That Was Quick

Flickr is already "A Yahoo Company" with regards to branding. Hmm. I wonder if we should get on that. It's been a few years. Is there a time limit, like with wedding presents? Would it enhance the blogging experience? Let's all think on this and see what happens.

Hot or Not: thin slicing since 2000.
A screaming meme.

The OC Wars

George Lucas is going to guest star as himself on The OC and he's doing a Star Wars spinoff television series. Sign me up for that.

Good Eats

When I was in Portland, Oregon last week I was wandering around hungry and stumbled upon Veganopolis. It happens that I am a vegan so this for me was very good fortune. Especially when you take into consideration the fact that I was hungry at the time. The food was exactly my kind of thing—cafeteria/deli style and de-effing-licious. I'm seriously considering flying back to Portland just to eat there again. Of course I'd do other stuff too. It's not like I'm crazy. Although the pigeon-in-the-house post previous to this one kind of messes with that theory a bit. Whatevah.

Beer and Sunflower Seeds

There is a pigeon in my house. It sounds like some sort of mistake or accidental situation but he or she is currently spending the night in our guest bedroom—quite politely I might add. Livy evidently spotted our avian comrade with a problem wing this evening on her way home and the local wildlife shelter closes at 5pm so there you have it. I picked up some beer and sunflower seeds on the way home from work. (The beer was for me.)

A True Fact

The Last Nail: Museum of Unnatural History: Part 7

Kiddie pools hidden away in the woods are creepy enough, but when you lie awake at night imagining moonlit snarling demon kids dancing in a kiddie pool filled with human blood, it makes you want to cry yourself to sleep in Man-Diapers.

That's true. It does.

Just Blog It

I gave a talk at the Tiger Woods Center in Beaverton, Oregon on Wednesday. Nike put me up in a nice hotel in downtown Portland and it was cool. I felt like an international spy. Actually, I gave three talks so I was beat when I got back to the hotel. Managed to watch Greg's episode of Alias before I passed out tired. I'd seen his cut of it already so my drifting in and out of consciousness only heightened the experience. Also, I got some sneakers and stuff on the house. At least I think it was on the house. Not sure what all that beeping and flashing was about on my way out of the employee store. Must just be a thing they do. Good times.

Inside The Stanford

We saw Notorious last night at The Stanford. The theatre only shows classics, the tickets are cheap, and the popcorn is a steal. All this because it's run by a foundation dedicated to operating the theatre and promoting the preservation and public appreciation of classic films. Nice.

This Would Be Cool

If I could easily subscribe to photos and video clips from my friends on TiVo? Forgetaboutit! I'd love that. (I also wouldn't mind subscribing to feeds for movie trailers. I love me my previews.)

Dirty Bruce

He was mighty dusty when we got him back but we were really glad he was home. The best part of getting him back was going around to all the people and places we had handed "lost cat" flyers to and telling them to nevermind because we found him. Everybody was happy.

Come Home Bruce!

Update: We found him! He's filthy and we think he was mostly over at the big construction site nearby. The Bruce is back. Whew.

So first we find out that he has heart problems and now Brewster has left the premesis. Bruce is an indoor cat but early this morning he had a window spat with an outdoor cat during which the screen popped out and he took off. We have no idea where he is but we've checked all over the neighborhood, handed out flyers advertising a reward, and all that stuff. I really hope he comes home sometime today.

Participatory Culture Foundation

PCF: "Anyone can broadcast full-screen video to thousands of people at virtually no cost, using BitTorrent technology. Viewers get intuitive, elegant software to subscribe to channels, watch video, and organize their video library."

Free Sound?

The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, and bleeps released under a Creative Commons license.

Chocolate Covered Nano-Loompas

I just had some dark chocolate covered espresso beans with my coffee. The microcosmic oompa loompas in my stomachacular region are not into it. Update: They're still not into it.

Published by Amazon

Amazon To Offer On-Demand Self Publishing:

The services have been most popular with writers who are unable or unwilling to strike deals with publishing houses, and who do not want to spend thousands of dollars to complete a print run of, say, 2,000 books on a traditional offset press. Publishers, too, have used digital printing companies to satisfy small orders of obscure titles.

