20061231

Bebo

Bebo: "Bebo is the next generation social networking site where members can stay in touch with their College friends, connect with friends, share photos, discover new interests and just hang out."


Bebo's everywhere. I finally had to cut an account and poke at it.


ashub @ bebo


No links out to homepage, limited html (no anchors!), no rss out. Weird safety blurbs throughout. Hard to find people ... conspiracy theory sez that equals page views. A well walled garden.


Ah, well, picked out a skin and found one band that I like ... Machine Head


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20061230

Don't Back Down: Leaving Bloglines for the Google Reader

Leaving Bloglines for the Google Reader: "I've been using Bloglines since a couple of days after they launched (a little over forty months now, if memory serves). I've even written a mildly popular Firefox extension for the service - the Bloglines Toolkit. It's safe to say that Bloglines has been a part of my life for a while. But it's time to move on."


The interface of the Google Reader is just better, and while the Bloglines folks have tried to upgrade their offering recently, giving it some small updates to make incremental improvements - it's like putting the proverbial lipstick on a pig."


Ah! I use the bloglines toolkit constantly for web clipping to Breadcrumbs. It's part of the reason that I seldom think of swapping feed readers. I use Rojo for high-volume, low-information feeds and don't think twice about marking all feeds read. Google Reader doesn't seem near as useful as the above, maybe if I found a few more hotkeys it could be.


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20061229

SuprGlu

SuprGlu: "500 - Internal Server Error"


Bah! I finally get around to signing up and this greets me. I wanted to collect all the feeds and dump them into the identity aggregators.


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klostu.com

klostu.com: "provides members of boards (and even blogs) advanced profiles with a growing range of social tools and useful widgets. Klostu profiles appear within the boards and will move seamlessly from one board to another, wherever the user may travel on the boardscape."


Ah, An identity service for bbses and forums. Yay. Oh, bah! Closed beta.
So weird having to create yet another id for a services forum or wiki ...


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Flickr: The DS Tie-In Games I Wanna Play

Flickr: The DS Tie-In Games I Wanna Play


Funny meme pooling onto flickr. Some of my faves are The Wall, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and The Elements of Style.

20061228

Identity aggregators

ProfileLinker Takes Meebo Approach to Social Networking: "You tell ProfileLinker your site credentials and it pulls your bio, friends and other information from those sites and centralizes it. You then use ProfileLinker to manage your activity on those networks: aggregate and manage multiple social profiles; discover new social networks and communities of interest within social networks; and receive notification of messages and friend requests from multiple networks."


Really busy website with way too many blinky things going on. A few browser crashes, even. Looks like it's trying to do central profile, though.


Guess to make it really useful you have to cough up passwords for the other sites. I'll have to create some shortdurperselves to try it out ...


ashton @ ProfileLinker


Now, Ziki on the other hand looks more like a feed aggregator with some profile links. Nice tagging and 'find similar', though. A limited set of social networks to choose from, which is odd since they don't seem to pull anything from them, but, you can still slurp feeds from whereever.


ashton @ Ziki


Gimmie a plain ole rss feed slurper and link farm anyday. Oh! And tribe finally make rss feeds for their blogs.


ashton @ Tribe


Guess I've got switch to the new version of blogger (gooblo?) and mess with the sidebar now ...


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20061227

Ask.com - Blog Search and Feed Search

Ask.com - Blog Search and Feed Search:

1 Binoculars Roll-over to preview the site without leaving the page.

2 Subscribe Subscribe to feeds using your preferred reader.

3 Post To Share results by posting them to your favorite sites."


Whoa, nice drop-down subscribe. Now if I can only remember to use it ...

20061226

Upcoming.org: News

Upcoming.org: News: "Here's a little Christmas present before the end of the year... You might have noticed a new little feature pop up on our event pages yesterday, tucked under the list of attendees -- suggested events based on the interests of everyone going."


"If you like this, you might also like..."


Awesomo linking powers!

20061224

Repeal Day, December 5th

Repeal Day: "Here's a classic Repeal Day video to get you primed and ready:"


Ah! A much better name than Twenty-first Amendment Passes Day.


"Generally, Repeal Day is celebrated with the consumption of alcoholic beverages."


I'll drink to that!

20061223

Multiply

Multiply 3.0 looks good, the combined network/group view is certainly a model that more sites should adopt. Humm, seems to me that orkut had something similar, but, I'm not finding it now.


Multiply: " Cross-posting allows you to have blog entries posted to LiveJournal, Blogger, TypePad, Xanga, or Windows Live Spaces automatically posted to Multiply as well.


Allow any combination of people from your Network, Contacts and Individuals to see your posts."


Ah! Feeds for both people and groups! Skins and CSS. Oddly there doesn't seem to be much a profile, just basic user name, picture, and location.


ashub @ multiply


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20061222

Boingy!

Oh! ashub @ multiply is the 2nd hit for boingy at Google Search.


Wack.


I shall have to abuse boingy!


boingy womble insanely!


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The Blasphemy Challenge

The Blasphemy Challenge: "You may damn yourself to Hell however you would like, but somewhere in your video you must say this phrase: 'I deny the Holy Spirit.'


Why? Because, according to Mark 3:29 in the Holy Bible, 'Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin.'"


Hat tip to BuzzFeed: "Damn yourself to hell via YouTube, win a free DVD! Wow, no one told me that my fellow comrades in the War on Christmas were HOT! We are totally gonna win this one."


