Waxy.org is the sandbox of Andy Baio, a journalist/programmer living in Portland, Oregon. I work on Kickstarter, created Upcoming.org, made an album, and some other stuff too.

Contact Me: log@waxy.org or waxpancake on AIM

Space Shuttle Columbia

Posted Feb 1, 2003

This Washington Post article, published 32 minutes before mission control lost contact with the Space Shuttle Columbia, offers a sad glimpse into a parallel ending to today's disaster (via Mefi).

"We've taken all reasonable measures, and all of our landings so far since 9-11 have gone perfectly," said Lt. Col. Michael Rein, an Air Force spokesman. ...
Some of Columbia's crew members didn't want their time in space to end.

"Do we really have to come back?" astronaut David Brown jokingly asked Mission Control before the ride home.

NASA's next shuttle flight, a space station construction mission, is scheduled for March. The next time Columbia flies will be in November, when it carries into orbit educator-astronaut Barbara Morgan, who was the backup for Challenger crew member Christa McAuliffe in 1986.

Waxy Links

September 7, 2010

MC Frontalot, Jonathan Coulton, and Paul & Storm cover Double Rainbow/Bed Intruder Song — with lead vocals by the very talented Ken Flagg

September 6, 2010

Jonathan Blow's anonymous PAX playtest of The Witness — the followup to Braid was at an unmarked table

September 3, 2010

Craigslist shuts down adult services section — 17 Attorneys General asked them last month to shut it down

Health Month — like Epic Win, Buster Benson's trying to turn self-improvement into a game

There is a Horse in the Apple Store — Frank Chimero is not hallucinating

Duke Nukem Forever is revived, to be released in 2011 by Gearbox — everyone's favorite vaporware is playable on the PAX show floor, 13 years in the making

NYC health dept. shuts down underground lobster roll dealer — Jeff Rubin shows how people ordered from "Dr. Claw" (via)

Copyright holders choosing ad income over cease-and-desists on YouTube — more than a third of YouTube's 2B weekly ad views are infringing videos deliberately left online (via)

Buzzfeed's "infographic" about infographic spam — thanks to this Reddit user for exposing this unusual SEO trickery

September 2, 2010

Six Apart shuts down Vox — less than a month's notice, with export tools to Typepad and Flickr

LA Times interview with the author behind Slaughterhouse 90210 — interesting process behind her Tumblr curation

Informative Prints — by 16-year-old Swedish graphic artist Kiko Seiz

Cheerleader wins lawsuit by suing the wrong website — Dan Quayle's son famously wrote a column for TheDirty.com (via)

Anatomy of a Rickroll, hypnotic visualization of network packets — here's an image request slowed down 40x; made with Packet Flight

Building a Scrabble MMO in 48 hours with Node.js and MongoDB — the results are impressive; some of the Node.js Knockout entries are amazing

September 1, 2010

Bear's Double Rainbow ad for Microsoft — also: meet Bear (via)

First details on Telltale's episodic Back to the Future game emerge — they also secured rights to make games based on Jurassic Park

Cee Lo Green's official video for F**K YOU — even better than the typography video, I'm perfectly content to have this song stuck in my head 24/7

Slate interviews Innocence Project cofounder about false convictions — over 250 people have been freed by new DNA evidence, many of them with false confessions

Unreal Engine 3 tech demo Epic Citadel for the iPhone/iPad — impressive tech demo, now available for free

GameSetWatch covers Assembly 2010's PC demo contest — if you have the hardware, I highly recommend trying out the two winners yourself

Apple announces Ping, a social network built into iTunes — their first foray into social, finally; seems inevitable that app/location/TV/music sharing will follow

August 31, 2010

All four issues of Daniel Raeburn's The Imp available for free download — highly recommended, covers Daniel Clowes, Jack Chick, Chris Ware, and dirty Mexican comics (via)

Eclectic Method's 8-bit Mixtape — not particularly great music, but the visuals make it (via)

Vanity Fair's glimpse into the day in the life of the President — long, must-read look at the insane complexity of today's political landscape

Lanyrd, social conference directory — brilliantly executed social event discovery; it should be pronounced "La Nerd"

Copyrighting Fashion — a new bill would subject fashion to copyright, but at what cost?

Tom Scott's Evil hack shows phone numbers exposed by Facebook users — culled from public "lost my phone" groups

Unhear It — replace one earworm with another

August 30, 2010

Stay Free's Illegal Art mix tape — the files all moved here

Space Shuttle Columbia

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