That's neat.

Amazon Concordance

Frequently occuring words in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, explained:

Concordance is an alphabetized list of the most frequently occurring words in a book, excluding common words such as "of" and "it." The font size of a word is proportional to the number of times it occurs in the book. Hover your mouse over a word to see how many times it occurs, or click on a word to see a list of book excerpts containing that word.

I got tricked by the look of concordance! I thought Amazon had implemented tags.

IM

Matt had this nifty idea in his dream:

So he goes on, explaining how he built a chatbot that is wired to a stream of TV closed captioning, so you add captionbot to your buddy list, then talk to it. You ask it what's on TV right now, and it returns a list of shows, you pick a show and it starts streaming out dialogue from characters, directly via closed caption data.

I'm not sure if I love the idea itself but I like the idea of the idea. I wouldn't mind if more services were available over IM. For example, if I could ask how much is in my checking account and get an immediate answer. Maybe there could be operators like Wish List: Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 3 for Amazon; TiVo: Record Daily Show. Or, how far is it to Berkeley from here? Directions? Tell me a joke! Or maybe not. Whatevah.

Zoods, This Is Gross

Doctors Remove Leech From Woman's Nose:

The patient was taken to the emergency room, where doctors identified the problem as a bloodsucking leech. They had trouble pulling it out because the 2 inch invertebrate retracted into the nostril and disappeared, the journal said.

How do I spell the noise one makes when one is about to barf? Mmbuh... mmbuh... mmmbuhahhff... *cough*. (Via)

Just My Tune

Mai has a cool idea: "Postulating that the ideas of perceptional stimuli and emotional stimuli can be combined à la Synthesia, brings up the idea of a (fantasy) phenomena that I've been thinking about."

When I first read Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens I thought synesthesia would make a great condition for a character in a novel or movie. In my version, the character would be a strung out secret agent on the run who hears violins when he sees blood but Mai's version sounds more upbeat like a iPod commercial.

What if iPods had a setting that allowed you to hear what other people were listening too when you got close to them on the subway, etc? Like the way iTunes is networked at the office but out in the wild instead. That'd be neat.

Brewster The Prince

For a guy who has his very own web site I don't post nearly enough about the cats. We received bad news this week. Our prince Brewster (aka "The Bruce!") has been diagnosed with Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy which, unfortunately is not a small thing. It means he's got five years, tops. It's sad for us but now we are even more interested in buying a house so we can get him a yard to prowl, sniff, and sneak around.

Is This Thing On?

Hello? Nice. I think it's working.

New Blogger Feature: No More Lost Posts!

We posted this over at Blogger Buzz earlier but it's worth repeating. Blogger now has a recover post feature. Here's how it works: Blogger saves your post to a cookie in your browser as you're typing. If something bad happens, just click the "recover post" link once you find your way back to the new post window and bam! Your lost post is magically recovered.

Odeo.mov

After the apartment-office but before the real office, Odeo had temporary space in suite 404 of it's current building. (Yes, upon leaving the elevator you were confronted with a 404.) Anywhoo, I shot Odeo.mov last week, on the first day Odeo moved into its swank new space. Historic! Nice, I like it. That reminds me. I have video somewhere (my sister's attic?) of an empty Xanga HQ circa 2000.

More Music

I created two more strange songs this weekend. Guitar Dreams.mp3 doesn't have any vocals but it does have a bit too much shaker. The other one is How Little It Matters.mp3 and it's kinda creepy. Whatevah. I'm learnin' the Garagebands. It really is fun putting these things together. I highly recommend trying it out.

Weekending

I feel like we're having a real weekend. Livy's volunteer shift was overstaffed so she didn't end up going in. Instead we slept till ten, walked the dog to a park, had lunch, saw Sin City (graphic!), and walked the dog again before coming home to have some beers and hang out which is what we are doing at this very moment. Okay, back to more of that.