Thursday, March 12, 2009 

Via Tor.com, Lex Luthor asking the president for a bailout.

posted on Friday, March 13, 2009 2:02:59 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00) 
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Sunday, February 03, 2008 

http://www.georgevreilly.com/blog/content/binary/Stochastic-Peregrinations.png

Use O'Reilly Maker to generate book covers. I've always wanted to write a book for cousin Tim, and now I have!

Via Pavel: Adolf Hitler - Vista Problems (YouTube).

The Photographer's Right: a handy one-page guide.

The general rule in the United States is that anyone may take photographs of whatever they want when they are in a public place or places where they have permission to take photographs. Absent a specific legal prohibition such as a statute or ordinance, you are legally entitled to take photographs. Examples of places that are traditionally considered public are streets, sidewalks, and public parks.

The tiny <code> font in Firefox has been bugging me for a long time. I finally figured out the obvious: Override the Monospace setting. Tools > Options > Content > Fonts & Colors > Advanced > Monospace: change Courier New at size 13 to 16. While you're at it, change the font to Consolas or Lucida Console or Monaco. Courier New is ugly.

My man, John Edwards, is out of the presidential race. Some analysis from Corrente and Meteor Blades of Edwards' candidacy.

I have never been enthusiastic about Hillary Rodham Clinton as a presidential candidate. She's accumulated 16 years of negatives from being relentlessly demonized by Limbaugh and his ilk; she's too damn centrist and corporate for my liking; and I remain troubled about her vote for the Iraq War and her refusal to apologize for it.

I am now an Obama voter. I have expressed some doubts in the past about his efficacy, but there's no doubt that his messages of transformation and inspiration are striking a chord with primary voters.

The Washington state primary on February 19th is a complete farce, at least if you're a Democrat. The Democratic presidential candidates are entirely chosen by the Washington state caucuses on Saturday, February 9th. Washington state law requires that a presidential primary be held, but the parties are not actually obliged to select any delegates as a result of the vote. The Republicans delegates will be allocated 49% from the caucus results, and 51% from the primary results.

I'm the Democratic Precinct Committee Officer for SEA-1945, and I'll be participating in our neighborhood caucus at Asa Mercer School. I need to phone participants of the previous caucus today, both in my own precinct and some adjoining, PCO-less precincts, to remind them of the caucus.

I've uploaded Vim syntax highlighting for PBwiki, a free, hosted wiki that I've used for a few different projects.

posted on Sunday, February 03, 2008 8:43:06 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00) 
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Thursday, January 10, 2008 

content/binary/AnimatorVsAnimation.jpg

Miscellaneous links.

posted on Thursday, January 10, 2008 8:06:04 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00) 
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Saturday, May 05, 2007 

content/binary/contraptionII.png

Via Digg, one heck of a Rube Goldberg contraption. The Digg page also led to The Bravery - Honest Mistake below.


The Bravery: Honest Mistake
posted on Saturday, May 05, 2007 8:45:55 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00) 
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Wednesday, February 07, 2007 

Doctor Who and the French Dalek

Via Andrew Sullivan, an extremely well cut YouTube mashup of Doctor Who and Monty Python.

posted on Wednesday, February 07, 2007 8:58:18 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00) 
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Monday, November 06, 2006 

King George II -or- How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love W

This video says it all.

Go vote tomorrow!

posted on Monday, November 06, 2006 10:25:36 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00) 
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Thursday, November 02, 2006 

http://athena.libraries.claremont.edu/~blog/blog/images/scotty.jpg

I've seen a number of references to a Microsoft demo of speech recognition that went famously wrong, but it wasn't until this evening that I finally watched the CNBC Video that started the meme.

A TV reporter makes a snarky introduction then cuts to video of a Microsoft PM demoing the new speech recognition technology in Windows Vista. Dear Mom comma, he says. Dear aunt, appears in Word. It gets worse from there. Funny stuff. Go watch the original video.

But it's not the whole story. There's another video which sets the demo in context. Overall, the demo was reasonably successful and the speech commands worked fairly well.

If you think people talking into their cellphones is annoying now, wait until you hear them talking at their computers!

posted on Friday, November 03, 2006 3:32:41 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00) 
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Saturday, June 03, 2006 

The Ninth Ward of New Orleans, as shot by Scout Prime.