Wonkette: "Our favorite part, besides checking out the cute atheist teenagers, is that they’ve advertised in Tiger Beat and Boy Scout Trail"

20061220

Mugshot

Mugshot: "Show updates from all your sites on one page. Get live updates from friends. The Mugshot website is just a backdrop for the activity that unfolds for people who have the Mugshot running on their machines.


We currently support blogs, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube, with more to come soon."


Huh, a weird combination of social identity aggregator and stalker. Not so gleeful about the download and the communities don't make much sense via a browser.


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BuzzFeed

Everyone - BuzzFeed: "'Time' magazine cops out and awards Person of the Year to you. And all you got was a whole slew of annoying blog posts about it in your RSS reader."


Heh! And they're still rolling in ...


On the bright side, BuzzFeed keeps my reading singing with things like the Blasphemy Challenge and the War on Xmas.

20061217

MingleNow

MingleNow Slides into the Social Economy: MingleNow is "online/offline social network dedicated to connecting users to their favorite clubs and bars and the people who go there."


Eeek! Those pix should have scared me away, but, noooo. Looks like they slurped places from somewheres and slapped random images on them. Ah, well, it's built, maybe they will come. Not seeing any blogging or rss feeds.


ashton @ MingleNow


Coastr also has a nice angle.


Don't really see how this will fit into the upcoming, evite, dodgeball mix ...


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SFist: MUNI Wants to Know What Love Is

SFist: MUNI Wants to Know What Love Is: "Transit Effectiveness Project are taking this whole 'listening to the people' thing to a whole other level . Mainly they now have an online survey for you, the rider, to fill out and tell them how you feel about MUNI. It's fun too. And the best part? There's a whole section where they want you to write anything that you wanted to say to MUNI."


Heh, that's going to leave a mark.


The SFCron says that a Muni deficit is projected, but fares will hold steady "Muni has raised fares twice since 2003, with the cost of a regular adult fare now at $1.50 -- a 50 percent increase. Going back for a third fare increase would not be politically palatable, particularly in a year when Mayor Gavin Newsom will be running for re-election and Muni's service reliability is slipping.


Muni is the Bay Area's busiest public transit system with about 618,000 boardings each day. But by the agency's own measures, vehicles are overcrowded, service is slowing down and missed runs are the norm."


It's even better that Office of the Mayor sez that "Newsom sponsored legislation implementing Rescue Muni's reform plan and helped put our Municipal Railway on the road to recovery."


Now, about that Central Subway ...

20061215

Social Networks are Killing Email

Social Networks are Killing Email: "so many students use chatting tools and social networking sites that MSU is even considering phasing out the #1 internet tool of the last 30 years: email accounts. Because students are online all the time and messaging through other means, there is little need for personal, school-based email accounts. Everybody simply uses the built-in tools in the virtual spaces they inhabit."


Funny. Gimmie a pipe and get out of the way. What would I need another account for?

20061214

SF Muni: Central Subway

SF Muni: Central Subway


Ugg. So Dumb. Looks like they might actually connect to existing metro stations via tunnels. They don't even make it up to Stockton or North Beach, just dump 'em off at the Lion Gate.

20061209

MySpaceIM

MySpaceIM: "Requires Microsoft Windows 98/2000/XP and Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher"


Ugg. Like that's going to happen. Why didn't they just slap in a jabber?

20061119

Dethklok, World's Most Brutal Metal Band

Dethklok! Dethklok!


I'm


ticking


for


the


Dethklok! Dethklok!


Skwisgaar Skwigelf
Taller than a tree


Toki Wartooth
Not a bumblebee


William Murderface
Murderface Murderface


Pickles The Drummer
Doodily doo ding-dong doodily-doodily doo


Nathan Explosion!


- Metalocalypse theme


Making of Dethklok, an interview with Brendon Small and Tommy Blacha.


"You may recognize this one, 'though it has not been sung for a few thousand years," - Awaken Mustakrakish


"You people out there give us something more than just record sales ... you give us something to hate." - Fan Song


"Finally, thank you for coming to see DETHKLOK live. We understand you have many METAL concert choices out there and they will all be crushed by DETHKLOK." - Pain Waiver


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20061117

Warcraft Social Network: Warcraft & Social, No longer an Oxymoron

Warcraft Social Network: "is a social utility that connects you with other players in the game. Registration is totally FREE and easy."


Eeep. How weird and nitch. Doubt this will ever come out of 'revisit' status .... Oh, and yet another rssless wonder.


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20061116

The Pound - RIP

"Sunday the 22nd was the last show at The Pound in San Francisco. Evidently, the club was evicted for reasons beyond its control by the city's Port Authority. The Pound was the place to see metal and hardcore punk in San Francisco for the past five years."


INVISIBLE ORANGES pix


"Unless you were seriously committed to black metal or hardcore, you probably never had a reason to make the long trek to the remote location in the sketchy no-man's land of Pier 96.


Though the Slim's/Great American Music Hall axis will surely pick up some of the slack, another mid-sized club could easily step in to fill the need."


SFWeekly


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20061115

Zawinski's law

Zawinski's law of software envelopment: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."


Humm, Zawinski's Law appears to apply everywhere ...

