August 2004 Entries
While searching for nutrition information for my carnitas soft tacos so I could fill out my daily fitday.com food log I came upon ChipotleFan.com. They have a great nutrition information calculator -- something Chipotle.com lacks. My tacos = 912 calories. But the best part is the Find your Burrito Soulmate feature. There are 40,960 ways to get your meal at Chipotle. The person who gets the exact same meal as you is your Burrito Soulmate.
Eric Lippert of Fabulous Adventures in Coding has a funny writeup in his logs about questions people have asked google (in the form of a search query) and ended up at his site. How can I tell if I'm a centaur?Is the lower half of your body that of a large, hooved quadruped? Is the upper half human? If you answered "yes" to both questions, odds are good that you are a centaur.My google search logs include all sorts of stuff that is somewhat obvious given my posting content. Lots of people want to know about pudding/jello wrestling, megatouch, rance,...
I've been reading the How to be Creative series by Hugh Macleod entry by entry for a while now. There is some really tremendously good stuff in there. It applies to everyone that aspires, not just creative-career artist types. He's put the whole thing together in one long entry here: [link]
I've subscribed to Satan's Laundromat RSS feed for a long time now. It is a photo-blog based in Brooklyn. The author (artist? photographer) has a knack for finding sublime images in rough and forgotten neighborhoods on the fringe of the city. Lots of urban decay, etc. Turns out via today's entry he spent the weekend in jail. Arrested during one of Bloomberg's fascist mass-arrests of harmless bicycling protesters. The tale he tells is really awful. 16 hours in a make-shift jail, followed by another 14 waiting for paperwork. Read the whole thing. [link]Technical note: Because his RSS feed doesn't include images I use a NewsGator plugin called FetchLinks...
When I saw the crazy leprechaun guy disrupt the men's marathon I immediately recognized him as the same guy who ran on track at Silverstone last year. During that F1 race, the producers of the TV program were cautious to not go too deeply into the guy, they showed the clip a few times, but didn't announce his name or cause or anything. Contrast that to NBC's coverage. They showed the clip a hundred times, said the guys name over and over, tried to read his sign, read the text of his sign from last year. Isn't that exactly why...
Ian has posted some good pictures of his latest two week stint in Hong Kong. My favorites: A residential building - linkPilipino working women on Sunday, their only day off - link"Let's go shopping" - linkIsland-city - linkThe whole lot here.
If you've run into someone being referred to a cargo cult programmer, this is where that comes from: During the Second World War, the Americans set up airstrips on various tiny islands in the Pacific. After the war was over and the Americans went home, the natives did a perfectly sensible thing -- they dressed themselves up as ground traffic controllers and waved those sticks around. They mistook cause and effect -- they assumed that the guys waving the sticks were the ones making the planes full of supplies appear, and that if only they could get it right, they...
Piano Salesman: If you see a potential customer eyeing a piano, estimate their age and calculate what year it was when they were 18 years old. Play a big hit from that year on the piano they’re looking at. With a lot of preparation and a little luck, you might play the exact song they were listening to when they lost their virginity, got married, or drove their first car. The emotional resonance will overcome sales resistance and even open their wallets to a more expensive piano. Nurse: Patients will occasionally pretend to be unconscious. A surefire way to find...
Ian sent me this link to a fascinating article in New Scientist by Alexander Yuvhenko on his tale the night Chernobyl exploded. Also note the creepy photographs taken on motorcycle rides through the area: Ghost Town ride
Want a little extra boost on IE download speeds and are not afraid to disobey the HTTP protocol conventions?» Increase the number of simultaneous connections in Internet Explorer 4.0 and above.By default the number of simultaneous connections to a HTTP 1.0 server is 4, to a HTTP 1.1 server is 2. To change these limits, use Regedt32 to navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings On the Edit menu, add the following REG_DWORD value names: MaxConnectionsPerServer - The number of simultaneous requests to a single HTTP 1.1 Server. The default is 2. MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server - The number of simultaneous requests to a single HTTP...
Dead Fucking Last @ this year's Olympic games.
UPDATE: Also, Gold metal count ranked by medals/population: Austrailian Bureau of Statistics
Some of y'all might have read about the lobster eating contest held in Maine recently. Won by an Asian-American woman named Sonya Thomas. Like all good pseudo-celebrities she has a website where she nicknamed (herself?) "The Black Widow". Here are some highlights from her World Records page: - August 21, 2004, Kennebunkport, Maine, 9.76 pounds of Lobster meat (38 soft shell lobsters) in 12 minutes.- August 7, 2004, Centerville, Indiana: 84 Lumber World Baked Bean Championship: 8.4 lbs. of Baked Beans in 2 minutes, 47 seconds. - July 8, 2004, Madison Square Garden, NYC, NY, Chicken Nuggets: 80 in 5 minutes.- July...