Christy at FireDogLake has written a post about this year's hurricane season, which officially started on June 1st.

New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf is still a disaster area: watch the video linked to above. Disaster preparedness is far from where it should be. The levee improvements are inadequate. Reconstruction is mired in bureaucracy and stalled in incompetence. The money promised has not materialized. Only one-third of New Orleans residents have returned.

Christy links to a report put together by Nancy Pelosi, detailing the incompetence and cronyism of the Republicans, both in the immediate response and in the long-term followup.

  • Up to $1 billion dollars in waste and fraud for housing contractors and payments made by the government, mainly to contractors from outside the Gulf Region.

  • The SBA has rejected more than 60% of small business loan applications in the wake of Katrina. Of those that have been approved, only 4% of funds have been disbursed to small business owners at this point. (Oh yeah, I got yer business friendly environment here. What was that Republican talking point that small business is the backbone of American jobs and communities?)

  • Less than 2% of all Federal aid that has gone to the Gulf Coast has been used for education expenditures.

  • The Rubber Stamp Republican Congress still refuses to ease Medicare restrictions for children in the Gulf Coast region, despite the fact that there is a substantial health care crisis for children in the region, stemming from infections and other issues arising from prolonged exposure to pathogens from flood waters, stress, and other factors. (1/3 of all children living in FEMA trailer parks have been found to have a chronic illness.)

  • 40,000 families are still waiting for some sort of housing assistance, meanwhile there are 10,000 FEMA trailers still parked in the mud, just sitting there unused.

  • Contractors with a political connection to the Bush Administration were paid up to 15 times the actual cost of jobs contracted.

posted on Sunday, June 04, 2006 4:13:47 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00) 
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Friday, May 19, 2006 

A front group for Big Oil is putting out ads denying the reality of global warming, in a pre-emptive bid to undermine Al Gore's new documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

The first ad portrays global warming science as a vicious smear campaign against carbon dioxide. The ad, which despite appearances is not an SNL parody, helpfully reminds us that carbon dioxide is “essential to life” because “we breath[e] it out.”

"An Inconvenient Truth" opens in Seattle on June 2nd, 2006.

posted on Saturday, May 20, 2006 1:24:39 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00) 
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Sunday, May 14, 2006 

President Al Gore on Saturday Night Live, spoofing the disastrous six years of Bush.

posted on Sunday, May 14, 2006 10:50:22 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00) 
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Saturday, May 13, 2006 

Via Bootboy, a video of "Jesus" singing Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive.

posted on Saturday, May 13, 2006 8:38:51 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00) 
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Wednesday, May 10, 2006 

I saw a video clip of so-called Russian Climbing at work today. It turns out that it's an extreme sport of French origin called Parkour or Free Running.

Parkour is "the art of forward motion in spite of obstacles". Its practitioners (traceurs) run around urban landscapes, performing Jacky Chan-like leaps, rolls, stunts, jumps, and flips.

The excellent HowStuffWorks.com has a good introductory piece on Parkour.

There is a local group of traceurs, who are written up in a P-I article. Their website is Washington Parkour. It seems there's a "jam" every Sunday at noon at Seattle's Freeway Park. It sounds like a photo-op to me.

posted on Thursday, May 11, 2006 6:03:20 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00) 
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Friday, May 05, 2006 

Here's an interesting Campari ad, where things are not as they seem. Worksafe, but only barely.

Some background from Campari: The Secret

posted on Friday, May 05, 2006 7:02:36 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00) 
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Sunday, April 16, 2006 

Via Win Tech Off Topic, an amazing collection of Rube Goldberg devices from a Japanese children's TV show. 13 minutes.

It reminds me of the famous Honda 'Cog' Ad, which can be viewed here.

posted on Sunday, April 16, 2006 10:08:14 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00) 
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Saturday, April 08, 2006 

Here's (left) a video of Chris Bliss doing a pretty amazing juggling routine to the accompaniment of the Beatle's Once There Was a Way.

And here's (right) a video of Jason Garfield doing the same routine with five balls instead of three.

(Each video is about 4.5 minutes long.)

posted on Saturday, April 08, 2006 11:13:36 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00) 
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