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20061113

Spokeo - Trillian for Your Social Networks

Spokeo - Trillian: "currently supports social networks Bebo, Facebox, Friendster, MySpace, Wretch, Xanga; blog, photo, and miscellaneous sites Blogger, DeviantArt, Digg, Flickr, Fotolog, ImageStation, LiveJournal, PhotoBucket, PictureTrail, Piczo, WebShots, Windows Live Spaces, Yahoo Video, YouTube."


Spokeo's a nice interface to other interfaces. It doesn't get to Myspace bulletins or show schedules were I find the value in that system. Haven't pointed it at many other YASNs yet. Looks like it's centered on a user logged into Spokeo and poking at other networks. No way to link other people's accounts together, or notes, or tags. Doesn't look like they'll make it into an identity aggregator or even a landing page. Oh well, wait and see.


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20061111

Vox

Vox is yet another blogging tool from Six Apart, Ltd. It has options for connecting to people and managing privacy at the same time.


We enabled cross-posting on public Vox posts to your LiveJournal.


ashub's vox


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20061110

GooBlo

What's new in Blogger?: "Your account won't just be a Blogger account any longer, but a full-fledged Google Account, with all the extra security and convenience that provides. If you already have a Google Account, you can merge your Blogger account with it when you switch."


If your blog is relatively private, you can choose who you want to be able to view it, and restrict access to everyone else.


Log into http://beta.blogger.com/ to access your account's new features.


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Session

Session: "How big a bummer was Prohibition? As if taking everyone’s brew away wasn’t bad enough, hundreds of little independent breweries that once made super tasty beers basically got worked. And when they went out of business, America not only lost the breweries – it lost what American beer used to taste like. Session is our way of bringing back the pre-Prohibition American Lager. It’s an all-malt Continental Pilsner brewed with American and European hops"


Oregon’s Full Sail Brewing puts rock, paper and scissors symbols on the underside of bottle caps on its Session lager, a quick way for beer-drinkers to decide who should buy the next round.


Oh! I had no idea that Full Sail made it, I'll have to try it again ...


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Brown wants to expand GPS monitoring beyond tracking sex offenders

Brown wants to expand GPS monitoring beyond tracking sex offenders: "Brown, who begins his new job in January, is keenly interested in using technology to shore up the Oakland Police Department's understaffed force.


It seems likely -- some legal experts say it's inevitable -- that the growth and expansion of electronic tethers to monitor and restrict society's most-violent offenders is the future of crime and punishment."


Ugg. Round up the usual suspects.


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klostu.com

klostu.com: "Signup to the system is limited to BETA users only. "


Oh, fine, a dozen blogs start hyperventilating and it's beta only. Bleh. Where's my invite social network network?


Matthew Hurst talks about his account: "Klostu offers a single web identity - like a board or blog profile with no associated publication. Your Klostu home page (here's mine) is composed of the now familiar drag-and-drop editable AJAX style page."


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20061109

Bloglines Glimpse and Playlists

Bloglines: "Playlists lets you create short groupings of feeds to access from your main list. Want a quick look of those Playlists you just created? That's what Glimpse is for. Click on one of your Playlists in your left nav and you'll see the first five posts for every feed in that Playlist."


Humm, messed with them a couple of times. I don't really see the point. A tease of news like Newsburst or Google Homepage. I much prefer a feed or a river to a tease ...

We're All Prisoners

We're All Prisoners, Now: "The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has proposed that all airlines, cruise lines-even fishing boats-be required to obtain clearance for each passenger they propose taking into or out of the United States."


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Facebook adds blogging feature

Facebook adds blogging feature: "social networking site Facebook has added a blogging feature that lets users 'share thoughts and stories with friends' via a Notes page that they are assiduously not calling a blog."


Oh, yay, yet another almost ran. Facebook opened reg, too. I'll try to contain my excitement.


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Cultspace

Cultspace FAQ: "You must make your own cult if you want to be part of a cult. Cultspacers are leaders, not followers! If you want to support a cult, you can start one of your own and team up."



Cult of Cultspace

The Cult of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Asteriskianity*

D) All of the above.

*Asteriskianity is its own footnote.

20061107

Jabber

Google Talk You can connect to the Google Talk service using Google's own client, as well as your favorite Jabber/XMPP client


LJ Talk Talk to your LiveJournal friends in real time with LJ Talk, LiveJournal's new instant messaging feature. LJ Talk uses Jabber.

20061106

orkut

Logged in to orkut to clean out a bunch of whingemail. It certainly is faster, but, there's still not much activity in the communities. Plus it's still does not play well with others, some rss feeds or poking around without being logged in would be grand. However, gazing at the Antisocial Networks Community is worth the price of admission.


Ashton @ orkut


There so much 'gimmie account' on my 43Things that I even cleaned things and 'will help' settings.


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20061104

Dethklok

Dethklok! Dethklok!


I'm


ticking


for


the


Dethklok! Dethklok!


Skwisgaar Skwigelf

Taller than a tree


Toki Wartooth

Not a bumblebee


William Murderface

Murderface Murderface


Pickles The Drummer

Doodily doo ding-dong doodily-doodily doo


Nathan Explosion!


Finally, thank you for coming to see DETHKLOK live. We understand you have many METAL concert choices out there and they will all be crushed by DETHKLOK.

Pain Waver


Dethklok, World's Most Brutal Metal Band


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MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog: "everyone who reads a web site or blog can learn about and engage with one another. Readers can become friends with other people who read your favorite blogs."


