Sin bins for worst families

Sunday Express | UK News :: Sin bins for worst families: "the Children’s Secretary set out �400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes. Around 2,000 families have gone through these Family Intervention Projects so far."

Youch. Bad enough that they're all over the streets. They've even become plot points in BBC shows like Torchwood. But in the houses? That's getting the bad end of the reality show!

Table of Hours, anyone?

The Matrix Online decompiles

Reminder: Check out The Matrix Online before it decompiles - Massively: "The Matrix Online is reminding us all that it's slowing coming undone as the system becomes more and more unstable with each passing day. Ashes raining from the sky, eyes being seen in the clouds, zombies, agents, angels, and demons all appearing out of the system's corruption to wreak havoc across the Mega City."

Oh! What a fine way to go out ... fighting!

Newsgator Shuts Down Its Online Feed Reader

Newsgator Shuts Down Its Online Feed Reader: "NewsGator, the company behind the popular FeedDemon and NetNewsWire feed readers, just announced that it will shut down the NewsGator Online Reader on August 31, 2009. The company will provide users with instructions on how to migrate to Google Reader."

Whoa! Feadreaders are dead? Is it all just a Twitter river of what I had for lunch now?

Tru Blood is now a true drink

Tru Blood is now a true drink - TV Squad: "Tru Blood (the fictional vampire blood-substitute from the HBO series True Blood) is going to be offered as a novelty drink."

Ew. Oh, well, can't taste much worse than Red Bull. Blood and Vodka anyone? Just be sure to order it with a high-pitched whine just like in the stories ...

Pon Farr Perfume

Pon Farr Perfume: "Pon Farr Perfume for Women"

"Drive him crazy"

Ah, well, It's gotta smell better than Red Shirt in the morning ...

Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others

Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others: "Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price."

"The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”"

Hah! The books disappeared one by one as the clocks struck thirteen.

I love the idea of a passive electronic reader, but hate the form factor of the Kindle ...
Besides the fact that they flash fright-white between pages.

Riding Muni’s 14 Mission — For 24 Hours

Riding Muni’s 14 Mission — For 24 Hours | Mission Loc@l: "It’s possible riders are accustomed to fare increases. They’ve had three in the last six years, doubling the fare from $1 in 2003. The first went to $1.25, then to $1.50 in September 2005, and today we hit the $2 mark."

"The 14’s route passes through San Francisco’s largest enclaves of Filipinos and Latinos and businesses, picking up more than 36,000 passengers a day."

Hard to believe that they increased the Muni fare instead of the hours of parking meter operation. Next year the Fast Pass will go up to $60 plus $10 if you want Bart in the city. I bet that will mean more cash fares, slower boarding, and even worse on-time performance. Sheesh.

The Prisoner

The Prisoner will be free to appear at Comic-Con - TV Squad: "The reboot is a gutsy move by AMC as The Prisoner, created by and starring Patrick McGoohan in the late 1960s, is widely considered one of the greatest series in television history.

Friday, July 24 at 11:30 AM on AMC

Ugg. Now there's a dumb idea. And, yea, I'm gonna watch.

Get ready for even foggier summers

Get ready for even foggier summers: "The Bay Area just had its foggiest May in 50 years. And thanks to global warming, it's about to get even foggier."

"The theory, then and now, is that the hotter the Central Valley gets, the greater the temperature and pressure gradients between the inland and coast will be - therefore forming more fog."

Yay! Dampening down the heat waves would be nice, too.

FWIW, Weather Underground is my fav weather feed ...

Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest,

Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest was fun to watch. Funny to have frantic ESPN announcing all over the contest.

Glad to see two women in the Horsemen of the Esophagus, Juliet Lee and Sonya "The Black Widow" Thomas ...

More than you ever wanted to know about gurgitating at Major League Eating

The Biography Channel has I'm a Competitive Eater on Wednesday.

"Look upon our gurgitators, ye Mighty, and despair. Behold these new super-gluttons, these ambassadors of the American appetite, these Horsemen of the Esophagus"

US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive

US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive - Telegraph: "The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature."

"Most are former industrial cities in the 'rust belt' of America s Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit Philadelphia Pittsburgh Baltimore and Memphis."

"Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow," he said."

That's the spirit! Certainly makes sense to prune services like water, sewage, and trash from areas ...

Also, Life After People on History.Com is really pretty.

Zomblog

Zomblog: "The main difference you’ll see is that the amount of points required for levels has been tuned down, particularly to avoid having large gaps between levels in the middle ranges. As a side effect, many of you may gain levels if your current point total puts you higher on the level curve."

Zomblog : Zombies, Vampires, Werewolves and Slayers apps

Whoa! Shot up stack of levels and splattered notices all over me wall.

Not so sure about the collections, yet, but, they have certainly livened up the forums!

Ancient Robots

Robot Builder has added Ancient Ones ! I may just have to play it a bit, in spite of the fact that the game seems goalless. Whereas Mad Scientist from the same developers is awesome ...

Facebook | Robot Builder

No More San Francisco Edition of The Onion - SFist: San Francisco

No More San Francisco Edition of The Onion - SFist: San Francisco: "Today's editions of the The Onion in San Francisco and Los Angeles will be the last."

