Driving in the Void
Posted on October 19, 2009
I was trying to put a visual on an address I read and was confused about in Google Maps and look what happened:
The effect of moving around is pretty neat, with the weird blurred landscape stretching and snapping back on each block. Don’t really know what is going on there, but it was an interesting little distraction. Here’s a photo version for the non javacript inclined among us.
A few of my favorite things
Posted on September 24, 2009
I look at a lot of stuff on the internet, and there is a lot out there I like. Would you like to see?
Here are some tweets I like.
Here are some tumblr posts I like.
As always, you can find the links I like on my delicious account.
You can also see who else likes my tweeting.
As a parting note, please use your twitter favorites. I don’t care if retweeting is becoming officially accepted, that stuff is for the birds.
It’s Time for Boadrum 9
Posted on September 14, 2009
Really stretching for a clever title there. The yearly Boadrum experience rolls on, up to 09/09/09 now. Since it’s kind of ridiculous to think we’d be up to 99 drummers now (88 was already getting pretty shaky as far as keeping everyone in sync goes) the Boredoms decided to take it down to just (just?) 9 drummers this year. The other big change was this year would be indoors, at Terminal 5, making this the second time I’ve seen them there.
Before the show, while puttering around the city my friends and I stopped in at Whole Foods on 2nd Ave. We saw EYE buying some drinks and snacks, but we weren’t sure if it was actually him or just another one of those dreadlocked Japanese guys you see wandering NY so often. He was wearing a wonky hat though, and later at the concert our suspicions were confirmed when that same weird train conductor looking thing was on his head. Weird.
Lichens, who I had never heard before, did an opening set by sitting in a chair and layering his voice over and over and over and over until it was a crazed rainforest of noise. Actually I think he went a little too far at the end and turned something that could have been an interesting listen into a bit of a clusterfuck.
At 9:09 (of course, you know the drill at this point) the Boredoms + a few friends took the stage. But there was something strange. One of the drum sets sat empty. What could this mean? Was someone sick? Also why were only EYE and Yoshimi on stage? All my questions were answered a few minutes later when YO2RO was literally carried out on 4 men’s shoulders, drum set and all.
The rest of the show was about an hour of bombastic throwdown. A more mellow encore followed and that was that. It was nice because 88 was in many ways very similar to 77. I suppose that isn’t too surprising, one was in New York and the other in LA, so there was probably very little overlap outside of freaky obsessives like yours truly. The one irritating thing about the show was the sudden prevalence of the iPhone 3GS. I realize I just embedded a video taken with one and yes, I took one picture too, but come on guys, let’s just enjoy the show and how be sticking your phone up in the air every 5 seconds. I’d rather you just have your hands out spastically like the guy who looked to be shakily praising the lord near the front all concert than watch the stage through your viewfinder. That being said, here are some useful links for those of you who didn’t make it!
- Flickr photo search for “Boadrum 9″
- Youtube video search for “Boadrum 9″
- 99 pictures & 9 reviews of the Boredoms’ Boadrum 9 @ Terminal 5 in NYC on 9/9/9
See you next year at 10/10/10. I was just thinking, if the time keeps being pushed back we’re going to have to either do 12/12/12 at midnight just as 12/11/12 ends or at noon. A midday winter concert could be fun, maybe we could all have a snowball fight after.
An Otherworldly Sense of Timing
Posted on July 7, 2009
Without noticing it I posted the Jesse Jackson picture entry on exactly the 5th anniversary of this blog. Isn’t that weird? Upon realizing this I felt compelled to check out killingmachines.org, the domain of the blog I temporarily “maintained” before this one. The site has long since closed, but I enjoy the soccer stock photo and the assertion that it is my “gateway to sites on the Internet for Online journal!” Perhaps even parked domain pages have a memory. Now here is a photo of a bus:
Have a Heart
Posted on June 15, 2009
CNN is reporting that more than half of people surveyed could not find the human heart on a diagram and over 70 percent could not identify the correct shape of lungs. I happen to have more detailed results of this survey and I wanted to share with you some of the potential lung shapes people chose.
CONCLUSION: I am a terrible artist and ran out of ideas but a professional sees these kinds of things through to the bitter terrible end.
Twiogle: the Perfect Spam Storm
Posted on May 26, 2009
I generally try to keep my head above the churning mire that is twitter data harvesting “startup” domains, but this one compelled me to the point of *gasp* updating my own website.
Twiogle is a search engine that displays both Google and Twitter search side by site. This seems like an interesting idea, allowing for some context to be given from the outside world to the sometimes impenetrable wall of abbreviations and nonsense on twitter. I have used side by side search engines in the past, and besides the slight loss in screen real estate, I found them to deliver on what they promised.
There is a problem with Twiogle though. It is a spam machine. Hooked into the search itself is a corporate twitter account that tweets every search entered on Twiogle’s website as it happens. As you might guess there are a lot of searches going on at any given moment, and that number promises to skyrocket if one of the trendy “tech news” blogs (which might as well just be official Facebook and twitter mouthpieces at this point) picks up the story. Besides just cluttering twitter search results up with nonsensical posts, Twiogle is now the perfect spam machine. I can make Twiogle say anything I want it to. Even more irritatingly it just drops a link back to the homepage, not to the query listed. But using my new zombie account I can post negative things about anyone I want, filling a rival company’s brand name twitter search results with disparaging remarks or lies, sneaking embarrassing secrets into my friends name searches or anything else I can think of. I don’t even have to go through the trouble of making a fake twitter account!
