Marco.org

I’m : a programmer, writer, podcaster, geek, and coffee enthusiast.

NewsFire is now FREE!

For those new to this, NewsFire is a news reader for blogs, news sites, and anything else that publishes an ‘RSS’ syndication feed. It watches for news so you don’t have to. When a new story is published, NewsFire brings it to your attention with some super-slick animation. Unlike other readers, NewsFire is designed with a deliberately minimal interface. The news is what matters and it takes center stage.

This is huge news for any Mac users in need of a great RSS reader. (Especially those who think NetNewsWire isn’t great.)

I bought my copy in 2004 with no regrets.

The addiction is spreading

Within 18 months of getting my Powerbook in Pittsburgh, I had convinced three coworkers to get their own.

More recently, I ordered my Mac Pro with the January update. Then we got two of them at work. Now this.

Apple should give me a commission. (Payable in Apple Store credit, of course.)

When you’re young, you look at television and think, ‘There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down.’ But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.

Steve Jobs in Wired (thanks, livejamie)

The internet lets me buy just what I need when I remember I need it and get on with my life.

Dawn. And that’s the retailers’ worst nightmare: not that internet shopping will undercut their prices, but that it will reduce unnecessary impulse buys.

A fundamental trait of today’s right wing is the willingness to lie, baldly and repeatedly and without shame. And it always catches the Democrats off guard. Just ask war criminal John Kerry or Munchausen Syndrome sufferer Al Gore. Are people like Sean Hannity really so dumb that they think Barack Obama is an African spy who’s plotting to be the Lion King? Well, in his case, yes, but…People like Karl Rove know that the more ridiculous the charge you make, the better. Because they’re not aimed at rational people. They’re aimed at that great teeming mass of Americans who wept with joy when they heard “American Gladiators” was coming back. They’re called “undecideds” or “swing voters”, but I prefer the traditional term, “morons”.

Bill Maher (via AZspot)

Long content

There has been some heated debate recently on whether long posts “belong” on Tumblr. As usual, I have an opinion. (It’s the internet. What did you expect?) My authority comes not from my job, but as a long-time Tumblr user.

Yes. Long content belongs on Tumblr.

So does short content. So does nearly anything. You can use Tumblr for whatever you like.

Tumblr is a tool, first and foremost. There are plenty of community features to make it more useful to many people, but fundamentally, this is a tool. Not everyone will use it the same way. If you find that it works for long content, by all means, use it for long content. If you want every post to be 5 or fewer words, you can do that, too.

Like Daring Fireball, I also have a separate “long post” website. And you know what? I hardly ever post there anymore. Dan posts more than I do, I think. I’ve found that much of my content is better suited for the community here. Sometimes, I just feel like writing it quickly and don’t want to use my long-post-website’s CMS. And sometimes a short post becomes long and I don’t even realize it.

With Tumblr, I publish more than I ever have before. If I wasn’t writing all of this content here, it wouldn’t go on Marco.org — it just wouldn’t be written. Regardless of what you think of my content, you have to agree that having an outlet is always better than not.

If Tumblr enables people to publish valuable, original content, we’ve succeeded. And if you publish your thoughts online with the tool of your choice, you’ve succeeded. Who cares if some people need to spend valuable milliseconds scrolling their mousewheels past the long posts on their Tumblr Dashboards?

…I have no doubt that Senator Obama has the judgment, bearing, intellect, and high ethnical standards to be an outstanding president — completely aside from the movement that has formed around him, and in complete contradition to the silly assertions by both the Clinton and McCain campaigns that he’s somehow not ready.

An hour and a half with Barack Obama (via azspot). Great article — read it.

Us (and Tumblr) in this week’s Time Out Chicago.

Semi-interesting insider note: we actually took this picture ourselves with a 200mm telephoto across the room and a wireless remote.

Meetings are a bunch of people in a room not working.

Jakob Lodwick

We rode in the back of the train tonight.

