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B. Duke interviewed, Gonzo goes to Seattle


If you haven’t heard, Dodger and Paul Addis and Carolyn Anhalt produced a one-man play about Hunter S. Thompson called GONZO: A Brutal Chrysalis. 10 Zen Monkeys has a good interview with Paul and R.U. Sirius, which I saw linked off BoingBoing!

They’ve already performed in SF and Portland, and next up is several shows in Seattle. You should go! I should go too!

“Gonzo – A Brutal Chrysalis”

July 12-14 and 19-21
Northwest Actors’ Studio (nwactorsstudio.org)
8:00 p.m.
Tickets: $20/general; $10/students & seniors

July 26-28
Capitol Hill Arts Center (capitolhillarts.com)
8:00 p.m.
Tickets: $20/general; $10/students & seniors

Tickets will be available soon; for more info, see: www.gonzoduke.com

Apple TV to get official YouTube support

From Apple’s web site:

Coming in June, you can browse and watch thousands of free YouTube videos streaming directly from the Internet.

Both the Apple TV and the Wii support YouTube, and since YouTube is my primary source of entertainment (after Zara of course), it looks like I’m gonna have to get one or the other..

Mike’s B-day!

For Mike’s b-day we went to Little Baobab for dinner and then Bissap Baobab for drinks. I know, we got it backwards, but it was great! Here are some pics:

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There were some awesome musicians at Little Baobab who were playing a cajón, a Peruvian drum that looks like a box. Somehow I’d never seen or heard one before!

28 New Exoplanets Discovered!

Our friend Dr. John Johnson and his team have discovered some new planets!

John Johnson of the University of California at Berkeley and his colleagues presented the findings here today at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS).

Astronomers don’t directly spot extrasolar planets, but rather look for stellar wobbles caused by orbiting planets. The planet’s size and distance from the parent star affect how strong or weak of a wobble, and more sophisticated techniques for measuring the stellar wobbles has led to an ever-lengthening list of such outer planets. Now they can detect wobbles of a meter per second compared with the 10-meter limit just 15 years ago.

Previously, JJ found a planet with a 2.1 day orbit!

Bernal Pig Roast!

Our neighbors dug a hole in their back yard, and um… roasted a pig in it. I didn’t realize “pig in a blanket” meant acutally wrapping a dead pig in a blanket and then throwing it in a hole in the ground along with some coals and rocks! I brought over a couple pitchers of mai tais, which didn’t last too long!

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Created with Paul’s flickrSLiDR.

photo linky!

B-Day Cupkakes at El Rincon!

Bob was in town for my B-day, and Tyrone’s band SABRETEETH happened to be playing at El Rincon, so we went out for birthday drinkies.. May and Peliom surprised me with CUPKAKES!!!, which we ate in the back of the truck, due to an extremely loud opening band.. photo linky!


Created with Paul’s flickrSLiDR.

Backyard Valentine

I stepped out into the backyard early one morning and found this:
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I don’t think it was for me!

Mr. T is the T in IT


Intelligence in the network is for suckas!

iLike rocks Facebook




Web 2.0 companies lined up for a mass start at the Facebook F8 Launch this past Thursday. Facebook has 24 million users, set to have more than MySpace’s 150 million users by the end of the year, and an unprecedented empty application market. Just a few days after launch the dust has yet to settle, but iLike is clearly the shot heard around the Facebook. Less than 72 hours after launch of the F8 platform, iLike has over 200,000 users, almost 1% of the Facebook user base and ten times higher than the second place contender picnik, a Flash-based photo editing widget.

Apparently Facebook users like them some music.

Link to iLike Application on Facebook

Words to live by…

Bob, Shag, and I made this SkyMaul-inspired remix of this Attribution2.0-licensed image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nantaskart/61707032/

fmfu

Hang it in your office!

reCAPTCHA: stop spam and help digitize books

reCaptcha is a project by Prof. Luis van Ahn at CMU.

