Tastes Like Chicken: This funny story is running around the Internet:
According to the Knight-Ridder News Service, the inscription on the metal bands used by the U.S. Department of the Interior to tag migratory birds has been changed. The bands used to bear the address of the Washington Biological Survey, abbreviated Wash. Biol. Surv. until the agency received the following letter from an Arkansas camper:
Dear Sirs: While camping last week I shot one of your birds. I think it was a crow. I followed the cooking instructions on the leg tag and I want to tell you it was horrible.
Dear Sirs:
While camping last week I shot one of your birds. I think it was a crow. I followed the cooking instructions on the leg tag and I want to tell you it was horrible.
The bands are now marked Fish and Wildlife Service. Update: This is an old joke going all the way back the 1940s.
Was the CIA involved in the WTC attacks? Here is a very interesting timeline of events and coincidences leading up to the WTC attacks concerning a possible conspiracy between the oil companies, the CIA, the White House, some insurance companies, and a bunch of other seemingly unrelated companies and organizations. Depending on how you look at it, these events and coincidences are like pieces of a puzzle and if you put them together in the right order the puzzle may show something shocking. If you put them together a different way, the puzzle shows nothing but pure conjecture. Regardless of whether there is a secret conspiracy or not, there are many things being kept from the public. Fascinating.
From Today's NY Times:
No no, the mouse goes outside the computer...
The NYC Mozilla 1.0 Release Party is June 7 at the Remote Lounge. I am planning on attending.
Business 2.0: Eight Technologies That Will Change the World
Not that I advocate the use of them but the Racial Slur Database is a pretty thorough compilation of data and might be of use for writers seeking to create memorable characters.
They busted the Nigerian Scam email people. I'll bet we continue to see these emails, though. It's almost become a part of net folklore and the spammers/scammers will copycat it just because they can keep it going. Update: Forget the Nigerian spam scam, now it's the Afghan-War-scam!
Working For Change: The emerging connection between oil plans and the 9-11 attacks
Instructions for making a neat-looking cardboard box end table. Forget the trip to IKEA, I'm making cardboard furniture for my new apartment! [via punkchick]
Tecumseh's Curse: An interesting set of coincidences called Tecumseh's Curse or the "Zero Factor". The following U.S. Presidents elected in years ending in a 0 (zero) have all died, been assassinated, or have survived assassination attempts while in office:
It's probably just coincidence but with the increased dislike of George W. Bush both in the U.S. but mostly overseas, it wouldn't be all that surprising to see an assassination attempt before the year is out.
Please Stop. For George W. Bush to give Russian President Vladimir Putin the nickname "Pootie-poot" almost seems like an insult. If I were Putin I'd punch Bush right in the face if he called me that. What an incredible display of dis-respect. Nicknames can be honorable. Nicknames can even be good. But when a nickname is dumb, you just have to shake your head and wonder about the intellect of the person assigning them. I'm disappointed that Bush continues with this schtick. I wish he'd just grow up already. You're not fooling anyone anymore Mr. President. The worst part is that Putin probably doesn't even realize how insulting "Pootie-poot" sounds to the native English speaker. Perhaps Putin has a few choice nicknames for Bush, like khokhol or mudilo or raz'yebuy. You can look these Russian words up here.
I just chatted to a Russian friend of mine and asked her if the word "poot" or "pootie-poot" meant anything in Russian and she said that it didn't. She's never heard the word, it being an English word typically used to describe the act of passing gas or farting. In conclusion, President Bush has now referred to the President of Russia as "farthead". He might as well have just insulted Putin in Russian by calling him bzdenok which means "little old man who farts frequently." Gee thanks, Bush. Way to represent your country.
If you measure the popularity of world figures by watching the Russian doll market, this article points out that the Bush doll is not doing so well. [via BoingBoing]
Tongue-in-cheek: Wow, labor and expenses must be getting really cheap in the island nations of the South Pacific. So many web sites are now located in Tuvalu (.tv) and Western Samoa (.ws). It seems that the entire television industry has relocated to the tiny almost-underwater country of Tuvalu.
It's no surprise that Microsoft is using its lobbying muscle to fight against open source software within the U.S. military. The good news is that their efforts may very well backfire. Microsoft is finding it more and more difficult to convince IT directors that their mission-critical solutions are stable, scalable and secure. Companies and organizations are increasingly opting for the tried-and-true open-source solutions.