[via MSNBC's Week in Pictures]
On the subway ride home tonight, the 3 train from downtown uptown, a group of teenagers was "rough-housing" as they say. Yelling, playing basketball on the mostly empty train car, etc. One kid decided he needed to relieve himself immediately. He proceeded to pee on the tracks between two cars while the train was moving!
follow up to the javelin discussion:I just learned that they changed the table-tennis ball from 38 mm to 40 mm after the 2000 olympics to make it better for TV and live audiences. Watching it now I can't believe that 2 mm would make a difference, but it is indeed much easier to see the ball than I remember. Slate has an article about the new vaulting "tongue" that replaced the old horse. I suppose the vault is better off for it, but what will replace the running headlong into the end of it on TV blooper shows?Anyone have any other interesting...
Olympic Gymnastic all around champion and mild-mannered co-worker Amanda.
Anyone else notice that Michael Phelps is wearing Bose QuietComfort 2 noise cancelling headphones before his races?
I just got back from two days in Louisville, Kentucky. We had lunch at a BBQ place called Mark's feed store. They were instantly suspicious of the yankee with the blazer and pink dress shirt. The good news was that I found a new interesting regional food item. Burgoo. Essentially it is a spicy stew made out of whatever meats they have left over. Delicious. Here's a recipe I found online: [link]600 pounds lean soup meat200 pounds fat hens2000 pounds potatoes, peeled and diced200 pounds of onions5 bushels of cabbage, chopped60 ten-pound cans of tomatos24 ten-pound cans puree of tomatoes24 ten-pound...
Now playing: Faithless - In the EndI love this song.
Two explosive related links: 1) WeBlowItUp.com You’d think that one of the few small pleasures of destroying some gadget that’s been driving you crazy would be doing it yourself. But if you can’t be bothered, a company called WeBlowITup.com (get it?) says that for the princely sum of about a hundred bucks they’ll use explosives to blow up your cellphone, laptop, or “small appliance” for you, and then send you a video commemorating its destruction.P.S. - Make sure to watch the sample video that’s on there. It’s as porno as non-porno gets.[via Engadget]2) Explosive sink and toilet plunger I went...
More and more I'm learning that caffeine affects my sleep dramatically. I don't remember this being a big issue before. Is it just getting older?
I can't have caffeine after 5pm or else I just can't sleep right.
Mid last week I got a blind evite from my friend Marc. The title was "Jello Wrestling Extravaganza" and had 250 on the invite list. I didn't recognise the names of the hosts or 99% of the invites. Here was the evite text: Celebrate [edited]'s birthdays with a slippery romp in the wrestling ring. And even if you don't feel like getting sticky and copping cheap feels, simply come to enjoy the cheap beer, fabulous DJs and overall debauchery. Prizes will be awarded to the wrestlers with the most original smackdown skills and outrageous attire. Wrestlers will also be rewarded with a...
No, it's not red - it's greenOkay, just about everyone has a red laser pointer. Heck, we even sell a fine one here at ThinkGeek. But, we're pretty sure you want to be a superior geek - and doing it with a green laser is the way to go. This pointer is significantly brighter (about 50 times) than a red laser pointer and because of its unusual color it is much more noticeable. I mean come on, a 532 nm green laser wavelength is obviously superior to a laughable 650 nm red laser wavelength. And unlike a red laser, the...
Is it me or is the NBC Olympic coverage finally striking a decent balance between the woman-viewer-focused back stories and actual sports coverage? The human interest stories have been relatively short and to the point. So far so good. The balance of American athletes only vs showing the rest of the world seems better this year. I've even seen events where the American team/individual didn't win!
From this UK site: badgas.co.ukWho can forget the iconic image of Lynndie England, the ugly she-man, grinning and pointing at an Iraqi prisoner-of-war's cock?The image has shocked, sickened and outraged people. But more importantly, it has captured the imagination of young men and women up and down the country who don't give much of a shit about anything. The result is a new craze called "doing a Lynndie". If you aren't "doing a Lynndie" now, you soon will be.So what does doing a Lynndie involve? Here are the basic instructions: Find a victim who deserves to be "Lynndied". Make sure...
I'm very close to opting-out of voicemail at work. I hate it, it isn't useful for me, it is a waste of time to check and I think I'm done with it. Voicemails are always "Corey, you missed our meeting", "Corey, can you do this for me". In ten years of work-life I've never had a good voicemail message. I'm going to love the telecom department's reaction - "You can't just not have voicemail!", me "Sure I can, just turn it off please."
Most of you probably heard about how Bush's new CIA appointee Porter Goss was interviewed by Micheal Moore during the filming of Fahrenheit 9/11 and basically laid out the case for why he's not even qualified to *be* in the CIA, much less run it. I didn't realize the video is available online here. [quicktime link]
Not wanting to jinx anything, but I am finding support for regular folks against Bush in lots of encouraging places. My barber is an Old-School Italian-American barber. He went off for five minutes today about how bad Bush is - calling him the worst president we've had since he arrived in America - 1958. There is momentum. Let's keep it going for another couple months folks.
