Japanese Warning Signs

A very informative and amazing look at Japanese warning signs- all photographed by a German photographer living in Tokyo.

Music Video

This guy always wanted to be in a music video...so he recorded his own! Very nice! Scott and/or Mike could easily do this too!

BTW- I downloaded it for those with slow speeds- just let me know you want to see it.

Secularism and the Meaningless Life

Dennis Prager takes on the question of what gives life meaning and what the consequences of an irreligious (secular) life are.

Most irreligious individuals, quite understandably, do not like to acknowledge the inevitable and logical consequence of their irreligiosity — that life is ultimately purposeless

Movie Review Podcast

This is a cool blog/podcast: Family Reviews, where a family watches movies and then reviews them together. They've been doing reviews this way since November of last year, and since then they've reviewed Racing Striped, Incredibles, Ocean's Twelve, Napolean Dynamite, and a few others.

I found it when Adam Curry mentioned it on his show "The Daily Source Code" -- he always plugs new and cool podcasts to listen to.

Download podcast software to subscribe to the podcast feeds, and then when a new program is available it will download it for you. I'm listening to a couple of podcasts in the morning before I listen to Rush.

Most boys at Christian schools say no to sex

Here's an excerpt from a report from the Evening Standard of London:

A Christian education makes teenage boys less permissive, according to research out today.

Boys at private Anglican and Catholic schools are more likely to oppose sex before marriage and be less tolerant of pornography.

They are also less likely to feel depressed or consider suicide, according to a survey of 13,000 teenagers by Professor Leslie J Francis from the University of Wales, Bangor.

So education was the answer all along -- a Christian education!

Funnyfox Flicks

These Firefox promo videos hit the net a couple of weeks ago.

Now Wired has a story that says the videos have been downloaded almost 2,000,000 times.

If the Bible was Blogged

Jesus wrote in the sand with his finger. No doubt a Wiki-man who would have preferred his own Wiki Sandbox.

Solomon would have sent out his proverbs with an daily RSS feed, perhaps using a blog as a home base for his feeds.

Matthew. A hyperlink geek who would blog with a constant stream of links back to the original prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures. Most blogging programs make that easy. But a blogging editor lets you do it all offline. I use Ecto.

Read the rest ...

The Amazing Rise of the Do-It-Yourself Economy

Great story on the popularity of DIY projects on the Internet.

Will You Pay?

In an effort to make money (since print subscriptions are down) the NYT will start charging 49.95 for a yearly subscription to their Op-Ed pages and certain "big name" news writers. They are calling it Times Select. I guess this is one option I won't waste my money on!

BTW- I didn't know this interesting fact. I wonder who voted.

For the fifth consecutive year, the Company was ranked No. 1 in the publishing industry in Fortune's 2005 list of America's Most Admired Companies.

Store Wars

A great 5-6 minute parody of Star Wars.
Meet, Cuke, C3Peanuts, Darth Tater and others.

Spong Strikes Again

His new work "The Sins of Scripture" can give liberals a way to fight back against those fanatic Bible-thumping reactionaries. Find out how the Bible was used to condone slavery and mass-murder and was used to keep women and minorities in their place.

"Liberals can and should confront Bible-thumping preachers on their own terms, for the scriptural emphasis on justice and compassion gives the left plenty of ammunition. After all, the Bible depicts Jesus as healing lepers, not slashing Medicaid."

No More Books

University libraries in S. California and Texas are beginning to ditch books for computer worktables. They say this is the future.

But, will ALL books be digitalized and available online?
As new books are written are they automatically digitalized?
Does the library pay a subscription fee to have the right to let students view non-public domain materials?
What if you don't have internet access at home. How can you "sign out a book?"

These are just a few questions I have.

The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

Disney has put out a teaser trailer [mov] for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (official site), which is to be released December 9, 2005.

Mae: The same actress who played Gabriel in Constantine is playing "Jadis the White Witch".

