(Thursday, August 31)

Random (or not Random?) Kids Lost Set Photos

WoW. Very very well said.

BBS : This is your life cyanbane.

Visiting such old BBSes is incredible - it's like traveling back in time to the early-mid 1990s. Each BBS is a unique a time capsule, stocked with trinkets and ephemera from the period. On message boards, you'll find posts from 1994 about the O.J. Simpson trial and which player-made Doom levels are best. In file transfer sections you’ll run across large archives of long-forgotten Windows 3.1 screen savers. In door sections (online games), you'll find abandoned TradeWars 2002 games, still in progress, that haven't been touched in eight years. And of course, the Ferrengi have completely taken over.

(Wednesday, August 30)

Why Hasn't Amazon Bought Last.FM?

There are a couple of web 2.0 companies that I feel REALLY do make me more efficient day to day, these are the crem de la crem of web 2.0 sites. Sites that actually have a use for me and are really are not just mashups of a couple of service APIs in a new way (just becuase something CAN be done doesn't mean it SHOULD be done). I mean it is cool that I can geotrace my flickr pics on Google Maps and document them with some 3rd party css overlay browser or ajax script, but honeslty at the end of the day am I any better for it? Here are 2 web 2.0 companies that actually DO make me more productive at work during the day: #1 is my online newsreader that I talk about too much about already, Netvibes is so slick, well coded (sometimes a little slow while updating, but it is getting fast) and isa breeze to get to be a power user of (one of the things that I think all web 2.0 companies need to audit their product with, barring it is needed). Netvibes is a French compcnay and I believe was just backed by a few American VCs. The other service that I use everyday that I have gotten to where I can't live without is Last.FM. I talk about it all the time, so I won't get into why I enjoy their service so much, but I love the fact that I can log into the service and see exactly what my friends from college are all listening too, I can see what the "wisdom of the masses" is listening too, or other people like Fred Wilson (Positively 10th St) or Raj Bala (Loudspeakers at the Internment Camp) who are people who I only know from their blogs/podcasts but that I know listen to music that interests me. This service is the definitive way that I choose new music to listen too. The data that they have on me and my personal listening habits is invaluable to me and I am not even trying to sell myself anything. I do not understand why I have not heard of Amazon or other large tangible music retailer not trying to purchase them.

Amazon always surprises me with how well they can suggest stuff that I might like. Generally in relation to music they are sometimes dead-on, and most of the time in the correct general area. The only problem is that when they are dead on it is usually an album I already own. Here is where Last.FM is invaluable, they know WHAT I listen to exactly, and also have a better idea (Note: not a complete picture) of what I actually probably already have in my library. Also Amazon could harness my past data for future trending purposes "Does Eric usually purchase CDs of certain people on the week they have a new album out?","When listening to older albums from established bands does he usually listen to greatest hits compilations or just earlier albums?", etc.

I would consider myself pretty stubborn when it comes to privacy issues, so it should really say something that I enjoy giving my listening habits (of course by my own decision) to last.fm's database. The service they give back to me is invaluable, but the data they have on me (and many many others) is extremely valuable.

LOTR: Abridged

Found via Raph Koster's Blog:

(Monday, August 28)

For Those Keeping Score: Microsoft =1, Eric's Productivity at Home = -1

(Friday, August 25)

Nothing Brings Up Discussions of Weapon Choices Like Zombies

I started the day with an 'almost shit my pants' when the Bunny passed me this link:

Cambodian Troops Quarantine Quan'sul

As I read the article I thought, whoa here it is. There is Hope for that one situation to happen that every man dreams of. I don't care who you are or where you are from, I believe one thing and one thing only:

"Every human with a penis over the age of 12, at some point in time, envisions himself and some highly attractive woman in a situation where they have kill a mass amount of zombies until some type of army can arrive for support. "


This is a time tested theory that always holds much like the "30second hot chick rule on Univision" [for those that don't know at anytime Univision is broadcasting if you flip it to that channel you are guaranteed to see a hot chick in less than 30 seconds])

So alas when I read this "BBC" article My first thought was where exactly would me and the wife have to fight off said zombies ( I just earned some massive wife points), what would we use, and could the dogs take care of themselves? The answer to the last question is Yes on the Jack Russell, but the Min Pin is toast. The Min Pin would have yellow/red eyes quicker than MJ in Thriller.

There is a group of about 9 of guys that we email each other sometimes during the day to talk about all sorts of topics that somehow always end up boiling down to evolution, religion, politics, or Georgia Football, so I emailed the link out to see what the response was completely expecting tactical discussions to ensue.