From Sam Reich:

Dear Tumblr,

Thanks for including me in your Staff Picks section. In return, here’s original AOL voiceover artist El Edwards doing custom sounds for Tumblr. I hope you can include them in version 4.

Thanks again,

Sam

This is awesome!

No fun?

MySQL 5’s slow InnoDB performance

Google wasn’t much of a help while researching this, so I’m lending some of my PageRank to it. There isn’t enough good Linux server administration help out there — or if there is, it’s buried under a million unanswered newsgroup postings (copied to 3 million different sites).

The problem: On MySQL 5.0 (in our case, version 5.0.22 from the stock RHEL5/CentOS 5 x86-64 yum repository), concurrent InnoDB queries take much longer than they did under MySQL 4.1. A query that normally takes 1-2 seconds might balloon to 20-40 seconds when a few are executing simultaneously. No amount of hardware upgrades or configuration-variable tweaking solves the problem. CPU usage is moderate to high, but disk activity is low. Eventually, the server gets heavily burdened by these queries.

The cause: This MySQL bug.

The solution: Upgrade to a newer version of MySQL, at least 5.0.30 (that’s when they claim it was fixed). We upgraded to the latest stable RPM from MySQL’s site (version 5.0.51a) and the problem was immediately and completely fixed.

Make sure you get all three RPMs: client, server, and common-libs. I would not suggest using yum with third-party repositories for this — I tried, and it screwed up very badly with a million file conflicts that ended up breaking my use of yum for MySQL.

Hopefully, the RHEL5/CentOS5 repositories will be updated soon with an official version of MySQL that contains this bugfix.

There are few things in life less fun than a pickup game of volleyball. It always seems like a good idea at the time. You imagine yourself and a few athletic friends passing, spiking, and diving to dig out great shots, as the ball almost magically never hits the ground. What actually happens looks like something from a movie where a virus has turned everyone on earth into spastic zombies. You watch in horror as grandma on her motorized scooter joins your side, along with two toddlers, a drunk, and a woman whose hands are apparently made of bubble wrap. And your team is the good one. What follows is a whole lot of people acting surprised they can’t punch an inflated ball in any directions but downward and backwards. Meanwhile your youth slowly drains away.

Scott Adams (via peterwknox)

In fact, things that don’t make men feel threatened (including anything pink and fuzzy, impractically tiny dogs, excessively objectifying clothing, half-sweaters, and those sort of puffy, sort of pleated skirts that were in style a few years back) are only unthreatening because they are confusing. How do you compete with a pink pom-pom at the back of a pen? Do you get a bigger pink pompom or do you get a pen without a pink pom-pom? Do you want a brighter pink or a paler pink? We don’t even have the metric. We understand things like bigger, louder, sharper, faster, taller, and more expensive. Froofier? Not as much.

Dan

Cactus Hug (thanks, ruhi)

Democracies don’t make great products. You need a competent tyrant.

Jean-Louis Gasse on Steve Jobs

Starbucks Honey Latte review

An unforeseen problem with our regular coffee shop left us with Starbucks as our only choice this afternoon. Since they make mediocre coffee, they need to resort to gimmicky drinks.

I tried the new Honey Latte.

I don’t think anyone in charge of designing or constructing this drink has ever had honey. Or a latte.

Not recommended.

Tumblr Meetup 2

Organized by sharingtime (Lee):

It’s that time again. If you missed our last meetup, here’s your chance to finally meet the people you’ve reblogged/disliked from a distance/stalked/e-crushed.

What: a tumblr meetup for people in the NYC area

When: Thursday, March 13th @ 9 PM

Where: Fat Cat, 75 Christopher Street

Please reblog and hope to see you there!

This was fun last time. I’ll try to make it there again.

Support email.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Aristotle (via Lindsay Campbell)

Skip to 4:19 in the video.

Bush’s McCain endorsement. This can’t be good for McCain.

It’s especially painful at 5:21 when Bush runs out of scripted lines and starts falling apart.

Watching Bush in this clip reignited my anger that we’ve let that guy run our country for 8 years.

I didn’t know Instapaper was hiring.

