Posted on by lhl

George W. Bush Loves Michael Jackson (This Is Important)

A number of explosions tore through the British consulate in Turkey today, killing scores of people. George W. Bush is in England, surrounded on all sides by enraged British citizens whose massive protests have required nearly every police officer in London to be put on the line of defense.

This is happening in a nation that has been, both in government and among the populace, one of the strongest allies America has ever known. There are a couple of wars happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, neither of which are going very well. A great many soldiers and civilians have died in the last year. Osama bin Laden is still on the loose, and after nearly 750 days, the American people have still been given no explanation for why September 11 happened.

It is 3:16 p.m. on Thursday afternoon as I write this. CNN has been covering, with total exclusivity, a parking lot outside a police station for the last hour. They covered an airplane landing. They covered the same airplane sitting still on the tarmac. They covered the airplane slowly moving into a hangar. All the while, talking head after talking head explored every conceivable facet of the parking lot, the plane, the tarmac, and the hangar, as well as a variety of parallel issues. No stone of data was left unturned.

Why? Michael Jackson is about to surrender to police.

In the last two years, CNN has not devoted this much energy and coverage to any story in the manner that is unfolding right now…

Fuck the media.

Posted on by lhl

Was randomly clicking through the Blogger site (finding the date created link Andy sent me a while ago) and saw suggestions on what to do when your mom finds out about your blog (also, less tongue in cheeck, how not to get fired because of your blog) in the knowledge base.

Good suggestions, but it also highlights the need for more fine grained publishing control (Towards Semi-Permeable Blogging), and (ideally), a concurrent wide adoption of some sort of federated trust infrastructure [this could help to alleviate the comment spam problem. implemented properly, this could retain privacy fairly well, pseudonymity is all that’s required])

Posted on by lhl
Posted on by lhl

Hmm, so this is pretty interesting behavior. Been noticing that AIM’s been giving me a system message that I’m signed on in different locations instead of kicking me off when I log in from multiple systems. It doesn’t have a jabber-like presence, but instead duplexes all incoming messages. Wackiness.

Ahh: AIM: Instant Message Routing

When you are signed in more than once, messages sent to you will be
delivered to all locations. You can control which locations will
receive messages by setting your Away Message.

When signed into multiple locations:

  • Your messages will generally be delivered to all locations not set as Away (or locations that have gone Idle).
     
  • If all locations are set Away, then messages will be delivered to all locations.

Please note, that you will only receive these notifications from the screen name AOL System Msg.

Posted on by lhl

I’ve been neglecting the blog recently as classes and work have conspired against me. A quick linkdump:

  • resident Bush and the Naked Ladies of London

    The WP’s Dana Milbank reports
    that a British reporter of a reputable journalistic outlet asked
    McClellan, “Just to clarify, why has the president chosen to do an
    interview with the Sun? It’s a newspaper which publishes daily pictures
    of topless women.” After detailing the Sun’s bread and butter (not just
    naked ladies – there are stories about natives eating someone’s
    ancestor and “German saboteurs plotted to bomb Palace with peas in
    WW2″), Milbank notes McClellan’s answer, “It has a large readership.”
    Notably, Bush hasn’t given one-on-one interviews to publications like
    the NY Times, WSJ, Washington Post, Time or Newsweek this year (and
    hasn’t given solo interviews to LA Times, Chicago Tribune, and Boston
    Globe ever). Hypothesis: Rupert Murdoch is a billionaire, The
    Sun-owning media baron and Bush is running for re-election next year.
    Ta-da, Bush interviews with Trevor Kavanagh.

  • Chasing Bush – in the UK via mobile technology (see also: BBC report)
  • Emergants – etech merchandise; the ThinkGeek shirt is still the best blogging shirt evar though
  • SprintPCS has gone structural; XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS (also, my Treo finally shipped. w00t!)
  • SCO Hints at *BSD Lawsuits Next Year, And More – oh, lordy
  • Health Effects of Cell Phone Use – the federal government is funding $10M of further studies; disturbing brain cell results – wifi probably ok…
  • Kottke: The redesign continues… – I really like this; the idea of templated data (entry/output) is the next step after categories; the logical conclusion will be to enter all typed data into a reconfigurable knowledge-base; (thoughts: creating a standard set of XML export filters for standard data types; is this orthogonal to arbitrary node-level representation? where are the atomic segments? should base nodes allow complex typing or not? – implement first, worry about design post facto?)
  • Spam Sandals – would be a great gift for geeks
  • Breaking Up is Hard to Do – Jane write about breaking up and not being able to transfer their saved games. Err, Justin writes about having shingles
  • New ‘Mystery Meson’ Sub-Atomic Particle Discovered – wacky subatomics
  • Mr. Brown goes to town – Camron writes about MTV’s Made
  • Andy just linked to the Uberman sleep schedule – funny since I was just thinking about that; recently, Provigil has recently come up in conversation. I haven’t been getting much sleep lately. Like majorly bad sleeping habits for the past week. This semester can not end soon enough.
  • Aaron‘s been making a good sell of Nader
  • CryptoPhone – PTP encryption via AES256 and TwoFish, w/ key exchange and source code. Or, if you don’t feel like paying $4,000/handset, try PGPfone w/ VOIP
  • Why Linux Is Wealthier Than Microsoft
  • Client Quotes from Dreamless, 2000 – some great stuff if you’re a web designer
  • WTC Memorial Design Finalists
  • snakeversuswizard – whoa, cool band. (EP for $3) [via Eileen]
  • Her Space Holiday – My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend video – nice concept, well done, by Jason Koxvold (having gotten a fair bit of compositing under my belt, it’s nice to be able to confidently say ‘hey, i can do something like that’ 🙂
  • LookBetterOnline – headshots for online dating. inevitable?
  • Building a Web Media Empire on a Daily Dose of Fresh Links – NYTimes on Gawker Media
  • Desiderata – great Flash animation
  • Audio Lunchbox – DRM-less (MP3) Indie Music (what’s the bitrate)? – killer-app: digital downloads + library/streaming + collab filtering + community/trust tools
  • Whoa, sick: PHP.net has a kick-ass autocomplete script
  • Macromedia Flex Blog – by Macromedia Tech Evangelist Christope Coenraets
  • Andre has been throwing up great media on the ol’ bloog lately. It’s like he has access to some incredible pile of files or soemthing
  • ProFont – the ultimate programming font; a bit small for my tastes, personally I like xterm 7×14
  • The Irony of Outsourcing

    Economically, trade is no different than other technologies. Economist David Friedman
    of Santa Clara University puts it most succinctly: there are two ways
    to make a car — you can either make it in Detroit or grow it in Iowa.
    You already know how to make it in Detroit. You get a bunch of iron
    ore, smelt it into steel, and have an assembly line of robots and
    workers shape it into a finished vehicle.

    To grow it in Iowa, you plant car seeds in the ground (also known as
    “wheat”), wait until they sprout, and harvest them. Take the harvest
    and put it into a big boat marked “to Japan” and let it sail off. A few
    months later a brand new car comes back.

Posted on by lhl
Posted on by lhl