And they did, here is a stellar conversation that I had make record of:

My Original Email:

Fuck Yeah! Zombies!

http://65.127.124.62/south_asia/4483241.stm.htm

I laughed like hell at this, but then got scared at it.

wow, that is messed up

Its not real (note the ip in place of domain). But upon first glance it was sent to me and I had visions of 28 days later, and thought "oh shit, time to work on my zombie kill skills [which I have lots of]" I think that if it were ever to come down to me and zombies, I woud fare somewhat well as long as I have ample ammo. The firewhip skills I have aquired would be a huge bonus. Now to find a Simon Belmont outfit on ebay.

Well, it’s either the birdflu or zombism. Either way I am boarding up my windows and buying an assload of ammo.

This is exactly why I am getting a shotgun. It is widely known that shotguns are the most effective zombie killers

I guess it is just a jedi mentatity that I have. There is art within the lightsaber, just like there is art in the way I mow down anal bleeding zombies with a firewhip. Yes I know I could take out many many more with a shotgun, but seriously who looks cooler? The guy standing 40 feet away spraying an onslaught of slowly marching zombies up the street? Or the guy who is in the thick of them so much that you can't actually see him, you just see the arc'ing tail of two flaming whips creating their own island of living in the sea of undead. James E Belmont is on the loose. Zombie Heads will be flown.

Hell no they are not. It takes too long to pump and reload when you are in the midst of multiple zombies. You are dead sucka.

Come on A, didn't you read THE MANUAL? (No lie I acutally have this book at home if anyone wants to borrow, I am dead serious.) Dead Serious (get it?)

What a great argument…. I think the light saber would be the coolest personally… Or one of those weapons in blade 3 with the light saberesque quality that you could use to slice flesh like butta.

I don't know what is scarier, zombies overtaking the planet or the thought of a 3rd Blade movie. (just kidding, Jessica Biel makes anything hot)

Talking about fictional weapons I would agree nothing would be better against zombies than a lightsaber. But from my extensive zombie killing experience the shotgun is best against small groups of zombies

Not nearly precise enough (considering they die from severing or putting a bullet through their head) and not fast enough. One or two zombies here or there and the shotgun is effective, but you are fucked when they get through. Give me a minigun and I will save us all. http://www.montysminiguns.com/

Don't call me a bleeding heart liberal, but for starters we need to take political movements against them. Start to stiffle of their ability to vote via voting regualtions, maybe introduce a new cheap and highly addictive drug into the zombie community. If that doesnt work then we should move into move aggressive and voilent tactics. I am not trying to appease any specific zombies, but we gotta be fair to them and lets just admit it the porous border with Canada is just an open door for them, and I don't see them bringin over any of those cheap perscriptions either. Thats what sucks about them being undead is that they have no need for universal healthcare up there, so of course they come here to America. GD Zombies ain't going to be f'n with my votes. Images liek this just make me sick. That zombie wasnt born here, he didn't die here. Why the fuck should he get to make political statements. Its worse than Neil fucking Young.

(Wednesday, August 23)

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Bedtime Stories by Thom Yorke.

Everybody Enjoys Manners! When we eat, it's fun to have our manners eat with us! Wear your napkin on your lap and don't hit your sister, even if she throws peas at you. Reason your reasons, razors shave the planet clean. Blood fills the rivers, clogs the tubes. I want to die, eat your ice cream.

(Tuesday, August 15)

masturbate-a-thon and Tea w/ Crumpets

"LONDON - Hundreds of Britons are being urged to attend what is being branded as Europe's first 'masturbate-a-thon,' a leading British reproductive health care charity said Friday. ... However, the rules on the event's Web site states there can be no touching of other participants, nor are people allowed to fake orgasms. "The amount you raise will be determined by how many minutes you masturbate and/or how many orgasms you achieve," the Web site said."

(Monday, August 14)

In a perfect world...

GPU is a Gnutella client that creates ad-hoc supercomputers by allowing individual PCs on the network to share CPU resources with each other. That's intriguing enough, but the really interesting thing about GPU is the license its developers have given it. They call it a "no military use" modified version of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Tiziano Mengotti and Rene Tegel are the lead developers on the GPU project. Mengotti is the driving force behind the license "patch," which says "the program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed." Mengotti says the clause is specifically intended to prevent military use. "We are software developers who dedicate part of our free time to open source development. The fact is that open source is used by the military industry. Open source operating systems can steer warplanes and rockets. [This] patch should make clear to users of the software that this is definitely not allowed by the licenser."