Unfortunately, despite healthy readership in both Los Angeles and San Francisco (readership has actually risen despite our reduction in copies in recent months) the advertising in both cities has been abysmal.

So, at the end of the day, you have to make a decision whether to pump money into parts of the company that are straining us financially (LA and SF print) or reroute that capital into the areas of the company
that are growing in size and value.

Now that The Onion finally has slots in the stupid pedmounts and you can find it somewhere other than bars, it's gone. The event listings were brilliant when the print version started, but, have steadily declined. I'd hoped that the Decider would improve them ...

Bah!

MyOpenBar.com to Shutdown SF, LA Operations - SFist: San Francisco

MyOpenBar.com to Shutdown SF, LA Operations - SFist: San Francisco: "MyOpenBar, the AWESOME site that informs readers on any and all open-bar/cheap-booze events, will cease operations in Los Angeles and San Francisco. We talked to MyOpenBar, who we hoped would inform us that this was some sort of cruel joke. No suck luck. According MyOpenBar, 'Yes, we're closing both LA and SF websites due to our inability to monetize those branches in all this time."

Arg! The weekly newsletter was good, but, the twitter stream was invaluable. Curses! SF will not support event listings? At this rate we're going to loose the Chronicle Pink Section too ...

Wines on Tap

The Pour - Are Wines on Tap a Passing Trend or the Wave of the Future? - NYTimes.com: "Wine? On tap? Wine, stored in kegs and served through a method similar to a draft-beer line, may be the glorious future of by-the-glass pours in bars and restaurants."

Replacing Guinness in a bar near you? I always laugh at people getting wine from a box in beer bars ...

Nokia to Shut Down Mosh

Nokia to Shut Down Mosh: "Nokia, the Finnish cell phone maker and wanna-be web power, will shut down Mosh, its wildly popular service that makes it easy for people to post and share content with others."

Oh! They were out so early that I thought that they would take over the world. Instead it looks like porn already took over the world, and took noika out ...

Red Dwarf

Red Dwarf: "To celebrate the 21st birthday of Red Dwarf, we're bringing back the original cast for four brand new specials later in April."

Yay! I'm sure that there's a few episodes that I've missed, as well ...

Muzak runs out

Bloomberg.com: Worldwide: "Muzak Holdings LLC, the company that made “elevator music” famous, sought bankruptcy protection from creditors as its debt matured and restructuring alternatives fell through due to the economic crisis."

Whoa, Surreal. Now who do you buy your hold music from?

Live Nation, Ticketmaster Reach $2.5 Billion Deal

Live Nation, Ticketmaster Reach $2.5 Billion Deal: "This merger would give a giant, new entity unrivaled power over concertgoers and the prices they pay to see their favorite artists and bands"

Ugg, and that if you can even find a place to get physical tickets.

Wife murdered for changing Facebook status

Wife murdered for changing Facebook status - Telegraph: "Richardson became enraged when Sarah changed her marital status on Facebook to single and decided to go and see her as she was not responding to his messages."

Whoa, Gonna have to watch those late-night status updates ...

Verizon Hub "landline slayer" officially unveiled

Verizon Hub "landline slayer" officially unveiled - Engadget: "The system boasts a 7-inch touchscreen display, and will work with Verizon wireless subscribers handset(s) to eliminate the need for a landline. The idea here is that the hub can sync to your calendar, contacts, maps, traffic and weather reports via broadband."

Whoa! Gonna have to poke at one. Mighty shiny!

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

Official Google Blog: One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish: "You may have noticed that Google has a new favicon"

Whoa, how could you miss it?! It's the technicolor yawn of favicons ...

Gaza aggressors kiss cell phones goodbye

Press TV - Gaza aggressors kiss cell phones goodbye: "Six hours before the Israeli ground incursion into Gaza on Saturday, thousands of infantry and armored forces were ordered to hand over their cell phones, an official has told AFP on condition of anonymity. The order was 'to keep the impending attack secret', an Israeli official was quoted as saying."

The very act of having a cell phone is a security leak! Guess the monkey mind is moving faster than the military can train it ...

Whopper Sacrifice

Whopper Sacrifice Application
Install WHOPPER® Sacrifice on your Facebook profile and we'll reward you with a free flame-broiled WHOPPER® Sandwich when you sacrifice 10 of your friends*

That's the spirit! Unloyalty rewards!

Love the burning human graphic. Do they make burgers from the unfriended?

LiveJournal on Life Support

Report: LiveJournal on Life Support: "The company has reportedly laid off 20 of 28 employees, “leaving only a handful of finance and operations workers.”"

Even with paid accounts and plenty of advertising? Weird.

Stacey's Demise

Stacey's Demise - SFist: San Francisco: "Venerable Stacey's Books, after celebrating 85 years in business this last fall, announced to staff today that the store will close sometime in late March."

SF can't sustain an excellent bookstore downtown? Bah!

Fruitcake wins!

International Federation of Competitive Eating - IFOCE: "Takeru Kobayashi will attempt to break the fruitcake-eating world record, seeking to consume all fruitcake leftover from the holidays ..."

Kobayashi failed to beat Sonya"The Black Widow" Thomas' 2001 record of 4 pounds and 14 ounces in 10 minutes.

