20080228

Iron Chef Boyardee

Iron Chef Boyardee: "Iron Chef America is more bogus than even I had imagined. ... The choice of Iron Chef had clearly been made much earlier, because two of the Iron Chefs standing on the pedestals in roiling clouds of fog were out-and-out imposters."

A fun spectator rant. The long shots of the three (three, not four, and not five) Iron Chefs has always bugged me ...

And, in other Food Frenzy news, Top Chef foie-hawks

20080227

AdFreak: Poker-faced Enzyte maker caught bluffing

AdFreak: Poker-faced Enzyte maker caught bluffing: "The man behind Enzyte is facing more than 20 years in prison and millions in forfeited revenue after a federal jury found him guilty Friday of conspiracy to commit mail fraud, bank fraud and money laundering.

Prosecutors claimed customers were bilked out of $100 million through a series of deceptive ads, manipulated credit card transactions and the company's refusal to accept returns or cancel orders.” Steve Warshak, the founder and president of Enzyte distributor Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, was convicted along with his mother."

Huh, I could swear that I was still seeing commercials. Maybe they were long-running pre-pays or maybe I'm watching really old dvr shows ...

20080226

Forumwarz

Forumwarz - Spoilerpedia - Main Page: "Forumwarz is the first 'Massively Single-Player' online RPG completely built around Internet culture."

A role-playing game so epic you will never again leave your mom's basement!



When you enter a forum, a Toolbar will be placed on the bottom of your screen. It is your primary battle interface.

Your Toolbar displays your Ego and Secondary Attribute on the right-hand side. Keep an eye on them, because if your Ego runs out you will die!

David Allen


I’d say enough coffee, enough alcohol, enough humor and you can handle anything.

David Allen

The Battle for Craft Beer

The Battle for Craft Beer: "Home-brewing is currently illegal in Alabama. A brewpub can only operate in a historical building situated in a county that sold alcohol pre-Prohibition. You can be fined for bringing two cases of beer into dry counties. And most problematic for craft-suds fiends like Carter, Alabama (along with Mississippi and West Virginia) prohibits the sale of beer that’s higher than 6 percent alcohol by volume (5 percent alcohol by weight)—just a bit stronger than a Budweiser (which has 5 percent ABV)."

Whoa, I knew that there were goofy laws on the books, state liquor stores, dry sundays, and the ilk. But, capping beer alcohol percent is cruel and quite odd.

20080225

Bloglines Suffers Major Outage

Bloglines Suffers Major Outage: "RSS reader Bloglines has suffered a major outage over the weekend with the service simply ceasing to update any blogs from just before midnight PST February 24.

Bloglines users are not happy with the outage, with some already signing up for other services, and other comments including such as “Remember when they at least showed the plumber?”"

Awww, drat. And here I thought that I caught up all by myself. Sheesh, they still haven't posted to the bloglines blog.

Ditto for assetbar

20080224

Bloglines | My Feeds (628) (14)

50/850 feeds bloglines
540/168, 2 friends greader
/50 feeds, 0/6 friends assetbar, mostly greader shares

and, wow, does greader do the epic fail with just a few hundred feeds

Living Card Games

Fantasy Flight launches “Living Card Games”: "a new sales model for A Game of Thrones and Call of Cthulhu collectible card games. Both games will fall under the new banner of the “Living Card Game,” or LCG. The LCG format will feature starter boxes with a large assortment of cards. Rather than traditional random blind booster pack releases three or four times per year, an LCG will have monthly releases all year round. Every month, FFG will produce a new pack containing 40 fixed cards for $9.95 – one each of

10 cards, and three each of another 10 – allowing the game to grow and evolve, yet letting new players easily join in down the line."

Odd format, but certainly better than Tragic: the Addiction's brain dumps of 250+ cards, some of which were obviously broken (Umezawa’s Jitte, Fact or Fiction, Gifts Ungiven). I'm certainly in for a couple of cycles ...

20080223

O Noes!