No wonder the iPhone SDK download site was down all evening yesterday.

…I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

Barack Obama (via azspot)

Probably a good idea. Stupid Daylight Saving Time. (don’t forget)

We see tons of startups predicated on the so-called “wisdom of crowds”, an idea that’s been so thoroughly internalized by people, the actual premise, that crowds are wise, are rarely questioned. But maybe when the individuals within the crowd don’t know anything, the crowd doesn’t either.

Questioning The Wisdom Of Crowds (via anthonydever)

[Obama] has a million little donors. He has brought many, many Republicans and Independents to the brink of re-thinking their relationship with the Democratic party. And he has won the majority of primaries and caucuses and has a majority of the delegates and popular vote. This has been a staggering achievement - one that has already made campaign history. […] If the Clintons, after having already enjoyed presidential power for eight long years, destroy this movement in order to preserve their own grip on privilege and influence in Democratic circles, it will be more than old-fashioned politics. It will be a generational moment — as formative as 1968. Killing it will be remembered for a very, very long time. And everyone will remember who did it — and why.

Andrew Sullivan (via claudia)

Marco.org: Senior-year class notebook. If anyone is curious to see how much effort I put into my schoolwork, this is a great example.

Texas

I’ve never been here before, so here are my first impressions:

I’m sure you’ll hear more about it soon…

Jet Blue

…lets you watch TV in the seats for free, gives good leg-room, and brings you half-decent coffee (Dunkin’ Donuts) and cashews.

Recommended.

I haven’t flown anywhere in 2 years, so this is new to me.

I don’t really care what my friends are doing right now. Does that make me less of a friend in 2008?

Scott Heiferman

Tricia Ward makes me want to visit Alaska just to take pictures.

Let’s go back to my place and I’ll blog this. Then you can reblog my post and we’ll watch Battlestar Galactica re-runs! Where are you going? What did I say?

Sharing Time: Tumblr pickup lines

When you scale animals you can’t just keep everything in proportion. For example, volume grows as the cube of linear dimension, but surface area only as the square. So as animals get bigger they have trouble radiating heat. That’s why mice and rabbits are furry and elephants and hippos aren’t. You can’t make a mouse by scaling down an elephant.

Paul Graham (via christmasgorilla, my favorite Tumblr username, because his name is Chris Muscarella — say it out loud — get it?)

The Hideout Theatre in Austin has really good coffee.

And “breakfast tacos”. Who would have guessed?

I’d go back to Austin just to have coffee there again.

Rovery

jessicagoldharalson:

What strikes me about Barack Obama saying he wouldn’t accept being Vice President is how… pompous that is. Regardless of who wins the nomination, our country could use us some Barack. And he’d turn down Veep because of his… pride? Because Hillary Clinton is OMG SO MEEN even though she seems to carry swing states?

I don’t think that’s it.

The Clinton campaign is losing. They’re pulling out all the stops, stooping to new lows (e.g. the 3 AM phonecall ad) in a desperate grab for support.

It’s in their best interest to attempt to deflate the Obama momentum. One way to do that is to convince people that Clinton is winning, even though she isn’t. If you keep saying you’re the winner, and the media helps you repeat it, you can sway a close race to your side.

You can make them stop counting, declaring you the winner, even if you aren’t.

Remember that?

Right.

Obama rejected their notion of “offering” him the VP seat because he’s winning, and letting that possibility circulate would sound like he’s losing. It might reduce his momentum in the remaining primaries, and it would help convince the population (and the superdelegates) that he’s not powerful enough to beat McCain.

That’s why the Clintons floated that idea — that was the goal! Did you think it was some sort of altruistic peace offering? Of course not. It was pure political strategy — and it was the sleazy, dirty kind that Karl Rove used to wedge Bush into office. The Clintons have repeatedly shown that they’re willing to engage in these tactics, while Obama’s campaign has been impressively clean and fair.

Obama had to quickly, publicly, and definitively reject any notion of settling for the vice-presidency. And that’s exactly what he did. Clinton would have done the same if the offer was in the other direction.