Tango DropBox

This some cool software -- it lets you create "dropboxes" that you can drag and drop files into, and it will automatically copy the files you dropped onto the FTP location associated with the dropbox, according to FTP account info you give it. This can save a lot of time logging into FTP servers and navigating through the remote location with slow and clumsy software. Via del.icio.us/Tuxhedoh

Mozilla Vulnerablilities

Two vulnerabilities were found in Mozilla Firefox that combined allow an attacker to run arbitrary code. The Mozilla Suite is only partially vulnerable.

By causing a frame to navigate back to a previous javascript: url an attacker can inject script into any site. This could be used to steal cookies or sensitive data from that site, or to perform actions on behalf of that user. (Affects Firefox and the Suite).

A separate vulnerability in the Firefox install confirmation dialog allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code by using a javascript: URL as the package icon. By default only the Mozilla Foundation update site is allowed to bring up this dialog, but the script injection vulnerability described above enables this to be exploited from any malicious site.

Read the rest to see what to do.

>[May 12] Update by Scott:
As I said in the comments to this post when you first put it up, the true test of the quality of a pice of software is not whether or not the software has vulnerabilities (all software has holes), but how quickly a patch is released once vulnerabilities have been disclosed.

Mozilla did not fail me. Firefox 1.04 has just been released, patching the vulnerabilities announced May 8. Four days -- not too shabby. Just click the red arrow in the top left corner of the Firefox window to begin the Update process, or click Tools | Options... | Advanced | Software Update | Check Now.

Blair Wins, the Media Spins

Evan Coyne Maloney puts the British election results in a little better context:

Britain's Labour Party won re-election in Parliament, which ensures that Tony Blair will continue on as Prime Minister. Already, the media is spinning the election as a terrible rebuke for Blair over the Iraq war. Setting aside the fact that this terrible rebuke resulted in Labour winning its third consecutive election for the first time in history, the numbers simply don't bear out the media's contention.

As of this writing, the election results show that the Conservatives have gained 33 seats in Parliament, while the Labor Party lost a total of 47 seats. In other words, over 70% of the seats lost by Labour were picked up by the other major party that supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. This hardly seems like a stunning victory for the anti-war side.

EPIC 2014

from the Museum of Media History.

John Leo says

"The video appears to be an unusually dry satire, but taken at face value, most of it is plausible— and scary. Without gatekeepers, no one stands ready to verify reports as accurate, so there's no difference between real news and agreed-upon gossip or low-level fluff. Issues debated today— Are bloggers real journalists? Is there a clear line between news and entertainment? — would be irrelevant. Everyone would be a journalist. And though some contributors would be paid, it isn't clear that the flow of money would be enough to fund complicated reports and investigations. Reporters would be paid according to how popular their stories were. Good luck if your job is to cover Rwanda or global warming."

Interesting conclusion with more than a grain of truth- what do you think?

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Your Linguistic Profile:

75% General American English

15% Yankee

5% Dixie

5% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Clusty

 Here's an interesting search engine. I like the list on the left side that categorizes the search. So instead of searching 102,987 hits, I can pick a category. This is still in beta, butI see they even have wikipedia on their tab

RSS-to-Javascript converter

Yesterday on del.icio.us/popular I found a site that will take any RSS feed on the web and generate a script that will load the latest items and format them so that you can add the feed to a webpage (like a blog template, for example). All you have to do is paste the script into the template. So I have added two feeds to the blog template (they're over on the bottom of the left sidebar): one for my del.icio.us bookmarks -- it shows the latest twelve I've added; and one that shows the ten most popular sites on del.icio.us based on recent bookmarks.

Minister ex-communicates members for not backing Bush

This is just ridiculous--

The minister of a Haywood County Baptist church is telling members of his congregation that if they're Democrats, they either need to find another place of worship or support President Bush.

Already, the Reverend Chan Chandler has ex-communicated nine members of East Waynesville Baptist Church. Another 40 members have left in protest.