An Italian legend says fruitcake was created by a nun at the urging of the devil in the form of a black cat

The Atlas of True Names

The Atlas of True Names : Strange Maps: "The Atlas substitutes the original meanings of the world’s place names for the better-known, ossified toponyms."

The Atlas of True Names restores an element of enchantment to the world we all think we know so well.

Spotted: Sibling Love, Stink Onion, Conquered City, "I don't understand you!"

Repeal Day!

21st-Amendment Brewery: Prohibition: "The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution went into effect on January 16, 1920. It wiped out the beers, the breweries and the culture that had come to define American social life."

Beer Examiner: 75 years ago prohibition was repealed by the 21st amendment of the U.S. Constitution: "December 5, 2008 will mark the 75th anniversary of enactment of the 21st amendment which repealed the 18th amendment and the federal repeal of prohibition.

After Prohibition, brewing companies began to market to women, designing beers that were lighter in flavor and character. While the use of corn, rice and sugar adjuncts was used before, they were now being used to develop a style that would appeal to women."

Heh! Girly-man beers! That's slightly more pleasant than "already been used beer" ...

Happy Repeal Day and Cheers!

Lovecraft's Re-Animator Re-animated

The Escapist : News : Lovecraft's Re-Animator Re-animated: "the game tells the story of the hapless Dr. Herbert West, the inventor of a special serum that can literally bring the dead back to life. There are a few side effects, of course, like the re-animated corpses turning into violent blood-thirsty zombies

The whole game plays in grainy black and white, reminiscent of the 1920's where the story was originally set; and whilst short, has an online score board where you can see how long you kept the rozzers from your door."

Free download, looks to be Windohs only ... Oh, the sanity points you could loose!

Buy Line

Buy Line - SF Weekly: "With the newspaper industry in a tailspin, readers ditching print for the Web in droves, and the country entering its worst recession in recent memory, San Francisco Chronicle execs have a brilliant solution to their financial problems: Charge people more to read their ailing product."

Oh, yay! As it is, I only buy the paper for event listings (The Pink Section) and tickets going on sale. Heck, they even dumbed down the comix to the point where Peanuts reprints start looking good ... Cathy, Blondie, Hagar, and Wizard of Id, oh joy! Weekend comix even lost a page.

Ah, well, the price hike will mean the purchase of a couple less papers a week. Not like we're short on free daily papers!

Tribe deal

Mark Pincus Blog: Tribe deal: "tah Street Networks and New Systems Associates today entered into an operating agreement to manage Tribe.net (http://www.tribe.net), add competitive social networking features to the site, and revitalize the Tribe community.

New Systems Associates is an LLC formed by long-time Tribe members who believe in protecting and expanding Tribe's unique culture."

Huh, guess they're keeping the lights on. Doesn't seem like anyone's home, though. Guess the hive from Tribe is still kicking, as well ...

http://www.free-association.net/

Anti-pattern recognition

Adactio: Journal—Anti-pattern recognition: "Eager geeks rushed to sign up for the contact aggregation service. The second step of the process involved handing over your Twitter username and password. This request was dutifully obeyed by the eager geeks."

Sigh. Eager little geeks with Quechup all over their faces.

"Twitter often feels like being in an abusive relationship with a Fail Whale" - Jeremy Keith

Announcing LinkedIn Events

Announcing LinkedIn Events: "Now all LinkedIn users should be able to find events and conferences that are most suitable for your career based a combination of your professional network and information culled from your LinkedIn profile."

Oh! Geeze, there's an obvious one. Dunno why they waited for multiple news, module, and OpenSocial redesigns before springing it.

Change has come to America | Change.gov

Change has come to America | Change.gov: "Change.gov provides resources to better understand the transition process and the decisions being made as part of it."

The YouTube Presidency: "Today, President-elect Obama will record the weekly Democratic address not just on radio but also on video -- a first. The address, typically four minutes long, will be turned into a YouTube video and posted on Obama's transition site, Change.gov, once the radio address is made public on Saturday morning."

"Added Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation, a D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for government transparency: "We're living, after all, in the Internet era. This is an individualized version of the 'fireside chats.' It's not delivered between 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. but whenever anyone wants to see it. I don't know if it necessarily creates transparency -- it's still a controlled, one-way message. But it creates the aura of a much more accessible presidency."

It's been fun to watch YouTube videos on network news. Broadcast media is starting to look as dated as newspapers.

Still no news on the appointment of the 12 disciples, though ...

Google robots.txt

http://google.com/robots.txt

User-agent: zombies
Disallow: /brains

Rick Astley to Perform at EMAs

Rick Astley to Perform at EMAs: "The Internet voters have spoken, and (surprise, surprise), it looks like Rick Astley is ahead in the polls for MTV Europe’s “Best Act Ever” award."

Buh? That's just not right ...

FriendFeed Blog: View your FriendFeed in real-time

FriendFeed Blog: View your FriendFeed in real-time: "In our new, experimental real-time view, comments and posts will appear at the top of your feed as quickly as they arrive. This is accomplished by a technique called long polling, where our server doesn't respond to your browser's request until there's something it wants to send."

Smooth scrolling updates and pop-out windows! Nice. More SortDurAttentionSuck.

Mother's Cookies abruptly shut down

Mother's Cookies abruptly shut down: "Mother's Cookies, an Oakland institution for 92 years, has been shuttered, its owner seeking bankruptcy protection for the company."

