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!
The Furious Force of Thunder
Posted on January 7, 2009
Timeslaughter Remembered
Posted on November 9, 2008
The year was 1996. There had already been three popular releases of Mortal Kombat, proving that not only did kids love fighting games, but they loved to tear people’s ribcages out and dance on their spinal cords. The gory stage was set for Bloodlust Software to release their finest work, Timeslaughter. I can’t remember exactly where I first heard about Bloodlust (potentially from Portal of Evil, one of the best websites of the mid 90’s), but after playing the earlier released Noggin Knockers 2 I knew that these were people after my own adolescent heart. Ridiculous violence, over the top stereotypes and tard jokes as far as the eye could see.
Timeslaughter’s story revolves around a group of “time worshiping demons” called the Takar who don’t approve of a time machine created by William Spade, a mild mannered scientist. After an encounter with the Takar that leaves him a mutilated shell of a man (shown in glorious detail by the opening cinematic), he creates a robotic exoskeleton and goes insane, attacking anyone who may stumble through his time portal which has now completely destroyed the normal flow of time and space, causing people from different times to meet on the field of bloody battle. It provides as good an excuse as any to get a variety characters brawling, and adds in time period variations to the traditional ethnic diversity of fighting games.
Considering the indie (and freeware) nature of the game, the quality is really impressive. Even now (thanks to DosBox) I find it to be both visually pleasing and fun, with large animated characters, infinitely quotable voice clips and blood that soaks the entire screen by the end of every match. Each character has a set of special moves, including the mandatory fatalities to put a violent exclamation point on the end of a match. There were even secret characters and unique endings for every character to complete the package.
As a service to the modern Internet, and to honor the past, I decided to upload the game opening and all the character endings to my Youtube account:
You can watch these videos, my LSD dream journal videos and more on my Youtube profile. Play Timeslaughter. It’s fun.
BONUS INFO: In 1998 a company called Paradox Development almost released a game called Thrill Kill. A violent Playstation 4 player 3D fighting game, Thrill Kill was never officially released, (although a basically complete disc image was circulated online) and was eventually re-purposed as the engine for Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style in 1999. I don’t want to point any accusatory fingers, but Thrill Kill featured a straight-jacketed psychotic who looks sliiiightly familiar…
Forecasting Ubiquity
Posted on August 28, 2008
Recently the Ubiquity extension for Firefox has been making quite a splash. I usually find the extensions developed by Mozilla Labs to be a little obtuse, but admittedly many of them serve market semgents I am just not a part of. I thought Ubiquity was pretty impressive looking though, so I took it for a spin. After using it for a little while I tried to decide on some command I could come up with easily, but would still be useful. I realized that the weather command only covered the current conditions, but not the extended forecast. With that in mind I threw together a little command myself.
Forecast grabs the extended forecast from wunderground in either Fahrenheit or Celsius and displays it in the Ubiquity notification area. I am by no means a Javascript master, so I’m sure there is still room for optimization, but things are still fairly snappy and the functionality is pretty much all there. I was surprised at how easy it was to develop, and all the stumbling blocks I ran into were related to my own Javacript abilities. I’m mulling over what to develop next, which is probably a good sign for the future if someone as inexperienced as me is still excited about making new commands.
If you end up using forecast, let me know about any issues you run into or any improvements you’d like to see. Also if you are making any new commands drop me a note and show me what you’ve come up with.
88boadrum in the Sun
Posted on August 26, 2008
On 08/08/08 the Boredoms and their friends put on a concert in the La Brea Tar Pits. The day was beautiful and the night was full of magic space music. I flew out from my DC area home allll the way to LA to see a free concert. So it ended up being pretty expensive when you take everything into consideration. Musically it was fairly similar to last year’s 77boadrum, but not identical. Things weren’t QUITE as tight as they were with the 77, but it was still impressive. I got to hang around in the tar pit park for all of the dress rehearsal, which was pretty interesting. I’m not sure how much they all practiced together beforehand, (probably not at all, it must be hard to organize that many people) so watching things come together made the final product even more interesting.
There wasn’t any of the nonsense from last year with thousands of people getting turned away at the gate, thanks to the actual ticket system employed, but there was quite a line for the custom screened t-shirts. Actually there were two, one to get the shirt itself and one to get it screened. Things just seemed to run smoother this year, which was nice after the confusing frenzy in New York.
Some things were strange though. Right before everyone was supposed to line up to get in to the actual concert there was a traffic…incident. Since there were a lot of extra cars parked on the street for the event it created some slightly different driving conditions. A little old lady got confused, clipped a parked car and smashed into a tree, right in front of the metal security gate for the concert entrance line. We had to wait a while longer than expected to get in, but the human traffic drama unfolding made it interesting. During the concert itself, the drummer right in front of me just got up from his kit and left for a few minutes, and an audience member replaced him. It was actually a smooth transition because the audience guy had some skills. Never a dull moment!
Check out my flickr slideshow below, with some short videos of the performance.
In Rain(bows)
Posted on May 12, 2008
Yesterday, May 11, 2008 Radiohead played at Virginia’s Nissan Pavilion. At the same time, there was…”some weather.” On the drive down from Baltimore it started to rain. Then it rained harder. Then it rained so hard we could only see about 5 feet in front of the car. By the time we made it down to the venue (about 5:00 pm) the parking lot was a soupy mess. People clad in trash bags, coats, ponchos and slickers of all sizes sloshed through the lot. We hid in the car until the gates opened hoping that things would let up.
At 6:30 we finally got out and walked to the front gate. After the least thorough pat-down of all time we were inside, and totally soaked. Standing water was everywhere, and due to the slight incline in the path around the pavilion a river was starting to form. We fought upstream to the end of the line and grabbed a piece of wall next to a bathroom under an overhang just long enough to shield us from the downpour. It rained as hard as I’ve ever seen it rain. The standing water got worse and worse. The opening band came and went. The sun went down and the temperature dipped into the 40’s. Then it rained harder.
At 9:00 Radiohead came on. We had moved around a bit but the water was inescapable. Even if we COULD escape it we were so saturated it wouldn’t have mattered. Songs started to come and go when something strange happened. A guy came out from under the cover of the pavilion and asked if we were stuck out on the lawn. Then he told us to take his pavilion seats because he was too ill to stay. So just a few songs into the set, we were running as fast as our rain frozen legs could carry us to sweet relief under the roof.
Relief isn’t quite what we found, but we did find a better view than the wall of humanity and umbrellas that was the lawn. The show was great. When it came time to leave the walkway dividing the seats from the lawn had become an actual river, more than ankle deep. I couldn’t help but laugh hysterically as we sloshed through the water, down the ramp and back out into the disgusting mud pit of the parking lot. We lined up to get out but didn’t move for 20 minutes. Out of the corner of our eye we spotted a cop car zooming off to the back of the lot. We followed and managed to circumvent the entire line somehow. The roads we were all funneled out to eventually were whittled down to a single lane on the way back to 66 in the blinding rain.
This brings up an interesting point. This venue has been around for quite a while, and is in the middle of a lot of nothing. Why then are the roads so bad? Why is there only on exit / entrance to the parking lot? Why did the structure handle rain so poorly? I don’t have an answer to any of that, but if someone has some answers I’d love to hear them.
Today I came home from work to find a box on my doorstep. What was inside? A new umbrella of course.
Here’s what Radiohead had to say. Here’s a rundown from the Radiohead 2008 Tour blog. Make sure to read the comments for the full effect.