I promised myself last year that I’d never go again, but the tentative lineup for this year’s Coachella Festival in Palm Springs is too tempting. How can I pass up seeing Badly Drawn Boy, Ben Folds, Ben Kweller, Cat Power, Gomez, the White Stripes, Ladytron, Tortoise, Sonic Youth, Polyphonic Spree, Soundtrack of Our Lives, Mouse on Mars, RJD2, El P, Amon Tobin and Stereo Total at a single event? Even at $140 for a two-day pass, it’s a deal.

Update: Goldenvoice posted the official set list. Looks like Cat Power was removed. (It’s probably for the best, since Chan Marshall has difficulty enough playing small clubs.)

As discussed in Rob Malda’s journal, Slashdot is considering allowing early access to pending Slashdot stories for premium subscribers. But who cares about seeing one or two stories an hour, 10 minutes before it goes live?

A much better idea would be to allow paid access to the massive Slashdot submission queue, a business model made popular by Fark and FuckedCompany. This would allow eager newshounds and journalists to access a real-time feed of unedited story ideas and breaking news items, updated hundreds of times an hour.

I followed a link from Boing Boing this morning to this Tripod-hosted Disney website, but was instead prompted with an error: “The Tripod page you are trying to reach has exceeded its hourly bandwidth limit. The site will be available again in 1 hour!”

The site’s owner can then pay Tripod for bandwidth upgrades. But why can’t the end user volunteer to pay the upgrade fees, so they can get to the information they want? Similarly, readers of Blogspot-hosted weblogs can’t volunteer to “gift upgrade” their favorite websites to Blogspot Plus accounts; only the site’s owner can upgrade.

Is there a good reason for limiting their revenue like this? Is there some sort of privacy issue I’m not aware of? It seems like a huge oversight.

Congratulations to my good friend “Crazy Uncle Joe” Utsler on the birth of his new daughter, Zöe Alexis Utsler. Welcome to the world, kid!

My friend Mat Honan and his wife Harper have been backpacking across Southeast Asia for the past five months. While staying in Laos, the country sandwiched between Cambodia and Vietnam, they contracted the dengue virus, or “break-bone fever.” His weblog entry is a gripping survival story.

I stayed home sick from work today with a head cold and sore throat; now I feel like a big sissy.

Some RSS readers are vulnerable to security exploits and other annoyances embedded in RSS/XML feeds. This morning, Phil showed me a proof-of-concept sample for Newsgator, the Outlook-based RSS reader, triggered by VBScript code in an RSS feed that e-mails a random person in your Outlook address book.

Other readers may not be vulnerable to Outlook-style hacks, but they can still be screwed up by Javascript. Try subscribing to this RSS feed I created with your reader of choice. Syndirella displays the popup window and crashes on the Javascript alerts. How about other readers?

Just to be clear, I’m not saying this is a serious issue. Users only subscribe to trusted RSS feeds, and feed providers are extremely unlikely to put malicious code in their feeds. It’s just interesting that it works.

The Google Dance has begun, and it looks like I finally overtook the Scott Baio fan club in a search for “baio.” Take that, Chachi! (If you still see the old results, try the Google Dance Tool to search all their servers.)

For all you Scott Baio fans ending up here, here’s a little something special for you. In the late 1980s, Chachi hosted a series of sex-ed videos targeted to pre-teen and teenagers. You can buy them online, and preview the video clips for each. That’s Edutainment!

Crispin “Hellion” Glover will be on Late Show with David Letterman tonight for the first third time since his disastrous appearance in July 1987, when he took the stage in a wig and big platform shoes, offered up a brief and bizarre interview, and delivered a high kick inches from Letterman’s face. The producers cut to commercial and he hasn’t been seen on the show since. Here’s a collage of eight screen captures from that episode. (If you have a video clip, send it to me!)

So it should be an interesting show tonight. Unfortunately, Dave’s out sick; maybe Crispin will try to jump-kick guest host Will Ferrell instead. (Or maybe he’ll sing “Ben.”)

I’ve included a full transcript below of the 1987 appearance below.

July 16, 2003: Consumption Junction has the video clip of the original Letterman appearance (careful at work).