During last Sunday's sermon, he acknowledged that church members were upset because he named people, and he says he'll do it again because he has to according to the word of God.

Chandler could not be reached for comment today, but says his actions weren't politically motivated.

One former church member says Chandler told some of the members that if they didn't support George Bush, they needed to resign their positions and get out of the church, or go to the altar, repent and agree to vote for Bush.

A former church treasurer says she's at church to worship God and not the preacher.

May 11 update: the pastor resigned

'Creepy' photo of Bush and Abdullah

Interesting post on "pomomusings" (Adam B. Cleaveland)... first he quotes Moby from his blog:

ok, i was just looking at a news site(ap, i think)and they had a picture of president bush and the crown prince of saudi arabia walking around the ranch in crawford and they were HOLDING HANDS while they walked.

ew, that is creepy.

don't get me wrong, i'm not opposed to same sex couples walking around holding hands, but i do find it a bit odd when the president of the united states walks around with the crown prince of saudi arabia and they're so close and intimate that they're holding hands like young lovers.

doesn't anyone else find this odd?

And he went on to comment:

I'm no Bush-fan by any means. Not at all. And I am generally a Moby-fan. But Moby apparently just does not get it here... Here I am actually a little bit impressed with Bush. He knows that it is the custom of the Middle East for [men] to hold hands while they walk together, it's just common. Anyone who has been in Egypt, or Palestine or other places in the Middle East wil tell you - just get used to it. It is how men walk in public. So, Moby (and others) - let's be upset with this picture because of what this says about America's (or rather, Bush's) foreign policy, with the obsession with oil, etc. But c'mon Moby, let's not blog about how this picture is "creepy" because they're holding hands -- I'd expect you to be a bit more culturally-knowledgable than that...

Funny that that this president has been criticized for being less than culturally sensitive since before he was even elected president, but the left in general manages to overlook this over-the-top display of cultural accomodation and find a way to come down on him for being to cozy with the crown prince while trying not to look homophobic about it (tricky!). Adam gets this exactly right.

Unlocker

Ever seen one of these?



This program tells you what program is locking the file, and will let you 'unlock' it from the program.

This can be really helpful when dealing with viruses -- it's difficult to delete the virus files because often they're locked in the OS. Potentially this program would help you get around that to delete the files.

Found on del.icio.us.

Gore to Get Lifetime Award for Internet

Al Gore finally gets his due:

Al Gore may have been lampooned for taking credit in the Internet's development, but organizers of the Webby Awards for online achievements don't find it funny at all.
In part to "set the record straight," they will give Gore a lifetime achievement award for three decades of contributions to the Internet, said Tiffany Shlain, the awards' founder and chairwoman.
"It's just one of those instances someone did amazing work for three decades as congressman, senator and vice president and it got spun around into this political mess," Shlain said.
Vint Cerf, undisputedly one of the Internet's key inventors, will give Gore the award at a June 6 ceremony in New York.
"He is indeed due some thanks and consideration for his early contributions," Cerf said.
Gore, who boasted in a CNN interview he "took the initiative in creating the Internet," was only 21 when the Internet was born out of a Pentagon project.
But after joining Congress eight years later, he promoted high-speed telecommunications for economic growth and supported funding increases for the then-fledging network, according to the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, which presents the annual awards.
He popularized the term "information superhighway" as vice president.

Nazi-fied Dance Music

I found this a while back and thought you might be interested...

In the 1930's the Nazis had [a] love/hate relationship with swing music. They outlawed it on their homefront, throwing it into the category of "degenerate" art. But at the same time, they employed it in the service of the fatherland. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, assembled a fairly competent swing band called Charlie and His Orchestra to perform Nazified versions of the jazz hits of the day. Led by an English speaking German, Karl Schwendler, Charlie and His Orchestra broadcast on the medium-wave and short-wave bands throughout the 1930s to Canada, the US and Britain.

