Gathering Darkness - 19

So, some idiot politicians thought "Hey, let's make some crazy-stupid new laws that make the Internet a giant bag of fail!"

Hearing this, the giant brains at certain websites - like, oh, let's say Wikipedia - thought "We'll show them! Let's just make the Internet a giant bag of fail ALL ON OUR OWN! *THAT* will teach them to pass silly laws!"

Idiots. Anyway, if you need to access Wikipedia during this outage, drag this Show Wikipedia, Please! link to your bookmarks bar and click on it when you see the Wikipedia "blackout" page.

I normally don't like to shill for other people, but in this case, I've found something that I think really has a lot of promise that I wanted to mention to you guys. In case you're not familiar with Kickstarter.com, I'll cover the premise first. Continue reading "Kickstarting"

Quoth the original post: "My one concern is that this not turn into an attack post on You-Know-Who." Come on, MG, I'm a Harry Potter hater, and even I know we're supposed to call him 'Tom Riddle'...

More seriously, here are some of my thoughts - please don't take these as attacks on "Mr. Riddle", they're just a frank interpretation of events through the lens of my own experience. This is only the first half of the entry, discussing some of the things that "went wrong" - there's another half of an article in the works about the things that "went right", but I'm having more trouble finding the words for that half, so I'm pushing out this portion now.
Continue reading "INS: A Post-Mortem"

As most of you know, December 2nd is Peter Nash Day. I thought I'd share some of the photos that are pouring in from around the world demonstrating how Peter Nash Day is celebrated - feel free to add a link to your own Peter Nash Day celebration photojournal in the comments! More will be added as they come in, so keep watching this space. Continue reading "Peter Nash Day Around the World"

I'm a big fan of Gregg Easterbrook, who writes under the nom-de-web "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" (or TMQ) - I find his writing style entertaining, and he gives decent insight into the whys and wherefores of many things that happened in games I could not watch each week. I was really impressed by a recent article he wrote directed at kids who want to play college sports, and I thought many of you might enjoy it as well - so, with minimal further ado, I bring you Tuesday Morning Quarterback's Thousand-Word Guide to College Recruiting. Even if you're not a TMQ fan - or a fan of professional sports in general - you should still check it out.

[This entry brought to you via my involvement in 750words.com. I really enjoy the service - if you aspire to be a writer, you should check it out.]

This past weekend, I watched a beautiful documentary called "Stone Reader". Directed by Mark Moskowitz, it's the story of a book called "The Stones of Summer", by a man named Dow Morrison. The book itself is described as a "coming of age novel" set in Iowa, telling a story which "succeeds in conveying the rebellious energies of youth, the essential madness of adolescent reality."

In 1972, the 18 year old Mark Moskowitz read a book review in the New York Times written by John Seelye, reviewing Mossman's novel. Continue reading "Review: Stone Reader"

Looking around the Intertron Tuesday night for ways to improve my writing skills, I stumbled across a website called 750words.

Much different from a blog, the core idea of 750words is that everything you write is private, and that WHAT you write is less important than THAT you write. For me, this was a liberating idea - many of the emails, stories, and blog posts that are rolling around in my mind never go anywhere because I can't get them up to a level of quality that I am comfortable sharing with other people. With 750words, the content itself is invisible to others, but it does give you a way to track how well I'm doing by publishing a very interesting page of statistics - in fact, you should go look at my stats page for 2010-MAY-20 right now.

They also have many "game theory" kind of things going on - there's a point system, and they have a monthly challenge that you can opt-in to where you commit to writing the full 750 words every single day for an entire calendar month - if you make the commitment and you miss even one day, your name goes on the "Wall of Shame", but if you make it every single day your name goes on the "Wall of Amazingness" - and, if you had previously been on the Wall of Shame, getting your name on the "Wall of Amazingness" would wipe out the shameful entry entirely. The site's creator also strongly encourages you to design your own rewards and consequences - it seems a lot of people promise to treat themselves if they accomplish it - imagine my surprise to discover that one of his suggested "consequences" is "If I miss a day or more, I will donate $___ to help support 750 Words." He's a very clever man, this Buster Benson fellow. ;)

You can read more about the project on the About page, or you can just open your own account and start writing!

My wife says I need to be more open with people, so here goes:

On Friday of last week, I was diagnosed with thrombophilia, due to a genetic condition called Factor V Leiden. This caused a series of bloodclots in my left leg (deep vein thrombosis, or "DVT") as well as one in my lung (called a pulmonary embolism, or PE). Continue reading "Thrombophilia - like Hemophilia, but the other way 'round"

Got this one today. Unforunately, I can't even tell by listening what the guy is trying to say:

Hey Joey, this is carl from fast now. This call about getting screwed. I couldn't find one that that's exactly but I think. You, hey, there's a way to make a Marge and if you any questions, give us call back.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090815152830AAEQaml

You probably don't read the Bad Astronomy blog, so you probably haven't noticed that he's put up his annual review of what he considers the top 10 astronomy pictures of 2009. Personally, I think this photo of the Earth from the Rosetta spacecraft (click image for article and link to larger version):. There are some other excellent images, I recommend you check it out.

Turns out, there's an extension for that. Even if you're a Google Chrome user.

Thought some of you might find this funny:



You can read more awesome satire like this at Business Guys on Business Trips.

I cannot, for the life of me, understand why we STILL have "developers" who don't know that a + sign is a valid component of the "username" portion of an email address.