21 July 2004, lunch time
I received an email from one Andy Knight, asking me to check out a web site he has set up. A dating web site of sorts no less. The thing was, it didn’t sound like spam. So, I did what any idiot would do, I wrote the dude back, and I went to the web site he sent me.
The site, Popmates, is a sort of online popularity contest. The computer dating aspect of the site is apparently the natural direction any site with a large collection of men and women on it will take. The site was also created as part of Andy’s master thesis. How can I not support something like that?
Here is a guest account you can use to look around, UN – pm2000, PW – pm2000.
Apu: I enrolled in Springfield Heights Institute of Technology under the tutelage of the brilliant Professor John Frink…
Frink: Well, sure, the Frinkiac-7 looks impressive, don’t touch it, but I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.
Apu: Could it be used for dating?
Frink: Well, theoretically, yes. But the computer matches would be so perfect as to eliminate the thrill of romantic conquest. Mw-hurgn-whey
Interesting Links
20 July 2004, early evening
I’ve made a custom 404 / Not Found page for my web site. I felt inspired after reading an interesting write up about them at GraphikJunkie.
Because of my use of mod_rewrite rules and some holes in textpattern, my site is a bit wonky when you stray off the beaten path. Some requests that should return a 404 will not because textpattern will simply complain the requested section does not have a corresponding page template (example). Similarly, some requests for non-existent categories will return blank pages, instead of a 404 (example). Have you guys come across other instances of pages not showing up as you would expect. I hope to fix all these issues at some point in time.
Update: I fixed the problems I was having with 404 pages not showing up for bad section and bad category requests. As it stands a 404 should be correctly served up in all cases where one is required. I will write up a short how-to on the subject shortly since this is probably useful information.
[4] Interesting Links | Web Design
20 July 2004, lunch time
Fox News is exactly what is wrong with America. Bill O’Reilly is always fun to watch, because I honestly can’t figure out if he is acting or not. Many years ago, I was reading a transcript from an interview he did with a man, Jason Glick, whose father was killed in the 9/11 attack. Bill was unimpressed with the Jason’s position on the war on terrorism. Read more about Bill O’Reilly and make sure you watch the video at the bottom of the page. I’m fairly certain the video is from a documentary I have been dying to see called Outfoxed. Another documentary I really want to see is Control Room, which focuses on Al-Jezera.
[1] Interesting Links | Politics
18 July 2004, late afternoon
Update: Read this post carefully. I am trying to talk about not letting your curiosity get out of hand. Somethings are better left unknown.
Sometimes the word Bukkake comes up in conversation. Almost always, a girl who is out with my friends and I will ask, “What’s Bukkake?” We of course reply, you don’t want to know. This actually happens a fair bit. I’m not sure why Bukkake keeps coming up in conversation. My friends and I are a bit odd I suppose.
I found this little tidbit of advice, and I thought I would share it with you guys that don’t know what Bukkake is:
Curiosity is good, but remember: there are a lot of things out there that, if you go research them, will stick in your brain. Forever. Like “bukkake.” So be cautious. Once some shit like bukkake gets in there, it ain’t never coming out. You could be in the middle of a job interview or something, and your brain might start whispering, “Bukkake. Bukkake. Bukkake.”
From Bad News Hughes
[13] Life | Interesting Links
14 July 2004, mid-afternoon
Gizmodo is a gadget site I’ve started reading more frequently. It is part of the same consortium of blogs owned by Nick Denton. The not-safe-for-work Fleshbot is my favourite. The last issue of Wired had an article about the man and his fleet of blogs.
Now, I had no intention of posting anything about this to my blog, till I read this line at Gizmodo on an article about Black iPods
My guess? I think the original iPods were black, and then were later changed to white, just like they did to Jesus.
Interesting Links | Weblogs
9 July 2004, mid-afternoon
Cost of sex with a girlfriend and wife calculator. The people at NoMarriage.com are have devised some formulas for determining how much you need to shell out to get a little nookie from your significant other.
The above is from what I thought would be a pretty tame FPP at MetaFilter. 90 comments later…
[2] Metafilter | Interesting Links
4 July 2004, late at night
Valblog is offering up a poem a day in an attempt to add some culture to your life. My favourite poem of the set he’s posted so far is who knows if the moon’s… by E.E. Cummings.
[3] Weblogs | Interesting Links
27 June 2004, early evening
Andy Baio is putting up some videos for your viewing pleasure. The first up is something I’m sure some of my readers will enjoy:
First up, the best TV pilot you’ve never seen: Ben Stiller’s Heat Vision and Jack from 1999. Jack Black stars as Jack Austin, an astronaut on the run from NASA after a solar accident makes him the smartest man in the universe. Owen Wilson plays his talking motorcycle. Produced by Stiller, who also appears in the introduction and as a strip club DJ.
[4] Interesting Links
16 June 2004, late afternoon
Valblog looks wicked now. I like the new layout a lot, but you can’t comment on any of the posts on the site, so instead I comment here.
Interesting Links
20 May 2004, early evening
Google has posted a list of Software Principles on thier site. I don’t know if other software companies will start applying these principles when they develop software, but it would definetly be nice. In effect, this is an attack directed at those companies that create spywarem, and adware, programs. There is more discussion of this topic at Slashdot.
Technology | Interesting Links
7 May 2004, mid-afternoon
del.icio.us links is a social bookmark manager. What that means is that you can submit bookmarks that get saved at your own bookmark page. Anyone else can view and subscribe to your bookmark page. Furthermore, you can see how many other people are linking to the same things as you. The project is pretty interesting, and has been around for sometime. I may start using it, and importing the links I save on my del.icio.us links page here.