Continue reading “Crispin Glover on Letterman” →

While performing in London earlier this week, the Dixie Chicks’ lead singer Natalie Maines said, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” The comments and the followup explanation stirred up some controversy back home, leading to boycotts from country radio stations and the largely-conservative country music audience.

The comments from the online forums show how polarizing politics can be to a community of fans. The unofficial Dixie Chicks news forum thread has 63 posts so far, almost entirely by estranged (and often insulting) former fans. That’s relatively civil compared to Usenet or the always incendiary Yahoo Message Boards. It looks like their official website is offline, and the rest of the fan sites are getting slammed this morning from too much activity.

Here’s a strange quote by Wanda Barzee’s son Derrick Thompson, buried in an article profiling the couple who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart.

Mark’s brother, Derrick Thompson, suggested that the couple had started taking LSD about 10 years ago. “They said they weren’t on drugs, but we think that was a lie,” he told a television reporter. “We think that’s how he could communicate with God. That and listen to the Steve Miller Band.”

So, is Derrick saying that listening to Steve Miller lets you communicate with God, or that dropping acid is the only way to tolerate listening to Steve Miller?

“Beat it, Waxy!” — Homer Simpson, Episode EABF09, aired March 9, 2003

eBay offers the option of e-mailing new results of saved searches, but they’re very sporadic and incomplete. Instead, I whipped up a PHP script that queries eBay for a set of keywords and converts it to an RSS feed for syndication, allowing you to subscribe to recent eBay search results ordered by date or high bids. The code is here. (Just rename it to ebayrss.php and drop it somewhere on your own webserver.)

You can test it out for a short time on my server, but this is a very temporary demonstration. Please don’t abuse it.

By the way, I don’t see why developers should have to pay the ridiculous fees for the eBay API, especially when augmenting eBay’s own broken functionality and developing free software that makes them money.

July 8, 2003: eBay removed the Javascript array that I was parsing to gather the auction data… I don’t have the time to modify the script, but please feel free to e-mail me a patch, and I’ll post it here.

December 28, 2003: The script is fixed, but eBay may eventually break it again. It’s broken again.

April 12, 2004: This script is no longer maintained. I recommend FreeBiddingTools.com, which hosts RSS feeds for eBay searches.

August 19, 2004: RSS Auction is a new site that does the same thing, in a much more flexible way. Go use it.

You know blogging has hit the big time when your mom starts a weblog. Unlike most new webloggers though, she’s already found a confident and compelling voice. Highly recommended, even though I’m a little biased.

The current CNN.com homepage was begging to be remixed… Decapitation Attack!

I just received an e-mail with the subject line “Shock and Awe.” Turns out, it’s unsolicited spam advertising a gross-out porn site called freakview.com. Spammers seem to be adjusting to wartime nicely.

If you’re using Internet Explorer for Windows, try loading this image and typing Ctrl-A to highlight it. Is it magic? Or EEE-VIL?! (An explanation of the trick follows.)

Continue reading “Hiding Secret Images” →

Recently, I noticed that several webloggers that discussed the suspected chemical weapons plant found in southern Iraq on March 24 weren’t mentioning those claims turned out to be false, even after the story was retracted revised on USA Today, New York Times, the Washington Post, and Yahoo’s front page yesterday.

I thought this particular example would be an interesting case study to study how bias affects story selection on weblogs. So I searched Technorati for weblogs that linked to the four most popular URLs (1, 2, 3, 4) about the chemical plant. Starting with a list of 148 weblogs spanning the socio-political spectrum, I located the relevant entry on each site and searched for followups or updates.

In brief, here are my findings. 112 weblogs linked to the original story, but didn’t follow up with another entry or correct their existing entry in any way. 28 weblogs linked to the original story, and later posted a correction or other addendum. 8 weblogs only linked to the story after it proved to be false, but didn’t link to it when the news originally broke. The complete list of categorized links is below. (If you have any corrections, please e-mail or leave a comment.)

If you look at the sites, it appears that conservative weblogs tended to only link the original report, liberal weblogs tended to only link to the correction, and mixed and group weblogs linked to both.

