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When I saw this in the theatre for the first time, the theatre was crowded with teen girls. Leo was all dressed up in that borrowed tuxedo and turned toward the camera for the first time, this girl behind me sucked in her breath suddenly, literally breathless at his appearance.
.gnimit dna tolp eht tuoba desufnoc era uoy esac ni redro lacigolonorhc ni mlif eht hctaw ot noitpo na sniatnoc DVD otnemeM ehT
Much of the criticism aimed toward Orkut can be summed up thusly: *this is why you don’t let software engineers do user experience and interaction design*. Unless they have experience, expertise, or talent in that area.
Tanya Jessen lost 95 pounds playing Dance Dance Revolution.
Kevin Kelly points us toward a free document on surviving a WMD attack.
Eat This New York is a documentary about opening a restaurant in NYC. Starring Daniel Boulud, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Danny Meyer, Ruth Reichl, etc.
A year and a half ago, we had a big discussion as to some possible holes in Minority Report’s plot. I’m still disappointed in the “accuracy” of the future, especially since Spielberg went to the trouble of assembling a group of futurists to advise him on how to get it right. Each piece of technology made sense by itself but often did not make sense in combination with the environment or other technologies, lending an air of inauthenticity to the whole affair.
Play Scrabble in your web browser, implemented in CSS and Javascript. Impressive, but start the countdown to a cease and desist letter from Hasbro
US State Department bans Courier from all official correspondence, replacing it with “more modern” Times New Roman. Personally, I would like to see them using Comic Sans.
Depressing article on terrorism, personal liberties, and privacy in America by Bruce Schneier. “Few people remind us how minor the terrorist threat really is.”
ROTK extended DVD will be out in November and will run 4 hours and 10 minutes.
Keisha Castle-Hughes gives the best performance I’ve ever seen from a child actor. Her tearful speech near the end of the film was amazing for an actor of any age.
An alternate schedule for O’Reilly’s upcoming Etech conference. Panels include “Tim Tim Tim Tim. Look at me, I’m Tim.” and “Unpaid Interns: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks”
Dean centralizing his campaign or are the wheels coming off the wagon?. Interesting to see what effect this will have on his Internet efforts.
2 Nintendo GameCubes, 8 controllers, 2 TVs, and 2 copies of Mario Kart: Double Dash!! = too much fun. This is perhaps the nerdiest thing I’ve ever participated in.
The MacJams site looks to be a good resource for GarageBand-related news and such. And they’re having a GarageBand song contest.
See the relationships between search engines with this handy chart.
Do you have Ikeaphobia or Starbucksitis?. Maybe you’re not “being oppressed by flat-packable pine furniture with goofy pseudo-Scandinavian names”.
Overwhelmed by the amount of work necessary to keep up with all my friendships on Friendster, Orkut, and all the other social networking sites, I’ve posted a job opening over on craigslist for a personal social coordinator:
Permanent full-time position for a personal social coordinator for a New York-based web designer.
Your primary responsibility will be managing my accounts with various online social networking sites including, but not limited to, Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribe, Orkut, Ryze, Spoke, ZeroDegrees, Ecademy, RealContacts, Ringo, MySpace, Yafro, EveryonesConnected, Friendzy, FriendSurfer, Tickle, Evite, Plaxo, Squiby, and WhizSpark.
There’s even room to grow in the position:
Future duties may include discouraging companies and individuals from starting new social networking sites so that additional staff won’t be necessary in the future. Past employment as a bouncer, “heavy”, or hired goon may be helpful in this regard.
Or maybe I’m thinking about this all wrong. Perhaps we just need a web service for managing relationships on the social networking sites. A meta Friendster; Micrsoft Passport for social networking. We could call it, oh, I don’t know, Metaster…or Sterster. Sign in to all the sites with one username and password. Invite metafriends to all the sites with a single click. Manage a single profile across all the sites.
Of course, the marketplace won’t be content with just one metaster site. Multiple sites will spring up and we’ll then require a metametaster site to manage the information in all the metaster sites. Of course, the marketplace won’t be content with just one metametaster site. Multiple sites will spring up and we’ll then require a metametametaster site to manage the information in all the metametaster sites. Of course, the marketplace won’t be content with just one metametametaster site. Multiple sites will spring up and we’ll then require a metametametametaster site to manage the information in all the metametametaster sites. Of course, the marketplace won’t be content with just one metametametametaster site…
(And yes, it’s turtles all the way down.)
The Timberwolves are tied for the lead in the Western Conference. They finally have a team that contend; Spree, Garnett, and Cassell work so well together.