The idea was to lure the masses in with the irrestible tonic of swing music and then slyly work in the anti-Jewish, American and British lyrics after the second or third verse. The broadcasts of Charlie and His Orchestra were not available in the Fatherland proper, but that only enhanced their legend, and they picked up an underground following in Germany as well.

The site has 22 songs you can download, and links to find more. I can't decide whether it's creepy or hilarious.

GATES VS. GOOGLE

Really interesting piece on the dynamics between Gates/Microsft and Google. Reading this led me to try out Microsoft's Deskbar (since I had Google Desktop Search I never even thought to try the Microsoft product) and it's pretty cool. Of course you have to use it in IE and that's a turn-off, but it's got a cool feature that creates a thumbnail of the page you are looking at with little markers everywhere you search terms appear, and you can scroll the page up and down by dragging the rectangle representing viewable screen area in the viewer up and down. It also integrates with Outlook, Office and Explorer so you can search from anywhere. I'm still testing to see whether their search results are any good though.

Tax Receipts Exceed Treasury Predictions

I know the WashPost is reporting this, but c'mon -- we know this isn't true! We cut taxes! Whenever we do that we just keep getting deeper and deeper in debt, as everyone knows...

World Jump Day

Help in the effort to jolt the earth into a new planetary orbit by jumping at the appointed time. This will end global warming and a host of other evils! So save July 20, 2006 on your calendar for this momentous event.

Tagging

A blog post and a news story about 'tagging'--

From CNN:

Here's how we tend to organize our digital photos: We stick them into a folder on our computer and label it "Hawaii trip," or whatever.
Here's a new way: Forget folders or albums. Just "tag" the photos based on what's actually in each frame.
Now, extrapolate this concept to the ideas, images, videos -- and people -- you meet or wish to find online. If they're properly tagged, they're far easier to find.
That's "tagging", and it's currently all the rage among the digerati.
Tagging has the potential to change how we keep track of and discover things digital -- even whom we meet online. Several startups are banking their futures on it....

And from "Tagsonomy (a blog about tagging":

The real zinger for me was realizing that tagging or folksonomy is yet another manifestation of our evolution from hierarchical systems to more later, emergent, and empowering network/grassroots approaches. Here we’re talking about a populist approach to taxonomy: rather than fit our thinking into authoritative closed classification schemes, we can create our own through tagging, and in social tagging environments we can negotiate new, more nuanced ways to map meaning and relationship through shared, emergent classification systems.

It’s odd to be so excited about these little chunks of metadata. The concept of tagging, and the way the concept’s been applied so far, are deceptively simple. On the one hand, I can’t believe we weren’t doing this years ago; on the other hand, I have to admit that I didn’t get the value of tags when I first used del.icio.us. What’s the value of an ephemeral label, I wondered, a category I’ve dreamed up for my own use? I was misunderestimating my ability to build systems of organization that are simple and effective, and I wasn’t thinking about the value of “gardening,” as we do with wikis where architecture is not enforced by the technology....

To see how tagging in action, see Technorati, which lets you search for blog posts based on tags, del.icio.us, which lets you search for user-bookmarked sites based on tags, or Flickr, which lets you search for user-uploaded photos based on tags.

Kitten War

This site pits one cute kitten against the other, and you vote on which is cutest. It's a very fast voting site -- it tells you instantly whether you voted with the majority of other voters or not. You can also look at the winningest and losingest kittens.

放棄 (abadonment)

This site has been pretty popular on del.icio.us over the past week. It's an eerie set of photos depicting abandoned Japanese buildings -- apartment buildings, industrial buildings, and even amusement parks! The pages are in Japanese, and if you don't feel like translating you can just click on the linked thumbnails to take you to albums, and use the bar at the top ("File1, FIle2, File3" etc.) to take you to the different pages of thumbnails.

RJD2-1976

Surreal and very inventive. I like the music too.

History of a Forgotten Space Program

Ran across this tonight and I'm sure you'll sense the truth in it.