InMyExperience.com. I just discovered today this weblog about user interface design run by Damiel Kapusta, a user interface designer at AOL. It's worth keeping an eye on.
Handicapped Pets: Bendy the Kitten. Sad! It makes you want to root for the underdogkitty.
The Economics of the XBox. Great article that analyzes how Microsoft is fighting the game console price war. And it looks liek Microsoft is losing. [via Winterspeak]
Bizarre. I mis-typed mail.yahoo.com last night and got to this page (warning: pop-up Hell unless using Mozilla). What's interesting is the message on this generic portal/search page is "Network Solutions and Verisign are very bad companies." Odd. Sounds to me like some domain squatters got burned by NetSol.
Excellent long article at Business 2.0 about strategies some companies are taking to compete against Microsoft. Definitely worth reading. Lots of great research.
Meow, meow meow, meoooow, meeeeeow, meow mmeow, meowwww!
$1.4b worth of stolen artwork destroyed. This is one of the more bizarre stories coming out of the art world.
It's interesting to watch Microsoft try to succeed in the video game market. This recent article about the various deals between Electronic Arts, Microsoft, and game console companies outlines the issues fairly well. What's ironic is that Microsoft could likely do a hostile takeover of Electronic Arts using it's $40b in cash reserves. EA's current market cap is a measly $8.6b. Basically, with $40b in cash reserves Microsoft can effectively ask themselves "What market do we want to buy next?"
If Yahoo can change your privacy preferences without notification, then Microsoft must think they can do so as well with Hotmail. More about this.
This guy apparently does not get as much spam as the rest of us. He also does not realize that most spammers are illegally using the hardware and bandwidth of unsuspecting companies to send out their spam. This is where his "junk mail" and spam comparison falls apart. [via madman]
The president of Venezuela apparently had advance warning of last month's failed coup against him. While that's interesting in itself, the more interesting thing to me is this phrase:
[Rodriguez] said Opec had learned that some Arab countries, later revealed to be Libya and Iraq, planned to call for a new oil embargo against the United States because of its support for Israel.
Since the terrorist attacks last year I am finding my interest uncomfortably being drawn more and more into the goings on of world politics, and to learn that such things are happening because of a hatred of the United States or a hatred of what the United States "supports" is not a good feeling. The problem is that most Americans are woefully ignorant of world politics and do not realize that the decisions made by our government regarding international affairs have an immediate or future effect on our way of life. I don't claim to understand or even necessarily want to understand the root cause [differences of religion?] of the conflicts between Israel and some Arab countries, but I do know that the U.S. is being unwillingly pulled into something that we're probably better off being left out of. If history shows us anything, it's that whenever the U.S. gets drawn into a world conflict, it ends up badly. I think the one exception to this would be when the U.S. entered World War II even though that ended up with us dropping atom bombs.
I knew that buying that Pixar stock back in February when it was nearing it's 52-week-low was a good idea. It's up 36% since I bought it. This makes me and my portfolio very happy. My only complaint is that I should have bought more.
"Here, let me hold this frying pan and you can shoot it to make sure the gun works."
I guess one way to gain attention for yourself is to completely rip off the design and content of an industry leader. That's clearly what Alex Au of HKAD..networks has done. His entire site is a complete copy of the old 37Signals web site. More proof he simply scraped the 37Signals site.
I didn't know that there were a number of GUIs for Apache. How cool is that?
The NY Times has two great articles about the technology absurdity that is BMW's iDrive. Dazed by a Technical Knockout and Menus Behaving Badly. Read them both.
Scott Teare: "So to be anti-Microsoft is almost to be anti-innovation." I find this to be a silly statement. The reason RealNames failed is because they decided to completely rely on Microsoft for their technology integration. RealNames bet the farm; Microsoft decided they didn't like farms; RealNames lost. For all those companies out there dreaming up revenue streams to take advantage of Microsoft's monopoly in the Web browser market, it'd be a good idea to pay close attention to the RealNames story. Oh yeah, don't be surprised in a few months when Microsoft announces something called ".NET Keywords" or something along that line.
The next NYC CHI meeting is this Wednesday:
NYC CHI's NEXT MEETING: 15 May, 6-8PM The State of IA in NYC Date and Time: Wednesday, May 15, 6-8pm (program starts at 6:30 sharp) Location: TechSpace, 41 East 11th Street between University Place and Broadway -FREE- (RSVP Required: nycchi@usableproducts.com)
The imminent release of Mozilla 1.0 is getting closer and closer. There's a 1.0 Release Party being planned for June 12 in San Francisco. There are also satellite parties happening simultaneously around the world.
