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  • LiveJournal RSS Celebration

    The other day over on #joiito i was whining about how I wished I could get friends-locked posts in the RSS feeds on LiveJournal. Luckily LJ user crschmidt was there to let me know that it was possible. In general, the link to someone’s feed on LJ is http://www.livejournal.com/users/[username]/data/rss. The problem is, it only shows you public entries. So, in order to get friends locked entries, you need to send along your LJ username and password and tell LJ what kind of authorization method to use. The end result looks something like this:

    http://[YourLJName]:[YourLJPassword]@www.livejournal.com/users/[username]/data/rss?auth=digest

    Note that this will only work in RSS readers that do the right thing with urls that have login information in them. But it works in NetNewsWire so I’m happy. While I still have my friends page, this means I now have access to all my LJ friends in the same place I read other blogs.

  • Run. Really, Really Fast.

    It seems that the Gov UK isn’t able to take a joke:

    Emergency advice parody misses Gov UK funny bone

    The Cabinet Office has demanded that the author of the Preparing for Emergencies parody site, remove it from the Net immediately, and not put it up again in another guise.

    The government launched an advertising and leafleting campaign yesterday, advising us all of what to do in the event of a national emergency. The idea is that because we live in a faster, 24-hour world, we are unlikely to have a stockpile of tinned food in our cupboards like our WWII surviving grannies, and are so less well-prepared for any terrorist strike.

    Naturally, the campaign has an associated website, and as we all know, it doesn’t take long for things to happen in Internet-Land. The parody site went up almost immediately at the remarkably similar address www.preparingforemergencies.CO.uk, as opposed to GOV.uk. [The Register] [via dropsafe]

    The author has refused to take the site down so far, but has added links to the real site in hopes to satisfy the powers that be. Here’s some advice he gives on what to do in an emergency.

    General advice about what to do in an emergency

    If you find yourself in the middle of an emergency, your common sense and instincts will usually tell you what to do. However, it is important to:

    • Run.
    • Really, really fast.
    • Follow the advice of the emergency services, unless that advice is something other than “Run”.
    • Try to remain calm and think before acting, and try to reassure others. Or, trample them in a desperate attempt to flee as the building you’re in is consumed by a radioactive cloud.
    • Check for injuries. Here’s a hint: if it’s painful, it’s probably injured. However, hurting when you pee is probably not an injury related to the incident. But get yourself checked out anyway.

  • MA Turnpike Authority? Bite me.

    A few weeks ago, while getting on the Pike at like 1 AM (at the Allston entrance), I ran into a situation I’d never experienced before. The only green lights to get onto the pike were at the FAST LANEs. The lights above the lanes to pay cash were red. I slowed the car, thought “what the fuck?” and slowly drove through the regular lane (one of them didn’t have a traffic cone blocking the way). As I drove by the booth and peeked in there was nobody there. I thought this was odd, but figured maybe whoever was working had to go take a leak or something.

    15 minutes later I’m pulling off the pike in Natick and run into the same situation. Only this time there were cones in front of all the lanes but the FAST LANE ones. This time I was really confused. What did they expect me to do? Just sit there and wait? In the end I went through a the FAST LANE and went on home.

    Today I open up my mail to find a “Toll Violation – WARNING LETTER” for the night when I went through that lane in Natick (I guess going through the red light lane at the Allston exit was a good idea). Now, I don’t owe anything because it is only a warning, but I’m close to thinking this is all a big scam. Since, at the bottom of the warning, is the note “If you are interested in joining FAST LANE, call the FAST LANE Service Center”. This must be how they get new customers, they force them to go through the fast lane and then ‘warn’ them with a helpful offer of how this won’t ever be an issue again.

    Bastards.

  • Tapping on Soda Cans

    I think I knew this already, but just in case you were wondering.

