April 2004 Archives

Oh my!

VIRGIN MOBILE'S PIT POLICE TO OFFER HELMET POLISHING SERVICE
Virgin Mobile - 8 Apr 2004

Virgin Mobile, title sponsors of the Yamaha British Superbike Team and the Yamaha R6 Cup, is offering a unique helmet polishing service for lucky bikers at each of the British Superbike rounds this year.

The complementary service, performed by the twelve stunning Virgin Mobile Pit Police, will be available to all bikers at the British Superbike Championship at the Virgin Mobile roadshow area. The Pit Police will be armed with the very latest lubricants and foams by Shift-It products to give bikers' helmets a satisfying shine.

Virgin Mobile's brand director, James Kydd, said: "All superbike fans like having their helmets polished, and the free service is available to all bikers although we suspect the sexy Virgin Mobile Pit Police might prove to be a bigger hit with the men! We recognise there is a serious safety issue if bikers ride home with bug-smeared visors and poor visibility so we are offering this as a public service to make sure their helmets are clean and polished to perfection!"

The helmet polishing service will be one of many Virgin Mobile activities that the fans can enjoy on race day. For a limited period, fans will have a chance to win an official team Yamaha scooter, worth £1800 and a Samsung E400 phone, while runners-up also have the chance to win phones and team merchandise.

 

Update: Edited to add pics of the Pit Police.

Via Davezilla, a site for making your own road signs. Here's mine. I also invite you to share yours, post a link to yours in the comments if you have a good sign to share.

Miss Piggy: "Never eat more than you can lift." [Quotes of the Day]

Cult of Mac posted a fun bit from the Terms and Conditions of the new version of iTunes.

Does Homer Use ITunes?

The Terms and Conditions attached to the new version of Apple's iTunes says, “THE APPLE SOFTWARE IS NOT INTENDED FOR USE IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEMS, LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES OR OTHER EQUIPMENT IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF THE APPLE SOFTWARE COULD LEAD TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE.” (Via Lockergnome News Watch) [Cult of Mac]

Damn, and I wanted my next life support machine to have iTunes built in.

Carinah just told me about this neat little toy that lets you know when a blog you read has changed via AIM called Blog Change Bot. I'm giving it a try and placed a little button for it down on the left that looks like: .

Update (4/30/04): Ooops, forgot to change that so that it subscribes to www.ezoons.com, fixed now.

I just got an email notification from Orkut that a friend of mine left me a message. So I go over there to check it out and it isn't showing up in my messages area. This has happened to me a few times. Orkut will send you a notification of something, yet it seems to be before the site itself has updated. Hello? What's the point of telling someone there's a message or friend request from them if you aren't going to let them read/accept it. Idiots.

Just found a cool bit of information about those little arrows in the new iTunes. It appears you can change the behavior so that it doesn't go to the iTMS. Yay! That's one gripe down.

My other is that the party mix should use songs from shared playlists. I mean, I have access to all this music remotely (on my server) directly into iTunes, and I can't use it with the one new feature I think is the neatest. So that's a big nitpick/wishlist item. I still think they should have the concept of an 'admin' iTunes user. So that I can store all my music on my desktop, but edit playlists and song information and ratings from my laptop. That would truely rock.

Needing to do work and having the DSL be down pretty much all day.

I've been using Spamassassin to check my email for spam for ages now. And it has worked pretty well on and off. Recently, people on one of the mailing lists I frequent have been discussing something called CRM114 (since the author of it is on the list). Last night I finally sat down and read up on it and tried installing it. After one false try and a little bit of fiddling I got it working (note to self, email them about issues I had getting it set up).

So far it's still in the learning stage. A fair number of false positives and negatives, but the documentation indicates that is normal in the early stages of training. I'll report back as more time passes and see how well it works. If it works quite well I'm thinking of making a set of applescripts for Mail.app so that instead of running it on ones mail server, they can run it on their local machine. I think it should be quite doable.

