Posts from — January 2008

This may be my favorite sketch from Flying Circus:

(I don’t remember all that Portuguese, though…)

This blog has some hilarious excerpts of FCC complaints obtained via the FOIA.

I think my favorite part is:

When Jon Stewart described loosing his keys as “bad”, I think after that he said that the apocalypse was “shitty”. It didn’t get bleeped, and you guys are usually pretty good at that. Either you slipped up or my ears are going bad, but I played it about 10 times and I’m pretty sure that’s what he said

(my emphasis)

Lots of people have too much time on their hands…

As an aside, if you didn’t get the Monty Python reference, then here you go. I’ve never been a huge fan of that sketch, though..

I’ve seen a few people mention Hemmingway’s 6-word story in the last year, which I hadn’t heard of before. The story is:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn

There’s a flickr group for 6-word stories, though most of them aren’t too good. Wired had an article in which they asked a bunch of different writers to try writing 6-word stories. There are quite a few… some of them are quite amusing, though most of them seem like summaries instead of stories.

I wonder if there’s a minimum length a piece of text must have for it to be copyrighted…

Oldboy, a Korean movie that I recommended a while ago, popped into my head recently. Specifically, the scene in which the protagonist eats a live octopus:

(turn down the volume, the dubbing is terrible)

I was looking for the 3 minute fight scene that’s filmed without interruption, but I could only find the scene with different songs dubbed over it, which was annoying.

The whole scene synced to the theme of Brazil (annoying music, but awesome because it’s a dozen bad guys, one good guy, and a hammer):

I was less annoyed when I found the scene sped up and put to the Benny Hill theme:

Meme from here, who knows where it’ll end up.

The political stuff on Scripting News has been top-notch lately. I was especially fond of Find a shared vision, v2.0.

Obama seems to be the most popular candidate in Silicon Valley, at least among technology people (except for one coworker who doesn’t like Obama because “he left his grandmother in Kenya!”). Obama’s website has a fairly extensive section about technology, most of which makes a lot of sense.

He announced his technology platform at Google last November, actually:

OK, last google-related post of the night.

Last week, Google Maps added a feature that I really like and have been wanting for a while. It lets you search for locations and directions at the same time. It sounds confusing, but some examples make the usefulness pretty clear… you can now enter searches like: Grand Central Station to Carnegie Hall (gives directions, no need to look up the address separately) or Lehigh University to beer (it gives a list of places to get beer and how far they are from LU).

Sadly, the Carnegie Hall directions don’t mention anything about practicing…

A month and a half ago, Google Reader started allowing you to share items with friends. This means that whenever I mark an item as shared in Reader, it’ll show up in my friends’ (i.e. gmail contacts’) reader streams. A few friends have already shared items with me, which I found to be cool (and different than the usual drivel that I read). I got into the habit of sharing items as well. These are basically things that I think are interesting or funny, but I don’t really have anything to say to justify its own post. The headlines from my recently shared items show up on the left side of my blog, too.

If you’re using reader and wany my shared items to show up, let me know. I don’t post a huge amount of them.

You can view my recently shared items as a web page or subscribe to the feed, too.

A while ago, I promised a “mega rant” about facebook. After some writing, rewriting, and thought, I’ve decided not to write a mega-rant.

I don’t think I’ve been on facebook for any appreciable amount of time in at least a month. It’s just not an effective use of my time. Communication on facebook is less effective than outside (as I’ve already explained). Facebook is a really well-designed system, but it’s not really well-designed to quickly get you to the information you want. Easy example: notification that someone has written on my wall doesn’t contain the actual message from the wall, I’m forced to waste my time to go to the site just to find out that someone wrote “LOL” to me. Replying on facebook only adds to the vicious cycle. It seems like these things are changing with time, but until it does, there are plenty of other things for me to use.

Also, I couldn’t care less about being bit by a zombie.

Anyway, one facebook app I find really useful is Birthday Exporter. It takes all your friends’ birthdays and exports them to Google Calendar, iCal or whatever. With this, I can see all the birthdays in a nice calendar interface that’s already integrated with my schedule. Useful!

Now, if only I could export all my facebook contacts to gmail without getting banned, I’d be set. Hopefully things like this will work cleanly someday..

I often don’t see the Google holiday logos since I do most of my searching through the firefox search bar, but I especially like this one:

(for the 50th anniversary of the lego brick. Legos have some special meaning for Google, too)

I think this is my favorite speech so far of any campaign. Obama is a brilliant orator. Worth watching.

(image from Don Park)