"Mother's later had a series of corporate owners: a Belgian company, Artal B.V., bought it in 1991; it was owned by Specialty Foods Corp. of Illinois in the late 1990s; in 2000, Specialty sold Mother's and Archway Cookies to Parmalat, which in turn sold the combined business to Catterton for an undisclosed sum."

Ohhh. No more waxen animal crackers with BBs on them? Shame about the Archway soft cookies with jam filling, though ...

Update: "Kellogg's announced it would acquire trademarks and recipes to the famous Circus Animal cookies, as well as the sandwich cookies and wire-cut cookies."

The beloved pink and white Circus Animal cookies are saved!

Hammer Films has risen from the grave

Hammer Films has risen from the grave: "Classic film fans lock up your daughters, take up your wooden stakes and prepare to battle the forces of darkness: Hammer Films has announced it s called action on its first horror production for over 30 years."

Yay! Steaks all around!

The Beer That Takes You Back . . . Millions of Years

The Beer That Takes You Back . . . Millions of Years: "The result is Fossil Fuels Brewing Co., which ferments a yeast strain Cano found in a piece of Burmese amber dating from about 25 million to 45 million years ago. The company -- in which Cano is a partner, along with another scientist and a lawyer -- introduced its pale ale and German wheat beer with a party last month at one of the two Bay Area pubs where Fossil Fuels is made and served.

It's been on tap for two years at Stumptown in Guerneville, Calif."

social notworking

Word Spy - social notworking: "social notworking pp. Surfing a social networking site instead of working."

Bloglines | My Feeds (3) (28)

18/1025 feeds

Hit the shiney Mark All Read button after not reading much for a couple of weeks ...

Compari Liqueur Will Make Coffee Hooch, Illyquore

Compari Liqueur Will Make Coffee Hooch, Illyquore: "Campari, the Italian liqueur company is blending with Illy to give you a better buzz two ways. Together, they will make a new coffee liqueur drink called Illyquore."

Humm, I see that Starbucks and Godiva are already in this nitch. Hope they keep some herbal bitter in the mix, otherwise it won't be good for much more than a bump in the x-tini, sex-on-the-x, and Aqualung family of spew.

On the other foot, maybe they'll spike interest and we'll get another entry in the beer family like Redhook Doubleblack Stout

Emily the Strange Film

Emily the Strange Film: "Counterculture icon Emily the Strange will soon star in a long-anticipated feature film, and Dark Horse Entertainment President Mike Richardson has signed on as the film’s produce"

Nice! If doomed ...

Hell's Kitchen The Game

Hell's Kitchen The Game: "Hell’s Kitchen is a US TV phenomenon as renowned Gordon Ramsay puts aspiring chefs through a rigorous culinary bootcamp. Experience the show's pressure-cooker atmosphere as you go through a series of kitchen and dining room challenges."

Those willing to fork up $19.99 can get the "uncensored" version with "language not suitable for all audiences

Buh? So many things wrong with this that the head spins.

Twitter Status - With friends tab and feeds

Twitter Status - With friends tab and feeds: "Recently we made a change to remove the With Friends tab from user profiles. We did this after finding out that this tab was both a relatively rarely accessed as well as computationally expensive page for us to serve. At the same time we removed access to the feeds for this page."

Doh! Loose your feed, loose your friends. Sheesh, do people actually use the UI and page back though messages?

Guess I'm getting my Twitter via a feed from http://friendfeed.com/?service=twitter

Plurk.com

Plurk.com storm on Twitter and Friendfeed ... may as well play along!

A couple of user lists

ashnod @ Plurk.com

The Facebook Blog | Facebook

The Facebook Blog | Facebook: "A recent place where we've been fighting the spam battle has been through sites that ask for a user's login information to use a contact importer, and then spam all of their friends. Right now, the sites that are asking for this information, and that we are blocking as a result, gain complete access and control over your account when you enter your login info—your photos, your private messages, and your friends."

Well, it's a good start for one of the super-powers to take issue with the practice. Even if they still have a Friend Finder begging for email passwords.

Papers Written by Googlers

Papers Written by Googlers: "Below is a partial list of publications by people after joining Google, organized by category."

Whoa, dunno how I missed this section. New Feed!

RSS Feed Mayhem

[scribkin] RSS Feed Mayhem: "A radical new plan was hatched that we both agreed to abide by, starting today. We would dump all our RSS feeds out of Google Reader and only add new feeds based on a set of rules:"

Whoa, Drastic. I've certainly got too many unsorted/ignored feeds and need to get some filing done. Some odd combination of grazr, toluu, shyftr I think ...

Feedalizr

Feedalizr version 1.1.2 alpha: "you can now post directly to Jaiku from the feedalizr interface."

A Jaiku client is keen, a usable app for Friendfeed would rock. However, the thing that kills the app is the cursed flashy blinking taskbar in windows. After every update, toasters on or not, you have to poke at the taskbar icon to make it stop with the blinking. I want a partial attention app, not one that demands clicks.

That's three sad little Friendfeed air icons sitting on the desktop unused.

twitter has a tumblr?

Twitter / Jack Dorsey: "We now have a status tumblr!: http://status.twitter.com/. We'll be updating it on the regular."

Twitter tumbles as it falls down!