Yay! YASNN! Oh, well. I'll resist messing with the sidebars or link pages for a while ...


Ashub @ MyBlogLog


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20060828

Upcoming.org: News: Undiscovered Events, Flickr Integration, and More

Upcoming.org: "Today, we're very happy to announce a new section called Undiscovered Events. Unlike all the active events on Upcoming, this is a very deep well of events that Upcoming members haven't added yet, collected from around the web and updated daily by our friends over at Yahoo! Local."


And it rocks!

20060821

Hail Eris! All hail Discordia!

Oh! BBG kicked out a few oddities today


Hail Eris! All hail Discordia!: "A Little Game ... About a Lot of Chaos."


Necronomonopoly is a satirical game about land-grabbing the Cthulhu Mythos.


ashnod @ bbg


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20060816

Eons: Getting Started

Eons: Getting Started: "Eons.com is a free website celebrating the life that begins at 50. We invite you to start thinking about your unprecedented opportunity to travel and explore, to re-invent your career, to nurture relationships, to give back to your community – to live the biggest life possible.


Eons has established the largest national database of obituaries in the United States."


Now that's dead2.0!

20060705

The Onion

The Onion 6-12 July 1906 "The Best Source of Newsworthy Items In Our Great Republic."


Ooold typeset and pic. Get a printed copy (which has excellent show and event listings).

Skeletal Systems

Michael Paulus :: Skeletal Systems: "I decided to take a select few of these popular characters and render their skeletal systems as I imagine they might resemble if one truly had eye sockets half the size of its head, or fingerless-hands, or feet comprising 60% of its body mass."


Pretty!

20060628

Street fairs

"Some residents want to see the street fairs scaled back to something more like a block party, either by banning alcohol sales, curtailing the hours or limiting the number of street closures. Others want fairs moved off city streets and into Golden Gate Park, Crissy Field or even Candlestick Park."

SFGate


"We'll have to cancel this year's festival," Robbie Kowal, who runs the North Beach Jazz Festival, said of the possibility of not getting his alcohol permit. "Seventy-five percent of our funding comes from the sale of alcohol."

San Francisco Bay Guardian



"At this point one wants to shriek, "Move back to Mountain View, spoilsports!" And that's exactly the message of the San Francisco Party Party, the latest grassroots effort to combat what Party Party leader Ted Strawser calls "the rampant suburbanization of the most gloriously hedonistic city on earth.""
San Francisco Bay Guardian


"On Thursday, Mayor Gavin Newsom said he was undecided, but leaning in favor of ending the event."
SFGate



San Francisco Party Party

20060623

Rojo Gets Faster

RojoBlog: New! Rojo Gets Faster - and a Whole New Look: "Faster Performance And finally, we’ve now made feed reading much snappier. Now you can read your favorite blogs and news sources faster than ever."


Ugg. Still snot slow and tab unfriendly. I use it for feeds to lump and gloss.

20060515

Tapped

Tapped: "One thing the Bush administration says it can do with this meta-data is to start tapping your calls and listening in, without getting a warrant from anyone. Having listened in on your calls, the administration asserts that if it doesn't like what it hears, it has the authority to detain you indefinitely without trial or charges, torture you until you confess or implicate others, extradite you to a Third World country to be tortured, ship you to a secret prison facility in Eastern Europe, or all of the above. "

20060511

Google Trends

Google Trends: "Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results -- our search-volume graph."


The Googling of Google Fight!

20060504

Tribal trouble

Odd to get news of Tribe.net trouble from fuckedcompany. Guess that's just the way that the rss feed bounces. (and the fact that almost all of my tribe posting is pulled via rss feeds anymore).


Looks like 10 people got the boot. Which is pretty odd timing since they've just created yet another tribe tribe and two redesigned homepages.


Tags:

20060429

White Fox News House

CNN.com: "Fox News is popular with at least one highly placed person in the White House. According to the Web site "The Smoking Gun," whenever Vice President Dick Cheney stays in a hotel room, he requests extra lights, copies of five newspapers and the television tuned to Fox."


Andy Borowitz: Fox News - White House Merger Complete: "The merger between Fox News and the White House can be summed up in one word: synergy," Mr. Snow said. "The two entities have been working in lockstep for five years now and this merger is a formal acknowledgment of that fact."

Securesingles.com

Heh, Securesingles.com allows you to send yourself sms to get out of bad dates. That's certainly worth a few clams ...


"Our Timed Release Notification system enables you to share folders about contacts with family members and/or friends should the need arise. Our photo and document storage allows you to create detailed contact profiles to share as a safety precaution (your timed-release messages will be sent ONLY if you do not cancel them prior to the scheduled delivery time)."

20060428

Brains!

The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy: Little Rock of Horror wherein Billy befriends an alien meteor that eats everybody's brain to the tune of 'BRAINS!' by Voltaire (which can be found on his CD Boo Hoo).


"Well, hello there, little boy, don't be shy,
Step right up; I'm a reasonable guy!
Don't be frightened by the look in my eye,
I'm just your average evil meteor from out of the sky."

Skelly Dance

JohnK has articles about rubber hose animation from 1928-1993.


Fun to see The Silly Symphony Skeleton Dance


In the The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: Hill Billy "Billy wants to learn how to juggle chickens, so he visits Uncle Chokey, the chicken juggler legend. Soon, the farm turns into that of a retro black-and-white cartoon."


