Categories
Miscellaneous

Nickelback How You Remind Me Someday

Via MeFi:

“What you are hearing is Nickelback’s “Someday” in your left speaker and “How you remind me in the right”. All of those left shocked please raise their hands.”

I’ve never understood what the big fascination with Nickelback is anyway. I mean I’m happy for them being somewhat of locals making it to the big time, but for some mysterious reason I just don’t dig their music. I don’t think it’s just that their music is formulaic either, it’s probably just the old argument that the music from your highschool days is going to end up being your favorite no matter when you grew up.

It also makes me wonder, is a band still a one-hit wonder if all of their next hits are just subtle reworkings of their first hit?

Categories
Miscellaneous

$14 Steady Cam

My brother is into photography. He has been the photo-editor at the Gauntlet Newspaper (The University of Calgary’s Student Run Paper) for the past few years and always has a few good tips. Anyway he told me that you can really improve your pictures with a steady cam tripod but they usually run between $600 and $1500. Well today I found a site that shows you how to build your own Steady-Cam for about $14 (I’m guessing that’s USD).

Categories
Miscellaneous

How Memes Spread Or Why Bloggers Kill Croutons

The Memespread project is a little experiment in the way information travels across the blogosphere.

Categories
Miscellaneous


I’ll bet somebody like Jerry Bruckheimer sees a movie in this. During the Sadr militia’s Sunday attempt to seize the U.S. government headquarters in Najaf, the building was defended not by U.S. troops but by a small group of Blackwater Security Consulting “employees”. The Blackwater commandos, most of whom are former Special Forces troops, are on contract to provide security for the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Najaf. It turns out that the four men brutally slain Wednesday in Fallujah were also Blackwater employees.

Spectacularly interesting article about the standoff. Hey, if it was a movie, I’d probably go see it.

Categories
Miscellaneous

Croc Hunter Saves 11 Year Old

SYDNEY, Australia – A retired Australian crocodile hunter saved a young girl from the jaws of a 10-foot crocodile when he jumped on top of the man-eating reptile and gouged its eyes, local media said Tuesday.

Categories
Miscellaneous

All Hail the Database

This article was of particular interest to me, given that I used to work in The City of Medicine Hat’s GIS department.

When the 40,000 subscribers to Reason, the monthly libertarian magazine, receive a copy of the June issue, they will see on the cover a satellite photo of a neighborhood – their own neighborhood. And their house will be graphically circled.

Free Registration Required or you could go to Bugmenot.com and pickup a username and password there.

Categories
Google

GMail is Just Around the Corner

Google recently announced they will soon open up a free email service offering users 1 gigabyte of free storage space. They intend to make money off of the service by placing context sensitive ads beside your incoming mail. Some people have privacy concerns but to me if you are worried about privacy then you probably shouldn’t be using Hotmail or Yahoo mail because as far as I’m concerned they all have privacy issues. The other thing people have been talking about is just how Google is going to possibly be able to open up and maintain the huge amount of storage space that would be required for millions of users all with 1 gigabyte of storage space. It seems impossible. Anyway here is a news article from ITworld about Google’s new mail service.

As for whether Google will be able to deal with the huge demand, whether its search technology and DAS approach to storage will revolutionize Web email or leave a huge black spot on Google’s untarnished image, well, only time will tell. But one of the reasons that Google is so popular is that it has a tendency to achieve the unachievable.

Check out GMail now, but beware Google’s intense terms of service agreement.

If they allege a “technical issue”, including spam filtering, then they can access, read, preserve, and disclose anything in your mailbox. Since they probably do spam filtering for everybody (both for incoming and outgoing mail), then they have the right to read and disclose the contents of your email at any time.

Many spam-filtering services send copies of alleged spams to some central location. If they get N copies of similar messages, they declare it spam and publish the offending messages on the web. Google’s right to send your spam to such services gives them the right to send ANY of your email to ANYONE — for publication.

Categories
Miscellaneous

A Special Sense of Humour


Cbrown posted this little gem via their blog, and I thought it worth mentioning.

I had to share this find. I recently purchased a high-quality computer sleeve from a small boutique manufacturer. I was checking if it could be washed. The photo is the attached tag with the washing instructions in both English and French. The English is exactly what you would expect and so is the French, for the first 6 lines. The last three lines of French are most interesting. “We are sorry that our President is an idiot. We didn’t vote for him.”

Update: Salon has an article about the french labels.

Categories
Miscellaneous

The Four Types of Blog Posts

An intesting look at categories of blog posts from BoingBoing’s Guest blog:

Informative: short, sweet, linked. Makes a quick point and backs it up with a link to another site. Boing Boing has made this into an art form.

Blisdom (blog wisdom): can be short or long, relies on a narrative to make a subtle point. Often pulled from a life experience. Here’s an example from a conversation with my wife:

Wife: I just had the strangest dream. I was on a train…

Me: Coach or First Class?

Wife: Honey, I don’t dream in coach.

Vanity Post: Often inane. Represents everything that journalists like to point to and say, “See, blogs are worthless.”

‘While the unexamined life may not be worth living the overexamined life is not worth reading.’

–Scott Simon of NPR on “inane weblogs”

That doesn’t mean these blog entries aren’t interesting when read as part of the whole blog…it just means that if there is a point, it is often missed by the casual visitor, like going from Sopranos series 1 to series 4.

Fiction: There is a lot of emerging fiction popping up from blogs. Harder to find, but worth the journey.

Then comes the post that has had the biggest affect on my life. I don’t have a clever name for it, so let’s just call it the “shoes” post…as in walk a mile in another’s shoes. Sometimes it has a clear point, and other times it just resonates inside you. Whatever the author’s point behind the post, it takes on new meaning in your own mind. Sometimes you learn something about someone else, but often you learn something about yourself.

I like to think of my posts as a combination of Informative and Blisdom, giving a tiny slice-of-my-life to readers while at the same time posting short sweet links along with my thoughts on the matter.

Categories
Miscellaneous

I Heart BitTorrent

BitTorrent is the greatest! For example, even though I went to Calgary to watch the BareNaked Ladies last Thursday and Anna forgot to set the VCR, I was able to download her a copy of the newest episode of ER and we could just watch it on the computer. But using BitTorrent gets even better when you use RSS. With an RSS feed you can use your news aggregator to let you know whenever there is a new episode of your favorite show available for download, this way you’ll always be up to date on whatever Tony Soprano and/or Homer Simpson are up to. It’s the greatest!