In addition to spamming anyone you want without fear of reprisal, Twiogle is also spamming twitter itself. Once “trending topics” and search hit the sidebar of twitter proper people have been pimping paper-thin meme attempts and have been jumping on trend bandwagons like the ground had suddenly turned to molten rock. It takes nothing short of a herculean effort to actually get a trend into the sidebar, thanks to the parasitic and disgusting practice of “retweeting,” something that inspires about one new twitter vestigial organ startup a week, and inspires tech blog posters to write “5 Tips You Must Know About Retweeting!” posts that should be titled “How to Hook your Crappy Wagon to a Fading Star.” Twiogle is creating it’s own buzz though, by using the search results of unwitting users and book-ending them with “Twiogled:” and a link back to the Twiogle homepage. This ensures that the more people search the more their brand name appears.
What is the point though? Why create this bizarre spam engine to just aggregate search results from elsewhere? For its Google results Twiogle is using the Google Custom Search, which can be connected to an AdSense account. Ad clicks in those results for connected accounts means revenue for the account owner. Even just a temporary appearance in the trending topics on twitter could be self perpetuating in this case, leading to more visits by curious searchers, more searches, more tweets, reinforcement of the “trend” and more potential clicks on ads.
I don’t know if the site was really made to be an evil spam juggernaut, but as it stands now it has real potential. Twitter isn’t “serious business” and probably never will be, but it would be nice if things like this could be stifled.
UPDATE: As you can tell from the comments below, the wheels are in motion and the stream of tweets has stopped. Crisis averted, good work everyone.
Sign Sign Everywhere a Sign
Posted on May 10, 2009
Jesse Jackson is thrilled to endorse the following sponsors:
I’ll probably make more versions of this as I find new things for him to be so enthusiastic about.
It’s a lock
Posted on March 31, 2009
I live alone. Not terribly far from people I know and love, but I am the only person who lives in my apartment. There is a plant that lives here too, but it has a generally passive role in the ecosystem. I don’t have a washing machine in my apartment, but there are several in the basement. I set an alarm on my phone for when my clothes are ready to be moved from the washer to the dryer, or when they need to go back in the closet. Last night I did my laundry.
I put my laundry in the machine and ate dinner. My alarm went off so I trotted outside and closed my door, just as I realized I didn’t have my keys. My doorknob still turns from the inside if the door is locked, so while I could get out, I could now not get back in. I stood in front of my door in stunned silence for a few minutes. I considered what my options were:
- Could I kick the door down?
- Could I get in through a window?
- Would the apartment office offer some kind of assistance?
It seemed like a bad idea to get caught by my neighbors trying to destroy my own door. I put my laundry in the dryer. I rang my next door neighbor’s doorbell. A girl answered the door and fought her way off the phone with her chatty aunt. I told her that I was her neighbor and that I had locked myself out. Thankfully I was wearing marginally presentable clothes. I was wearing my slippers though. My neighbor let me use her phone and computer. The apartment office informed me they offered no help in this situation, and since it was now 7:00 p.m. many locksmiths were closed. I was given the name of a local locksmith by a not local locksmith. They said they would arrive in 45 minutes.
My neighbor is a high school and middle school art teacher. We talked about our local schools, both being Montgomery County children. She was very accommodating considering the half-dressed shell-shocked stranger sitting on her couch. The locksmith arrived and I let her return to her drawing.
The locksmith is a young ginger, with a heavy toolbag on something called a “Magna Cart.” He tries to pick my lock, but it is very old and the pins are dry. He tries to lubricate it with a can of WD-40 from his bag, but realizes it is empty. He fails to pick the lock, and tells me he needs to drill the lock out if I’m going to get back in. “Sometimes you can pick ‘em all, sometimes you can’t pick yer nose,” he tells me. He uses a very thin drill bit in his power drill. The knob doesn’t turn. This is because the drill bit is now broken off inside the lock. He uses a drill bit five times thicker to drill the rest of the lock, and now drill bit, out. My door opens. I give him $175. This is a discounted rate.
He tells me he could sell me a lock, but they are all commercial grade and will cost me over $100. He says I should go to Home Depot instead. It is 9:00 p.m. so I hurry to the local Home Depot and buy a new doorknob for $10. I return home, disassemble my door and install the new lock.
If I could give any advice from this experience, it would be that you should not lock yourself out of your apartment. The plant was no help during any of this, so don’t rely on one of those either.
Dreamin’ Up A Storm
Posted on January 15, 2009
I’ve been dreaming quite often recently. I decided to start keeping a list of them on dream chimney. You can see my profile here and a list of dreams I’ve had here. There’s also a link in the sidebar to the right. Now is the beginning of an adventure to the cave of monsters of my mind!