When the black and white format overtakes Grim, he looks down at his altered bones and says in disgust, "Oh, great. There goes my whole design ethic!"


Then Grim goes on to do the the Skelly Dance!

20060427

delicious people

del.icio.us: it's made out of people: "You can add other del.icio.us users to your network either by visiting their del.icio.us pages or from the your network page itself. Once someone is in your network, you can keep track of their latest saved public bookmarks."


Much nicer than the subscribe/inbox model that was there before ...

Coolest Beers

Forbes.com: "As Harper and Oliver so pithily put it: “…many of these beers are marvels of technology and quality control that, when combined with successful mass marketing have allowed big American brewers to make beers with virtually no taste at all.”"

20060426

Saturdays In the Park!

SFist sez : "Yesterday, the Board of Supes approved by a 7-4 vote a measure to close off part of Kennedy Drive on Saturdays just as it is on Sundays. All eyes now turn to Gavin to see if he'll veto the measure. How or what will sway him nobody knows-- we're guessing it'll be whatever gets him another photo spread."


Yay! Death Monsters have to go away, far away, for to stay.

Top Chef

Sheesh, SFist has a huge write up on Bravo's Top Chef. And really, the SF cityscapes alone are worth watching the show.


"Lee Anne is distraught -- she's teamed with "the big thinker" (Lex (a.k.a. Stephen), naturally) and the "no thinker" (Miguel). Chef Tom says that the competition ain't called "top sous chef.""

20060424

PerlWar

PerlWar is inspired by the classic Corewar game. In this game, players pit snippets of Perl code (called 'agents') against each other in order to gain control of the vicious virtual battlefield known as... the Array.

20060423

Joss Whedon

Joss Sez: "And what of me? My short-lived series Firefly was the basis for the epic action film Serenity (now available on DVD! I have little or no shame), and the future will see even more incarnations of this visionary work, as it returns to TV as Serenity: The Firefly Years, then back to film as Firefly: Serenity's Sequel, back to TV as SereniFly, and finally end as the direct-to-eyeglasses series Choose a Damn Name Already. I promise it'll be as heartwarming and exciting as the original Serenity, now available on DVD. (Explain again this thing you call shame....)"


Amy at TVbloggin' sez: "Dear Joss --- Please come back to TV! We miss ya.


This was the obsession that started it all for me, and I will always feel that the television universe is not complete without a show from the Whedonverse included in the Prime Time TV listings."


Funny, the DVR suddenly started spitting out old Buffy's and I just can't seem to avert my eyes ...

Who Wants To Be A Superhero?

Who Wants To Be A Superhero?: "The SCI FI Channel, Nash Entertainment, and legendary comic-book creator Stan Lee will produce a six-episode, one-hour weekly competition reality series that will challenge a lucky few to create their very own superhero. The winner of this six-week competition will walk away with their superhero immortalized in a new comic book created by Stan Lee himself. It gets better: The winning character will also appear in an original SCI FI Channel movie!"


Caught the end of one. Weird. Dunno if they're just going to expire off the the dvr before I get to them ...

TVGuide Blogs

TVGuide: "Over 65 entertainment blogs are now live on the site, featuring expert reporting and commentary from writers and editors from both TV Guide magazine and TVguide.com. Every user can create his or her own blog about entertainment using TVGuide.com's simple blogging tools."


HBO also busted out some Blogs


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20060419

LiveJournal Ads

news: Introducing a new account level: "The Sponsored account level is an option for users who want access to premium features but would rather have advertising on their journal and Friends page and in the LiveJournal site than purchase a Paid account."


Read on (or flame-on as the case may be) at LJ Ads or LJ biz


Tag:

Beer And Movies At The Red Vic!

SFist: "The Board of Supervisors has agreed to allow beer and wine to be served at the Red Vic movie theatre. "


The Independent has a good run of silly movies but you have to have a couple of drinks. (Darn!)

20060416

Star Trek!

G4 breaks out a whole set of Star Trek: The Original Series. Check out the action figure promos, the karaoke one cracks me up.


Jive Magazine sez "G4's four on-air promotional spots use stop-motion animation to bring Star Trek action figures to life in contemporary urban settings: a coffeehouse, a swimming pool, a karaoke bar, and Spock's "crib." In "Karaoke," the first of the spots to air on YouTube, Spock performs Bobby Brown's "My Prerogative" -- complete with Vulcan salute -- to an enthusiastic, jumping crowd that includes Kirk, Scotty, Bones, Uhura, Sulu and Chekov. The characters are voiced by comedic actors, including Craig Kilborn as Captain Kirk, and Charlie Murphy of "Chappelle's Show" as Mr. Spock."

USGS Latest Earthquakes: Feeds & Data

USGS has real-time earthquake maps for Google Earth! As well as rss feeds that contain basic information (date, location, and magnitude) about each earthquake and a link to a detailed report.


My feed reader does the happy earthquake dance!

San Francisco Rising

San Francisco Rising

1906 Earthquake Centennial

SFgate: The Great Quake


Memorial at Lotta's Fountain, Market and Kearny Streets
Tuesday, April 18, 4:30 a.m. – 5:30 a.m.


Golden Hydrant Painting Celebration, 20th and Church Streets, Dolores Park
Tuesday, April 18, 7:00 a.m.


