LA may have pot vending machines, but Missouri has Tiki Rings!, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

If only I had some quarters…

Filed under: bobslobster, tiki lifestyle · 3 Comments

hi

the simpsons were singing the jingle for “armour hotdogs”

so i read the wikipedia entry for armour hotdogs

apparently the armour meatpacking company was one of those truly evil companies that you just can’t get today what with labor laws and such

they even sold 500K pounds of tainted meat to the army and gave food poisoning to soldiers during the spanish american war

that is some pre-halliburton war contract profiteering!

it was a family business of the armour brothers from chicago

they were the real hot dog kings of chicago!

it gets weirder

with you, it always does

they made lots of stuff as meat and animal byproducts

like dial soap!

then their profits went down

and the company was bought by greyhound bus co.

which is actually a canadian company

wtf

the name was changed to the dial corporation

then it was sold to some german food conglomerate

the song the simpsons were singing is the actual jingle that was apparently very popular

Hotdogs, Armour hotdogs.
What kinds of kids eat Armour hot dogs?
Fat kids, skinny kids, kids who climb on rocks.
Tough kids, sissy kids
Even kids with chicken pox
Love hotdogs, Armour hot dogs
The dogs kids love to bite!

there is another armour reference in the simpsons where principal skinner is wearing a bunch of hotdogs to look like a guy with bombs strapped to him

and chief wiggum says “what kind of man wears armour hot dogs?”

and that is all i know about armour hot dogs.

what is up with u?

oh wait, one last thing about armour hot dogs!

some really old patients i saw in KC took a thyroid replacement called “armour thyroid”

its not used anymore because the dosing is unreliable

it comes from pig thryoids

i never made a connection between it and the hot dogs, but there you go! one more weird thing about hot dogs.

Filed under: Armour, chatlog, food, hotdogs, medicine, random crap i learned from obscure simpsons references · 2 Comments

I’ve finally made it easy to post good-looking iChat transcripts to the blog! We use CSS to style DIVs to look like iChat speech balloons.

Cool! Where I can get the CSS?

All the code is checked into SourceForge. You can browse it here.

But how does it work?

A brief description is here. Scott Schiller came up with the Even More Rounded Corners technique that we use. There is a CSS file to include and a python script that turns transcripts into html that you can paste into a blog post. We need more documentation, CSS cleanup, cross-bowswer support, and more speech balloon colors, if you feel like contributing patches.

Doesn’t WordPress completely bork the formatting in Safari by adding unmatched </p> tags?

Yup! WordPress is crap! You can use the wp-unformatted plugin to disable autop() on posts that contain ChatBubbles.

Filed under: ChatBubble, code code, css, iChat, opensource, python · 5 Comments

I recently got this for some friends of mine who are about to become parents, but I pretty much think it could be useful to all sorts of people….like

• roommates (whose turn is it to scrub the toilet? spin the wheel!)
• siblings (whose turn is it to organize mom’s birthday party? spin the wheel!)
• coworkers (who gets to have the nice desk by the window? spin the wheel!)

Of course there are much more mature and logical ways of going about everyday decision-making, but the one thing this solution has going for it is that you can’t really hold a grudge against or argue with chance…and it’s probably a whole lot faster. (in the absence of a wheel, a game of heads or tails also works quite well)

Filed under: parenting, support · 1 Comment

The greatest thing about Leopard is that you can configure your Mac laptop to backup wirelessly and transparently using Time Machine. You can wander around the world editing files, and your laptop will automatically back them up when you come home and connect to your wireless router, without you having to do anything.

You will need a second Mac or Linux box to host the remote backup. This takes five to ten minutes to set up and configure.

First, configure your remote backup machine. These instructions assume that you are using a Mac for this.