I’m not going to jump to conclusions with these results; they don’t necessarily imply bias from their authors. The followup article could be considered less newsworthy as the breaking news, for example, or it might be more a reflection of a reluctance to rehash a story that a weblogger has already covered. I would love to hear from any of the webloggers, explaining why they did or didn’t follow up with an update to the story. Any theories or interpretations of the data are also welcome.

And if you can think of a polarizing breaking news story that many left-wing, anti-war webloggers jumped on but later neglected to retract, e-mail me.

Continue reading “Bias Affects Story Updates on Political Weblogs” →

Another stupid Internet Explorer trick… This webpage actually opens your CD-ROM drive without prompting, using VBScript to access the Windows Media Player API. If you hate Internet Explorer, feel free to include the below sample code on every page of your own site.

July 29, 2003: The Windows Media Player API won’t let you close the CD-ROM drive once it’s open. Sorry.

Continue reading “Open CD-ROM Drive with VBScript” →

Probably the most obscure and underrated genre of gaming is text-based interactive fiction, made popular with the Zork series in the 1980s. Commercial text adventure games are long gone, but hobbyists like Andrew Plotkin and Adam Cadre continue to push the boundaries of the genre.

I finished Plotkin’s Shade in only 15 minutes, but it continues to resonate like only the best short fiction can. Take a few minutes to play it online right now, and let me know what you think of his strange and beautiful world.

A couple hints are below, for those unfamiliar with Interactive Fiction.

Continue reading “Shade and Interactive Fiction” →

This Japanese website appears to define the geometry of breasts (in eight parts), miniskirts, bathing suits, and women in glasses. I can’t make heads or tails of any of it, and the Babelfish translation doesn’t help at all.

Can someone translate a little and tell us what they’re talking about?

If you can read this, you’re sitting too close to your monitor. (For those of you arriving late to the party, my homepage was displayed at 50% scale for the whole day.)

In other news on this lovely April 1:

– Google buys Metafilter

– Matt’s Script Archive merges with CPAN

– Joi Ito met the Pope

– Tori Amos to play Mary Poppins

– Aaron abandons Google for Overture

– From Slashdot: the Evil Bit RFC, Gentoo switches to RPM, whitespace-only programming language, Distrowatch loves Windows XP, anti-cracker application for PC/Mac, Enlightenment goes gold, new Lord of the Rings movie delayed

– From the Mefi thread: The End of Free gets ads, Chris Pirillo gets blurry, Thinkgeek’s new products, DC Comics buys Elfquest, SomethingAwful’s boring fetish

– From the K5 thread: WinXPHints

– Word 5.1 for OS X

– Honda’s Mecha car salesman

– Minidisc.com gives up on the format

– Dave Matthews fan site changes to John Mayer fan site (is there a meaningful difference?)

– Bradlands goes Brady Bunch

– Inmate wins freedom in new reality show

– Movable Bloggerland

– Phonescoop covers Nokia’s rotary cell phone and Samsung’s Gollum Phone

– New BBEdit pricing option

– Teevee’s brilliant Reality Network

– Digital Web displayed upside-down and backwards

More April 1 updates throughout the day.

A Usenet group devoted to swapping karaoke versions of popular songs is unusually popular, with 7500+ songs posted in the last month alone. I don’t know where the original files are coming from, but the diversity and timeliness of available files in alt.binaries.sounds.karaoke is staggering. The standards are all represented (“Celebration,” “I Will Survive,” and “Mandy”), along with brand new songs spanning the genres of alt-rock, country, and pop. The MP3s are bundled into ZIP files along with mysterious .CDG files, so I did a little research.

Apparently, karaoke CDs are distributed in a format called CD+G, which stores images and lyrics information along with the uncompressed audio. Clever karaoke fans developed software to rip and compress these discs into a format they call MP3+G. It looks like the .CDG file is all of the goofy images, lyrics, and metadata that is normally displayed by specialized karaoke players.

Some of the more oddball gems were karaoke versions of King Missile’s “Detachable Penis,” Nirvana’s “You Know You’re Right,” Electric 6’s “High Voltage,” Liz Phair’s “Fuck and Run,” PJ Harvey’s “One Line,” and the Dead Kennedys’ “Too Drunk To Fuck.” Is there really much overlap between karaoke and Dead Kennedys fans?

