Monday, October 30, 2006
Start-of-day inhibitor
No wonder I can never get anything done at the start of the day. In the eight hours I was asleep, I received about 50 emails. Some are simple bounce notifications for the Roble email lists, which are easily ignored; a few are spam; many are widely-broadcast announcements. But at least six merited near-immediate response.
The tranquil summer seems so far away...
The tranquil summer seems so far away...
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Guster? I don't even know'er
Listening to a randomly generated playlist when Guster's "Red Oyster Cult" blasted in. It was kinda refreshing. I might really like Guster. I know that I sometimes overhear other people playing Guster and like what I'm hearing. So I'm renewing my pledge to give them a full listen-to.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
QotD: Myspace
QFT (which from now on I'll consider to stand for "Quoted for Truthiness"):
Oh, explanation for the above comic. (Like many of the jokes on xkcd, either you get it immediately or you have no idea what it's about.) Many Myspace pages are set up so that a song begins playing as soon as a page is loaded. For instance, Green Day's Myspace page immediately starts playing a preview/ad for their DVD, Bullet in a Bible; Kat's plays Tullycraft. This behavior is often unexpected and unwanted, and if it happens to take place in a public area like a computer lab, cafe, or classroom, highly embarassing. It usually takes about five seconds to either lower your computer's volume or to find the song/video on the page and hit the pause button. And if you don't remember embedded MIDIs on Geocities pages, consider yourself lucky.
"It's like they got together and said 'what do we miss most from the internet in 1998? that's right, embedded MIDI!'"Oh xkcd, for your unpronouncable name, absurdist and often math-based humor, and tendency to remind me of Kat, you are soon to be sidebarred.
Oh, explanation for the above comic. (Like many of the jokes on xkcd, either you get it immediately or you have no idea what it's about.) Many Myspace pages are set up so that a song begins playing as soon as a page is loaded. For instance, Green Day's Myspace page immediately starts playing a preview/ad for their DVD, Bullet in a Bible; Kat's plays Tullycraft. This behavior is often unexpected and unwanted, and if it happens to take place in a public area like a computer lab, cafe, or classroom, highly embarassing. It usually takes about five seconds to either lower your computer's volume or to find the song/video on the page and hit the pause button. And if you don't remember embedded MIDIs on Geocities pages, consider yourself lucky.
Monday, October 09, 2006
North Korea claims nuclear test
CNN.com - North Korea claims nuclear test - Oct 9, 2006
Wow this seems pretty bad. As I understand it, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il is legitimately unstable and about the last person in the world that we'd want controlling nukes.
To help myself sleep tonight, I'm rewatching that funny "End of the World" flash animation that went viral a few years back.
Follow-up: Now I read that Republican Representative Mark Foley had sex with an ex-Page who was 21. I find it ironic that Republicans are now desperately trying to push the nation's focus off of this scandal and back onto "the issues," since their one-party government has actually done a pretty poor job on the issues: Iraq is a quagmire that is worsening the terrorist threat; the Geneva Conventions are being supplanted by police-state tactics; the real threats to our security (see above) are hardly being addressed; and while the government runs up the largest budget deficit in history, they repeatedly find room to cut taxes for the richest of the rich. It would be kind of sad if the only way for the Republicans to lose control of one or both houses of Congress is that one of them happens to be a pedophile.
Wow this seems pretty bad. As I understand it, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il is legitimately unstable and about the last person in the world that we'd want controlling nukes.
To help myself sleep tonight, I'm rewatching that funny "End of the World" flash animation that went viral a few years back.
Follow-up: Now I read that Republican Representative Mark Foley had sex with an ex-Page who was 21. I find it ironic that Republicans are now desperately trying to push the nation's focus off of this scandal and back onto "the issues," since their one-party government has actually done a pretty poor job on the issues: Iraq is a quagmire that is worsening the terrorist threat; the Geneva Conventions are being supplanted by police-state tactics; the real threats to our security (see above) are hardly being addressed; and while the government runs up the largest budget deficit in history, they repeatedly find room to cut taxes for the richest of the rich. It would be kind of sad if the only way for the Republicans to lose control of one or both houses of Congress is that one of them happens to be a pedophile.
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
QotD: Rep. Foley scandal
Official Web site: Foley=vacancy | News.blog | CNET News.com
"Looking for the old Foley official Web site? Too late. The Yahoo and Google caches now have the updated site for the vacant seat. But a Foley search on Congress' Web site brings back 20 pages full. Ah, that's 'pages' as in text."(That's a reference to current events in US politics, Muscovitya. Fortunately, by the time you get back the midterm elections will be over, for better or for worse.)
Sunday, October 01, 2006
My Alma Mater
I was just checking out Stanford University's homepage.
(Random aside: On campus, all URLs of the form "http://cs.stanford.edu" can be accessed by typing only "http://cs"; the domain "stanford.edu" is implicitly appended. So to get to "www.stanford.edu", I type "http://www". Hehe.)
The page is headed by a banner that contains three images that are randomly chosen each visit. Here's what I just rolled:
The first shows the famous Leland Stanford Junior (pause) Univeristy Marching Band, which is currently on "indefinite provisional status" (kinda like "double secret probation") after tens of thousands of dollars of damage was inflicted on the old Band Shak this summer.
The second shows a bike parked in the arcades of the Main Quad. This year, the Stanford Department of Public Safety chose safety over convenience and tradition by banning bikes from the Main Quad. I actually agree with this move: the quad has way too many blind corners. What if a brilliant X-egenarian professor, walking through the quad, formulating a theory that might win a Nobel prize, gets clobbered by a student flying to get to class on time?
The third is just an aerial view of Stanford. Nothing illegal there... maybe blimps are banned from flying over campus? Still, two out of three is pretty highly ironic in my book.
(Random aside: On campus, all URLs of the form "http://cs.stanford.edu" can be accessed by typing only "http://cs"; the domain "stanford.edu" is implicitly appended. So to get to "www.stanford.edu", I type "http://www". Hehe.)
The page is headed by a banner that contains three images that are randomly chosen each visit. Here's what I just rolled:
The first shows the famous Leland Stanford Junior (pause) Univeristy Marching Band, which is currently on "indefinite provisional status" (kinda like "double secret probation") after tens of thousands of dollars of damage was inflicted on the old Band Shak this summer.
The second shows a bike parked in the arcades of the Main Quad. This year, the Stanford Department of Public Safety chose safety over convenience and tradition by banning bikes from the Main Quad. I actually agree with this move: the quad has way too many blind corners. What if a brilliant X-egenarian professor, walking through the quad, formulating a theory that might win a Nobel prize, gets clobbered by a student flying to get to class on time?
The third is just an aerial view of Stanford. Nothing illegal there... maybe blimps are banned from flying over campus? Still, two out of three is pretty highly ironic in my book.
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