    Tapping on soda cans actually works?
    shocking, I always thought it was an urban myth [via scattered.org] 
    [Waxy.org Links]

  • QOTD 07/25/2004

    Groucho Marx
    “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”
    [Quotes of the Day]

  • Shady Websites

    So a friend of mine pointed out that one of the ads served by google to my site pointed at a site called My Music Inc (I’m not going to put the actual link here because I don’t want to give them any promotion, but the shortened link is http://xrl.us/ciot). Which tells me that I can “Download free unlimited mp3 music, dvd movies, software, games and more!” and that it is “100% Safe & 100% Legal”. Sounds kickass to me, so I put in a name and email address and am brought to the download page where I see it costs me $0.76 cents per month or $25 for a lifetime membership that will let me download FREE MUSIC AND MOVIES. Hmmm. Well, if I even want to consider paying for free stuff I want to know if they really have music I want. So I go to their search page, click on artist and type in LSG. And they say they found some LSG. So then I thought to myself “self, I wonder if they have that hot track ‘asdfg’ or ‘ztsjfb’?” And they did! They even had “skdhfusdsd”. In fact, they had everything I searched for. So my opinion is that these guys are scam artists. I wonder how many other shady websites like this there are out there

    And If they are legit, they really don’t seem to be making much of an effort to seem so.

  • QOTD 07/24/2004

    Friedrich Nietzsche
    “Only sick music makes money today.”
    [Quotes of the Day]

  • Another Example of Why I Like OS X

    With OS X, I don’t have to deal with computer problems like Adam Felber is having.

    I’d just written an amusing explanation of the incredible discovery of Bush’s lost military records. And then my browser crashed. I haven’t worked on a Windows PC for a while, and I’d forgotten that they only work for so long before something horrible happens, at which point the Windows manual suggests that I scream, sob, rend my garments, and upgrade to a newer version of the software that will really definitely totally not crash quite so much this time albeit depending on various conditions involving things that would be far more difficult to learn about than simply following directions and getting a head start on my next bout of screaming, sobbing, and etc. [Fanatical Apathy]

    I’d also recommend valium, and some whiskey, and maybe some Lexapro.

  • Be All That You Can Be… And Then Some

    Wow, being in the army has some great perks, including things like new breasts!

    Bigger breasts offered as perk to U.S. soldiers
    Plastic surgery available on taxpayers’ dime
    Updated: 10:34 a.m. ET July 22, 2004

    NEW YORK – The U.S. Army has long lured recruits with the slogan “Be All You Can Be,” but now soldiers and their families can receive plastic surgery, including breast enlargements, on the taxpayers’ dime.

    The New Yorker magazine reports in its July 26th edition that members of all four branches of the U.S. military can get face-lifts, breast enlargements, liposuction and nose jobs for free — something the military says helps surgeons practice their skills.

    “Anyone wearing a uniform is eligible,” Dr. Bob Lyons, chief of plastic surgery at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio told the magazine, which said soldiers needed the approval of their commanding officers to get the time off.

    Between 2000 and 2003, military doctors performed 496 breast enlargements and 1,361 liposuction surgeries on soldiers and their dependents, the magazine said. [MSNBC]

    The article doesn’t mention whether or not these were performed on men or women though.

  • I Think This Is The Solution for My N.A.D.D. Too

    Rands in Repose gives a history of his N.A.D.D. and some good reasoning for getting a 30 inch flat panel.

    Thinking is messy.

    You don’t want to admit this because you’ve been carefully orchestrating yourself out of the chaos by constructing your personal version of N.A.D.D. These interactions with your desktop, your content, your thoughts exist because information is messy, too. It’s all a big mess and our job as consumers of an infinite amount of information is to find a system of organization which best suits our interests and our attention spans.

    The comment I’ve heard most about this new 30 inch flat panel is, “Who in the world needs it?” You do. Right now. So do I. 60 inches would better, but 30 inches is all we got.

    Yes, I can’t afford it. Neither can you because we’re not working at Pixar or PDI where they’ve got a present day politically correct justification for all those pixels, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need it. It just means we haven’t successfully convinced the bill payers that more pixels means more productivity. [Rands in Repose]