Anyway, enjoy singing along to these karaoke renditions of The Strokes’ “Last Nite,” Andrew WK’s “Party Hard,” and the White Stripes’ “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground.”

Armed with a list of spelling errors and my old friend Google, I decided to see if I could find the most commonly misspelled word on the Web. If you can do better, leave a comment. (The number of results is in parentheses after each word or term.)

– transexual (2860k)

– didnt (1230k, via Matt)

– doesnt (1080k, via Evan)

– seperate (804k, via Bill)

– calender (727k, via Graham)

– definately (693k, via Shannon)

– recieve (667k, via Matt)

– offical (366k)

– managment (359k)

– goverment (317k)

– commerical (277k)

– Febuary (245k)

– enviroment (242k)

– occurence (186k)

– commision (167k)

– assocation (134k)

– Cincinatti (70k)

– milennium (32k)

Special mention: “could of” (166k results), “would of” (296k), “should of” (123k)

Can anybody find a misspelled word that’s more popular than its correct spelling? Update: We have a winner! Ewin found that “transexual” (2860k) is the more common (but incorrect) spelling of “transsexual” (1660k)!

In addition to his other crimes against humanity, Saddam Hussein also pirates movies: “In one cabinet was an assortment of pirated movies, some with the titles in English.”

It’s one thing to piss off the President of the United States, but now Saddam will face the ultimate adversary: Jack Valenti!

I downloaded the VisualBoyAdvance Gameboy Advance emulator last night and was pleasantly surprised to see near-perfect emulation, even with brand new GBA games like Sonic Advance 2 and Tony Hawk 4. (You can find ROMs in alt.binaries.emulators.gameboy.advance or on the web, if you look hard enough.)

Likewise, I tested out the Nemu Nintendo 64 emulator with Mario 64 and Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Zelda was playable despite display bugs, and Mario looked nearly perfect. (Try alt.binaries.emulators.nintendo-64 for ROMs.) Update: Apparently, Project64 is the most popular and compatible N64 emulator to date, but I haven’t tested it yet. These compatibility lists are very useful.

The NSX2 Playstation 2 emulation project managed to get the loading screens from Mortal Kombat 5 and Blade 2 to display. As far as I know, it’s the first PS2 emulator to partially load a commercial game.

Finally, gCubix is an amazing Gamecube emulator that’s been ported to a number of platforms, including Windows, Mac, BeOS, AmigaOS, Apple II GS, Commodore 64, Atari ST, PDP-1, and Babbage’s analytical engine.

Rumor of the Day: a little bird told me that Google is planning on integrating Blogger with the Google Appliance, and is courting media companies and portals to implement Blogger for their user communities.

You’ve probably seen these adorably amateurish animations featuring kittens lip-syncing White Stripes, Destiny’s Child and the Vines. Created by Rathergood.com’s Joel Veitch, the Flash animations started appearing on weblogs and discussion lists last August.

Well, someone at VH-1 just discovered it. In a short bumper promoting VH-1, the station co-opted the Flash meme for their own purposes. I created an animated GIF composed of six screen grabs from the commercial, which features two kitties and a chameleon performing Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon.”

This wouldn’t be the first time that TV stations borrowed web-based memes for commercial purposes (see: Dancing Baby), but this might be the most blatant rip-off. The commercial is in the same limited-motion Flash style as the original Flash animations and uses the same kitten images. I hope you got a royalty, Joel.

Update: Um, nevermind. Joel confirmed via e-mail that he created the animations for VH-1.

People who try to download tracks off of the new Madonna album from peer-to-peer networks will likely get an MP3 full of silence, prefixed by this short personal message from Madonna (150Kb MP3). More information from Dotmusic. Thanks to Tpoh.org for the file.

Update: Using the MP3 I posted, several people have created remixes that use the Madonna sample heavily.

Randall Hyde is pioneering a new musical genre called Parodeities, biblical parodies of popular secular songs. The MP3 recordings are rough — Randall has no formal vocal training and he’s accompanied only by downloaded MIDI files — but the results are charming, like outsider art.