I've been playing around a bit with AudioScrobbler.com. It's a kind of music community site that gives you music suggestions based on what you listen to. Since I just started using it, it's still learning what I listen to via a plugin for iTunes (there are plugins for most of the popular music programs out there for Windows and Mac). Right now it is just building up a profile of me that you can look at. Since I'm always looking for new music things to sample, hopefully this will give me some good suggestions down the road. On top of all that they have various web forums and groups you can join for different music genres and performers. I dig it!

Sinus Headaches SUCK.

Here's some more comments on the new anime season (mirrored from my anime blog as usual. For LJ people, here is the feed.).

• Sensei no Ojikan - This is quite a cute little show. It reminds me a lot of Azumanga Daioh in the pacing. It's about a 27 year old teacher who still looks like a little girl. It's pretty funny and the nosebleed in one scene was one of the best ever. This one doesn't seem to have a lot of substance, but it is quite fun to watch. So I'll probably watch at least a few more episodes.

• Midori no Hibi - I wrote about this show back when I first found out about it. Sawamura Seiji is a 17 year old high school student who is terrible at romance. One morning he wakes up to find that his right hand is gone and in its place is a girl. It seems she has had a crush on him since childhood and somehow ended up there. Despite the absurd premise the show is actually quite cute and very funny (and not at all what I expected). It's definitely one to check out.

• Bakuretsu Tenshi - A new action show from Gonzo. It's the year 2050 and the story follows four females as they fight crime in future Tokyo. On yeah, and their cook, who is hired in the first episode and ends up getting caught up in their lives. This show is pretty fun. So far I think it's just going to end up being one of those fun action shows where I get to see lots of things go boom, but with Gonzo one never can tell.

So there are another three. Still some shows to comment on, but I'll leave that for next time. Oh yes, and the images are thanks to anime-source.com, a really nice site with lots of reviews and a nice forum. Click on the pictures above to get to their pages there.

I want to find the spammer that is using my domain name and beat them senseless with a porcupine. Assholes.

Yet another one of those "I love that just about everything is on the net" moments. BoingBoing has a link to The Electric Company Digital Archive that has mp3s of such classic bits as the L-Y song (by Tom Lehrer) as Easy Reader (Morgan Freeman). It also has video clips of some of these songs. I'm grabbing a bunch to toss into my main playlist because I love little things like this showing up randomly in what I'm listening to. I give this site two thumbs up.

(Mirror of post on the anime blog)

I've watched a bunch of the shows that just started recently and so here are some of my thoughts on them so far. Note this is all based on only seeing one or two episodes, so I'll try and update if anything changes greatly.

• Monster - Based on manga by Naoki Urasawa, this show is about a doctor who gets fights back against hospital politics, and ends up paying the price for it. I've only seen one episode, so some of my information on the show is from the link above. It sounds like the show definitely has a twist or two, some of which is hinted at in the first episode. I'll keep watching this one at least for a few more episodes. Also, the show gets bonus points by having David Sylvian do the end theme.

• 

  Tenjou Tenge - I admit it, I like fighting anime. And as Jasc says at the beginning of his review: "An awesome opening, great characters, fights that don't put me to sleep, and boobies? I'm sold!" This show is just fun. It's like Ikkitousen, but it doesn't suck. Two delinquents who love to fight show up at Toudou Gakuen, a school for martial arts training and a fighter's paradise. The school seems to have some dark secret to do with the fighters there, but it's only been hinted at so far. This show is also based on a manga that has 10 volumes out so far, so there should be quite a bit of story for them to work with. And Maya Natsume's transformation scene in the first episode is a classic.

• 

  Aishiteruze Baby - So far this is my favorite show of the season. This was one of those shows that I knew nothing of before watching it and it completely overwhelmed me. Based on a manga by Yoko Makai, the show is the story of Kippei, a teenage boy who cares only about girls (and they all seem to love him). One day his 5 year old cousin Yuzuyu shows up, having been left by her mother. At that point it becomes his job to take care of Yuzuyu. The show is very well done, and I found the first episode very moving. This is one I can't wait to watch more of.