Blame FriendFeed

Blame FriendFeed: "FriendFeed is Twitter, only slower. Here’s my demo of the difference between FriendFeed and Twitter:

Twitter: Hi, I’m having Sugar Pops for breakfast.

Ten minutes later….

FriendFeed: Hi, I’m having Sugar Pops for breakfast."

Heh! Have to Hide with Extreme Prejudice.

Eater SF: The Best Bars in America

Eater SF: The Best Bars in America: Esquire Magazine picks Zeitgeist as one of the Best Bars?

Esquire. Best. Zeitgeist. Pick one.

Twitter Blog

Twitter Blog: "We've gone through our various databases, caches, web servers, daemons, and despite some increased traffic activity across the board, all systems are running nominally. The truth is we're not sure what's happening. It seems to be occurring in-between these parts."

Eww. That's gotta leave a warm fuzzy in the hearts of a stack of developers. Ah, well, better ever than sooner.

Twitter: An admission of failure, a call for help

Love the headless tweet image!

Epic

Robert Scoble - FriendFeed

"You used the word 'collection' for business cards of people. What's the epic rare foil collectible in that mix? :) - Eric Rice

Woz's card. Hehehh. - Robert Scoble"

Oh! Just so.

Social networking can prove guessing game

Business Edge News Magazine - Social networking can prove guessing game: "Joey Scarface has invited you to join his network on CosaNostra.com. Click here to accept his kind invitation. Click here to decline and get whacked."

Heh! That's what all bacn should be, more pointy.

Facebook Smackdown

Facebook Developers | Facebook Developers News: "Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service."

Whoa, Godzilla noises all around. Set Techmeme on stun.

The Social Platform PR Wars Continue: Facebook Bans Google Friend Connect

* Thur May 8: MySpace announces its “Data Availability” initiative, whereby it will share public user profile data with partner sites like Yahoo, eBay, and Twitter.
* Fri May 9: Facebook announces its “Facebook Connect” initiative, which will let third party developers access Facebook user profile and friend data.
* Mon May 12: Google announces its “Friend Connect” initiative, which will let users do much of the same thing through an OAuth/OpenID/OpenSocial system administered by Google.

via Facebook Developers News. Seems like the first time that I've gotten news from the primary source in months.

ZOMBIE

DM's Esoteric Programming Languages - ZOMBIE: "ZOMBIE is a programming language designed for Necromancers, particularly evil ones. (Actually, what other sorts are there?) ZOMBIE is an acronym, and stands for Zombie-Oriented Machine-Being Interface Engine."

ZOMBIE runs in a multithreaded environment. Several entities may be animated at once, and each may perform multiple tasks at once. The relative speeds and orders in which the entities perform tasks is undefined, and should not be relied on by the programmer.

Entities and their tasks may be active or inactive. An active entity is one which has been animated, disturbed, or is free-willed. A zombie or ghost that has been summoned and bound is inactive. An active task is one that has been animated; an inactive task is one that has been bound, or that the entity has completed.

Ha! How much fun. I'll have to poke at this on some sunny day to see it work.

Severed Ways

Severed Ways

In 1007 AD on the mainland of North America, two stranded Vikings search against all odds to find their way home. As they struggle to survive in the vast forests of the New World, their paths diverge as one pursues a spiritual quest and the other reverts to his primal instincts.

YouTube - Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of North America

"A full speed ahead Viking epic complete with nordic ballads and metal from the likes of Morbid Angel."

Sign me up! Looks to be opening July 25th ...

Google Spreadsheets Become Wikis

Google Spreadsheets Become Wikis: "In other spreadsheet-related news, you can now embed forms in a web site by just copying some code, there's a new option to duplicate questions and users can add their own answer to a multiple-choice question."

Yay, Google dropped the awful invite to spreadsheet and even the need for a google account. Shocking and most certainly the right thing to do.

Google Friend Connect

Google Press Center: News Announcement: "Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social -- and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect, any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming -- picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community."

Google Friend Connect

Google Confirms Friend Connect

I was able to talk with Google engineering director David Glazer to get some more details. The point of Friend Connect, he says, is to “, give users a shortcut to connections they’ve built up somewhere else.” So if you go to a Website that is part of Friend Connect, you will be able to sign in under your Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, Orkut, or Plaxo IDs


The bigger downside of Friend Connect is that Websites using it cannot mash up the data with their own to make compelling new applications. Glazer confirmed that the data will be sent to third party sites via an iframe rather than directly through a set of APIs (as Michael speculated on Friday).

Google Friend Connect Previews Tonight

The user experience is simple. When a user comes to a site in the Friend Connect program they can sign into any social network that is sharing their data. Their data is not actually shared with the site. Impressively Google is supporting OpenID and OAuth in addition to their own standard OpenSocial.

Google Friend Connect Tries to Strangle the Social

Those hard questions are the ones that these companies are supposed to be working on together through the Data Portability Working Group, though. The Group has published best practices documents tackling a number of difficult questions already.

Welcome to the social mess?

Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, MySpace Data Availability, OpenID, DataPortability: Managing a bunch of different log-ins and passwords suddenly seems easy and straightforward.

Heh, Interop dead. Backlash at 11.

Now we need a WWE-style smackdown between the beasts ...

Interesting times ...