Wow! Another cool devkit: Microsoft Has a Starter Kit for Aspiring Game Designers - New York Times

During the last decade, the cost of recording and producing music and video has plummeted, giving amateur auteurs a chance at stardom. But at the same time, the expense involved in making video games has gone up: the development kits needed to create games for the consoles made by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo cost thousands of dollars, and those companies usually send the kits only to established producers. Microsoft is trying to change that. Today the company is expected to announce the fall release of a product called XNA Game Studio Express, a basic version of the company�s game authoring tools that will let aspiring designers write games on a PC and test them on an ordinary Xbox 360. (To test games, the designer pays $99 a year to translate the game from the PC into the Xbox format.)

(Wednesday, August 9)

Common Barn Owl Vs Soulless Beast of the Underworld

(Tuesday, August 8)

Googly Fox (and why my YHOO went down)...

From my blog in Oct of 2005:

"I got to admit, I thought myspace.com was a waste. After doing the research, I can see where Rupert might think it is valued above half a billion dollars. (Rumor has it it sold for 800million). I thought it was over blown, but it was Rupert looking for an in for the net, and I figured maybe I was just not seeing some inherent value. "

Under the terms of the agreement, Google will be obligated to make guaranteed minimum revenue share payments to Fox Interactive Media of $900 million based on Fox achieving certain traffic and other commitments. These guaranteed minimum revenue share payments are expected to be made over the period beginning in the first quarter of 2007 and ending in the second quarter of 2010.

Zoo meerkats test negative for rabies :(

The five meerkats were euthanized Thursday, a day after a 9-year-old girl reached her hand into the exhibit and was bitten. The meerkats � two adults and their three babies born in spring � were vaccinated for rabies, but state health protocol required that they be killed and tested because the girl's parents didn't want her to undergo a series of six painful rabies shots.

(Monday, August 7)

7th level of AOHell

Up until last night AOL at around 7pm (I am not sure when it started) I heard AOL Research had been hosting and making available some "anonymous" user data (about 2 gigs of logs) of searches within AOL (which I believe at this time essentially served up results from Google). I don�t know how long these were actually up but from what I understand, this data that did not correlate with any specific users searches, but was 500k searches of random pulls from their data. This amounted to a wet dream for a lot of online marketers, and will probably be a "search privacy" media fest once it hits the mainstream news. Glossing over a lot of uses for this mass amount of data here is who it could really effect in my opinion: Google (and to a lesser degree Yahoo/MSN) - Basically when you search for something there are organic results (usually on the left hand side of the search engine result page [ aka serp]) and depending on the search engine, paid for results on the top and on the right. These "paid for" results are usually of a PPC (pay per click) business model, which in general means that a company is paying the search engine every time a person clicks on their add. This could be 5 cents a click to $25 a click (and much higher in some cases). The advertiser hopes that this click payment will convert to a sale or something on their end, hence you don't see bob's blog paying for these things, it is usually someone with something to sell. The price for these clicks depends on a large amount of variables, but one is the simple fact that someone else might be wanting to also pay for a specific query. For example, there may be 10 companies that make tents and they all want to be shown on any query for "buy camping equipment", but there are only 3 spaces on the page, so they bid against each other to see who can be placed higher (and /or make it on the page). Well the reason that all 10 companies want to get on the results for that page is because it is really hard to get on that page for organic results (just the websites that naturally make it onto the non paid for portion of that site). So this advertising method is great for new businesses that may not rank well in the search engine results, but that want to be on the serp pages for specific terms. If the costs of the pay-per-click advertising still brings people to their site to order then they can bypass trying to rank in the organic search results. The more people that are competing for a phrase (ie our "buy camping equipment") then the more bidding is done (and some other variables) and the higher the price to pay for that keyword (which I assume means a higher percentage for the search engine doing the selling). So this system works because everyone is happy. The Search Engine is making great profits, the seller is getting to people to their website which converts to sales for them (barring the price they pay for people is worth it of course) and the user *hopefully* finds what they want on the site they go too. The "hopefully" part of that I am going to save for another post sometime because I have many opinions on that that range from 'Does the common person searching understand these are ads and not necessarily what the search engine thinks are the best results?' etc. So this is a very large and generalized view of the how the system works, when this data comes into play everything gets messed up. The one thing that this model gives as an advantage to the search engine is no one besides the search engine knows what the mass amount of people are searching for (what their intentions are). This is almost a guarded secret, because what if instead of "buy camping equipment" more people are putting in a more specific query like "show me a 1 man pup ten that weighs under 2 lbs". Well if the market (people selling the tents and ppc advertising with the search engine) know this then first they are going to try to organically rank well for this specific term, if they cannot organically rank well, then they will purchase this term. The only thing is that this term (which might get a lot more eyes as told from the data) might only be purchased by 2 tent sellers. Because it is so targeted no one ever thought it would get enough eyeballs to warrant paying money for it. So instead of paying money to advertise for the term "buy camping equipment" which was $5 a click (this is just a made up number) they now can pay $.50 per click for "show me a 1 man pup ten that weighs under 2lbs" which is great for the advertiser. They know (from the data) that more people are searching for this, which means they reach their audience more and also no one else bidding on this term (which makes it way cheaper). Now the search engine (and other search engines) want the competitive bidding because (I assume) they make more money from the percentage they charge for the bid. This information out in the open, kind of messes up their system. Now people are more focused and targeted in both search engine optimization and also in the pay per click bidding. It loses the "Fog of War" in the realm which was an advantage to the search engine selling the placement on the terms. The way in which this AOL data was also provided can hurt the consumer (or at least the people who use AOL) also. I ego search all the time, I admit it. I have also searched the last 8 digits of my credit card number before on search engines to see if my credit card number was listed on the net anywhere (I would not recommend doing this now). But I also understand a little about how search engines work, so I of course didn�t search for my credit card number say with my name. Well I am sure someone has before and that search might be in that 500k queries of data. Also if this was the same people doing the searches and they have the same id associated with all the searches then it is easy to aggregate all the searches for one specific person (thus seeing that person a searched for address x and name y in the span of 2 mins (I assume the time data is there). That would be easy to correlate with any large database. I will try to go back over and revise this post and elaborate some more with links to other people�s thought on this matter (which I have read some this morning) and also list some good references for some of the points. It is near the end of my lunch break so I need to get back to work. I have another blog in the works (http://www.cyancode.com) which is going to be specifically my coding blog (with some SEO/Search write-ups also in there). Where I am going to start posting more technical posts like this. Just because I don�t want to post a bunch of technical stuff on this blog and bore everyone that comes here for other subjects. Until then feel the wrath of my bad grama!