Highlights: “God’s Filled Ya” (Blue Oyster Cult’s “Godzilla”), “Welcomed by the Devil” (Guns ‘n Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle”), and “Takin’ Care of Jesus” (BTO’s “Takin’ Care of Business”). The cover art is cute, too. (via the Yeti)

So, Monday was my weblog’s first birthday. My guidelines were pretty simple, and I think I’ve kept to them. I’m going to make one exception today, and talk entirely about myself.

Continue reading “1st Birthday” →

Donna D’Errico, former Baywatch alum and wife to Motley Crue’s Nikki Sixx, opened a day spa in Los Angeles that offers Classical Rock Massage, massage services set to the sounds of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” and the Moody Blues’ “Days of Future Passed.” Sounds great, but do they offer munchies and a laser light show?

Fox Television has collaborated with alumni directory Classmates.com to form a new reality series, where long-lost friends reunite through the website.

If you haven’t tried it, Classmates.com is extremely sneaky about how they acquired their massive alumni database. Originally a free service, Classmates.com now requires you to “complete your free registration to view your classmates.” After entering in your name, e-mail address and graduating class information, they let you browse lists of your old friends and classmates without any identifying information. To contact your friends, you’re forced to pay a $36 subscription fee.

Of course, they don’t disclose any of these caveats before you choose to add yourself to their database. Of Classmates.com’s reported 35 million members, only a mere fraction are paying subscribers. Everyone else was exploited for their personal information. Can anyone recommend a popular and free alternative to Classmates.com?

If you’re going to videotape your Star Wars fighting skills on a school camera, remember to remove the cassette when you’re done. Watch this embarrassingly good video.

It didn’t take long for the online community to remix it with full Star Wars special effects and lightsaber noises. I have no idea where this video originated from; if you know this kid, let me know. The kid has been identified… The full story here!

Update: I’ve turned off new comments in this thread because of the mean-spirited tone, and deleted the most vicious comments. Yes, he’s fat and awkward. We get it. Since 90% of the traffic to these videos is coming from gaming, technology, and Star Wars news websites, I’m guessing that most of you weren’t any cooler in junior high school than this poor kid. All you geeks, nerds, and dorks out there need to think twice before trashing one of your own.

I whipped up a quick PHP script that allows anyone (even PC users like myself) to search the iTunes Music Store. Sound clips are in Apple’s proprietary M4P format, so don’t expect to be able to listen to them unless you have iTunes installed.

You can try out the search for a limited time here (until it gets too popular), or download the script for your own site. Feel free to modify it however you like.

Update: Apple seems to be encrypting (or compressing?) their XML now, which breaks the script entirely. It doesn’t seem to be gzip-encoding, either. Any guesses on what they’re up to?

February 10, 2004: Someone sent me the e-mail below, discussing how they figured out the encryption. This is a bit above my head, but other people may find it useful.

April 17, 2004: Someone finally wrote a script to work around iTunes encryption. Go play with iTMS-4-All.

Continue reading “Search the iTunes Music Store” →

Between the opening of Matrix Reloaded and the E3 Electronic Gaming Expo, it’s a very good week to be a geek. I’ll be attending a private screening of the Matrix on Thursday afternoon and E3 all day on Friday.

I’m not the live-blogging type, but I compiled a list of other webloggers who will be attending. (Those blogging the event daily are marked with an asterisk.) A list of other E3 news websites follows.

Continue reading “E3 2003” →

The Star Wars Kid has been found!

The two videos were downloaded 1.1 million times from my site alone, a staggering 2.3 terabytes of traffic, placing a geeky little kid at the center of the web’s attention practically overnight. So who was he and what was he thinking?

My research revealed few details, until the culprits finally contacted me. His name is Ghyslain, a 15-year-old tenth grader living in Quebec. Originally recorded onto an 8mm tape on November 4, 2002 in the school’s studio, the video was never meant to be seen by anyone. After Ghyslain returned the borrowed videotape to his friend, the video sat in a basement for months. On April 19, 2003, Ghyslain’s friend stumbled on the tape’s secret contents and immediately shared it with friends. They thought it would be a funny prank to encode the video and upload it to Kazaa.