Parrot 0.5.2 "P.e. nipalensis" Released - parrotcode: "Parrot now has a LOLCODE implementation! Not an 'enterprise-class' computing language, you say? We don't expect anyone to use it for their next app, but at less than 500 lines of source code (and most of that in a subset of Perl 6), it demonstrates the power of the Parrot Compiler Toolkit. See http://lolcode.com/news/i-haz-a-parrot


HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
PLZ OPEN FILE "LOLCATS.TXT"?
AWSUM THX
VISIBLE FILE
O NOES
INVISIBLE "ERROR!"
KTHXBYE

filezorz

Wordz Fail.

Golden Clog Awards

Eater SF: SobeWire: Live-Blogging the 2008 Golden Clog Awards: "THE ALTON For being on Food Network and yet, somehow managing to Not Suck"

heh, some goodly bits from The Bourdain and The Ruhlman.

20080218

Every child in school numbered for life

Every child in school numbered for life - Times Online: "The new database will be known as MIAP (managing Information Across Partners). To be registered on the new database every 14-year-old will be issued with a unique learner number. The ULN will be used by government agencies to track individuals until they retire. Ultimately, it will create a numbered database for every citizen aged 14-plus in the UK."

I feel safer already!

Adactio: Journal—Foo fighting

Adactio: Journal—Foo fighting: "My subject was the password anti-pattern. Brave representatives from Facebook, Plaxo, Twitter, LinkedIn, Dopplr and Pownce showed up to be named and shamed (though most of the shame was reserved for Google in not providing an API for contacts). I can’t talk too much about some of the things that were said but it was by turns frustrating, exhilarating, inspiring and depressing."

Nice that someone's out there swingin'.

Ben 10 Turns 15 As Cartoon Network Fave Targets Tweens


When the new show, Ben 10: Alien Force, premiers this spring, Ben will be 15 years old. The 10 in his name refers to the number of new aliens Ben can transform into when using the “Omnitrix.

With Ben now an adolescent, merchandising can now include remote control vehicles, electronics and other categories, which wouldn’t have made sense tying in with a tween character.

This is one of the first times a show at the height of its popularity is aging its lead character.

Ben 10 Turns 15 As Cartoon Network Fave Targets Tweens

Aging a character makes sense, but, somehow offends my TV-given sensibilities. The pitch must have been funny, "just think of the advertising!'

20080214

Yahoo! oneConnect


Yahoo! oneConnect will be the first mobile product with an open architecture that aggregates communications tools - email, instant messaging (IM), text messaging (SMS), and social networks.

Give consumers the capability to view their contacts by their most recent status updates on popular social networks, as well as update their own status on their favorite social networks.

Yahoo! oneConnect

Whoa, a mobile social Aggregator. That should leave a dent in the market, but, it seems like a weird one-off. Sure is ugly.

20080212

Haiku/BeOS

Haiku brings back those BeOS glory days - Engadget: "open source replacement for the gone-but-not-forgotten BeOS of yore is maturing nicely,"

Haiku is an open-source operating system currently in development designed from the ground up for desktop computing. Inspired by the BeOS,

http://www.haiku-os.org/

20080205

Textonyms


A new language is being developed by mobile phone-addicted kids based on the predictive text of their treasured handsets.

Key words are replaced by the first alternative that comes up on a mobile phone using predictive text -- changing 'cool' into 'book', 'awake' into 'cycle', 'beer' into adds', 'pub' into 'sub' and 'barmaid' into 'carnage'.

The replacement words -- technically paragrams, but commonly known as textonyms, adaptonyms or cellodromes -- are becoming part of regular teen banter."


Textonyms give mobile phone addicts a new language�


Textonyms! Cellodromes! Swoon!

Nip Joints

Nip Joints: "Nip joints, also known as shot houses, are unlicensed establishments (usually private residences) where alcoholic beverages are sold by the drink for both on-and off-premise consumption. Beverages of all types are sold, including illegally produced moonshine."

Huh, sort of like Underground Restaurants for booze. A shame that they didn't continue with the words Speakeasy, Smokeasy and go with Shoteasy.