(Friday, August 4)

OK GO = 4x cooler than Jamiroquai

These guys just rock. Be sure to check out Oh No also (their album where this song is)

(Wednesday, August 2)

Freakonomics Blog >> Why Do Beautiful Women Sometimes Marry Unattractive Men?

"It may be that the unattractive man has a lot of money, or some other compelling attribute. But a new study by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, suggests it may be a simple supply-and-demand issue: there are more beautiful women in the world than there are handsome men. Why? Kanazawa argues it�s because good-looking parents are 36% more likely to have a baby daughter as their first child than a baby son�which suggests, evolutionarily speaking, that beauty is a trait more valuable for women than for men. The study was conducted with data from 3,000 Americans, derived from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, and was published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology."

(Tuesday, August 1)

The State of My Music Listening Habits

I was spending way to much money at iTunes. As you can probably infer from this site, I have a problem with new music. It isn't a problem I guess, it is more like an addiction. I love hearing new stuff. The only problem was that our bank account wasn't conducive to my "grab a few cds at iTunes a week" solution that I had come up with as an answer. Luckily there were 2 things that I have found in the last few months that are basically my saviours. First, I swear by last.fm. It is the shit and it is free. The system suggests new music, your friends suggest new music, it takes people whom you have never met but have similar tastes and suggests music from their library. Also if you don't have your music with you, or don't want the itunes/media player memory footprint on the system you are working on you can just stream it via their app. The application takes note of everything you listen to and you can go back and see what you think you like, vs what you are listening to the most. It is a music suggestion service combined with a social network, but what is cool is that I can say listen to User X's station (basically a stream of music they like). Which rocks because I have a lot of friends into cool music, but I know that it is impossible let everyone know about it all, so I just say "Hey let me listen to what D is diggin right now" and I can. Streaming and Skipable. I honestly wish everyone I knew used it. It is easy as hell to install, and I know I can browse people's profiles all evening if I wanted trolling for new music. After seeing my last.fm stats for awhile I noticed that I also was doing about 65% of my listening at the office. I keep music on for a pretty good amount of the day while I code. I have my laptop which I setup right next to my work comp and plug the ipod into it. So I started looking at Microsoft's Urge. It is $10 a month, you can't move the music to your ipod (I have a feeling it will only work with MS's new devices coming out) but if you actually use a computer for listening to music a lot it is a great deal. The catalog is fairly extensive, I would say probably not as much selection as itunes, but for $10 a month you can listen to whatever floats you boat that day, which is nice. I have a lot of old CDs that I don't know where they are or if they were scratched and thrown out, I don't really feel like purchasing them again, but I also would like to hear them and this solution works out perfectly. Also there are a lot of newer cds that I don't know if i would enjoy the entire album, so I am able to grab those too (at no extra cost). Check em both out if you can, and if you do with last.fm be sure to add me as a friend so I can see what your listening to and so that you can see the scary amount of Billy Ocean that I listen to.