FriendFeed is back

Paul Buchheit - FriendFeed: "“FriendFeed is back and should be completely caught up in a couple of hours. Sorry for the trouble.”"

Wow, FriendFeed really *is* the new Twitter. - ⓞnor

Funny that I saw all of the down messages on Friendfeed via rss and not in twitter.

6 seats removed from some BART cars

6 seats removed from some BART cars: "Six seats are being removed from some cars to create more space for people to stand and to accommodate the growing number of on-board bikes and the luggage hauled by passengers heading to and from San Francisco International Airport."

Average weekday ridership 360,000
Original seats per car 68
Seats to be removed per car 6
Train cars reconfigured 20
Train cars planned for reconfiguration 80
Cars systemwide 578
Trains systemwide 65

Thank Goodness! I'm all for more open access and fewer scuzzy seats.

Twitter / Kevin Fox

Twitter / Kevin Fox: "When Obama wins, the White House Press Secretary Goa-uld won't have to find a new host every 18 months."

Ah, and here I though that the white house was taking it out of them, not putting it in ...

Facebook Connect

Facebook Developers: "Today we are announcing Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect is the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site. This will now enable third party websites to implement and offer even more features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook – similar to features available to third party applications today on Facebook."

Facebook Connect Pulls Back The Curtain: Data Portability: "As a user moves around the open Web, their privacy settings will follow, ensuring that users’ information and privacy rules are always up-to-date."

Buh? I don't see how that's going to work.

Funny, after this week I guess I'll have to traverse the social backwaters changing my quip ...

Why can't social networking sites bother to network with one-another? Are they that anti-social?
http://hownottoblog.com/index.php/2005/03/18/

As John McCrea says "What a Week!"

Steve List Homepage

Steve List Homepage

Cheap Trick, Heart, Journey (together!)
Foreigner
REO Speedwagon
Billy Idol
Donna Summer
Daryl Hall & John Oates
Dr. John
Creedence Clearwater Revisited
The Tubes
Night Ranger
Judas Priest, Motorhead, Testament
Tom Jones
George Thorogood & the Destroyers
Yes
ZZ Top

Quick! What year is it?

DataPortability - MySpace officially joins the DataPortability Project

DataPortability - MySpace officially joins the DataPortability Project: "We are excited that MySpace will join the rest of the community to continue the design, documentation and implementation of a set of best practices for inter-operable Data Portability between trusted applications and vendors."

MySpace joins DataPortability,: "Whilst a number of high-profile launch partners have been announced (Yahoo!, eBay and Twitter), it’s worth point out that access to this project will be available to everyone who agrees to the T’s & C’s."

MySpace's Data Availability is not Data Portability: “After this announcement I had the pleasure of speaking with a reporter who was on the briefing call. He explained that MySpace said that due to their terms of service the participating sites (e.g. Twitter) would not be allowed to cache or store any of the profile information."

Weird. At least MySpace has lots of good data to throw around. Heck, I'd be happy with just basic profile data onto a handful of sites.

Funny that DataPortability uses Tumblr for a blog, but, a nice way to round up the coverage.

Why Facebook Is Useless | sarahintampa

Why Facebook Is Useless | sarahintampa: "my most regular activity on Facebook is clearing out hundreds of invites."

Hay! That's what I should change my status to most of the time. I usually just log in to whack zombies ... (both real and app).

Describe FriendFeed in 2-8 words

Paul Buchheit - FriendFeed: "Let me clarify, the description should be appealing."

A website describable in two to eight words
you bring the friends, we bring the benefits
Friendfeed: The New Babel-on
Friendfeed: The third place.
stalking made easy
facebook without zombies

Twitter / Maki

Twitter / Maki: "Removing all the email notifications I get from social media websites, they add far too much clutter to the inbox."

Nice! I have a whole account slaved to the social. I clear the relevant folder after logging in and seeing what the in-system experience is like. Usually it's just a poor version of a mail client ...

Google Reader

Official Google Reader Blog: Share anything. Anytime. Anywhere.: "Share items with a note - If you are like me, you might want to share something in Reader"

gReader now has 'share with note' which is a great idea but the cartoon bubble on the web landing page has got to go.

And a new bookmarklet (not the forgotten old Google Share bookmarklet) that feeds into the gReader stream, only what you highlight, though, and you have to allow javascript on the page that you clip. Now I have to figure which to use, Friendfeed, Social|Median, gShare, or bloglines ...

Also: I Am a Google Reader Shared Links Ninja

via Friendfeed RSS Post to Google Reader

Shyftr OMPL

OPML Support Is Here! - Shyftr Blog: "You can now import an OPML file or export your Shyftr feed list as an OPML file."

Whoa, you can go from a person's profile to their feeds, to reading their feeds in the usual interface and really easily subscribing (you have to backtrack to sort them, though). You have to enter feed edit mode to sort into folders, but, you can then edit feed title, description, and add multiple tags all of which show nicely on the reading header. View tagged feeds shows a tag cloud, clicking a tag shows matching feeds which can be clicked on to read. An implementation much stronger than folders.

Oh, and yet another bookmarklet which seems quite good at subscribing to yet another feed.