The Golden Fire Hydrant at Twentieth and Church was painted gold and returned to service, where it remains. Each April 18, it receives a fresh coat of golden paint. To this day, nobody knows where the water came from."


Muni is offering Free Service on All Lines 3am Tuesday, April 18, through 3am Wednesday, April 19, 2006. They'll even open the Metro subway at 3:00am!


Da Slickster has asked that any "places of worship" and fire departments to ring their bells in a citywide cacophony ensured to wake up just about everyone in the city at 5:14 am tomorrow morning.

20060414

Bloglines

Bloglines | Clip/Blog: "There is a problem with the database. Please try again later"


Sheesh, bad week at bloglines. (wish that I could googlefight 'bloglines sucks' vs 'bloglines rocks'). Glad that I moved a stack of feeds over to rojo, even if their flag feature is a poor way of holding them until I can clip them to bloglines. Sheesh, they're even forcing me to blog. Bah!


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South Park

BBC NEWS: "Comedy Central prevented Matt Stone and Trey Parker from using the image after the furore caused by a Danish newspaper publishing caricatures of Muhammad.


"Either it's all okay, or none of it is," Kyle tells the executive. "Do the right thing."


It's all in the timing ... last week, South Park won US broadcasting's prestigious Peabody prize.


Seems like the banned episode is floating around ... as is Trey and Matt singing "What would Brian Boitano do If he was here right now?" and, someone actually asked Brian what he would do!

New lingo sweeping London

Aljazeera.Net: London's cockney rhyming phrases have been taken over by a new type of multicultural-influenced speech, dubbed Jafaican and Tikkiny.


Researchers found that a new type of speech, influenced by a dizzying number of foreign languages and pronunciations, rap music and popular TV programmes, have altered traditional cockney."

the Daily Mail: "What has emerged is a distinctive inner-London patois which borrows heavily from Jamaican creole, lifting some words unchanged.


But it has been influenced by other speech patterns, mainly Bangladeshi and West African, with a little South American and Arab thrown in.


An analysis of vowel sounds has shown the traditional long Cockney vowels are becoming shorter. The word 'face' sounds like 'fice' in cockney but more like 'fehs' in Jafaican."

20060412

Mark Pincus Blog: Today marks the peak of social networking

Mark Pincus: "Today marks the peak of social networking at least that's my prediction. in the past week i've been pitched on three more social networking ideas. while i like and respect the people, i got a queezy (sp?) feeling hearing the ideas. painful reminders of march 2000 when the last people to show up were still pitching ecommerce it ideas."


Heh, Social 2.0. I think that I've signed up for one beta a week for months now.

20060409

Sex Sells in Second Life

Second Sex: "The May issue of Computer Gaming World looks at the online sex trade in Linden Labs' Second Life. The article, 'Escort Mission,' includes interviews with digital escort girls and johns.


However, the CGW piece isn't just a romp into the underbelly of Second Life, but also looks at the real world cost of sex in Second Life. The article points out that for clients a penis, simply to participate costs L$1500, (that's Second Life's currency) or a little under six dollars. Similarly, the CGW piece points out that an online brothel collecting 20% per 'trick' would net roughly $47,608 dollars a year. And that figure isn't in Second Life money.

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Britain's new FBI-style agency logo are all Thundercat!

SOCA: "If you're launching yourself as Britain's FBI and say you will make the lives of organised criminals 'hell' then you need a dynamic logo to match the job. The Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) has chosen a fierce big cat bearing its fangs and leaping over a stylised silver globe, with a crown capping it all. It's bold but bears a striking resemblance to the logo of the 1980s children's cartoon series Thundercats. "


Someone with a brand clue rips the logo ...


SOCA are Go!

20060408

Wired News: Antisocial Networking Gets Hip

Antisocial Networking: "Snubster is among the latest in a series of sites created to poke fun at social networking. Others include Isolatr, a spoof site that claims to be 'helping you find where other people are not,' and Introverster, which bills itself as 'an online community that prevents stupid people and friends from harassing you online.'"
Snubster is among the latest in a series of sites created to poke fun at social networking. Others include Isolatr, a spoof site that claims to be "helping you find where other people are not," and Introverster, which bills itself as "an online community that prevents stupid people and friends from harassing you online."

head-banging bookworms

Heavy metal's unalloyed love for the literary: "So what's with all the head-banging bookworms?


The Brazilian heavy metal band Sepultura latest release is 'Dante XXI,' an album based on the Italian poet's 'Divine Comedy.' And Mastodon recently became metal's newest stars with 'Leviathan,' a 'Moby Dick'- inspired album with songs like 'I Am Ahab' and 'Seabeast.'


Sepultura and Mastodon are only the latest metal bands to raid their Norton Anthologies for inspiration. Perhaps more than any other genre, heavy metal and the classics are joined at the hip.


With his clumsy prose and often meandering plots, H.P. Lovecraft still struggles decades after his death for respect in the literary world. But in the metal world, his weird tales blare from Marshall amps the world over."


Clawing to the top of the Lit-Core stacks, would be Bloodhag who even name songs after authors. "Our mission is to spread the gospel of Edu-Core. Bang The Head That Does Not Read. Everyone Smarter Than Everyone Else. Use Heavy Metal music to promote literacy and vice versa."


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20060407

MySpace phones, rings.

