her kitchen, praying for the safety of her family as they travelled in a storm, survived a lightning strike. Make of that answer to prayer what you will.

UPDATE: Fixed missing quotation mark that ate part of the post.

I just realized that I had not yet mentioned the new computer I built just after graduation.

Isn’t it pretty? I think so. It’s also very, very fast, at least as compared to my laptop. <geekmode>It runs on a AMD Athlon 64 3500+, using a FoxConn NF4SK8AA-8KRS motherboard. It has 2.5 gigs of RAM and single 256MB XFX GeForce 7600 GT XXX video card. Both the board and the card are SLI capable, meaning that in a few months, if I feel the itch to upgrade, I can pick up an identical video card (which will hopefully be cheaper by then) and plug it in, instantly (almost) doubling my video speed. All this wholesome goodness, plus DVD burner, floppy drive, and 250 gig hard drive are stuffed into the Antec Sonata II case, a beautiful, shiny black case that attracts fingerprints faster than a private investigator with a bottle of talcum powder.</geekmode>

It’s a very nice computer, paid for (mostly) by graduation presents and careful selection of items with rebates and sales. I just received the last piece today: My new flat panel monitor which I found at the astonishingly low price of $99 after rebates. It’s not a bad monitor either; no dead pixels, and the colors look good to my untrained eye. So, this is what my “workstation” looks like now:

I love it.