Interesting Links
7 May 2004, the wee hours
This site can now be reached at http://evilurl.com/hornyWankerTitty. If you would like your own evilurl, go to evilurl.
Interesting Links | Web Design
26 April 2004, mid-afternoon
I’ve come across a lot of really great sites from reading the text pattern support forum. There are a lot of really cool designers making pages with text pattern.
Here are a few I like:
- More Complicated. Nice and Simple.
- Naked Loft Party. The content is like intelligent pornography, and the layout is pretty slick. More impressive are the number of modifications he’s made to TXP. (NSFW)
- Valblog. This site has a wicked-simple design.
- Solipsistic. Very gothic and avant-garde. My only beef with the site are the nested scroll-bars.
[3] Interesting Links | Weblogs
24 April 2004, mid-afternoon
Everyone who doesn’t know, should know, that I love action figures. I love them a lot. With that said, I have to say, this star destroyer is the greatest thing ever.
Interesting Links
22 April 2004, late afternoon
Kevin, the Assistant manager at TJ’s, tells all in a very interesting online journal.
This is the most fascinating thing I’ve learned this week: natural gas has no smell. When you “smell” a gas leak, you are not smelling the gas, which has no smell, you are smelling an additive they insert into the gas to give it a smell, so you can detect it and get a safe distance from your home before it blows up and kills your neighbors.
This guy is brilliant.
[2] Interesting Links
20 April 2004, lunch time
Please, for the love of god people, don’t open those dirty emails from your friends at work. If you do, this may happen to you! (update correct link now.) A funny little movie I found at plasticbag.org
Interesting Links
1 April 2004, early afternoon
Here is a link to Kinja, the weblog guide. In particular, it is a link to my user page, which contains the latest posts from blogs that I read.
Kinja lets you make a digest of all the weblogs you read. They have programs that will scan those weblogs and when a new post is made, list the result. Kinja seems a bit imperfect, since Shima’s weblog has yet to show up in my digest. The service is currently a beta release, and is probably still not quite perfect.
[4] Interesting Links | Weblogs
30 March 2004, mid-afternoon
I think I like the handheld version of dollarshort.org more then that real, meant-for-the-web, version of the site. Both layouts are pretty nice though I must say. The site belongs to Mena Trott of Moveable Type fame.
Interesting Links | Weblogs
23 March 2004, early afternoon
XFN is a way to describe your relationship to someone else on the web via the rel attribute for a link. XFN is a simple idea, and seems easy to implement, so I may add the information to my links shortly. Basically if Dave is my friend, and I have a link to him on my web-page, then I state that he is my friend in that link.
Update: I’m listed on rubhub now. I haven’t thought of anything cool to do with the XFN information, except perhaps highlight links differently depending on my relationship with someone.
[8] Interesting Links | Weblogs
23 March 2004, the wee hours
I love useless widgets and other crap people add to their sites. This guy tells you the temperature in the area he lives using a banner picture that represents a garden of sorts. His description does his work much more justice then what I have just said.
[1] Interesting Links | Weblogs
22 March 2004, late evening
Apparently I wasn’t the only one who thought that this comment authentication thing was interesting:
Interesting Links | Weblogs
20 March 2004, late afternoon
I’ve been getting comment spam at my photoblog, as some of you may know. SixApart, the company that makes Moveable Type, is developing an authentication system called TypeKey that they hope will reduce comment spam. They plan to have people register with this authentication service before they can post comments to sites that are using TypeKey for authentication.
I wonder if it will be effective, and if people will want to use such a system. Some people want to post anonymously, and some people may not want the comments they post on one site to be linked in anyway to comments they post on another site. (Maybe you post comments at a forum for child abuse victims, and want those comments to remain anonymous and separate from comments you post on your friends photoblog, for example.)
Most of all though, I am really curious as to how they will implement the system.
(I found this link at one of my favourite sites on the net, kottke.org.)
Interesting Links | Weblogs
19 March 2004, late evening
Those of you who enjoy writing on the web, but are less then impressed with the way MT converts your writing into HTML, may want to look at the following two programs: Textile and Markdown.
Textile has been around for a while, and is basically a shorthand for HTML. Instead of using the tag <em> to emphasizes some piece of text, you simple mark your text with underscores, like so: emphasis. There is similar notation for most of the important html tags you would want to use. Also, textile will automatically encode entities (like &), will convert—to ’—’, and make your quotes curly. There is a moveable type plugin to let you use textile to format your text instead of using moveable type’s lame ‘convert line breaks’ function.
Markdown has all the features of textile as far as I can tell, but the design ideas behind it are slightly different. You can read in-depth the reasoning for the syntax markdown uses here.
I don’t use either program at the moment. Most of what I write is short, and not filled with lots of HTML. However, if you find you put a lot of HTML in your posts, then these programs definitely will make the code for the posts much easier to read.
Interesting Links | Web Design
17 March 2004, early evening
I like this dude’s site, Right Wingin-It. Most everything he posts bugs me, don’t get me wrong, but it’s interesting to read how the other side thinks I suppose.
How did I stumble on this site? Through a bizarre internet project called Radio Vox Populi, which converts blogs to streamed audio you can listen to.
[4] Interesting Links
12 March 2004, mid-afternoon
Someone has written a script to generate episode summaries for nonexistent episodes of 24. Metafilter is good.
Interesting Links