It only took two weeks for the video to spread around the world. Raven Software’s Bryan Dube added the Star Wars effects on April 24, a mere five days after it originally appeared to the Internet. A week later, both videos were linked on every major gaming- and technology-related website, forum, and chat room online.

What does Ghyslain think about all this? My French-speaking friend Jish interviewed him today to find out what he thought about his newfound popularity. Read the interview now. Overall, he seems like a damn cool kid. I don’t care what anyone else thinks; Ghyslain is my new hero.

Update: In return for all the trouble he’s gone through to entertain us, I think we should buy a new iPod for Ghyslain. We’re up to 421 donations, totalling $4,334.44! We can buy him a 30GB iPod and much more! The fundraiser is now closed; thank you to everyone who donated.

July 16, 2003: The Star Wars Kid received his presents.

Continue reading “Finding the Star Wars Kid” →

The New York Times just posted an article about the Star Wars Kid and our fundraising efforts, with quotes from me and Ghyslain. Also: Wired News, The Globe and Mail, National Post story & interview, Cinescape, Chicago Tribune, the Lycos 50, and Yahoo’s Buzz Index. Listen to the radio interview from PRI’s The World. GeekCulture.com posted a great comic.

If you’re here for the first time, view the original video and the lightsaber and Matrix remixes. Then, read more about Jish’s interviews with Ghyslain and the fundraiser effort.

Thank you so much to everyone who contributed to the Star Wars Kid fund! In only seven days, 421 people donated an unbelievable $4,334.44. After Paypal’s transaction fees, that leaves $4,074.80. Here’s a spreadsheet with all the donations that I downloaded from Paypal, in case you’re curious. (At their request, the names of anonymous donors were deleted.)

In the next couple days, we’ll talk to Ghyslain and his parents to determine the best way to spend this money. As soon as we make the purchase, I’ll post the receipts. Hopefully, we can get Ghyslain to send a few pictures of himself with his brand new toys.

We’ll also mail out the non-cash gifts that people donated, including an Industrial Light + Magic t-shirt and a Darth Maul lightsaber replica signed by Ray Park (aka Darth Maul)!

The outpouring of support has been staggering, far beyond what I ever expected. I wasn’t sure we’d be able to raise enough for a 15GB iPod, but here we are. Thanks again to all who donated, and thanks to the Star Wars Kid himself for making all this possible. Geeks like us need to stick together.

After debuting at E3 last week, Valve Software’s Half Life 2 is now the best-looking, most realistic, most highly anticipated game in the world. The lines were five hours long at E3, so I wasn’t able to witness the demonstration until yesterday. And after watching it, I’m in awe. I’ve never seen anything that comes close, and I’m giddy. I haven’t felt like this about a game since the first Quake was released. Needless to say, I’ll be in line to buy it on September 30.

If you have a high-bandwidth connection and have even a passing interest in games, you must download the 600MB Quicktime movie from Fileplanet, or possibly much faster by using BitTorrent. You’ll have to wait in an hour-long line, but it’s well worth it. If you’re on a dialup connection, you can read the play-by-play description of the movie on IGN. Go now.

Originally developed for Gameboy Advance developers, commercial “linker” devices (like these) allow anyone to copy downloaded game ROMs from your PC to high-capacity blank cartridges, which can then be played on an actual Gameboy Advance.

Most Gameboy Advance ROMs are 32MB or 64MB, which means you can store and play multiple games on a single 256MB cartridge by formatting the cartridge in multiboot mode and using a boot menu provided by one of several software packages.

And since the Gameboy Advance is powerful enough to emulate older systems, you can now play NES, Sega Master System, arcade, and original Gameboy games on your GBA. The thriving Gameboy Advance emulation scene is close to releasing a functional Atari 2600 emulator (another attempt). Hand-held Pitfall or Contra, anyone?

Last year, I wrote about the film adaptation of Po Bronson’s The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, a pre-crash novel about dot-com entrepreneurs trying to build and market a sub-$300 PC. If you missed the release of the movie, you weren’t alone. Greg Knauss informed me that it was released last year, but IMDB says it only opened on two screens, grossing a whopping $2,535 in its opening weekend.

