Atom Feed
January 14, 2002
White House physician Dr. Richard Tubb announces that President Bush’s resting heartbeat of 35 beats per minute is insufficient to enable him to sit and chew pretzels at the same time.
January 13, 2002
Doc blogged yesterday about having to retrace his steps painstakingly in order to find a misplaced item. “I felt like I was in a brain damage rehab,” he writes.
You are in a brain damage rehab, Doc. I’m there with you. It’s called “middle age.” (Of course, some of us are still able to differentiate The Sound of Music from real life.)
Halley Suitt has started blogging. When I was writing my book online, posting each day’s crappy draft, Halley was the most important critic and booster of what I was writing. She’s got a keen eye and she don’t take no guff.
January 12, 2002
David Isenberg points us to a map of Scott McNealy’s virtual Rolodex.. This is an interesting way to map a social network … or the circles of Hell.
Strata Rose Chalup passes along a site that lets you search through a large body of AOL Instant Messaging transcripts that were recently made public. You should search for your name immediately to see if any of your sessions were logged.
[Note: Before you panic, please search again for a different name. Draw the proper conclusion. This is important. There really is no need to panic.]
Dan Gillmor breaks the news that Google has done it again. It now has a site that indexes several news sources in real time, aggregating the top stories.
Jeneane Sessum’s main man is the bassist and producer of the band LeadBelly. One of their tracks is – today only! – featured at garageband.com. Go have a listen.
Note: After today, you can listen to the song here.
Chris Worth writes:
…on my first visit to your blog I was gratified to note friendsreunited.co.uk. I hereby defy your scornful insight into the banality of British life (since you mention the area where I grew up, Northamptonshire): When I registered at the site, the first two entries of people-I-went-to-school-with went something like this.
‘After leaving school I became a drug addict, then entered the porn industry, where I am still.’ ‘I am no longer known as Tim after undergoing sex reasssignment surgery in 1993.’ I didn’t read beyond the first two. Well… my old school DID once make the front page of a national tabloid (religious studies teacher had been holding black magic sex parties in her home – rented from the school governor…)
And some people wonder why I dropped out at 16.
I actually didn’t intend the two updates I quoted to be anything more than truly random examples. No scorn intended.
I came across Classmates.com, a site that does something similar for those clever enough to have been born in the US. But the real hook is the large album of celebrity high school photos on their site. I don’t hide the fact that I enjoy celebrity gossip (well, except in the sense that I never admit it, deny it when asked, and claim that the copy of The National Star is for my teenage daughter), and this is a good site to feed that particular jones. Here you’ll learn that:
As far as my own high school photo goes: you shouldn’t ask.
January 11, 2002
Chris Worth points us to this illustration from a CNN story:
Artist’s concept of a lethal space rock plunging into Earth
He writes:
Am I the only one to find the illustration and its caption somewhat surreal? Dunno why – it relates to the subject matter, and syncs well with American media’s unstated aim of converging news and entertainment- but I can’t quite grasp the mentality that felt this picture would add value. Then again, maybe I’m just losing touch.
Oh, Chris, it’s all of a piece with other recent coverage in CNN:
|
|
|
CNN: “Sci, Fi, what’s the diff?”
Gary No Blog Yet Stock continues to develop his “googlewhack” thread. Googlewhacking, you may recall, is the attempt to come up with combinations of two common words that return zero hits in Google. (Gary lists a number of variations.) A correspondent, Cinnamon Brunmeir, suggests “schadenfreude primp” which turned up one one hit for her and no hits when Gary ran it. (Google suggests we might mean “schadenfreude primo” and turns up 66 hits.)
Suggestion for a geekoid party game: “Guess the GoogleBeans!” Come up with random phrases and have everyone guess how many hits will show up in Google.
We used to play a game in college. One person suggests word. Everyone guesses what the word immediately before it in the dictionary is. I recall this as being tremendous fun, but I also recall watching a particular curtain rod drop shiny liquid golden pellets as tremendous fun too.
January 10, 2002
A forward from a friend who forwarded it from a friend, and so forth until the path trails off into the mist:
Why not to give your child a MagicMarker for her birthday.
Jacob Shwirtz is using Bloggar to help produce his new blog. I’ve just downloaded it and am composing this message with it, and so far – one sentence in – it seems very useful. It installs a client on your Windows desktop that lets you compose your blogger entries and then uploads them for you. One benefit, as Jacob points out, is that if Blogger.com’s servers are down, Blogger will update your blog when the servers are back up.
While Gary “No Blog” Stock hasn’t quite started a blog, despite my incessant whining, he has pseudo-blogged the gogglewhacking fad he’s propagating. (Gogglewhacking means finding combinations of ordinary words that bring up the fewest hits on Google.com)
Jacob Shwirtz, creator of the truly odd, upload orgy Gazm.org, has started a blog cleverly named Fuzzy Blogic.
Julian Harley points to FriendsReunited, a site that’s apparently a big hit in the UK. You tell it which schools you went to with any comments about your life since being paddled by the upper form boys, and then you can see which of your chums have also registered.
Unfortunately, you have to register to be able to search for pals. If you do, you’ll be able to see notes such as these from classmates at the Aspen House School in Streatham: “I have been married for 18 years to Andy and have two children aged 14 and 11. I live in Northamptonshire and work as a cashier at Sainsburys” and “I’m very happily married with two little girls. Jobwise I’m a Business Analyst with a large retail company.” (These are probably more interesting if you actually know the people. True of so much of life.)
Joho the Blog uses WordPress blogging software.
Thank you, WordPress!
