Device warns you if you're boring or irritating

Wouldn't a gadget that warned you when you were being boring help you in your social interactions with others? Then you wouldn't have to rely on your own faulty human perception. Kind of like a Garmin for the navigationally challenged.

heh, so any thoughts on who should get one? Could make conferences a lot more tolerable...

~Elphie

Welcome to First Life

I've posted a couple times now about Second Life. So I've got to show you the funniest parody I've seen. "First Life is a 3D analog world where server lag does not exist". Check it out for an end of week chuckle.

~Elphie

Weekend geekery

I pre-ordered the LOTRO MMO game and will be click/slash/looting my way through middle earth this weekend. w00t!

~E

A message from your friends at the Institute of Self Determination

- Do you feel like you lack control over your schedule?
- Have you had to cancel things in your personal life with short notice due to last minute business travel?
- Are you burnt out on conferences?
- Have you delivered presentations to low priority audiences in the middle of nowhere?

If you answered yes to at least two of the questions above, you might be asking how this happened to you and what you can do about it. You might be hoping leet haxors broke into your scheduling application to send you off to Boise at a moment's notice - you can simply rebuild your box and do a better job defending it in the future. But unfortunately, you my friend are victim to something far more nefarious. You are pwned by PR.

Our experts at the Institute of Self Determination have developed several strategies to cope with situations like this. Many of our clients lack the ability to simply tell their PR department NO to that next business trip. They don't want to look like an ass or be the bad guy. Or maybe they are not in a power position to say no without losing their job. Here are our four most popular self-help programs:

1. Cloning - send your replicants out to do the speaking engagements you don't want to do. This has become more difficult since villainsupply.com went out of business. They were by far the most reputable of the Evil Villain cabals that thumbed their noses at political ramifications of scientific experiments on humans. Of course there are rumors that villainsupply has merely gone deeper underground to protect their plots for world domination. Unfortunately we cannot confirm or deny this rumor or we'd have to kill you later. Our clients have to find their own cloning firm, but once they do we'll help them train and store their replicants as well as deal with the psychological trauma of losing their sense of individuality.

2. Teflon - PR requests slide off you onto someone else. We can help you develop a strategy to find, mentor, and train a flock of lackeys to send off in your place the next time a travel request comes your way. Why be randomized yourself, when you can delegate that randomization to someone else?

3. White lies - the sick parent/pet excuse. While weak, sometimes it is just easier to feign personal obligations that require you to stay home. We can help you craft a believable story that isn't so complicated you screw it up and get caught. Note that this is just a temporary solution to the pwnership problem to buy you a reprieve.

4. Acceptance - the final stage of grieving. If none of the above options work for you, we can counsel you on ways to accept your PR biatch status. Lets face it, unless you use your spine, become utterly incompetent or quit your job, PR will keep pimping you out. It will be easier on you if you learn to accept your Media Whore situation and quit fighting it.

The Institute of Self Determination is accredited in multiple temporal dimensions, provides services worldwide, and offers a variety of payment plan options. Don't let your PR department push you around any more! Contact the Institute of Self Determination and start down the road towards a more self-determined life today!


++++++++++++++++

hee hee hee. This is for a friend. He knows who he is.

~Elphie

Happy Pi Day

It only comes once a year, what are you doing to celebrate?

http://www.piday.org/

Me, I'm having pie.

~Elphie

Techno Firefly Video

This morning I found this on YouTube. I think it ROCKS. If you haven't seen Firefly you might not get as much out of it though.



Wonder if I can find it with higher quality video somewhere... the special effects in the original footage are awesome but suffer in this format...

~Elphie

Monster Names

Get Your Monster Name

Muppet Matrix

Yes, its the unholy alliance of the Muppets and The Matrix. Three ITT Tech (Louisville KY) students made this video for their 3-D graphics rendering course. Good stuff: Agent Smith, Neo, Cipher. Not so good stuff: Miss Piggy's ears are a bit long and make her look a more rabbitish than porcine. And I know that Miss Piggy is the sole female in the primary Muppets cast, but there is something just fundamentally wrong with putting her in Trinity's vinyl catsuit.

As always, Beaker is my hero.

~Elphie

Oh DOJ, what have you done?

Remember the time when the internet was no holds barred, take no prisoners competitive? A time when dot.coms flourished or failed, when pets had a place to shop (because pets can't drive!), and 10 foot tall e's were left on Netscape's front lawn to help motivate their employees to develop the best browser they could?

Alas, we are in a kinder, gentler era now. The IE team sends Mozilla a cake to congratulate them on the relase of Firefox 2. A cake. How is such friendly competition supposed to instill indignant anger in the FF development team? This must be a brilliant tactic by the borg to demotivate Mozilla employees by disarming them with kindness... that's just as plausible as there being a message in the sequence of the black/white frosting blobs...

