I'm finding this site absolutely addictive. It's a music contest site, you listen to songs and judge them against each other. Tons of surprisingly high quality music you've never heard before, and the judging aspect motivates you to listen actively. Only problem is a lot of good tracks you can't download or buy anywhere. Well I'm sure that will resolve itself.
(Find my favorites here).
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11:59:30 AM,
Sunday 22 February 2009
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Egad. I guess that's one solution to how to deal with kids and computers. (Found because someone on a local mailing list was complaining that her kid re-set the system clock to get around the time limits. All I could think was, go kid!)
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(1)
07:16:56 AM,
Wednesday 18 February 2009
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So I just noticed this meme going around Facebook, like "25 things" but having to do with names. You know, mix up your name and get a your "stripper name" or "witness protection name". It asks for information like: your mother's middle name. your father's middle name. your first pet. your first school. current pet's name. street where you grew up. What do these things have in common? They are often used for security questions. Only an identity thief would come up with this kind of fun "give me the keys to your online accounts (and bank accounts too)" game. So first off, if you see that meme, don't play. Second, why is hardly anyone sounding the alarm? I have to dig deep in search results to find anything about identity theft and memes, and even that is just isolated people also noticing the problem (while the blogosphere goes nuts over the terms of service kerfuffle). It's not a new thing, there have been memes like that before, but this one is particularly blatant in its grab for the specific bits of personal data that can be used to break into accounts. Oh and if you think I'm overreacting read all about what can be done with a bit of personal info-- less even than given on this meme.
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(7)
11:31:21 PM,
Tuesday 17 February 2009
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05:21:00 PM, Monday 16 February 2009
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deathwish
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06:51:13 PM,
Sunday 15 February 2009
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Richard Dawkins is wrong. (Just clicked on a link and had to get that out of my system).
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(3)
06:57:40 AM,
Wednesday 11 February 2009
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02:02:47 PM, Sunday 8 February 2009
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hm.
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(3)
10:37:07 PM,
Saturday 31 January 2009
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I wrote this little online notebook app a while ago and realized yesterday that I actually wanted to use it, so I dusted it off, spruced it up, posted it, and there it is. It exists mostly because I have been looking for a good aesthetically pleasing place to store notes online. Also because I wanted to learn python. Anyway, if you have a use for such a thing, feel free. (I completed a project for once! Yay!)
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02:07:14 PM,
Saturday 31 January 2009
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I have been working on a tape loop simulator that lets you overdub things at different speeds. So far the user interface is extremely primitive but it's fun to mess around with. Here is a track made entirely with scotch tape sounds. I didn't pick tape because of the pun! Really! It was just the thing hanging around my desk that made the most variety of noises.
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(1)
09:08:50 PM,
Monday 26 January 2009
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This is hatty town, where all the people live in hats. A surreal cartoon I remember watching as a kid.
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10:27:37 PM,
Monday 19 January 2009
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If all the people in the world were evenly spaced on the planet, how far away would the nearest person be?
world population: 6,706,993,152
world area: 148.94 million square kilometers
0.02 square kilometers per person
sqrt(0.02) = 0.15 kilometers (489 feet) between people.
So the nearest person would be shouting and waving distance away.
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(15)
02:21:55 PM,
Sunday 18 January 2009
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If all the world's corn were evenly distributed across the earth and popped all at once, how much would be in our apartment?
30.9 billion bushels worldwide corn production 2008
90,000 kernels/bushel
2.78 x 10^15 kernels produced 2008
148.95 million sq. kilometers in the world
18.7 million kernels/sq. kilometer.
1 square kilometer = 10,763,910.4 square feet
1.73 kernels of corn per square foot.
1000 square feet
1730 kernels. A decent snack.
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(2)
10:24:29 PM,
Saturday 17 January 2009
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O.o.C. Q.o.t.D.: "Let me get this straight, you'd rather have ice fall out of the sky than cockroaches."
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08:07:31 PM,
Monday 12 January 2009
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"It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines."
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(3)
12:54:27 PM,
Saturday 10 January 2009
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One solution.
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12:52:58 PM,
Saturday 10 January 2009
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meep!
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(2)
10:21:40 PM,
Tuesday 6 January 2009
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meep!
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10:21:05 PM,
Tuesday 6 January 2009
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meep!
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10:20:46 PM,
Tuesday 6 January 2009
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06:32:48 PM, Saturday 13 December 2008
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04:36:47 PM, Saturday 13 December 2008
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04:36:29 PM, Saturday 13 December 2008
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The moon was brighter than the streetlamps on my way home tonight. Apparently it is closer to the earth than usual.
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(5)
08:57:06 PM,
Friday 12 December 2008
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11:01:49 AM, Saturday 6 December 2008
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I had a dream last night involving teletype. The dream took place in around 1905, and had a shed in the woods where there was a machine automatically printing out bulletins of some sort from a town a few miles distant, and I was explaining to someone how this worked. When I woke up my first thought was, wait, is this historically accurate? Turns out the first teletype machine was patented in 1904. So it could have been an early prototype. Score 1 for Erika's dream history. The first commercial system was not until 1910.
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(3)
09:31:37 AM,
Saturday 6 December 2008
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When I aim to leave at 7, I leave at quarter to 8. When I aim to leave at 8, I leave at 8.
