December 2007
37 posts
It's a bit nippy in the Bay this morning
Flipping through the AM dial this morning on my way to work (a rare occurrence, but the assassination of Pakistani Former Prime Minister Bhutto was motivating), I came across a morning show in which they were discussing Post Secret and asking call-in listeners to relate their own secrets.
“Joe” from San Francisco called: he was deployed in Iraq at that beginning of the war, but...
“In the world according to the positivist, the inspiring thing about scrambled...”
– Still Life With Woodpecker, Tom Robbins.
This "blogosphere": how sad.
It really pisses me off how many people completely missed the point of the entire FSJ “Apple payoff” series of posts. The entire web is fighting about who realized FSJ was faking the payoff first, but what no one has figured out yet is that the whole point was to make a serious, poignant comment about this “paying bloggers to shut up” business. Although, I don’t think...
“Sure, Nick Ciarelli is just some college kid with a blog, and I’m just...”
– It’s official: I’m most definitely back in FSJ’s corner.
... Perl, the world’s best programming language.... →
I knew there was a reason I loved Gruber.
“It spent the last weeks of its life dutifully opening and closing its CD ROM...”
– One of the best they’ve had in years.
"csi: santa rosa" (crosspost) →
Just because I’m stoked enough about this to warrant posting it to two of things ridiculous “blog” things I tend to keep up…
Another gray matter helper post...
For when I loose the /etc/profile that these are saved in:
alias svnst='svn st | grep -i "^\w.*"'
alias svnvd='svn diff | vim -'
“The expeditions were looking mainly for signs of the ancient ice sheets that...”
– The article (via TDG) is about “mud waves” that have formed in the sediment on the ocean floor. Boring.
What is amazing, though, is the fact that the study was commissioned to find evidence of a massive, ancient ice sheet. Evidence that showed up as still-visible gouges in the ocean...
“And what would that do life on the planet?
“Decompose it,” Tyson...”
– Great premise for a sci-fi story disguised here: incomprehensibly advanced war-faring alien civilization “aims” a super massive black hole and it’s surrounding galaxy at other galactic targets, using the relativistic jet escaping it’s pole - composed of mainly extremely...
“Barry Bonds seems to find Oakland a pretty friendly place these days - not only...”
– No, I say!
Considering the A’s are the only Bay Area baseball team I can root for (being a die hard Dodger’s fan immediately rules out those dirty bastard Giants), I would be absolutely distraught if this disgrace of a player moves across the Bay. For fuck’s sake, Barry Zito...
"Scoble having a naked conversation. You're not... →
I’ve never been a fan of Scoble: in fact, I can’t stand the guy. Of all the over-verbose but under-skilled tech bloggers out there, he’s easily the worst. But one of the things that have always bothered me most is his “preach one thing, do another” methodology: Fake Steve seriously calls him out on it this time ‘round.
WatchBreaking News: All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash
Hadn’t seen anything from the “Onion News Network” before; very impressive production quality, and the anchorman pulls off the incredibly fake news laudably well.
Top 10 Ugliest Christmas Sweaters →
Wow.
“In fact, people today are genetically more different from people living 5,000...”
– From Reuters, via the Daily Grail.
I’ve been talking/thinking about this a lot lately. In learning about ancient cultures and their technological advancements (the Egyptians, the Greeks, etc.), we tend to think that the population in antiquity was at nearly the same place in the evolutionary...
“For once, the hippies are right. Web 2.0 wouldn’t exist without San...”
– “Snappy answers to stupid hippies,” V’wag.
The Winter, Alpha
From Metroblogging SF, “You know it’s winter in San Francisco when:”
You accidentally leave your heater on and you’re really happy that its’ still on when you get home.
You’re still asking that question: do I take my jacket off in the car or leave it on?
Beer is too cold. You’re constantly searching for Irish coffees or eggnogs at bars.
This is my...
1 tag
Serj On
A few choice quotes I found in an interview with Serj Tankian in the first November ‘07 issue of Rolling Stone:
In your new song “Money,” you sing, “My servitude can be traced to the tyranny of the down.” What is a “down”?
With System of a Down, we redefined the word “down” as a noun. A down could be anything: a lifetime that you...
Now that's a big laser
From a Wikipedia jaunt that started with a news story describing how Voyagers 1 and 2 have essentially confirmed that the heliosphere of our solar system is “squished” (has a bow shock) because of the approaching interstellar medium. Somehow I managed to end up reading about other possible interstellar craft that had been investigated in the past (such as Project Daedalus), many of...
“All too often, software developers are merely tourists in their own codebase....”
– Although he’s a Windows developer, Jeff Atwood tends to have some pretty interesting and insightful things to say about software development from time to time. We won’t hold it against you, Jeff.
Startling →
This guy is a genius at nailing down those feelings all of us (nerds) have in a humorous way, but this strip is probably the best he’s ever done. I still get this feeling all the time, and was just ruminating about it with my roommate the other day (inspired by my Star Trek-esque data pad we call an ‘iPhone’).
Remember to read the alt text: “We actually reached the future...
“They’re like Dictionaries on Meth!”
– Jeff Mossberg, my manager/mentor at Micromat, on Core Data and how its managed object model is far more powerful than a simple relational database. Definitely the Quote of the Day.
1 tag
They Smile 'Cus They Like It
I simply cannot stop listening to this track, as poppy and jolly as it is. Every twenty minutes or so, for a few days straight, it’s back. In hopes of avoiding an angry email from Andrew Maury for linking to his killer remix, make sure to head over to his remix page and rock out to some of the other sick tracks he’s done (some of the best remixes I’ve ever heard, to be honest).
“OK, I’m off to liquid state seminar. PBR on tap, woot!”
– Mi amigo (Dr.) Gabe Rockefeller, who’s at LANL, before signing off AIM.
PBR on tap at a liquid state seminar: I can only imagine the exquisite nerd jokes that were flying around that place.
“That said, there’s another thing Google could learn from Dell: Maintain...”
– Owen Thomas over at Valleywag paraphrasing a fairly epic post by his old protege Om Malik. Both the V’wag post and Om’s original are definitely worth a once-over.
BBC-on-Rails
When I heard that the BBC’s software engineering teams had created a “Perl-on-Rails” internally, I was stoked. Then I read the blog post discussing it, and was absolutely appalled to read about their current system that statically manages the majority of the BBC’s sites. Or, in their words, “HTML is created internally and FTP’ed to the web servers.” Good...
Ambiguous Acronym Fun
An exciting day today, as we finally got DF’ed today (for Syphone), via Om Malik - another blog’o’sphere heavy hitter - who posted yesterday and “loves it”: that’s right bitches.
Gruber was someone I was hopeful to get the attention of with this app, because his approval is both somewhat difficult to get and meaningful around these here ‘tubes.
Even...
“Once, he saw an enormous tractor-trailer speeding by, unaware that in its wake...”
– “Rural Britain wants to put itself off the GPS map”, International Herald Tribune, via Technocrat. Hilarious yet scary, in implication of “what’s to come” if anything.