Susan Kare on how the original Mac fonts (Chicago, Geneva, etc.) got their names.
Hyperdictionary is a free online dictionary that looks interesting and useful. Includes a computer dictionary, thesaurus, medical dictionary, and dream dictionary.
The Corporation, which just won an audience award at the Sundance Film Festival, is a film that explores the following question:
In law, the corporation is a “person”. But what kind of person is it?
Unsurprisingly, a corporation doesn’t make for a very well-adjusted individual (emphasis mine):
Considering the odd legal fiction that deems a corporation a “person” in the eyes of the law, the feature documentary employees a checklist, based on actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and DSM IV, the standard tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. What emerges is a disturbing diagnosis.
Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation’s operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.
I don’t think all companies are like this, but it certainly is an interesting idea to explore. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins asserts that the larger organism exists in order to propagate the genes and not the other way around as we, the organism, had always assumed. In the same way, corporations have traditionally thought of themselves as the most important entities in the economic ecosystem, but it might be more healthy for society in general to think of them as the organisms that ultimately benefit the humans that comprise them (humans = the genes in the corporation organism).
This thought fits in nicely with one of my favorite quotes on the subject of business from Ludicorp’s about page quoting Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores & Hubert Dreyfus in Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity:
A business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity.
Thanks to Devin for the pointer towards The Corporation, which will also be out in book form as The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.
First images from Opportunity rover of Meridiani Planum on Mars. Includes a color photo and a panoramic shot
Opportunity, the second Mars rover, lands safely. Scroll a bit for pictures
AFA gay marriage poll results won’t go to Congress after all. The result of the poll was “something other than what [the AFA] wanted”.
Friscosity is a group weblog about San Francisco. And they’re looking for contributors
Delta Tango Bravo is collecting links to great posters.
Subject of Super Size Me documentary eats at McDonald’s for a month and almost dies. “His liver became toxic, his cholesterol shot up from a low 165 to 230, his libido flagged” and he “was vomiting out the window of his car, and doctors … were shocked at how rapidly Spurlock’s entire body deteriorated.”
Whenever I post an entry to this site, a ping is (supposedly) sent to four different places (weblogs.com, Technorati, blo.gs, and Blog Chatter) that says, “hey, I’ve updated my site”. That way, people can use these services to stop by only when there’s something new to read.
The problem is that these services have not been working correctly lately. According to my MT activity log, weblogs.com times out more often than not (or doesn’t accept two pings within a half hour of each other, which is a problem for me because I update my remaindered links more often than that at times), blo.gs either times out or doesn’t accept pings because my “weblog hasn’t changed” (presumably because adding a remaindered link doesn’t change the page enough for it to count), and Technorati has been getting worse as well, timing out more often than it used to. It would be nice to have an adaptive, decentralized ping service that would be reliable and flexible enough to stop ping spam while letting legitimate pings through.
Update: I got email from the folks responsible for Technorati and blo.gs. Technorati’s infrastructure is currently undergoing an upgrade and should be more responsive soon. blo.gs had the settings for one of my weblogs misconfigured, but that has been corrected and it’s now pinging fine. I took a closer look at the MT activity log and found that I had been confused about how often blo.gs was timing out…turns out it hardly ever does and I have corrected the text above accordingly.
This is odd…just before I fell asleep last night, I thought, “I wonder why no one has spammed Trackback yet. It’s just so wide open, hanging out there like a breaking ball that didn’t break.” And then, magically, I’m surfing around this morning and ran across this report of Trackback spamming as well as a TB throttling patch for MT to help minimize the damage. If I believed in Star Wars, I might say that I felt a great disturbance in the Force last night, as if millions of web servers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
New blog in the Denton stable: Wonkette. Writing and politics by former Suckster Ana Marie Cox
Highly recommended documentary by Errol Morris about Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Now in his 80s, McNamara shares frankly what is hinted at as the tip of his personal iceberg, a refreshing occurance rarely seen among the rich, powerful, or famous. Many hold him responsible for the mess in Vietnam, but I ended up liking him more than not in this film; he seemed genuinely interested in personal discovery and re-evaluation and fully aware of the complications of being human. If you go see this movie (which is highly relevant to the current US political situation), I recommend keeping an open mind…you might be surprised at how you react (whether you’re pro- or anti-war…or somewhere in the middle).
- The Fog of War as a design achievement
- A late review from the New Yorker
- The Village Voice on Being Robert McNamara
Just how far can that Yeti smack a penguin?. My high score is 320.5.
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