Rather than keep it as a period piece, they apparently tried to write in the dot-com crash into the storyline and changed the invention to a sub-$99 device (because of the availability of sub-$300 PCs?). According to the reviews, this was the least of their transgressions. The movie is supposed to be terrible, but I’ll likely still rent it (if I can find it) because of this Onion review: “A sloppy, strangely fascinating footnote to the dot-com explosion, it would make for a terrific ‘Remember The Bubble’ double feature with the similarly misbegotten AntiTrust.”

The Transfiguration of Harold Maines is a documentary about a man with a dream: to become a horse. Not sure what to think about this, except that there must be a market for films catering to the human-equine transformation fetishists. At any rate, the trailer is very odd. (Hat tip to the sorely-missed Mister Pants.)

The following is my contribution to Newly Digital, a distributed writing project about early computing experiences started by Adam Kalsey. Read the other entries, and then write your own: Brad Choate, Steven Garrity, Anders Jacobsen, Dan James, Adam Kalsey, Cameron Marlow, Jeff Nichols, Chris Pirillo, Andre Torrez, and Bill Zeller.

Continue reading “Newly Digital: Hack's Retreat” →

Finally, a worthy parody. Everyone, meet Space Ghost Kid.

I’m guest-blogging over on Jason Kottke’s Remaindered links sidebar for the next couple weeks. The links come fast and furious, so check frequently. This is a dry run for my own links sidebar, which will have to wait until the next redesign.

Also, you may have noticed that I haven’t been posting much here lately. My family’s been dealing with the rapid decline of my grandmother, so I’ve been spending almost all available free time at the hospital. While I’m not comfortable getting into personal details on my own site, my mom is baring her soul on her own site. It’s an intensely personal, difficult read.

Idea of the day: a Thumbs-Up button in the browser, which you click whenever you find a webpage that interests you. Click it up to three times depending on how much you like it, a la TiVo ratings. Clicking the button either posts to your own weblog, or maybe to a central website that aggregates ratings for browsing and allows you to syndicate your own ratings to your weblog, if you have one.

This would be an ideal way to manage my upcoming links sidebar and, if centralized, a great way to browse new links by people I trust. No personal weblog or technical skill required. Get to work, LazyWeb!

Update: Brad points to StumbleUpon, which handles ratings but no weblog integration or syndication. And Graham points to Erik Benson’s Morale-O-Meter, which is a bookmarklet that posts website votes to a links sidebar. Very nice, thank you both.

We left the hospital at 2am, and got the call at 6am. She’s gone, and I’m heartbroken.

She was born Evelyn, but everyone called her Peggy. I called her Grandma. (1924-2003.)

Update: This is the eulogy that I wrote for her funeral yesterday.

Continue reading “Grandma” →

From Alan Murray’s Capitol Reports column:

“The highlight of last night’s party was a spoof video by Rep. Mary Bono, wife of the late Sonny Bono, and Billy Tauzin, House Commerce Committee chairman, who said they were ‘auditioning’ for Hilary’s job. They sang an Eminem-style song called ‘Piracy, Bad.’ Tauzin said he liked to download Sonny and Cher songs; Bono said, ‘I like the royalties.'”

If anyone knows where to find a copy of this duet, please send it along. I have to hear it. I added the lyrics below.

July 30, 2003: The transcript of the entire video is online at the video production studio’s website.

Continue reading “Piracy, Bad” →

Someone should make a moblogging site where users can post celebrity sighting photos from their phone or PDA, along with a brief description of where they’re posting from.

The closest I could find was this NYC-specific SMS group, which seems to be focused on text messages instead of photoblogging.

July 9, 2003: Joe pointed me to TextAmerica, a site that allows anyone to create a mobile photoblog (“mophos” or “moblogs”), so I created a new one for Celeb Sightings. Anyone can post to it by e-mailing their photos to [email protected] from their mobile phone. Get to it, people!

August 12, 2003: Buzznet.com has a celebrity moblogging page that people are actively using. Lyle Lovett, Janet Jackson, Jay Leno, and Randy Newman are some of the current highlights.

Inspired by the recent wave of Disney attractions adapted into full-length films, here’s an exclusive look at the next three movies in the series.