Jeff Jarvis is proposing a Weblog Foundation. What Jeff doesn't know is that I pitched a similar concept to a private weblog-centric mailing list last Fall. Here's the text of my email.
I'm a little bothered by all the media attention that weblogs are getting, but I'm still a believer the concept of weblogs as niche-market portals that are edited/written by community and industry experts.
Gotta love the irony. Microsoft was busted in France for illegally including the software code from another company in one of their products. Make me wonder what else might be included in Microsoft's products without disclosure. [Thanks, Bruce.]
"Here at Backstreet Labs we have one of the largest collections of Happy Drinking Birds in captivity." I gotta get me a drinking bird.
This article about the forced removal of Macs in the U.S. Senate offices is interesting. The Windows bigots who are setting the guidelines refuse to consider cross-platform solutions, even though it can be proven that a Microsoft-only solution costs more money. I wonder if they realize that Microsoft's new software licensing rules are basically raping customers out of more money and that because of the monopoly status Microsoft has there is very little Microsoft-entrenched companies and organziations can do. Don't misunderstand me. Microsoft makes some very nice software which I use it on a daily basis, but I am very much against Microsoft's business practices of putting their customers between a rock and a hard place.
It's good to see that the guys at Bungie haven't lost their sense of humor by being under the Redmond Mothership. Pimps At Sea is a web page for a game that doesn't exist. Methinks someone is blowing off steam; Ahoy Matey. [via Crummy]
ACM: Knowledge Management for Life: Make the World a Better Place
Some Russian: "Vash website bil zahvachen hackerom."
New York Times Letter to the Editor: "The world is growing impatient with America's go-it-alone president."
NSI Horror Stories: McDonald's Cashier vs. NSI Customer Support, Who's smarter?
Not sure why you would want to do this, but you can water-cool an Xbox.
Social Engineering: The Human Side Of Hacking
SiliconValley.com: Boom times have passed for online porn
A List Apart: What Online Porn Portends
Good IBM article about the little nitpicky things in Aqua that make Mac OS X "too differnet" from the classic UI that we all love. Hopefully, Apple will fine tune Aqua and many of these issues will be addressed.
I completely missed the announcement that OpenOffice 1.0 was released last week. Congratulations!
Oops!
James Duncan Davidson: Hello Photoshop, Goodbye Classic
Weblogger's Dilemna: Over the past few weeks I've discovered a few sites that I've badly wanted to link to because they are truly quite amazing. But I am reluctant to link because I know my traffic will possibly cause them to exceed their bandwidth limit or possibly shut down altogether. I know that if I provide the link it will get picked up by others and make the rounds. I don't want these sites to go away, but I also want to inform my readers and peers about them. I'm frustrated because I have no real answer to this problem.
Good article from Meg Hourihan about user interface design for web applications.
Yeah, fashion and culture runs in a 20-year cycle. The 80's are back.
We all know Verisign (a.k.a. Network Solutions) sucks. It's time to Google-bomb them and perhaps they will fix their pathetic and broken domain registration security processes. I transferred all of my domains from NetSol a long time ago, probably one of the best things I've done in a long time. I suggest you do the same.
Foreign Policy: Excellent article on Japan's hip 20-something culture and how it is spreading around the world.
Redneck Neighbor: "There's a working disco ball hanging on their ceiling fan."
Interesting. Adobe has won a favorable jury verdict in their legal case against Macromedia that claims Macromedia is infringing upon a patent owned by Adobe regarding reconfigurable tabbed palettes. Macromedia has to pay Adobe $2.8 million and I imagine work out a license deal for the patented technology if they want to continue to use this type of user interface implementation.
Ugh, I realize that Macromedia Flash is a nice technology and has some great uses, but I think that trying to replace existing Web infrastructure with their own is a very bad idea:
"Macromedia's MX architecture, which seeks to replace parts of today's web infrastructure with something faster, more powerful and more flexible, comprises client, server and development tools. The client - a "rich" one like the traditional Microsoft Windows environment - is based on the new Flash MX."
O'Reilly has announced a Mac OS X conference to be held September 30-October 3, 2002. Awesome!
The perennial question: Should Sun Open-Source Java?