There’s a lot more to political strategy than any of us realize.

A particularly dark Garfield Minus Garfield.

This comic is so good. It’s a great case for the potential of expanding the public domain.

Uncrate’s awesome photo of Instapaper. I love when screenshots are more interesting than just flat bitmap grabs.

Saying that Hillary has Executive Branch experience is like saying Yoko Ono was a Beatle.

Commenter on Daily Kos (via tgumbel)

Improv Everywhere: Food Court Musical. Excellent!

Our coffee shop is back from the dead!

Obama campaign email

When we won Iowa, the Clinton campaign said it’s not the number of states you win, it’s “a contest for delegates.”

When we won a significant lead in delegates, they said it’s really about which states you win.

When we won South Carolina, they discounted the votes of African-Americans.

When we won predominantly white, rural states like Idaho, Utah, and Nebraska, they said those didn’t count because they won’t be competitive in the general election.

When we won in Washington State, Wisconsin, and Missouri — general election battlegrounds where polls show Barack is a stronger candidate against John McCain — the Clinton campaign attacked those voters as “latte-sipping” elitists.

And now that we’ve won more than twice as many states, the Clinton spin is that only certain states really count.

By David Plouffe, Obama campaign manager.

montoya:

So I uploaded a GIF to Tumblr, and the mini version is animated, but the regular version is not. Why?

We had a problem with people uploading massive animated GIFs that, even when resized, would be inconveniently huge (1+ MB) and would slow down Dashboard rendering even on broadband. (You can fit a lot of animation within the 10 MB photo-upload limit. Some people were using it to post short video clips.)

We didn’t want to disable animation in our images — there are too many legitimate uses. But we wanted to make sure that people weren’t getting these huge images in their Dashboards, either.

So there’s a new method: any PNG or GIF for which the resized output is larger than 500 KB is converted to a high-quality JPEG instead.

NYC Tumblr meetup tonight

Arranged by sharingtime:

Where: Fat Cat, 75 Christopher Street

When: 9 PM

Cost: $3 

Sorry guys. Didn’t know about that until yesterday afternoon. I promise it’ll be worth the $3 to get in.

If it ends up being not worth it, please complain to mascarah as it was her idea to go to Fat Cat. Complaints should be given in the form of buying her a drink.

See you there!

Workaholism is an introspection-killing disease, the anxious disability of tunnel-vision middle managers.

Camille Paglia (via highindustrial

Wired’s Gadget Labs call the ThinkPad X300 a “MacBook Air without the compromise”, but then go on to point out that the screen isn’t bright enough, battery life is poor, it weighs a half pound more, and costs $1000 more.

Daring Fireball on this

Tumblr NY Meetup

Tumblr NY Meetup again

Don’t miss Tiff’s photos of the Tumblr NY meetup.

Vista makes me feel like my computer has an agenda of its own, and I am only there when it is politically correct for me to be involved. If what I am doing gets in the way of what the computer wants to do, I am out of luck.

The continuing saga of a Mac guy in Vista land (via azspot). Ah, Windows. I’ll never go back.

Me at the Tumblr meetup. (Photo by Tiff)

Business and life are built upon successful mediocrity; and victory comes to companies, not through the employment of brilliant men, but through knowing how to get the most out of ordinary folks.

Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men

Life is too short to be constantly dealing with operating system frustrations.

Applepeels: A Mac user’s view after five months with Vista

Sometimes, people force women against their will to work as prostitutes. Therefore, we should outlaw all prostitution (rather than just outlaw forced prostitution and human trafficking). It’s possible to eliminate recreational activities that people have engaged in privately for thousands of years simply by making it illegal and then imprisoning the people who do it. Thus, we criminalize prostitution and drugs to ensure that nobody does those things.

Misadventures in logical reasoning (via jessicagoldharalson)

By nikography, who brought these great nametags to the meetup.

