It really warms the cockles of my heart that the Sifl and Olly clip I put online tops alltheweb’s video search for the search term “orgasm” (you can try it w/ the content filter off, it’s still #1). RAWK.

Ahh, looks like our public government is preemptively collecting True Names.

TiddlyWiki – an experimental MicroContent WikiWikiWeb built by JeremyRuston. It’s written in HTML and JavaScript to run on any browser without needing any ServerSide logic.

Looks interesting, but not entirely useful (use case: detachable interface that can sync once you get network connectivity again). Notes: install by doing a ‘save all’ from the browser. No permalinks (see Ahoy for some possible ideas). Doesn’t save anything (yet). All data is on one page. Neat animation

Guardian Unlimited: After Abu Ghraib – goddammit, and half the country still wants to re-elect Bush?

Alazawi says that US guards left her sitting on the chair overnight, and that the next day they took her to a room known by detainees as “the torturing place”. “The US officer told us: ‘If you don’t confess we will torture you. So you have to confess.’ My hands were handcuffed. They took off my boots and stood me in the mud with my face against the wall. I could hear women and men shouting and weeping. I recognised one of the cries as my brother Mu’taz. I wanted to see what was going on so I tried to move the cloth from my eyes. When I did, I fainted.”

We killed one of her brothers in custody, and tortured/confined her for eigth months. Her two surviving brothers remain in Abu Ghraib, all because an Iraqi informant’s report (part of a blackmail scheme). Words fail to describe what I”m feeling right now.

They hate us for our freedom, do they? I think not.

Metadata. Specifically the capture, auto-generation, visualization, and interaction of. Like for many others, it’s fair to say that my intellectual orbit has been firmly captured in its gravity for some time. I believe that I can say without much controversy, that at the current point in the information age, the control and processing of this n-order information has increasingly superceded the importance of the information itself (very pomo; but of course, the distinction between data and metadata itself becomes increasingly murky as one tries to pin down the referent).

I swung by the local Korean supermarket today and picked up a number of things I’ve never eaten before, many with labels that I can’t read. It occurred to me that might be an interesting project: to try to get through every single fit for human consumption item in a market. (Over the past year or so, I’ve been entirely too conservative, and also eaten out way too much. I’m trying to better take advantage of the bounty and variety that generations past couldn’t even fathom).

Another interesting project might be to document that said endeavor. Which of course, gets the wheels turning about the best way to enter, tag, organize, represent, and present this data. How flexibly and most easily allow these arbitrary pursuits to be dashed off? Obviously many individuals, groups, companies and research institutions are exploring different aspects and approaches to this.

Still, it’s sobering to think about how far we have to go in reducing the complexity of even the simplest tasks when you consider Jason’s description of his Movie Listing functionality, self-described as done fairly easily, but requiring the installation and set up of 4 plugins combined together (ExtraFields, Compare, MTSQL, and MTIfEmpty for those counting at home).

• How Dell got soul – interesting strategy+business piece. (see also Bnoopy)
• osx2x – uses supports VNC and X11. (could run Ultr@VNC on Windows)
• SynergyOSX – OS X GUI for Synergy. While the OS X Synergy client works fine, the server has a problem if you’re running multi-monitor on the mac (see my current desktop setup). I’d rather switch the server to the Mac because OS X already has an sshd installed and running, but, well, I’ll live
• An alternative method of saving QuickTime streams
• jedimike.net :: Tsk, tsk, tsk, Apple and Akamai – Or, How To Actually Download Apple-Hosted QuickTime Files (see also: debed perl script. Sometimes this doesn’t work. I recommend Ethereal)
• Billabong Odyssey – documentary made of insane XXL surf competition 75-footer caught on film (see also)
• Inside Firefox – Firefox development musings by Ben Goodger.
• Columbia University Computing History – A Chronology of Computing at Columbia University
• JPG Magazine – for people who love imagemaking without attitude. It’s about the kind of photography you get when you love the moment more than the camera. It’s for photographers who, like us, have found themselves online, sharing their work, and would like to see that work in print.

Was thinking about making a mirror yesterday, and sure enough, the I Found Some Of Your Life blog is gone. Taken down preemptively with an apology. The concept, discussion, and fallout is all fascinating.

Azure Ray – New Resolution (TPS Mix) – a great mix from the single. Also, this Good Life EP has some amazing tracks (can you tell I just got a shipment from Saddle Creek?).

No matter what I tried (deleteing folders, profiles, mozreg files, registry keys), running the Firefox (1.0PR) or Thunderbird (0.8) installers would always result in text that said it was trying to install Thunderbird 0.6 (which looks positively bizarre w/ the Firefox logo. Turns out it was a stale tmp folder in Local SettingsTemp.

Now that was a frickin annoying bug. (ns_temp is evil)

flub, flub, flub