That's it for this post, next up I'll take a look at Midori no Hibi, Hi no Tori, Kyou Kara Maou, and Kono Minikukumo Utsukushii Sekai (Gainax's new show).

Henry J. Tillman: "The world is my lobster." [Quotes of the Day]

M. C. Escher: "He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder." [Quotes of the Day]

The Hartford Courant has an article about some of the stranger yard ornaments one can get these days, including headless, armless children.

The once-imagined lovely garden is occupied with huge, ugly, warty frogs; bears doing squat lifts; sobbing angels; and gnomes, gnomes and more gnomes, multiplying like nymphomaniac nymphets high on Scott's Fertilizer.

And into this already strange and scary flower bed marches a parade of headless, armless children - boy figures in overalls and girl figures especially frightening in their short white socks and red Mary Janes.

They're called "outdoor statuary" or "yard ornaments," but to anyone who basks in the glow of a buttercup held under a child's chin or smiles at the sight of a toddler picking daisies, these jardinieres are better suited to a gardening straight-to-video called "Night of the Living Deadheads."

"It's human nature to decorate one's environment," says Ellin Goetz, who runs a landscape architecture business in Naples, Fla. [The Hartford Courant]

I so would love to find some of the headless children planters and just put them around the yard for when my parents come home. I can just see them pulling in late at night after driving and finding them invading the yard. Another ornament mentioned is the Digger Dog, which is supposed to look like a dog with its head down a hole. According to the description it "barks, whines, stomps his back foot and (oops!) passes wind." And you can set it to be motion activated to "get a good laugh from neighbors, guests, and passersby."

This gives me a bunch of ideas. How about hands that look like a zombie trying to claw its way out of the ground (or maybe just a face peering out from the dirt)? It could be animated so passersby could hear the moans of the dead and maybe an occasional "brainsssss."

This recipe is based on one that's in this little book called Great Flavors of Louisiana, my mom has tweaked the recipe a little bit and it's quite amazing.

Cajun Meat Loaf

• 1/2 stick butter, melted
• 1 cup yellow onion, chopped
• 1/2 cup green pepper, chopped
• 2-3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• 1 tsp cayenne pepper
• 1/2 tsp thyme
• 1 tsp. freshly ground pepper
• 1/2 tsp cumin
• 1 1/4 lbs ground chuck or round
• 1 egg, beaten
• 3/4 cup catsup
• 1-2 tsps Lea & Perrins
• 3/4 cup sharp Cheddar cheese, grated (optional)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In skillet with butter, add next 7 ingredients; cook until vegetables are tender, stirring often. In a small bowl or measuring cup combine the catsup and Lea & Perrins. In another bowl, combine meat, egg, oats, half cup catsup mixture, and cheese. Blend in vegetables. Form into a loaf shape and put on a pan (you can optionally put it into a 9 1/2x5x3-inch loaf pan, but I like it better this way). Bake for 20 minutes; spread top with quarter cup catsup mixture. Turn oven down to 350 degrees and cook for 40-45 minutes more.

Some notes. If you think just using cayenne will be too spicy you can use a cajun spice mix instead. My mom can't have real spicy things, so that's what she does. Many times she'll also use a mixture of meats, mixing in some ground pork or veal (or both).

Wow, what a long weekend. Since my parents are away, I invited some friends from Boston to come down here and hang out this weekend. It was pretty fun. I made dinner last night (mmmm, cajun meatloaf. I'll post the recipe later) and people drank lots and we watched anime till some very late hour. Definitely lots of fun. I think the next time I invite folks down for anime I'm just going to show one show all night, I'm thinking One Piece, because pirates rock.