I have a compulsion to learn other people’s handwriting. Not just to recognize it, but to actually learn how they make their letters. So if someone writes me a note, I will automatically start tracing and retracing their letters. I try to imagine what it would feel like to form my letters that way all the time.

andreaallen

tylerriewer: “Yesterday’s Tumblr meetup in Nebraska.”

Ryan Adams nails Tumblr

He has since deleted the post, but it was here. Please don’t fan-mob him.

so, I just discovered this….but did you know, when you write things here, other people who write things here, they also read what you write, then sometimes they write about what you wrote, in the places they write.

I discovered this whole thing in the “dashboard” (i guess this is the windsheild of a very very isolated and lonely vehicle) …..where you see people who are “following” you….woah.

i looked at some of those people’s idea spaces or whatever.

pretty amazing.

my favorite was someone named Rach who somehow managed to get the most amazing picture of new york city to be in the space where on my blog it is just some neutral color or other.

And also someone who likes cupcakes and Iron Maiden.

It is kind of unsettling and strange and completely weird and awesome. I suppose it is okay seeing as these are just screens, and if you were to look down at this whole process from someplace above, you would just see very strange very isolated people rapping away on little microchip boxes,

not building bridges or furniture

not feeding bears or birds

not discovering new bodies of water or animals

not talking or being awkward

…maybe also if you went back in time and did the same thing, you would see very tired people coming in from tending to their crops or building houses sitting around their radio and staring at some strange box with a speaker

or hovering over tv trays of food, each food group in little tin boxes all in one tin tray, staring at a television, in silence, together,…..

all secretly wishing the autumn football game would go on forever,

so that they could enjoy each others company in silence

in the american version of meditation….forvere

and not have to say what is most painful but most true about life

which is that it is fleeting

and sometimes a pain paralyzes a person

and they must stay at home then

to collect themselves

in hopes of a springtime

that moves not only the green to go bright

but the soul to alight

I love the perception of Tumblr by new people, especially those less technical or less familiar with the web than us geeks.

Nice compliment to Rach’s theme in there, too.

I’m going to go back to my lonely vehicle and post on my idea space with my little microchip box because I hate water and birds.

Tiffany: “macro baking”

I like when Tiff bakes. I get free cookies.

Personal finance: Jim Cramer’s mutual fund picks

Jim Cramer’s book, Real Money, has had the opposite effect that he probably intended: it convinced me that I shouldn’t buy individual stocks — or at least, they shouldn’t make up the bulk of my investments. (He recommends devoting 20% of your investments to high-risk, discretionary stocks while you’re young. That still sounds good.)

That makes most of the book’s other lessons pretty useless to me now, other than preventing me from losing a bunch of money in the long run. But there was one other great part, with only one page devoted to it (page 200), that’s worth the price of the book for me: the list of recommended mutual funds for people who don’t want to buy individual stocks.

There’s so little guidance out there on this topic for newbies (like me and probably you) that I’d love to share this information here. Here are his recommendations:

HIGH RISK:

MEDIUM RISK:

LOW RISK:

ALSO RECOMMENDED:

In case you didn’t know: (I didn’t)

If you already have an investment account with someone else (Vanguard, E*TRADE, etc.), you can probably still buy these funds without starting a new account at their respective banks. Search for their ticker symbols from your investment account to find out.

Sidenote:

There’s a huge lack of good, practical, useful financial advice for regular people. Maybe it’s because money discussion is taboo. I don’t care — we’d have many fewer problems with personal finance in our society if people were better educated about it.

I’ve personally lost thousands of dollars from being uneducated (or under-educated) about finance, from both direct losses and missed opportunities. I’m lucky that I’m finally learning about this as a debt-free 25-year-old.

Hopefully we can have a more open discourse about personal finance in our culture. It’s too painful to see 50-year-olds without retirement funds because nobody ever told them they needed one, or 20-year-olds with credit-card debt because they bought frivolous things and didn’t consider the math.

Not a good day to be invested in banks.