I say to you Mozilla developers, rise up in your cubicles and shout in anger at those Redmond rascals who only coughed up the budget to send you a quarter sheet cake that will only feed a small fraction of your numbers. They didn't even send ice cream. What good is cake without ice cream?!? By the gods, the only thing more insulting would have been if they'd sent you a dozen cupcakes. Get back to your keyboards and code with the fury of those who have been scorned!

hahahahaha
~Elphie

cake photo source: http://fredericiana.com/2006/10/24/from-redmond-with-love/

More reasons to love autumn...

and for Tony to call me a geek.

1. Punkin Chunkin. Lets be clear, if you get drunk and destroy pumpkins by using them for target practice with your shotgun, that's redneck. If you take the time to build a trebuchet to launch your pumpkins vast distances and watch them explode upon impact with the ground, that's geeky. Sure, compressed air cannons are widely used for squash launching, but I prefer the trebuchet for artillery larger than my fist (maybe some other time I'll tell you all about my potato launcher and we can debate the combustible properties of Right Guard vs. Aqua Net).

You don't have to live in Delaware to enjoy Punkin Chunkin, you can find pumpkin launching in most rural areas, often at U-Pick pumpkin patches. Recognizing the lucrative business in tourist attractions like corn mazes, the pumpkin farmers have found a new way to sell their crop. After all, you may only buy one or two pumpkins for jack-o-lanters, but I bet you'll buy 8 or 10 just to see how far they'll shoot.

2. Pumpkin Bowling. This is fun for all ages. Of course adults often find it more fun when liquor is involved, just be sure your scorekeeper is relatively sober and immune to bribery by the other teams. You need a few smallish pumpkins, something you can palm fairly well and more or less spherical in shape. You don't want to use 10-16 pound pumpkins; you aren't going to be drilling finger holes in them (some websites recommend this, but it makes the game a lot messier, and beer bottles are slippery when you've got pumpkin guts on your hands). You'll also need 5-10 water bottles for pins (some people use empty 2-liter bottles filled with sand, but that's a lot more effort). I recommend playing on the lawn; you can play on concrete but you go through a lot more pumpkins that way. It's more fun than it sounds, and dorky shoes are completely optional.

Yes, I've done both. And no, I haven't gone cow tipping. Despite what you may have seen on Heathers, it takes more than two people to tip a cow. Do you realize how heavy cows are?

Happy Halloweenie

~Elphie

pumpkin trebuchet photo source: http://orca.bcnewsgroup.com/gallery/pumpkinfling/PB020875

Chevron seven... (b)locked

Legos. SG-1. The Goa'uld wish they were this cool.

Check out the blocky chappa'ai. Its a replicators dream.

~Elphie

Daily Show Geeks for sale

if you chuckle at John Hodgman selling himself as the nerdy (but lovable!) PC in the Mac ad campaign, and you enjoy the Trendspotting segments on The Daily Show, you'll probably enjoy Clearification. It is by far the strangest marketing I've ever seen from Microsoft. Not that I'm saying its a bad thing. Microsoft's ads generally suck ass. This is kind of funny, even if it is random and off the wall. Enjoy.

~Elphie

All God's creatures, fresh off the grill...

come on down to Mr.Meaty, where friends meet to eat meat.

I thought Mr.Meaty was pretty funny, in a juvenile, Beavis & Butthead sort of way. The franchise manager in the Buffalo Burrito episode cracks me up. Nickelodeon did a good job (along with Mr. Meaty creators) to pick the first 2 episodes. Buffalo Burrito focused on the store and introduces the manager & owner, while the second episode was more mall focused - the girls who hang out there and the saleslady at Pantosphere make their debut as Parkerina tries to find out 'why the ladies are hatin' on the Josh'. Just one unresolved question: why is a 1/4 Seagull w/ fries on the seafood menu? Seems more like a poultry entree to me. hah!

Of course the REALLY interesting thing about this show is how the public has reacted. There are vegetarian groups petitioning Nickelodeon to pull the show. I'm guessing they didn't even watch it first. If anything, the show makes fast food seem even grosser; it certainly didn't encourage me to go out to eat at my local mall food court. Mr. Meaty is about two teenage boys who have a typical teenage job - working at a fast food restaurant. While I respect the protesters right to peacefully assemble, I think they are being a bit ridiculous.

And while on the topic of fast food... why is it that a McDonald's cheeseburger is $0.99 but a double cheeseburger is only a penny more on the $1 menu? Is the meat really that cheap? Are buns and pickles more expensive than I thought? Is the profit margin on the single cheeseburger insanely high, while the double is being sold at a loss?

Even more mind boggling, a double cheeseburger weighs in at 460 calories, while two single cheeseburgers are 620 (and would cost you an extra $0.98). There are 160 calories in the extra bun, pickles, and condiments? That would mean that the meat and cheese in a double cheeseburger is just 300 calories - the same as a grande Caffè Mocha(no whip) from Starbucks. yikes.

~Elphie

Slanket Store is open again...

I mentioned the Slanket before, when it was sold out. But they're back. w00t.