On the OW side of things I've been fighting a sinus headache for about 20 hours so far. Trying to keep myself hydrated to see if that helps some, but it's driving me nuts.

I'm not a particularly religious person, so don't really pay much attention to Easter unless I'm with my family. But I do wish I had gotten a chocolate bunny so that I can bites its ears off. Then its feet. Then its head (finally putting it out of its misery). And then the rest of the remains. And it better not be one of those hollow easter bunnies either. Solid chocolate is what it is all about.

Okay, we've got decapitated cats, a chicken who likes to be dominated, and now we have an ad for Nutrigrain Bars. They really make you feel GREAT! (Thanks for this one goes out to my friend Sean). (requires Quicktime)

Found via Boing Boing (and people I know who were talking about it), Burger King's new marketing gimick: Subservient Chicken. You too can tell the chicken what to do. I'm really not sure what to think of this, is BK trying to go after that vast furry demographic?

Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies." [Quotes of the Day]

From ellen:

Performers Whip Easter Bunny At Church Play

Minister Says Play Wasn't Offensive

A church in western Pennsylvania trying to teach about the crucifixion of Jesus performed an Easter show with actors whipping the Easter bunny and breaking eggs, upsetting several parents and young children.

People who attended Saturday's performance at Glassport's memorial stadium quoted performers as saying, "There is no Easter bunny," and described the show as being a demonstration of how Jesus was crucified.

Melissa Salzmann, who brought her 4-year-old son J.T., said the program was inappropriate for young children. "He was crying and asking me why the bunny was being whipped," Salzmann said.

Patty Bickerton, the youth minister at Glassport Assembly of God, said the performance wasn't meant to be offensive. [NBC10.com]

No, not meant to be offensive, just to traumatize little kids.

A parent's group opposing a school program used a picture from The Onion on a pamphlet they sent out, supposedly without realizing it was a joke. A school board trustee is now demanding an apology.

The picture was copied from the Onion, a satirical newspaper from the United States. The headline of the 1998 story says, " '98 homosexual drive nearing goal."

The story, written out of San Francisco, goes on to say children are being successfully recruited into homosexuality because of the "gay lobby's infiltration of America's public schools."

Marilyn Ashworth of STOP said it's concerned the photo represents what will end up in this region's schools if the board goes ahead with its plan.

"We knew it was a gay paper and we hold that even as a joke, the gay community is proud of their advancements into the safe schools program in the U.S.," she said. "We don't think homosexuality in schools is a joke."

Asked whether she believed it was a real photo, Ashworth said the caption included the teacher's name, city, state and grade.

"We researched in depth and that was one of the things we found," she said, noting the group spent seven weeks accumulating research. [London Free Press]

From The Cult of Mac Blog, a viral ad for ford that features cat decapitation has leaked out onto the net (Ford had supposedly decided not to use it). Of course, there is already quite a fuss about the commercial.

Jules de Gaultier: "Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality." [Quotes of the Day]

This post on Boing Boing caught my eye because my mom is a docent at the Wadsworth Atheneum and has been telling me about this exhibit. The post links to a New York Times article discussing the exhibit.

This also reminds me that I still need to get my mom working on an art blog. I think she'd rock at it.

Last week Adam wrote about the idea of collaborating to create audio books.

collaborative audio books
About a week and a half ago I stumbled onto AKMA's brilliant idea to create an audio-book version of Lawrence Lessig's new book "Free Culture". Bloggers quickly signed up to the collaborative by claiming chapters to read in the posting's comments.

I arrived a bit late to the party, so I didn't get to read a chapter, although there is plenty of room for alternative voices and reads, but that's for later.

I'm a big believer in audio books and 'read' this way frequently. I just finished Dan Brown's 'The DaVinci Code' in about 2 week's time of travelling to my morning radio show whilst listeing in the car. I use my iPod and the iTrip, a snap-on fm-transmitter, so I can enjoy the reading on my car's stereo. It's also much safer.