Over 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day by people around the world. reCAPTCHA channels this human effort into helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive. When you solve a reCAPTCHA, you help preserve literature by deciphering a word that was not readable by computers.

reCAPTCHA is a great project. I added the WordPress plugin to TikiRobot, which will hopefully reduce all the crap that Akismet fails to catch. If you haven’t seen Prof. van Ahn’s TechTalk on Human Computation, check it out. It’s very good!

His other projects are The ESP Game and PeekABoom.

Update: Here is a quote from Brewster:

“I think it’s a brilliant idea — using the Internet to correct OCR mistakes,” said Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive, in a statement. “This is an example of why having open collections in the public domain is important. People are working together to build a good, open system.”

Walktopus!!!


Confused? A bit of an explaination:

Jim Henson’s The Cube

Someone please watch this movie for me and tell me if I should watch the whole thing. Bob thinks the premise is preposterous but I really like cubes.

via boingboing

Update: Shag and I watched it.. it’s good! This version on Google video has some good animation shorts tacked on the end, including Black Hula, which was just as surreal as The Cube…

Make a grid using ImageMagick

I needed a jpeg with gridlines on it. Here is a python script that will generate the arguments to ImageMagick to create a grid:

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#!/usr/bin/python
 
cmd = 'convert -size 1000x1000 xc:white -strokewidth 1 '
 
for i in range(0, 999, 100):
  cmd += "-draw 'line "+str(i)+",0 "+str(i)+",999' "
 
for i in range(0, 999, 100):
  cmd += "-draw 'line 0,"+str(i)+" 999,"+str(i)+"' "
 
cmd += "grid.jpg"
 
print cmd

Walrus Situps

via a mefi comment:

I imagine everyone feels like doing this

check.jpg

to their cell phone company eventually. (i’m on sprint and right now they’re driving me nuts. or to be more accurate, my crazy phone is driving me nuts. if you’ve tried calling me in the last few months, sorry if i haven’t picked up or called you back. my phone doesn’t tell me when i have missed calls. it also shuts down everyday for no good reason so i can’t get incoming calls. you’re better off sending me an email. sigh)

Canvas3D

This video of a canvas3d/javascript demo in Firefox gives me hope. Some parts of my canvas(2d) web app runs 100x slower in Firefox/linux than Safari/OSX. It looks like they have hardware acceleration working, finally :)

Here is some info on Canvas3d in javascript.

Massively Asymmetrical Bandwidth

Results of the Speakeasy bandwidth test, 60Mbit down/1Mbit up:
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Can you imagine how different the net would be if everyone had this kind of bandwidth at home, and it was symmetric? I think the market for desktop apps would collapse overnight, and owners licensers of broadcast spectrum would pass laws to cripple YouTube bitrates.

Fragile Like Eggs

IMG_3304.JPGFor my birthday, I received a package labeled FRAGILE LIKE EGGS! I need to work this phrase into my daily conversation…

I bet you can’t guess what was inside the box!

A Bernal Poem














A non-profit story

One of the perks of working as a programmer for a non-profit is that you get to collaborate with some top-notch hackers. The other day, I needed to find out the return values of the rm command, so of course I type ‘man rm’ on the Ubuntu command line. The manual page for rm didn’t list the return values, but it did list the authors. One of the names in the Authors section seemed vaugley familiar. “Hmmmm…”, I thought, “isn’t that the guy upstairs?” We ran upstairs and caught him off guard. “Um… that was a long time ago…” he told us. We suggested that he add a return values section to the man page, and then ran back downstairs, giggling like schoolkids. He probably thought we were nuts :)

paper sculptures

insight.jpg

oh wow, there are some beautiful paper sculptures on Richard Sweeney’s flickr page and his website. so beautiful, i want to live in them!

posting via email

The Knack… and How To Get It

I love The Knack.. it’s one of my favorite movies. I stumbled upon the Bed Scene while surfing youtube for videos of people playing tetris on the piano.

If you haven’t seen The Knack, be sure to at least netflix it!

a big hole

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apparently the biggest! in the WORLD! so big that the vortex above it caused several helicopter crashes. there are more pics of this crazy hole over here.

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