If you don’t like prostitution, don’t be a prostitute or the customer of one. I never have been, not out of disapproval, but because it is not what I want. I want to make love with my sweetheart, not just have sex. But if you would like sex with someone very attractive, and you don’t need love to go with it, I don’t see any harm in your paying a skilled professional sex-partner to please you, just as I pay skilled professional chefs and musicians to please me in other ways.

Richard M. Stallman (via jessta)

Another thing we know that is millions of Americans are losing their nest eggs. They gave up job security, unions, health care, pensions, on and on. They were promised a piece of the action in the stock market. Once again, they’re screwed. Will enough of them wake up? Or will they just look for the next hooker scandal to distract themselves while decrying the high price of gas, driving to Wal Mart in order to stock up on more junk produced in China, paid by credit cards, as the suburban house faces foreclosure and the call-center job they had to take after losing a real job is outsourced to India? Oh, the president “is on top of it.” And those tax refunds will fix everything.

Rogue Columnist (via azspot)

Myth and fraud

Tumblr users: This is a fake quote in response to this massive reblog thread. If you notice, the cited post says something completely different.

That’s a terrible idea, and we would never do that. Thanks!

The El Camino is coming back under the Pontiac brand. The ugliest car ever made is about to join the ranks of the Aztek. Seems appropriate.

(thanks I guess, incidentalthinking)

The Origin Of The iChat UI

I can’t tell you how huge this is going to be. There will be thousands of iPhone programs, covering every possible interest. The iPhone will be valuable for far more than simple communications tasks; it will be the first widespread pocket desktop computer. You’re witnessing the birth of a third major computer platform: Windows, Mac OS X, iPhone.

Hello BlackBerry, Meet the iPhone - Pogue’s Posts (via peterwknox)

I met MC Hammer tonight at a fancy party. I saw his nametag on the table and thought someone else had registered under his name to be funny.

He’s an incredibly nice, down-to-earth guy. We exchanged phone numbers and I’m going to try to get him to use Tumblr. He had a lot to say about the music industry, and he’s very passionate about being a part of its impending revolution. Very sharp guy.

I listened to his cassette. Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em. Now he’s a business contact.

I don’t know how you native New York people can think stuff like this is commonplace.

Anyway, you all know “Can’t Touch This”, but fewer of you probably knew his second single, “Pray”. So here it is. Wow. MC Hammer. If you don’t want me to publish this song here, you can call me.

Baking experiments gone wrong

As part of Tiff’s baking challenge tonight, I’ve been tasked with removing a Barbie doll’s leg with a Dremel.

The Barbie-dismembering baking experiment has claimed another victim: our $12 electric hand-mixer.

The smell of a burnt-out electric motor is pretty distinct. And strong. Glad we had a fan nearby to stick in the window.

By posting pictures of myself, I am also broadcasting the message, “It’s ok to be photographed even if you are not a model.” This may subtly influence people to post their own pictures; as a result, they will become more aware of their own image. As a result of that, they may learn to accept their unique physical traits as just that — unique traits — instead of flaws to be hidden.

Jakob Lodwick: Fan Male

Eddie Vedder: Hard Sun

This is an interesting album. It’s the soundtrack from a movie dramatization about a true story of a crazy guy who abandoned society, went out into the Alaskan wilderness to live, and died of starvation. (People from the area say that crazy hippies and assholes do this all the time.)

My only complaint about the album is that it’s only 33 minutes. It’s great, though. At $8, it’s a no-brainer. At $10, give it a listen first.

Goodbye, DRM

In order to post this song from an album I purchased from the iTunes Store, I had to illegally download a different DRM-free copy. Had I pirated the album in the first place, I could have skipped that step.

This is stupid.

Now, the Amazon MP3 Store exists and has a massive, 100% DRM-free catalog of well-priced music. It’s better than the iTunes Store in every way: more-universal format, high bitrate, much larger selection (compared to the DRM-free “iTunes Plus”), and (usually) lower prices.

I’ll never buy music with DRM again.

David Karp

My thanks to Valleywag for sending an amazing 93 referrers to Daring Fireball over the last 24 hours.

John Gruber on surviving “The Valleywag Effect.” (via merlin)

(via florencio)

It must have been a long day at work.