I listen to lots of stuff on my iPod besides music and audio books. There are interviews and archives of old radio shows. There's even an audio bible.

[Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

I've been listening to audio books a bit more lately now that I'm driving up and back to Boston all the time. It can be a nice way to make the almost two hour drive go by quickly. I just finished the second Dark Tower book and have started in on Sarah Vowell's The Partly Cloudy Patriot. But there are some books that aren't in audio format that I wish were. Adam brings up the point that there are lots of books in Project Gutenberg that would provide a good starting point (specifically mentioning the Tom Swift books).

Adam has some ideas about distributing the books that are recorded, but I've been thinking about this from another direction. Having a site for managing and tracking what books are being worked on. A page where users can register and then sign up for chapters of books and upload them when done. I have some other related ideas of letting people rate readers and chapters of books, since more than one person might upload a chapter. I wish I was going to be in town for BloggerCon II so I'd have a chance to chat about this with him, but I'll be stuck down in Hartford. I may just start coding up something for some php practice in the meantime.

From the Marimite DVD (I hope someone licenses this show soon).

(Also posted to the anime blog)

In other iPod news. The Boston Globe has a cool article about how the iPod has changed people's listening habits.

When thousands of titles are transferred onto the machine's hard drive and in rotation, users say, what happens on the listening end can be aesthetically stimulating, even liberating. This is not necessarily because the tracks are unfamiliar, but because the software's shuffle-play capability juxtaposes them in intriguing ways, not only across an entire 5,000-track collection but within, say, a compilation of blues tunes or Broadway melodies, or even shuffling through only the tracks played in the past 90 days.

In many cases, such specialized playlists can be automatically expanded by iTunes, the companion software that is another vital component of iPod chic. Want to create a continually updated playlist of every song on your iPod that was released during your college years? The machine can be programmed to do that, too. [boston.com]

This is the thing I love about my iPod. I have just about all my music on it. If I'm in the mood to listen to something specific I can easily find it and play it. Though I'm much more likely to be listening to a random set of music that I haven't yet rated or of my favorite songs. Now I want to upgrade to a 40GB iPod, so that I have room to expand my collection and keep it all with me.

OKay, using an iPod really isn't as hard as this article seems to indicate. They also seem to confuse using an iPod with using iTunes.

Even though the designer-creation from Apple has been flying off the shelves in a storm of favourable publicity, few realise how complicated it can be to operate.

Some music fans complain they have to upgrade their computer to get the iPod to work. Others report spending hours or even weeks transferring just a few tracks from their CD collection to the new player. [independent.co.uk]

Steven Wright: "Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time." [Quotes of the Day]

Ernie the Attorney talks about encrypting E-mail.

I tried to use the PGP encryption technology with a tech-savvy friend once. I won't describe the whole process but if you are interested click here. The important thing to understand is that, even if you can figure out how actually encrypt and decrypt emails, part of the process involves creating a special private/public key. In short, it's a pain in the ass to encrypt emails, even if you know what you are doing. After having done it myself I have come to the conclusion that the only people who are routinely encrypting emails are either uber-geeks or criminals/terrorists. [Ernie the Attorney]

Setting up mail encryption on OS X using Mail.app is actually not too difficult. MacDevCenter has a pretty good article about it (and you can now use Safari instead of Mozilla to request your certificate (make sure to read through the comments at the end)). Once you have it installed it is just a click of a button to sign your messages with your certificate, and if you have received email from someone else with a cert you can encrypt it with the click of another button.

Looks like I'm going to have to install mt-blacklist. Fucking spammers.

vfc links to a great blog post over at Pandragon. Here's some random babbling about how nifty it is to make this post a little bit longer.

My friend Ellen ordered something online and has been having some issues with it.

I've gotten used to buying something electronically and having it available immediately. It's the defacto way to get small pieces of software these days, tools that do this or that. Last night, I desperately needed a tool from officerecovery.com that would recover a dead powerpoint document for a client. I purchased it online and it shunted me to a site called digibuy.com to do the purchase, which I did. Fullfillment was supposed to come through an email. It's been about 12 hours and no email.