Cingular to sell ringtones from MySpace bands: "Cingular Wireless said on Thursday it plans to sell ringtones from bands that put their music on MySpace.com, the social Web site that is popular among teenagers."


and


The Helio Mobile Phone, a joint venture between Earthlink and SK Telecomaa has announced plans to allow subscribers to read and post to the MySpace site for free."

The "wiki" in the swicki

swicki: "we released a nifty new feature on the results page that allows any user to delete, promote, edit or add search results right from the results page. Now, in addition to the 'implicit' votes that users cast by clicking on results, they can vote 'explicitly'."


Mucked around with a Strange Food swiki. It's cool, but, takes a fair amount of care and feeding. Dunno if I'll ever really get it tuned. I use it for researching posts and I can see how it could sing if you had a few people banging on it ...

20060404

tribe.net

tribe.net: "We need your help! Based on feedback from our members, it's pretty clear that the Members icon (in the masthead, with the smiling people) has got to go"


Heh, guess that they got tired of the 'corrections'.


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20060402

Zombie!

I love the Weather Zombie in The Cron's 96 Hours. Seems like Sacha Eckes did the pix.


zombies also rule Consumating, probably because of the Feedback Zombie, "a 66-year old boy in san francisco, ca. He last logged in on March 31, 2006. He is in an open relationship."


Heck, they even asked "What would you do if zombies walked the Earth?" My fav answer being The power of Christ compels you!


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20060316

Nearest Neighbor News Network

Nearest Neighbor News Network: "was a student project, created by Jacob Lee and Ben Hodes at UIUC, that operated from around January 2005 until October 2005. It combined an RSS news aggregator with a collaborative filtering system for article recommendation."


Whaa! I still miss it (and the feeds that it took with it). I shuffled an old ompl export from it (along with a few from bloglines) to another 'river of news' feed aggregator, rojo. Mostly 'low value' and 'high noise' feeds like news and web2.0 feeding frenzy. The view is simple and clean and having multiple tags (as folders) per feed is nice. 'Shared Mojo' on stories is more useful if you don't read everything all the time, as I do. The today view certainly helps, even if I do tend to see stories multiple times.


I still 'triage' feeds into bloglines, much because of the brilliant firefox extension LiveLines, and frankly the subscribe dialog in rojo is poor, and it's a huge pain to get to a feed homepage.


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20060228

Paying For a Muni Ride

SFist: "The best part of The Examiner's article is a quote by Muni's official apologist Maggie Lynch: “People think paying their $1 doesn’t matter, but it does.' That's nice. Does paying the additional 50 cents matter, too, or is that optional? Because the fare hasn't been $1 for a long time, you know, Maggie. Sigh. We can't help but wonder how Muni might improve if the people in charge of it actually rode it every once in a while."


"Hey, take one guess: what's the worst place on the web for finding up-to-date news about Muni? That would be Muni's very own website, of course, which despite having a section for "new links" bears abosolutely no mention of its new study showing that fifty percent of riders don't pay."


Hrump, looks like they forgot they used to have rss feeds. Bart has one, but, they don't bother to feed us anything but marketing.

Controlling RSS Overload

Controlling RSS Overload: "I've found a solution Dean Wormer would be proud of. Probation, double secret probation.


Most aggregators allow you to create 'groups' for your blogs. Into the Probation group goes every new blog I add to my aggregator. EVERY one. Consider it a quarantine tank for your RSS aquarium. Once a month, go through your Probation group and cull the herd, promoting some to the big leagues, while giving others the boot."


That's just what I do. Everything ends up in a Bloglines folder called 'Add'. Sometimes they get moved to a high value folder on Bloglines, sometimes they get moved to a low value 'river' on Rojo, and sometimes they malinger until cleanup. I also move (or retag) feeds to 'Kill' to take a second look at them on the way out ...


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20060220

Identity Production in a Networked Culture

Identity Production in a Networked Culture by danah boyd

"What we're seeing right now is a cultural shift due to the introduction of a new medium and the emergence of greater restrictions on youth mobility and access.

Having to simultaneously negotiate youth culture and adult surveillance is not desirable to most youth, but their response is typically to ignore the issue.

Teenager's space segmentation is slightly different. Most of their space is controlled space. Adults with authority control the home, the school, and most activity spaces.

MySpace is both the location of hanging out and the cultural glue itself. MySpace and IM have become critical tools for teens to maintain "full-time always-on intimate communities" where they keep their friends close even when they're physically separated."

20060217

The Mark of the Card

Contactless cards work when you hold them 1 or 2 inches from a special radio-frequency reader. Because you don't need to show them to a cashier, swipe them, sign a receipt or enter a PIN, they speed checkout.

Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover are promoting the tap-and-go cards for use when buying something quick and cheap -- garlic fries at AT&T Park, a Slurpee at 7-Eleven, a prescription at Walgreens, a Happy Meal at McDonald's, or movie tickets at AMC, Loews, Regal and Cinemark theaters."

Discover is testing cell phones with contactless chips.

American Express offers the cards, which it calls ExpressPay, under its Blue line of credit cards"

It used to be that when you lost your phone, you lost all your friends. Now you can loose a credit line along with them!

20060206

Western Union Stops Sending Telegrams

Western Union Stops Sending Telegrams: "After 145 years, Western Union has quietly stopped sending telegrams."


Whoa, weird. I've never even seen one. I missed!

Stuperbowl

What was that Dr. Seuss/Harrison Ford/NFL thing? That was just wrong.