~E

quitcherbitchen

The life of an international chinchilla smuggler is not always easy or predictable. Sometimes I am just too busy flitting through the seedy underworld of exotic pet trade to expatriate my furry leetle amigos and dodging customs agents to blog much. Its not like I can just FedEx them to their new homes around the world - though we all know I'd never use FedEx, they have no sense of humor.

While offline and transporting cargo, I am reading The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. If I'm going to mither on about identity here on the Hideaway, I should probably do a bit of organized reading on the topic. Surely there will be more soul-searching posts once I'm done feeding my brain.

In the meantime, a lot of interesting stuff has happened in the world. Dan Kaminsky has an interesting article about Net Neutrality on ComputerWorld that I highly recommend reading. Once you've read that, check out Adam Shostack's thoughts on how net neutrality impacts innovation. Adam, if you get someone to make chocolate toothpaste, I will soooooo buy some. HD Moore has announced July as the Month of Browser Bugs, I guess it is like the Year of the Dog for software. HD is a smart guy, and while I'm quite sure he is looking at all browsers, it does appear that Microsoft might have pissed him off a bit recently... whoops. surely unintentional, seeing as they've invited him to speak at not one but two of their hoity-toity BlueHat events...

There was something else interesting but I've temporarily forgotten what it was, and I've got to get back to the chinchillas. Another time...

~Elphie

new meaning for 'soda fountain'

Can't make it to Black Hat Vegas this year (lamer)? Cheer yourself up a bit by watching this outstanding abuse of carbonated beverages - you can pretend its the fountain show at the Bellagio.

Thanks D for the url. Very funny stuff.

~Elphie

Fun stuff for a Friday

Far more portable and office appropriate than my potato cannon (if you saw it, you'd understand why it isn't just a potato 'gun'), this paper clip trebuchet is a fun diversion and doesn't require as much investment in propellant and ammo.

Wired News compiled a list of the 10 worst engineering mistakes. There are no software engineering mistakes on the list - it is made up of civil, mechanical, industrial, and some electrical engineering. Surprisingly, Galloping Gertie didn't make the list.

Insider trading at Google is spiking in May. Wonder what that means.

~Elphie

Internet mental health index

From a pure geek perspective this is one of the coolest things I've seen on the internet lately.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Blog data comes from a variety of online sources, including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

Pretty neat technology, eh? As a result of the We Feel Fine project, one is reminded that there are likely a number of other people around the world who feel the same way you do - something often forgotten in monocultures and regional/demographic sub-cultures of multi-cultural populations. If urban Americans and rural Chinese share some of the same experiences and emotions, maybe that means that on the micro-societal level the goths and the jocks really aren't that different underneath the eyeliner and jerseys? We could have cats and dogs living together before you know it as we break down the stereotypes that separate us and start building relationships on our shared human experience!

Unfortunately, before we all break out into song and belt out a verse of "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing", there is inevitably a downside to this. I'm a bit freaked out by the privacy aspect of such a massive data collection endeavor.

Because a high percentage of all blogs are hosted by one of several large blogging companies (Blogger, MySpace, MSN Spaces, LiveJournal, etc), the URL format of many blog posts can be used to extract the username of the post's author. Given the author's username, we can automatically traverse the given blogging site to find that user's profile page. From the profile page, we can often extract the age, gender, country, state, and city of the blog's owner. Given the country, state, and city, we can then retrieve the local weather conditions for that city at the time the post was written. We extract and save as much of this information as we can, along with the post.

They also save any photo associated with the post. I'm suddenly having second (well, okay, third) thoughts about blogging at all. If nothing else now I've got an F word I'll do my best to avoid using here in the future.

~Elphie

Back from blogcation

tan, rested, and ready to resume blogging...

Someone anonymously submitted a comment to my recent posting about game consoles that pointed to this article about MSN's George Foreman strategy for naming. Instead of approving the comment where it would be buried in a post, I'm making it our featured topic for today (hey, its my first day back, cut me some slack). I'm assuming this is another entry in the 'unfortunate name' category because I picked on Nintendo's Wii (if you play with it too much I've heard that you'll grow hair on the palms of your hands). While a valid example, it's just too easy to pick on MSN. I mean really, this is the group responsible for the iLoo.

That said, the unfortunate-name-game is fun. What else ya got? Don't just restrict yourself to computer technology. Think globally, but do your research first so you don't look like a retard - the Chevy Nova is just an urban legend.

~Elphie

By the way, out of respect for my reader's privacy and valuable time (creating throwaway anonymous gmail accounts takes time) I've changed the blog settings so you don't have to register with Blogger to make a comment. But to cut down on spam I do still moderate comments.

Some people have waaaaay too much time on their hands

For centuries, creative people given time and resources have produced amazing things.














On the other hand, some creative people use their time this way:

• The Oracle of Starbucks
• MIDAS: Multifunction In-Dorm Automation System
• MIDAS: video
• Lord of the Peeps: Fellowship of the Peep
• Philips Bodygroom
• Poop Report

these things are also amazing in their own way; after all, Lord of the Peeps is far more entertaining than an aqueduct. But I suspect these don't possess the same durability and cultural impact as Persistence of Memory...

~Elphie