When I read that NJ Gov McGreevey was resigning with "I am a gay American" with his wife by his side I just had to see the video so I could catch a glimpse of her reaction during. The reality is so much better than I had imagined. The look on her face when he talks about having an affair with another man is p-r-i-c-e-l-e-s-s. Video on msnvideo.msn.com
We had an informal company softball game yesterday in Central Park. Helpful hints for your next game: Go to the batting cages a few days before the event. I didn't get to go this year and suffered for it. The best spot on the field for looking like you want to field balls but really don't is shallow right field. In slow-pitch almost all right handed hitters will pull the ball to left. There is not enough time to get a hot dog and go to the bathroom between innings. It has to be one or the other. If you...
I just figured out Silvio from the Sopranos is Little Steven from the E-Street band. The only acting job he's ever had. From IMDB's Sopranos page: Steve Van Zandt .... Silvio Dante (as Steven Van Zandt)
Nick Schulz writes a blog about the nexus of sports and technology. He wrote a post about how the various sporting bodies were redefining the rules for javelin to keep the distances reasonable. I'm sure there is a logistical concern about keeping them on the field and away from other athletes. But still, couldn't it be a lot more interesting ...Responding to an earlier post on how javelins were modified to make them harder to throw far, a reader named Mark says maybe track and field officials should think in the other direction. He says that javelin doesn't have a...
I have a five year old Diamond Rio PMP 500 MP3 player that I use exclusively while exercising. It simply will not die no matter how badly I mistreat it. The screws on the back are rusted. I've run many times in the rain with it. The screen doesn't work half the time. If you push on it the wrong way you get a 5x volume jolt. The battery cover is broken. I have to take the battery out whenever I don't use it or it will discharge prematurely. But alas, I'm much more frugal gadget-wise than I used to be...
Two posts from people I greatly admire on the same topic: Seth Godin - "When I think about every successful project (whether it's a book or a business or a website) the people I trust have always given me exceedingly bad advice. And more often than not, that advice is about being conservative. Or it involves focusing on things that will require a lot of work, rather than things that will make it remarkable.""The incentive plan here is pretty clear. If someone dissuades you from trying, you can hardly blame them for the failure that doesn't happen, right? If, on the other...
Without a doubt the best thing about the CN tower in Toronto is the glass floor. I guess they only added it in 1994, so if you haven't been since you are missing out.
Walking out of my apartment yesterday I was closely following a young Latin woman in a two piece pink velour outfit. There on her lower back, in cursive, was the phrase "Lucky You".
Check out this video hosted by ebaumsworld. [WMV link] Trust me and watch for more than five seconds - I know my audience has the attention span of a hyperactive gnat. Folks on MetaFilter did some research and it looks like it is an old Aristocrats type joke done by engineers. The question is who was so motivated to hire an actor to pull it off?
My #1 network troubleshooting tool is called PortQry. Microsoft provides it as a download here in command line version and here with a GUI front-end. This is how you would find out if a machine had remote desktop running:C:\>portqry -n server01 -e 3389Querying target system called: server01Attempting to resolve name to IP address...Name resolved to 10.1.1.1querying...TCP port 3389 (unknown service): LISTENINGSince ICMP (ping) is disabled so often these days PortQry is now the new ping.
For those of us who love Will Ferrell and miss his Saturday Night Live presence we have to rely on stuff like this. (And seeing Anchorman, et al multiple times, which is what I am going to do this Thursday (see it again)) Will Ferrell spoofs GWB for ACT ... "you caught me mending my fences, one of the many things i do on my ranch ..." (streaming QuickTime or WMV). [via MetaFilter]
Vinod pointed me to a great Mike Tyson quote page after I questioned the origin of "I guess I'm gonna fade into Bolivian" when asked what he was going to do after losing his latest fight. "I paid a worker at New York's zoo to re-open it just for me and Robin. When we got to the gorilla cage there was 1 big silverback gorilla there just bullying all the other gorillas. They were so powerful but their eyes were like an innocent infant. I offered the attendant $10,000 to open the cage and let smash that silverback's snotbox! He...
I get on the 2,3 express subway at 96th street. Many days a local train pulls up, lets people off, many of whom are trying to transfer to the express. Without fail they will make a darting, elbowing move directly across the platform and will stand directly in front of you right on the edge and do the lean way over to look for the oncoming train. The depths of the NYC subway are not a pleasant place to be during the summer granted, but why these people feel like they own the fucking place is beyond me.
Visited my brother Kevin and his wife Julia in Toronto this weekend and stayed in their newly purchased house. We got the full tour of the town. We went up the CN tower. Of course Hollie felt the need to call out to all within earshot that it probably wouldn't be the "largest free-standing structure" if not for the extra-long antennae at the top. The unequivocal highlight was the glass floor, which apparently they only added ten years ago so it was new to all of us. Very strange sensation to walk out over Plexiglas with something like 1000 feet...