From Ryan Adams:

They need to make this into food. food is not anywhere near as interesting.

Saturdays

The best part about Saturdays is getting the freshest coffee in the world from the roaster downstairs and slowly enjoying it throughout the morning without any work or obligations.

It’s frustrating that I’m trying to learn iPhone development today and the reference site has been down for hours.

Religion is the reason why our political discourse in this country is so scandalously stupid.

Sam Harris: What Barack Obama Could Not (and Should Not) Say

Mediocre hires hurt you twice: they get less done, but they also make you big, because you need more of them to solve a given problem.

You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss, a great Paul Graham essay that you should read. (via jnunemaker)

(via montoya)

xkcd: Important Life Lesson (with funny tooltip shown, too)

nath:

Look at the sky, pick a random object, hold it in front of the clouds and take a picture. ‘Fun with Clouds’ is the unofficial name for this series of photographs that makes you to use your imagination in order to create cool illusion effects with the different shapes of clouds (more examples here).

If you still doubt the awesome power of the Internet, consider this: it has the power to make Garfield funny again.

Time Magazine on Garfield Minus Garfield

Rick Astley Returns to the Hits:

Astley may be more recognisable than he thinks, though, due to an internet phenomenon called “rickrolling”.

(thanks, kellyreeves)

Last week, for the first time in twelve years or so, I misspoke.

Hillary Clinton (via peterwknox). The Clintons are great at lying.

Today, our public discourse is dominated by people who have been wrong about everything — but are still, mysteriously, treated as men of wisdom, whose judgments should be believed. Those who were actually right about the major issues of the day can’t get a word in edgewise.

Paul Krugman (via azspot)

Steve Jobs on why computers are like bicycles (thanks, superamit)

Researchers have discovered that people who are incompetent generally lack the knowledge that they are incompetent.

The Dilbert Blog: Researchers Discover Cause of Voting

justin:

“Hillary WASN’T LYING! Bosnia gunfire footage discovered…”

Pulled this video off in a couple hours yesterday, and quite proud of the finished product. Thank you motion tracking!

Her securing the nomination is certainly possible - but it will require exercising the ‘Tonya Harding option.’

A Democratic Official, speaking on condition of anonymity<br/> (via squashed)

Songs sold without DRM, at high quality, with album art, that’s the best way to get people to buy music instead of stealing it. DRM is a way to punish people who are buying. Offering a great product at a great price is a way to combat piracy.

Pete Baltaxe - Amazon (via yum9me)

superdoofus-stratodrive:

Behind the scenes of dan meth photographings.

I wish I took that photo.

Lindsay Campbell’s excellent commentary on the federal stimulus package in this MobLogic episode. (thanks, imarks)

Epic.

(photo by superdoofus-stratodrive)

happycap:

Ben Folds covering Such Great Heights on Australian TV (via jjlove10 ).

One of the players is playing a champagne glass. Cool.

You just don’t get offered too many McCain stickers at Penn. They’d be a scarlet letter - like “zit stickers” from that game Girl Talk. “You got caught cheating on your Roman History exam. Take 3 McCain stickers!

Collin Beck on Obama stickers (via jessicagoldharalson)

(via elspethjane)

Abandoned amusement park photoset. Creepy. (thanks, kottke)

Why is bottled orange juice always so terrible?

Counting Crows, live on Howard Stern yesterday, singing a great 7-minute version of “Round Here”. Don’t judge me for liking 90’s music.

(Apologies for the low bitrate… it’s the best I could find. It sounded great on Sirius…)

What if money had instructions on the back? Basic economic facts, wise slogans, etc? I think it would be useful.

Jakob Lodwick: In$truction manual

Anyone under the delusion that you can’t make money from open source and Linux should have been on Red Hat’s 2008 fiscal year earnings call on March 27.

Linux-Watch, 3/28/08 (via bijan)

How great is it in a city where it can be so hard to really get to know new people outside of one’s typical “group” that such a random night of laughs and friendship can exist?

