Monday 3/31/03 §
Ice photography. (Boing Boing)
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You've Got Blimp. (mike.whybark.com)
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Sunday 3/30/03 §
Soldering with toaster ovens. (Flutterby)
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Judging a book by its cover. (Boing Boing)
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Tuesday 3/25/03 §
I try to keep this site focused on links to interesting things on the Web, with only occasional forays into politics. To a large extent this is because I'm a good deal less sure of my political opinions than a lot of people seem to be. But the explosion of warblogs has shown me that I actually know as much as a lot of people who are spouting opinions; it's just that others don't necessarily refrain from talking when they don't know what they're talking about. Still, I don't want this site to turn into a masturdebate society, so when my funk soul brother Dean Esmay offered to let me post on his site, I decided to accept. That way, he gets to deal with all the hassles of managing the site. Heh.
Dean is conservative, and his blog reflects his political views, with all that this implies, although I think he's pretty reasonable, and he'll listen to any well-thought-out argument. Still, if anything to the right of Clinton gets your blood pressure up, you probably won't feel at home over there. (Although personally, I'm more of a moderate with libertarian leanings, and I try to only ridicule the ridiculous.) In any case, if you want to read my occasional ramblings on politics and current events, now you know where to go. I've posted a couple articles already.
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Monday 3/24/03 §
Woody Norris may have a "lumbering, sports-fan demeanor," but he could be the Thomas Edison of our times. He invented the sonogram over a weekend, and the Jabra in-ear headset over another weekend -- and made millions off both. He has a personal helicopter in the prototype stage. And his latest invention is HyperSonic Sound, a way to project a highly focused beam of sound that also can be used as a non-lethal weapon. Read the New York Times Magazine profile of this uniquely American character.
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Saturday 3/22/03 §
Did you know that there are kite-flying competitions? Did you know that the kite-flying competition authority has a standard set of "figures" that flyers must be able to guide their kites through? Reed Design has nice Flash animations for both the current ISKC figures and the previous STACK Figures. More kite info. (xBlog)
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How to swear in many different languages. Conveniently, French is first. (Danelope)
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Friday 3/21/03 §
I've been remiss in posting lately, so here are some links I blatantly stole from Metafilter. I've weeded out all the war crap so you don't have to! Famous Locations will tell you about the real-world locations where thousands of movies were shot. Business 2.0 reviews the 101 dumbest business moments of 2002. A fun kaleidoscope in Flash. Exactitudes is a fascinating collection of photographs of people who express their individuality by looking just like each other. Gargoyles in New York City.A talking fish warns of the end of the world -- in Hebrew. And an Internet community for truckers that provides a concise demonstration that every occupation has its own language and norms.
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Friday 3/14/03 §
Ah, the joy of taking photos of cute animals using an extreme wide-angle (fisheye) lens. Some of these pictures are virtually real-life cartoons, like say this one or this one or this one. Say it with me now: awwwwwwwww! (Thanks Warren)
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Starting a weblog? Read this first. Heck, read it even if you've already got a blog. I found some useful tips in it myself. (Antipixel)
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Thursday 3/13/03 §
Seattle viewpoints. (Anita Rowland)
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Oh, by the way, I neglected to mention this, but the company I've been consulting for the last three months made it official last week. I am now an employee of Epok Inc., where I'll be doing pretty much the same thing I was doing at OneName. Their headquarters are in Maryland, but they're opening an office in Bellevue, where I and several other ex-OneNamers will soon spend our days slaving over hot computers. Hooray!
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Matt Haughey (of MetaFilter) posted an interesting entry about using Movable Type trackbacks to display a list of recently-played tracks in WinAmp. He asked me if something similar was possible for iTunes, and I put together an AppleScript for the purpose. I'll release it here officially in a bit, after I make it a bit more friendly to set up, but Matt's posted it on his site if you're interested in trying it now.
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Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett plumbs the depth of the gulf between postmodernism and truth. (Flutterby)
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Monday 3/10/03 §
If you happen to be trying to use Kung-Log or another such utility to post to your Movable Type weblog, and said weblog is being hosted on a Windows-based server (IIS), and you are getting an XML-RPC status error, change the name of the mt-xmlrpc.cgi file to nph-mt-xmlrpc.cgi (and adjust the URL in your posting application's preferences accordingly). Then it will work.
Yes, I'm moving this site over to Movable Type in the near future.
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Sunday 3/9/03 §
Spirograph. Free for Mac OS X. Just like the real thing, except you can't lose the plastic pieces, because there aren't any. And those nonexistent pieces can be any size you want, instead of just the sizes the manufacturer deigned to give you. Sweet.
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It's not often that you see a coin referred to with a definite article. One such coin is the 1933 Double Eagle, a solid gold coin with a face value of $20. Hundreds of thousands were struck in 1933, but since the country was going off the gold standard at the time, that year's run was never released to the public. Only nine leaked out, and just one of those is known to have survived an intensive effort to retrieve the stolen coins. After being sighted in the collection of Egypt's King Farouk, it vanished for decades, finally surfacing in 1996 when a coin dealer brought it to the United States to sell it. The Secret Service seized the coin and took Stephen Fenton, its owner, into custody.
After a lengthy but ultimately successful legal challenge, in 2002 the Treasury agreed to officially issue this single coin so it could be legally sold, on the condition that Fenton split the proceeds with them. In July, 2002, Sotheby's sold it for $6.6 million (plus a 15% seller's premium), shattering the previous $4.1 million record for the auction of a single coin. Read the whole amazing story. (Boing Boing)
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Thursday 3/6/03 §
Unemployed geek, bored and itching for an engineering challenge, designs, bulids, and launches his very own weather balloon. (BrainLog)
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Mike Jittlov's Web site has information on the creation of the first Federal income tax form -- including a picture of it and a discussion of the fonts used! -- plus lots of amusing ranting that we can all relate to as April 15 nears.
Jittlov is the creator of the cult classic film The Wizard of Speed and Time. Coincidentally, I met him briefly in San Francisco at a Macworld Expo, while working the Bare Bones booth. The man's eyebrows are unmistakable -- and the nametag didn't hurt either.
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Tuesday 3/4/03 §
Cause spammers pain by throttling their connections into mail servers based on a running analysis of the likelihood an inbound message is spam. In other words, the spammier a message seems, the longer it takes to deliver. Sending millions of spams then becomes painfully slow. Brilliant. (Flutterby)
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Saturday 3/1/03 §
A brain-teaser -- literally. My brain feels like it's been tied in knots. (AbsoBlogginLutely)
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Goodness gracious, I've got a full social calendar this weekend. First I'm going shooting with Gary, a former co-worker who collects interesting firearms, mostly rifles. (I've printed plenty of targets.) Then Anita has invited me to a gathering of local science fiction people Saturday evening. Sunday, I'm heading up to Bellingham to visit Deck and Alma, longtime friends who have just moved to our fair state. This after a SWUD ("Seattle Webloggers Unite, Dammit") last week, which tends to happen whenever Jish finds himself in town, and a lunch meeting with a friend and a blog.meetup the week before that.
I fear I may be in danger of getting a life.
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