Hat tip to Failbook.
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-02-20
- Woo-hoo! LeBeau staying in Pittsburgh! #
- I don't care who they replace him with. #FirePaulHewitt #
- Listening to East Village Radio this morning… and I hear a record SKIP! Haven't heard THAT in years! #
- "Oh, it is on like Genghis Khan wearing Sean John in Bhutan!” #
- Do they still make Gaines-Burgers? Hadn't thought about them in years! #
- Steve jobs is dying. His coffin will be shiny black, slim, and will be dropped repeatedly if AT&T carries it. #
- OMG! OMG! OMG! New Asobi Seksu is out! #
- fell asleep to the new Asobi Seksu album last night! Sweet! #
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Friday’s Random Roundup!
– Two geniuses at Stanford have figured out an easy way to double communications bandwidth. Basically, it’s a filter (not unlike noise-canceling headphones) which allows transmitters to receive as they send. Take THAT, modern physics!
– More genius: some folks at Art Lebedev have designed USB thumb drives that can be printed on plain paper and simply thrown away when used. Cost would be mere pennies, so if a friend needed a file, you could just tear one off a “pad” and let him take it.
– Not “genius”, exactly, but at least sanity: a British court recently ruled that an IP address is not a person. In other words, just because the Media Police find an IP address sharing a file, that doesn’t mean the person holding the account is automatically the culprit. Hooray!
– In the “not genius, but clever” department: if you have an account at a URL shortener, remember that most of them offer link tracking. So if you want to know if someone clicked a link in an email, just use the shortener to track their behavior.
– During World War I, British pilots downed German airships… with exploding darts. Remember the Hindenburg disaster? Imagine flying above the Hindenburg in a rickey old biplane… with an exploding dart.. that’s about to recreate the Hindenburg all over again.
– It’s the cutest Puma t-shirt ever!
Have a great weekend, folks!
The Japanese are Weird: Exhibit A
Every culture has things that other cultures think are strange. Many Muslims, for instance, think it’s strange that Americans allow filthy creatures like dogs into their homes. And many Puerto Ricans think it’s odd that some Americans keep pigs (i.e. food) as pets.
But there’s just something special about the Japanese. I’m not one of those American guys obsessed with Japanese culture, but there is something especially kooky about the Japanese, and it’s far more endearing than the weirdness of German or Turkish culture.
Exhibit A? Kikkoman!
Quote of the Day
“Parker’s wife was sitting on the front porch floor, snapping beans. Parker was sitting on the step, some distance away, watching her sullenly. She was plain, plain. The skin on her face was thin and drawn as tight as the skin on an onion and her eyes were grey and sharp like the points of two ice-picks. Parker understood why he married her – he couldn’t have got her any other way – but he couldn’t understand why he stayed with her now. She was pregnant and pregnant women were not his favorite kind. Nevertheless, he stayed as if she had him conjured. He was puzzled and ashamed of himself.
The house they rented sat alone save for a single tall pecan tree on a high embankment overlooking a highway. At intervals a car would shoot past below and his wife’s eyes would swerve suspiciously after the sound of it and then come back to rest on the newspaper full of beans in her lap. One of the things she did not approve of was automobiles. In addition to her other bad qualities, she was forever sniffing up sin. She did not smoke or dip, drink whiskey, use bad language or paint her face, and God knew that some paint would have improved it, Parker thought. Her being against color, it was the more remarkable she had married him. Sometimes he supposed that she had married him because she meant to save him. At other times he had a suspicion that she actually liked everything she said she didn’t. He could account for her one way or another; it was himself he could not understand.”
– Flannery O’Connor
“Parker’s Back”
My 2011 Oscar Picks
Below are my picks for the 2011 Academy Awards. Keep a few things in mind when you read the list: a) this is a list of my personal preferences, not a list of who I think will win; b) only the “big” categories are listed; c) missing nominees means that it didn’t see the nominated film; d) the numerical score listed after the nominee is a completely made-up weighting system of my own design, intended to show my relative likes and dislikes. It’s based on the standard 1-100 scale.
Best Motion Picture of the Year
The Social Network (99)
The King’s Speech (98)
True Grit (85)
Inception (79)
Black Swan (70)
127 Hours (65)
The Fighter (50)
Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role
Natalie Portman (Black Swan) (100)
Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network) (99)
Colin Firth (The King’s Speech) (98)
James Franco (127 Hours) (90)
Jeff Bridges (True Grit) (75)
Saving Website Icons
It’s been a long time since I answered a reader’s question here on the site, so let’s do this thing!
Reader Jeff was setting up a computer for a co-worker, and wanted to place several website shortcuts on the computer’s desktop. Dragging the website icon from the browser’s address bar to the desktop created the shortcut, but the problem was that those shortcuts only had generic icons, and not the “website icons” Jeff wanted. So how can you create a desktop shortcut for a website that uses the site’s actual icon?
Well, first of all, those icons are called “favicons”, and in most cases they’re located at www.domain.com/favicon.ico. You can use Firefox or Chrome to load each address and save the icon as an ICO file. You can also do this with Internet Explorer, but in many cases IE will insist on saving the file as a BMP file. You can sometimes rename the extension of the saved BMP file to ICO, but a lot of times IE will mangle the file header and you’ll get an error message when you try to actually use it. So just use Firefox or Chrome if possible.
Save each favicon.ico file in a permanent location with a unique, meaningful file name (such as jimcofer.ico). All you have to do then is right-click each desktop icon, choose “Properties” and then click the “Change Icon” button. Use the “Browse” button to locate the correct ICO file you saved in the previous step, then repeat for any additional icons.
Note that the desktop icons will now be “tied” to the saved icons. If you move the saved icons (for example, from My Documents\Icons to My Documents\Stuff\Icons) you’ll need to re-map them via Explorer.
An Anglican Funny
From here, where there is more:
Dr Rowan Williams has failed to quell the row over his recent comments with the announcement that he has been fully accepted into the Muslim faith. He claims to see no inconsistency with his new religion and his continuing role as the leader of the Anglican faith.
‘Both religions are saying basically the same thing,’ said Rahman Muhammed bin Williams as he now wishes to be known, ‘and I hope to bring together two aspects of these two major world faiths. So we will still have the Church of England Christingle Jumble Sale, but instead of getting a jar of home made jam in the raffle, the winner gets to drive a car bomb into the American Embassy.’
It’s funny because it could happen.
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-02-13
- it could be worse… I could be a Bengal fan! #
- If Mubarak was smart, he would have hired the Black Eyed Peas to clear out Tahir Square two weeks ago. #
- I liked Lady GaGa's new song "Born This Way" better when it was called "Express Yourself"… and sung by Madonna. #
- OK, the TuneIn app for Android is pretty damn cool! #
- The PAYMASTER GENERAL OF NIGERIA wants to give me $10,500,000? I'M RICH! #
- Sorry Ms. Jackson… #
- No, Cyril… once they're dead they're just hookers! #
- "Black Swan" = "Fight Club" for girls #
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You Can’t Handle the Cute!
In 1959, Audrey Hepburn made a movie called Green Mansions (IMDB link). One of her co-stars in the film was a baby deer named Pippin. Hepburn adopted the little guy, nicknamed him Ip, and took him everywhere she went.
[The other pictures that used to be in this post were removed at the request of the copyright holder]