Posts from — July 2008

Dear Everyone,
Stop telling me how great the Batman movie was. I get it. Everyone already knows it. I won’t have a chance to see it for another week, and you aren’t making this wait any easier.
Kind regards,
Matt

http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/

Awesome.

Inserting extra quotes like that is a practice I’ve never understood. Why do so many people do this?

A while ago, I mentioned that I was moving to San Francisco at some point. Well, that point was last Sunday. Girts, John and Chris helped with the move, which made it relatively easy. As with just about anyone who moves, I found that I owned more things than I realized. I need to control that a bit better.

Anyway, things have been pretty good so far. It’s rather cold out, especially since I’m not here during the day. I was in a jacket and jeans and shivering on my way home tonight (partly because of wind). The commute isn’t difficult, but it’s time-consuming. Lately I’ve been leaving the apartment at 7:30 (AM!) and getting to work a little after 9. I’ve been getting home after 9pm, which has made for some rather long days. I’ll probably change this up sometime, but I haven’t quite decided which way.

The shuttle is a pretty good deal, though. I do a lot of my feed reading, emailing, video watching, etc on there. These are things I used to do at home in the morning and evening, so in reality this schedule isn’t all that different.

I’ll hope to explore the area a bit more this weekend and maybe do some photo walking and/or urban hiking, so I’ll post an update then.

… but I have fixed grammar in several signs at work.

(photo from jfhatesmustard on flickr)

Here are some things from the internet that I’ve found interesting or amusing…

Results from the Google query “biggest regret”:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_IrqTbpTeA)
Reminds me of PostSecret a bit.

Demolishing a building floor-by-floor:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwf9LoS9Xt8)

Cornstarch + water + a huge subwoofer… I thought this was fake at first, but it’s really cool:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Px9jcA4decA, via)

A rendering of Starry Night in Second Life.. it’s oddly mesmerizing and enjoyable to watch:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxVDVggLqsA, via)

A really clever video of “stop-motion spaghetti”:

(http://view.break.com/534274, via)

More later..

I’ve had this song in my head since hearing it at dinner last week:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=602F1Db-uLY)

Not my usual fare, but it’s pretty catchy.

I’m too tired to give this the full rant it deserves, but here goes…

Tonight, I saw the movie Wanted and bought my tickets online. Completely by coincidence, I happened to log in to facebook after getting back since I hadn’t been on in a while. I was surprised to find a notification that I had bought the movie tickets in my public news feed. I don’t at all remember consenting to this, but even if it did happen, it’s not what I want. What if I had seen something really embarrassing like The Love Guru?

In general, I share information quite liberally. You can track a lot of what I do online on my FriendFeed page, my user profiles tend to have a lot of data, and I’m not too obsessive about protecting it. This just felt different, though. This felt like a violation of privacy (even if it wasn’t: I’d imagine I consented to this at some point).

The difference, I think, is that the source data is assumed to be private. Other sites (as far as I know) can’t subscribe to my fandango movie ticket buying feed and do interesting things with the data. When I post a photo to Flickr, I know that action is public, and I’m happy to see notification about it just about anywhere. This is different, and this is not cool.

You can turn this off now (you used to not be able to, I think). Log in to facebook, click “privacy” in the upper right, then select the “Actions on External Websites” and then check the box that says “Don’t allow any websites to send stories to my profile.”.

… who needs Republicans?

“Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”

- James Madison

From an article…

Rocky Twyman says nothing else has worked, so he’s urging motorists to pray for lower gasoline prices when they fuel up. Twyman says he and his fellow volunteers at a church soup kitchen launched “Pray at the Pump” today at a gas station in Washington D.C. After fueling up their cars, Twyman says they bowed their heads and asked God for cheaper gas.

If this works really well for arbitrary price changes, it could have a very grave effect on our economy.

I saw this on a blog earlier today, not sure where:

“Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”
— Margaret Thatcher