The ui is growing on me.

ashton @ shyftr and a pocket blog

via RSS feed of a Twitter follow of the TechMeme Firehose to Louis Gray: Shyftr Adds OPML Support

Twitter Blacklist

Twitter Blacklist: "Twitter as a social network has developed its own class of unfortunates that attempt to draw attention to themselves through spam-like methods"

This class of people has been neatly described in terms of the ratio between how many they "follow" compared to how many follow them:

1:5 = twittercaster, 1:2 = notable, 1:1 socially healthy, 2:1 newbie or social climber, 5:1 twitter spammer. — evan

@twitblacklist

There are links to a couple of Greasemonkey scripts using the list ...

heh, antifollowspammers.

Ugg @homebasedbiz4

feed of the now

The Patry Copyright Blog: "Senior Copyright Counsel, Google Inc."

Air marshals grounded in list mix-ups

Air marshals grounded in list mix-ups: "False identifications based on a terrorist no-fly list have for years prevented some federal air marshals from boarding flights they are assigned to protect"

Surprising no one. As Jon Stewart says, our goal is to export irony to the rest of the world.

Bloglines | My Feeds (8823) (26)

465/950 feeds bloglines
/192 greader

Gotta drag those gReader shared feeds from AssetBar back to gReader

gReader trends says that the Yahoo Mash blog is inactive and that I read feeds there on Tuesday and Friday.

BlogRize

Went in a fine circle to find BlogRize this evening. A RSSmeme feed of links from FriendFeed follows spit out a ReadWriteWeb story with an invite code. Which is certainly a roundabout way to get to a story that could have come through the RWW feed into gReader ...

After poking around for a while looking for the 'submit story' bookmarklet or form, I got turned back around to Louis Gray who had quoted "BlogRize is today's news, filtered by communities of people who enjoy reading the same blogs.' BlogRize tracks items from two sources - a person's blog, and their Google Reader shared items."

Ah! A blog's feed augmented with community gReader shares. Just so. Now, where are the rss feeds coming out of it (just to make everything quite circular).

ashton @ BlogRize

Twitter / kaloopy

Twitter / kaloopy: "Kaloopy Says is a Celeb News widget on Facebook."

Whoa, Twitter followspam for a Facebook Widget? Boggle.

Finally time to break out the Twitter block function ...

ThinkGeek :: Optimus Maximus Keyboard

ThinkGeek :: Optimus Maximus Keyboard: "Yep. Time to take a second mortgage on your home or break into your kid's college fund. With the singing of angels and a ray of sunlight parting the clouds, the fabled Optimus Maximus Keyboard has descended from Russia design studio Art Lebedev like an orgasm of geekiness."

Pretty, doesn't look very typely, though.

Twitter / jkalucki: followspam

Twitter / jkalucki: "followspam"

Ah! Followspam is a fine phrase. It's rare that I get twitter follow that not a bot ...

"Nerdic" geek speak is fastest growing language

"Nerdic" geek speak is fastest growing language: "The explosion of technology has created the fastest growing language in Europe, according to research published today.

Dubbed 'Nerdic', this new way of communicating via technological terminology has developed separately to English and become the shared language of Europe, allowing people to communicate without geographical boundary."

Bah, a rotten word that will not survive the telling. Speaking as one cryptolectic to another ... Jargon-1 does point and laugh.

The Facebook Blog | Mini-Feed

The Facebook Blog | Facebook: "The option to import stories from other sites can be found via the small 'Import' link at the top of your Mini-Feed. Only a few sites—Flickr, Yelp, Picasa, and del.icio.us—are available for importing at the moment,"

Yay! More noise in the update feed. Probably even more duplicate notifications from various forwards and feeds and lifestreams. Joy. Doubt if they can make the mini-feed useful, tuning updates is a great idea, but, it doesn't seem to work that well.

FriendFeed - Air

A much desired Air app was written for FriendFeed ... Alert Thingy! Unfortunately on Windoz it alerts into the menu bar, making it alerting as well as demanding. Back into the bit bucket with it!

Oddly enough there is no way to give them feedback. No blog, email, contact form, google group, friendfeed account, ... nothin'. Hardly friendly!

Feedalizr to the rescue! A much better thingy. With the blog, contact form, and twitter account. Still really odd to not have a friendfeed account.

[FRIENDFEED] Put Alert Thingy to Bed

A few of us were joking about the 'via Alert Thingy' spam and saying it would be funnier if it said 'in bed'.

With this Greasemonkey script it will :)

Bringing Blogging To Your Social Networks

Six Apart - News and Events: Bringing Blogging To Your Social Networks

We are excited to launch the first cross-platform blogging application for Facebook -- Blog It Powered by TypePad. We support bloggers on Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Pownce, Tumblr, TypePad, Twitter, Vox, WordPress.com and WordPress.org!

Plus, after you've posted using Blog It, you can choose to automatically share your post via Twitter and Pownce, in addition to the Facebook Newsfeed.

Arrrg! An auto-twat. Trickle down Friendzy is not my friend.

BlogIt, now with AutoTwat! Ask me how!

ReadWriteWeb hopes that it will tear down that wall ... "BlogIt may be just a beachhead landed in the hostile territory not of Facebook, but of online identity chaos in general."

Twitter / RU4Real

Twitter / RU4Real: "DO NOT FOLLOW THIS ACCOUNT. It is part of an experiment to see how many people actually read the pages of the people they follow."