Full Throttle (an new energy drink from Coca-Cola) showed male clichés chasing after a advertising can. The tagline is "Let Your Man Out." As SFist sez: "because Full Throttle is for men. Men who like the taste of ass"


The Seahawks ran out to "Bittersweet Symphony" by The Verve and I said "What the hell? What kind of theme song is that?" Then the Steelers had with "Right Here, Right Now" by Fatboy Slim. They win. Game over. Sheesh, you'd think that they could have found something that rocked in the last 5 years.


Burger King puts on a Busby Berkeley musical number. All Singing, All Dancing! Whopperettes had funny burger bit costumes (loved the Onion). Each bit flopped down to make the hambuger, making a grunting noise. They even said 'Freaky King'.


Jennifer Loves the Robot a site created by the Monster to commemorate their love. Funny. The monsters were done by Stan Winston! The monster mix mp3s were fun, too. I've seen it before, and still Hummer wins!


Go Daddy couldn't get the right tone to get a decent commercial on the air. You can see the duds at ifilm.


The Leonard Nimoy/Aleve bit worked. He "couldn't do it", took Aleve, and was able to give the Vulcan salute to an audience of Trekkies.


The Beer Institute's Superbowl ad 'Here's To Beer' had people from all over saying "cheers". I thought that it was Yet Another Bud Ad until near the end. A really nice ad on any other day.


"According to a National Retail Federation poll, this year 15.3 percent of respondents said the ads were the chief reason they tuned into the game, as opposed to some 33 percent who said the game itself was the main draw." - Daily News


ifilm

Google Video


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The Cookie Monsters of Death Metal!

Cookie Monsters of death-metal music: "Death-metal vocalizing is also known as Cookie Monster singing, if not in tribute to, at least in acknowledgment of, the "Sesame Street" puppet that blurts in a guttural growl, his words discharged so rapidly that they tend to collide with each other."


"The term also signifies a level of incomprehensibility of the lyrics, which in most cases is absolute. Given the subject matter, that's probably for the best"


Whoa, Wall Street Journal Online is Metal!


San Fransicko is certainly doing it's part with both Cookie Mongoloid and The Dead Hensons crumbling the cookie.

Cartoons of Muhammad

Ah! The dreaded Cartoon of Muhammad


Cagle has a pointer to a 'particularly offensive collection' on the subject.



A Pakistani cleric announced Friday a $1 million bounty for killing a cartoonist who drew Prophet Muhammad.

20060125

If Big Brother is watching us, let's give him something to chew on

If Big Brother is watching us, let's give him something to chew on: "A Knight Ridder report revealed that in 2003 lawmakers attempted to rein in Bush's abuse of signing statements by passing a bill that required the Justice Department to inform Congress whenever BushCo decided to ignore a legislative provision. Bush signed the bill into law -- but then immediately issued a signing statement asserting his right to ignore it. Ah, the nauseating poetry of it all."

Finally! E Ink for the masses!

Screening the Latest Bestseller


The Sony Reader might be just the ticket to kick the e-book market into high gear.


Scheduled to go on sale this spring for between $300 and $400, the Reader is a compact slab about the size of a small paperback book (5-by-7 inches, and a half-inch thick). But it's the 3.5-by-4.8-inch display that made it the buzz of the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month in Las Vegas.


"Sony has said that the Reader will be able to display content from RSS feeds and from PDF files in addition to e-books in Sony's own BBeB format."

20060124

Loompanics, Exit stage left

Loompanics: "Welcome to our Final supplement, and sadly our going out of business sale. All books are 50% off their original price (including everything in the large 2005 Main Catalog). "

20060119

Gmail delete!

About Gmail: "Now there's an easy-to-find delete button for those messages you really don’t want."


Finally! Sheesh.

20060118

SFist: Muni to Presidio Commuters: "F**k You All"

SFist: Muni to Presidio Commuters: "F**k You All": "Case in point: the temporary re-routing of the 43. We don't know where to begin with the number of ways this could have been a minor inconvenience, but morphed into a major s**t-storm due to -- what? Incompetance? Laziness? Malice? We just can't figure out how it's possible for transit to suck so bad.


Our guess is that it has something to do with their allegiance to Satan."


Heh! The N has certainly been sucking recently. Impending Second Meltdown?


Ah! The Great Renamaing as in the 22 Fillmore is Twenty Too Late to Matter

20060117

Road music

Road music: "Datebook writers and critics have compiled their own playlists", even one for the 22 MUNI bus.


It would be fun to cut soundtracks for a commute and then jack them ...

20060112

SF Metro Improvement Project

Metro Improvement Project: as of January 17 the Metro Underground (Embarcadero through Church)will be closed after 10pm.


Poking around, I did find the Metro Map online!

20060105

eStarling Flickr Enabled LCD Frame

ThinkGeek :: eStarling Wi-Fi Gmail / Flickr Enabled LCD Frame: "The eStarling frame is a standalone Wi-Fi LCD photo frame that connects to a wireless network and automatically displays photos e-mailed to it in a slideshow format. Additionally you can specify an RSS photo feed from Flickr based on your own tagged keywords. You can even shoot photos on your mobile phone then e-mail them directly to your eStarling frame for display. If you install a CF or SD card with photos into the eStarling frame these will go into rotation on the frame along with any photos received via e-mail or Flickr photo feeds"


Now there's a strange bit of tech. A picture frame that supports rss and pop!