Friday, April 06, 2007

Quote du jour

I've been spending a fair amount of the week with income taxes, expense reports, FrameScript (which is cool), and Wireless USB. I'm busy with item #3 at the moment and I've got the idiot box on in the background on the movie Monster-in-Law while I three-hole punch a bunch of manuals I printed out (got tired of reading them online and queued up a huge print job last night). J-Lo just got a really nice line: "Life's too short to live the same day twice."

I just wanted to share that. Back to reading programming manuals and experimenting on unsuspecting files (mwahahahahahaaaaa!).

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The theme to Star Trek

A lot of geeks can tell you that the theme to Star Trek was written by Alexander "Sandy" Courage, who was the composer of a truly incredible number of other themes and soundtracks. This YouTube clip is an interview with him about how the theme came to be and also how the "psssssssssshewwwww!" sounds of the ships zipping by were made.

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Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Americans aren't short of brains, buster!

Or maybe they really, really are.

Watch this video and make the call for yourself.


Americans are NOT stupid!
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Monday, April 02, 2007

The Bush pilot

Not what you think, nor that, nor even that.

The Bush pilot (video clip with English subtitles)
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Sunday, April 01, 2007

It's Palm Sunday

It's Palm Sunday, so, in the spirit of the season, I feel the need to do something totally, massively tasteless (and really funny) on several levels to celebrate the day.

If you're not easily offended, or if you like to live dangerously, go look at this animated gif. But if you don't like it--and you may not--don't blame me, 'cos I tried to warn yuh!
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Pranking the Super Bowl and the viewing public

This clip from zug.com is a story about how a dozen guys got together to prank the Super Bowl under the noses of federal marshals, Homeland Security guys, and probably lots of local police and rent-a-cops. They set it up so hundreds of people in the stands flashed a message on the screen, thinking they were spelling out Prince's name, but in fact, they showed a quite different message. To 93.1 million viewers.

What the author of the prank finds interesting--apart from the fact that they could do this so easily--is that the major news media apparently refused to report on it, on the grounds that (I'm paraphrasing here) this shows, once again, that the Emperor has no clothes. But it's not like we didn't know that already.

The author of this prank has a really good commentary about what they did here:

As I write this, I'm sitting in the Miami International Airport watching a TSA agent systematically destroy my carefully-packed carry-on luggage. He's taking every single item from my bag, including my fake business cards, badges, and detailed plans for the heist. Once we make it through this final checkpoint -- which we will -- we'll be on our way home.

No system is 100% secure. In a system as massively chaotic as the Super Bowl, there are too many variables to ever fully control. All they can do is look for rogue elements, then try to subdue or remove them. But when the rogue employees look exactly like the real employees, what can you do?

We live in a zero-risk society, convinced that more security, more police, more searches, and more technology will make us more safe. This is false. As we've proven, even four comics and a cameraman can outwit the most tightly-controlled event in history. Everyone did their job. No one did anything wrong. But no system is completely safe.

Life involves risk.

I want to leave you with this final thought. Life is some risky business. When we cling to the illusion of security, we give up our freedom and our privacy. When we willingly remove more clothing at airport security, when we allow our government to pass wiretapping legislation, when we give them power to spy on us, we are giving away our precious civil liberties that our founding fathers earned with blood.

So embrace the risk. Take a chance in life. Blow your kid's college education fund on a silly prank. That's what it's about. When we live in fear, then the bad guys have already won. (Are the bad guys the terrorists, or our own government? I'm not so sure anymore.)

It was the prank of a lifetime, and no one else could have done it. A corporate parent like Viacom would never have allowed Ashton Kutcher to do it for "Punk'd." College students could have thought it up, but would have never found the funds to pull it off. It was a magic moment, a momentous message.

Do you see?
The whole description of what they did and how they did it appears here.
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Customizing Google

There's a Google customizer that lets me put my name--or anyone else's for that matter--on the page in place of the "Google" logo. Here are a few examples (click any of these to go to the matching Google page):








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A handy guide to sinning

This is really rather interesting and is something that lends itself to a little reflection. Someone's mapped out the 7 deadly sins and then drawn a connection between them to show the outcome of each combination.



This originally came from a nifty blog here on Blogger.
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