Am I being too hypersensitive? Expectations too high? I mean, their site did say "within 5 or 10 minutes, 24 X7", but is this too much to expect, even these days? [Lumpy Gravy]

I don't think it is too much to expect. They seem to go out of their way to say that you will get the download information rapidly after ordering. Now, knowing the net, it's common sense that it's not always going to work, but since they indicate it will you should make a fuss.

Samuel Johnson: "Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it." [Quotes of the Day]

# packetlog > links to an article about switching to the Mac over at The Inquirer.

It's been sixty days today since I left Windows. I feel much better now. There are certainly OS/X foibles that I have to deal with, and the one-button mouse setup had to go. There is an equivalent to the hourglass in OS/X-- it's called the spinning ball of death (SPOD). It's a busy signal. For the most part, it goes away randomly just as it arrived. The PowerBook that I'm using has WiFi built-in (ExtremeG as it's called). There's a nice display. Underneath is BSD, although I can also use 'fink' to download then recompile most of the library of Linux and BSD software that lazes on a thousand servers across the world.

The most important item to note is that computers are tools - we control them. I can do most all of the work done before on a litany of breathtaking (for the first month that it's in release) hardware. I have no desire to overclock the G4 in this machine or the G5 on my desktop. It runs very well, thanks. Squeezing the next hyperthreaded over-coded game has no interest for me. In the corner is a machine - a newly purchased HP Pavilion that'll do the majority of the Windows compiling and testing that I need. It's imaged, and wakes up freshly like JayBee Corbell in Larry Niven's World Out of Time.

But my personal rat race with bugs, fixes, exceptions, gotchas, driver madness, synchronization bipolar disease, and the sheer Prozac of it all, is over. [The Inquirer]

My parents just drove off for a two week vacation and I'm now home alone. It feels weird having this huge place to myself. I'm trying to figure out how I'll keep myself busy so that I don't go insane. Any recommendations?

My friend Ellen has started a blog using Movable Type. She's one of those LJ people, but I think she's starting to see the light. I say it's one to check out (even if there are only three posts at the moment).

My favorite book on system administration, The Practice of System and Network Administration, is now also a blog. I definitely recommend both for all sysadmins (of any level).

Edit: Ooops. Forgot a link to the site before.

Brought to you by The Fortean Bureau: Grocery Lists of the Stars. See the shopping lists of authors like Steven Brust, Neil Gaiman, Nick Mamatas, and many others.

Thomas Szasz: "Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse." [Quotes of the Day]

Technorati's bot seems to really like me currently. It's hitting me at least once a minute. What's up with that?

The news is out. Everybody is talking about it:

• Google Planning to Roll Out E-Mail Service - New York Times
• Google to offer gigabyte of free e-mail - C|Net
• Google to Test E-Mail in Challenge to Rivals - Reuters

But the best part is if you then go to Google and read their press release.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - April 1, 2004 UTC - Amidst rampant media speculation, Google Inc. today announced it is testing a preview release of Gmail – a free search-based webmail service with a storage capacity of up to eight billion bits of information, the equivalent of 500,000 pages of email. Per user.

The inspiration for Gmail came from a Google user complaining about the poor quality of existing email services, recalled Larry Page, Google co-founder and president, Products. "She kvetched about spending all her time filing messages or trying to find them," Page said. "And when she's not doing that, she has to delete email like crazy to stay under the obligatory four megabyte limit. So she asked, 'Can't you people fix this?'" [Google.com]

I love it. The press release just reads too much like an April Fools joke to me. I wonder how long till the story gets pulled from the New York Times (or until there's confirmation that it is real).

More edit: Slashdot seems to think it may be a joke too.

Even more edit: Oh yes, and here's a cool job offer at Google.