Too funny. A Friend trap. Fewer Followers that I would expect ...

The Horror!

I opened The List today, oh boy. What a flashback!

Coming soon to a dive near me!

Eddie Money
War
Lynyrd Skynyrd
REO Speedwagon
Foreigner
The Tubes
Night Ranger
Yes
Donna Summer
Boz Scaggs
George Thorogood & The Destroyers
The Beach Boys
Joe Cocker, Steve Miller Band
Tower Of Power
Cheap Trick, Heart, Journey

Bloglines | My Feeds (955) (21)

64/907!

Now about those abandoned AssetBar greader feeds ...

Rick Roll It!

Rick Roll It! - Twelve Mountains

On Monday, John Gruber made a suggestion suggestion on Twitter:

The guy who owns rickroll.com should turn it into a URL shortening service.

And the horror was unleashed ... Rick Roll It! — a new URL shortening service.

Top Chef Dinner & Screening Party Wednesdays

Top Chef Dinner & Screening Party Wednesdays

It's no secret that San Fran is straight up representin' on this season of Top Chef with not one, but four SF foodies: Chef Ryan Scott (Myth Cafe), Chef Zoi Antonitsas (SF Restaurant Consultant), Chef Jennifer Biesty (Coco500 Restaurant) and Chef Erik Hopfinger (Circa Restaurant).

What better way to watch Top Chef than while eating a four course meal cooked by one of the contestants? Every Wednesday night, Hopfinger will serve up a tasty four-parter inspired by that week's show. Then stick around for a screening with a restaurant full of Top Chef fans. I wonder what will happen to this weekly event when (excuse me: if) Hopfinger gets told to pack his knives and leave? I guess we'll just have to hope he makes the cut.

Dinner: 6pm-10pm ~ $49 four-course menu

Top Chef! 10pm-11pm

http://www.circasf.com/

Sound like fun! But, unfortunately, Top Chef shows his food ...

Good news is that going.com finally spit up something interesting.

Bloglines | My Feeds (7710) (24)

366/910.

Cleaned up some of the old Add folder. Actually unsubed from a few. Oh, and probably added three.

April Fools Day

SANS Internet Storm Center busts out with the list, including

A very fine passwd file http://packetstormsecurity.org/err0r.txt

Infoworld list of their posts, one of which topped TechMeme for much of the morning. http://www.infoworld.com/archives/t.jsp?N=s&V=96815

And the day wouldn't be complete without a rfc! http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5241.txt

Or a book full of them! Books : The Complete April Fools' Day RFCs

Bloglines Toolkit 1.7.0: Don't Back Down

It's been a monstrous fifteen months since I last updated the Bloglines Toolkit.

That's about it really - functionally, everything else is the same as it ever has been, just in more languages and updated to work in the latest version of Firefox (and it should continue to work in Flock too, but I don't use Flock, so I don't know that for sure.

Bloglines Toolkit 1.7.0: Don't Back Down


Whoa, now that I'm all settled in with greader and FriendFeed Share, back comes the ole bloglines clip extention. Huh.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King: "bards of Azeroth are finally stepping into the spotlight on their own terms, proving once and for all that while just about anyone can pick up a sword or cast a spell, only a true hero can vanquish evil with the power of ROCK!"

Armed with a trusty axe, killer riffs, and a ton of attitude, the guitar-wielding bard is the second hero class to be introduced in the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft.

"Mosh Pit," which briefly boosts the group’s movement speed while its members stay within range.

Chance on hit: Unleash a killer riff that blows your target’s mind.
"This one goes to eleven."

Hah! The Shoegazer attack. I knew it!

and

Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announces its long-awaited return to console gaming with World of Warcraft: The Molten Core

World of Warcraft: The Molten Core will include single-player and multiplayer versions, fully loaded with nine different shapes (and possibly colors) representing the current World of Warcraft character classes.

Helvetica Serif

Helvetica Serif: "FontFont have announced that they are to release Helvetica Serif, following the discovery of drawing of that typeface by Max Miedinger. The sketches which were discovered by Miedinger’s granddaughter have been redrawn to create the digital version shown above."

Oh! Now that's the way that's it done. Tradition!

Changes at the World’s Top Company Cafeteria � Food Gal

Changes at the World’s Top Company Cafeteria: "Yes, that would be at Google in Mountain View.

Executive Chef Josef Desimone is jumping ship to become Facebook’s very first executive chef."

Whoa, they're even running off with the chefs.

Super Pii Pii Brothers

ThinkGeek :: Super Pii Pii Brothers: "Prepare yourself by strapping on the included belt harness and jacking in your Wiimote. A series of toilets are presented on screen and the challenge is to tilt your body to control a never-ending stream of pee. Get as much pee in the toilets as you can while spilling as little on the floor as possible. Sounds easy eh? Well the toilets open and close whack-a-mole style and occasionally the stray cat or other cute critter pops up. Spray a cat for extra points. Get too much pee on the ground and your game is over."

Oh! We so need one at my local! And a sign that says "You must be this level to use the restroom".

Bloglines | My Feeds (8626) (25)

425/908

Colorwars Bloat!

greader x/154

As cool as Treads is, greader doesn't tell you anything about your feed state or aging. 1000+? Oh, thanks. That's just great.