Mascarah on the Tumblr NYC community

Gary Vaynerchuk on new media:

[@1:38] You are who you are now, in this world, and you need to understand that very quickly. Your personal brand now is completely exposed to the world, 24/7. Everybody, my friends, is now the media.

(thanks, toldorknown)

I just figured out that a quart is called a quart because it’s a quarter gallon.

saramcpherson:

And, yes, a Post-It stuck on one’s computer screen to call attention to other nearby Post-Its most certainly does count as a system.

Hey, it’s probably more effective than my flag-the-email-and-forget-it “system”.

catastrofe:

faster, my ants, faster!

(via shawnblog)

Counting Crows’ new song, Washington Square, from their great new album.

I don’t want to hear another conservative bitch about our education system when they’re financing 720 million dollars a day for the Iraq War. I don’t want to hear another conservative bitch about our falling economy when they’re financing 720 million dollars a day for the Iraq War. Enough is enough. There couldn’t be a larger contradiction than that. You can’t eat your cake and have it too.

The Economy & Our Complicity (via azspot)

I envy Jared’s photography and wine skills.

That was easy

Tiff and I just accidentally supported the Hour Without Power, today’s worldwide effort to turn off your lights between 8-9 PM to show that you want to use less energy.

We were out to dinner between 8 and 9. Our lights were off the whole time. So were the TV and computer monitors.

Environmentalism is easy!

…And lots of drunk very rich people. Oh rich people, you bore me to fucking tears. Imagine all the art they could be making. Endless.

Ryan Adams (via triciaward)

Finally, in the seventh frame, Obama made a spare, cleaning up one pin. “Yes I can!” he started chanting after a couple admirers at a nearby lane started it. “Yes I can!

Barack Bowl. From Dan: “I love a candidate who can laugh at himself.”

tiffany:

My Sweetest Dreams: Strawberry Cake Balls AND Pops!

Well, I was going to make these today for Marco and his office, but our oven is broken. Bummer.

I hate our oven.

From marsz:

Puppy the World is a dog rental store. You can choose small, medium, or large breeds and rent them for $19/hr, or $100 a night. They have everything from chihuahuas to labs to border collies to papillons—and you get a 5% discount at the cafe if you rent one! You can’t lose.

Every day, they have about 10-15 dogs in circulation. The dogs rotate in and out of service every few days. The ones in service stay on-site in a kennel, and the rest are all kept in nearby facility on their days off. The average dog works for about 5-6 years before they retire. Once they retire, they go to a facility in Chiba where they “rest.” I wasn’t exactly sure what they meant by rest, but I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it means they get to romp in huge meadows with other retirees. (via TOKYOMANGO: What’s Hot Now: Dog Rental by the Hour)

Puppy rental is always one of the examples I cite as something that sounds like a really great idea, until you think about it, and you realize it’s a really terrible idea.

I had another such idea in the car once. You know how when you get on the highway, you roll up the windows because you’re speeding up and it’s getting too windy? Why doesn’t someone make a car window that rolls up the windows automatically when you speed up?

Yeah. Tiff won’t let me forget that one.

djdescribeseternity:

Sen. Obama bowled a 37 — yes, a 37 — on Saturday night in Altoona, Pa.

Is that even possible?

I’d like a president whom even I could beat in bowling.

(thanks, Ted Roden)

Larchmont (10538) gets a Walk Score of 94, beating many Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods. And it’s cheap[er], nicer, and quieter. Maybe city people will stop making fun of me for living in the suburbs now.

(via Peter)

Feature creep can also be present in our lives. If we pretend for a second that our lives are a piece of software, we can see the types of “features” that we’ve added to it. Cell phones, email, IM, iPhones, Crackberry’s, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace… suddenly we’ve got a bunch of digital accounts that are stealing our focus. All of these accounts demand attention, and carve bits of attention from our day. We’ve become more and more connected to our computers and other communication devices. Life, it seems, has become much less simple.

Zen Habits: Feature creep in our lives (via cowboyo)