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07:47:39 AM,
Friday 5 December 2008
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I am standing at the door of an art museum, looking from a doorway into an exhibit with colorful paintings and whatnot. In order to get into the exhibit one must change into black clothing, which is supplied by the museum, so everyone looking at the exhibit is dressed in black. The idea is that the observer is part of the exhibit. I pass. Then after some adventures I find myself in a room. There is wood everywhere, wood trim, an upright piano made of wood, wooden end tables. On the tables are various knick-knacks. There is a window ahead of me, and to the left, light is streaming in through them, and the door is on the right, it is a particular style of house, which in layout reminds me (now, awake) of the cottage drawing room in the Ang Lee Sense and Sensibility, but much more elegantly furnished. I think to myself, "this is the perfect room". But then I realize that everything in the room is useless, and what with all the carefully placed knick-knacks nothing useful could be brought in. There is not even a chair aside from the bench I am sitting on. So I get up and return to the art exhibit, and this time change into the black clothes so I can go in. I step into the exhibit, and that is where the dream ends.
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(2)
08:30:06 AM,
Wednesday 3 December 2008
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There's no such thing as too much Worcestershire sauce.
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(6)
06:28:12 PM,
Tuesday 18 November 2008
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O.o.C.Q.o.t.D.: "Cats are homeopathic lions."
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06:23:27 PM,
Sunday 16 November 2008
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Also, not to hide it in my sidebar, here's a collection of 9000 haiku by Issa, at random. My favorite so far is:
even in the mist
my house
is a mess
(because um yeah I can identify with that. yep yep).
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08:00:11 PM,
Saturday 15 November 2008
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fixed up my computers today. my little laptop now has ubuntu, which means it has completely-working wifi, a shutdown command, and general system stability. it was much less painful than I thought it would be. also my windows machine now wakes up from sleep still able to connect to the internet. I have no idea what it means but the command that fixed it is netsh winsock reset, for future reference.
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07:47:05 PM,
Saturday 15 November 2008
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Is a gong sound in the ringtone library too much to ask?
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05:32:49 PM,
Sunday 9 November 2008
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I don't ever want to meet Gustave.
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(1)
05:17:58 PM,
Sunday 9 November 2008
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I got these flowers from the grocery store, small white flowers lots and lots of them. I don't usually buy flowers but we recently got a wooden vase at a craft fair which seemed like a good thing to put flowers in. Turned out the flowers were much too much for the vase so now they are sitting in a small pitcher. They were marked "filler" which apparently according to Tim means that they are meant to be an accompaniment to larger and more impressive flowers in an arrangement. They seem pretty impressive to me by themselves. The cat likes them. Also they show off sunbeams nicely.
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(1)
11:28:03 AM,
Sunday 9 November 2008
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ok so i went for a walk, and on the way there was a tree and there were yellow leaves in the tree and yellow leaves under the tree and i felt dizzy for a second like I might almost be swallowed up by the yellow leafiness. and then i went on and there was a girl across the street who rang a doorbell and asked if someone could come out to play and apparently they couldn't because she left, walking across the street from me, same direction, and she was playing with a large leaf, some trees around there have six inch wide leaves, i don't know what they're called, but anyway she was playing with it and then she dropped it straight into a large puddle so it landed flat and looked satisfied. i was satisfied. that seems like the right sort of thing to do with leaves and puddles. we kept walking on the same direction at about the same pace (i was tired and walking slow), she looking back at me every so often. finally she disappeared round a corner, and i went on to my sitting-by-the-pond spot. i sat by the water, which was slightly smelly but very flat and pretty, and looked around. a heron took off as i sat down, and later two kingfishers dashed past, clacking, one in hot pursuit of the other. there were a lot of leaves in the water, slightly sunken down in the water, and in the very still water they looked like they were practicing for being frozen. earlier, at the beginning of my walk there had been a congregation of seagulls, all flying around the corner of pond that is our usual access point, which I'm quite sure i hadn't seen before because it's the sort of thing you notice. as i got closer i saw there were also ducks and swans, but i couldn't figure out what they were all after. i didn't see any particular food, there was just a bit of muck that the swans were picking at, but i dunno, they must have been after something.
it occurred to me at some point while sitting by the pond that it looked like new england, like pictures of new england that i'd seen before i ever lived here, with the trees all in color and their leaves half gone and the peaked roofed houses and all of it reflected in the pond, but that it wasn't new england, or anyway wasn't the new england that i pictured before i ever lived here, because that new england certainly didn't have a highway behind it. i'm not sure if it even had herons. i find that my first impressions of something are usually quite wrong but i sometimes recall them suddenly, like at work i walked past my first office and remembered what i thought it would be like, somehow i thought it would be grayer and dimmer and more orderly than it turned out to be, but possibly also more friendly. i find that in general, my expectations for what life will be like or what people will be like tend to be dim and grey and dignified and the world generally turns out to be painted in brighter colors and broader strokes and it's all more childlike than i expect, which is good and bad, mainly good i suppose, but sometimes i miss that dignity, the dignity feels like dust or cobwebs or something, or the smell of a used book store, and it's there sometimes just not as much as i expected and i'm never sure anymore how real it is, and it keeps disappearing out of places where i think it is, like for some reason i thought mccain exemplified it but then he didn't, he turned out to be very small, but then again its not being there opens things up somewhat, like when i was dealing with an insurance agent i was pretty sure he wasn't faceless and i was probably somewhere on his todo list between breakfast and lunch that day and that made it easier.
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05:31:46 PM,
Saturday 8 November 2008
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07:51:49 AM, Tuesday 4 November 2008
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