A painting of me
  • White Issue(s). 

    That’s the funny thing about being raised in the dominant culture of Toronto. If you don’t make a conscious decision to step away from its core whiteness, you won’t, and no one, barring some Bonfire of the Vanities type calamity, is ever going to make you.

    The flip-side to all this is ethnic enclaves and woe-is-me. Ethnic Aisle is pretty great.

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The Men Who Stare at Goats

   12 March 2012, lunch time

I watched The Men Who Stare at Goats last weekend. My cousin who was with us had seen it before, and felt it was a bit, “meh”. I read the list of stars and couldn’t imagine the film being anything less than awesome: Jeff Bridges, George Clooney, Ewen McGreggor and Kevin Mother-Fucking Spacey all hanging out in the same movie? How could this possibly be meh? The movie is about a journalist, played by McGreggor who meets a self-proclaimed US army trained psychic warrior, played by Clooney. They have an adventure together, and along the way you learn all about how Clooney’s character ended up as a psychic. I loved the film. It’s so weird and funny. It feels very much like a Coen brothers film, but it’s not. The movie is enjoyable, short, and on Netflix: that’s a winning combination.

The official The Men Who Stare At Goats website.

Comment  

Some thoughts on the GitHub Exploit

   7 March 2012, evening time

GitHub recently fell victim to a security hole in Rails, the web application framework they use to build their site. A user of their site exploited the security hole and gave himself commit permissions on a repository that didn’t belong to him. I’m sure it was no coincidence that the repository that he chose to mess with was the official Rails repo.

Read the rest of this post. (444 words)

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  • Mari0 

    A complete from scratch recreation of Super Mario Bros. with a focus on perfectly imitating the feel the 1985 classic gave us. Then give Mario a portal gun, add puzzle game mechanics from Portal and there you go. And if that wasn’t crazy enough, play 4-player coop, with everyone having their own Portal gun!

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  • Personal Lynch Fest. 

    Why would you do this to someone you love? I feel a rage coming just thinking about Mulholland Drive.

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  • kottke.org redesign, 2012 version. 

    My favourite site on the Internet has redesigned. He even created a mirror of his site on Tumblr. What? (The only thing I dislike about the redesign are the share buttons: those things are the worse.) One of the focuses of his redesign was improving the way the site looks on mobile devices. When I originally created this site, I did so on an iBook with a 1024×768 display. At the time I also had fond memories of my PowerBook 5300cs with a 640×468 display. Now in 2012, the site actually looks quite good on the iPhone and the iPad. (With the exception of the header on the iPhone, where the links are too small.) I haven’t touched the design here in so long that I still have hacks to make sure the site is centred in IE5. For serious. I need to tidy things up here, at some point.

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Pale Blue Dot

   6 March 2012, early morning

Pale Blue Dot

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

This weeks episode of RadioLab about Escape is particularly good. As I’ve said before, RadioLab is sole reason I now listen to podcasts: it’s incredible.

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  • Square Register on Vimeo. 

    Square is doing some pretty awesome stuff. It’s embarrassing and not that surprising they are beating the payment processor industry to these sorts of innovations.

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  • Foreclosures Las Vegas & Reno. 

    Bruce Gilden went to Las Vegas and Reno to continue his series on foreclosed homes. I supported the project on Kickstarter.

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