You might remember the sad story of Richard Goddard Jr. and David Winkleman, the stepfather/stepson that sued an Iowa radio station for failing to pay them each $125,000 to permanently tattoo the station’s logo on their foreheads (photo!).

According to a new article, Richard Goddard Jr.’s problems didn’t end with the unfortunate tattoo. Unable to find a job because of his tattoo and a history of legal trouble, Goddard was “really upset,” his grandmother said.

After several weeks of hearing him complain, his roommates at the Kershaw Trailer Park did something about it. They tried to kill him; first by hanging, then by beating his face with a ball-peen hammer.

Continue reading “The $125,000 Tattoo” →

The Audioscrobbler plugin for Winamp/XMMS aggregates listening habits by tracking the artists/songs you’ve listened to, and comparing that information with all of the other users in the database. If this catches on, a system like this would be a really effective way to discover new artists and find people with similar tastes. (My personal stats.)

A simple idea, but brilliant. (Thanks, Cameron.)

Update: Audioscrobbler’s service provider took the site offline because of increased bandwidth usage. The site’s creator is looking for a new host.

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.

For my job, I recently researched and reviewed almost every major web log analyzer on the market. Almost every package provided the same basic level of detail, summaries of daily/monthly/weekly usage and aggregate statistics.

But we needed more detail. Much more detail. We wanted to track the paths of any user (authenticated or not) through the site, to see which pages they looked at, in which order, and for how long. We wanted to drill down to any time period, seeing who visited the site during that period and what they were looking for. Here’s what I found…

Continue reading “Sawmill Log Analyzer” →

I’m mentioned in the New York Times for the second time this month, this time in an article from Thursday’s Circuits section that covers my Lost Friends page, with a couple relevant quotes from me. Honestly, I’m not a media whore; they contacted me. (Thanks for the head’s up, Paul.)

You might remember the author’s last column, the first offline mention of Matt Haughey’s Ticketstubs project. The “Everyone I’ve Ever Known” site in the current column was the subject of a Metafilter thread a few weeks ago, and her other columns have also covered subjects that were first posted to Metafilter. Do you have an account there, Pamela?