• Configure your remote backup machine with a static IP address
  
  • Your backup machine must be connected to the same wireless router that your laptop will connect to when you are home
  • My wireless router is set to assign IP addresses starting with 192.168.1.100, so I assigned my remote mac to use 192.168.1.23
  • To assign an IP address manually while still using DHCP to get other network settings from your wireless router, go to System Preferences -> Network -> Airport -> Advanced -> TCP/IP and choose “Using DHCP with manual address”
    
• Configure AFP File Sharing under System Preferences -> Sharing
  
  • Select the “File Sharing” checkbox. You should see a message that says “Others can access your computer at afp://192.168.1.23″, or something similar.
  • Click the “+” button under “Shared Folders:”, and add the hard drive you want to store the backups to the list
  • Click the “+” button under “Users:”. Create a user called “backup”. Give this user Read & Write permissions to the backup hard drive
    

• Mount the remote backup hard drive
  
  • In the Finder, choose “Connect to Server…” under the Go menu
  • Type afp://192.168.1.23 in for the server address
  • When asked, log in using user “backup” and type in the password. Be sure to click “Remember password in my Keychain”
    
• Now, Configure Time Machine
  
  • Choose System Preferences -> Time Machine
  • Click “Choose Backup Disk”
  • Choose the remote backup disk that you mounted using AFP
    

If you use your laptop in the standard, Apple-approved manner, then you can configure Time Machine to only backup your Users directory, which will save space and time. Let me know if you need more help!

Filed under: backup, howto, Leopard, osx, support, TimeMachine · 2 Comments

About a week and a half ago, a new state budget was proposed and under it’s terms, 48 (almost 20%) of California’s state parks would close, including these beautiful Bay Area parks

• Tomales Bay State Park
• Portola Redwoods State Park
• Henry W. Coe State Park
• Candlestick Point SRA
• Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park

The whole list is over here. You can petition against these closures through the California State Parks Foundation website which will help you send a letter to your local Assembly Member and Senator if you give them your name and address. There’s a prewritten message you can use or you can write one of your own.

I’d be really sad to see these parks close and hope you’ll send a letter! If you don’t want to disclose your critical info on a website and you live in Bernal, you can also fax a letter to Senator Carole Migden (916) 445-4722 and contact Assembly member Mark Leno.

(the photo above is from this gallery of panoramas of Portola Redwoods SP )

Filed under: bay area, petition, stateparks · 0 Comments

It’s called moneygami! I wish there were instructions to go with this gallery but I imagine they’ll come soon. My favorites are the penguin and dog above.

Filed under: crafts, cuuuuute, diy, neat, origami · 0 Comments

Apple seems to be trading in productivity for flash … here is how to disable the “reflecting mirror” effect from the Dock in Leopard:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES

Then send kill -1 to the Dock process.

Link to the blog I found this on

Filed under: no code, osx · 0 Comments

We take more than 5 million pictures every month using a pool of 250+ Canon 5D and Canon 1Ds mkII cameras. Recently, Jon was contemplating buying a 5D and wanted to know how long the shutter life was. Hey, we can answer that using real-world numbers!

The Canon 5D is rated for 50K+ shots, but they last much longer, and fail after an average of 150K shots.

The Canon 1Ds mkII is rated for 200K+ shots, but actually lasts for 750K shots before shutter failure!

Someone else might find these numbers useful.

Filed under: archive, canon, Canon1Ds, Canon5D, gadgets, ShutterLife · 2 Comments

Aaron Swartz has launched theinfo.org, a wiki for people who crawl and analyze large datasets.

This is a site for large data sets and the people who love them: the scrapers and crawlers who collect them, the academics and geeks who process them, the designers and artists who visualize them. It’s a place where they can exchange tips and tricks, develop and share tools together, and begin to integrate their particular projects.

Filed under: archive, crawlers, data, datasets · 0 Comments

Remember that Soulja Boy video that May posted? Well, here is Richard Stallman (yes, RICHARD STALLMAN) doing the Soulja Boy dance. His entourage is wearing labcoats, and he is holding a laptop. In a more perfect universe, it would be required that all music videos feature RMS.

via via

Filed under: beats, RMS, SouljaBoy, video, wtf??? · 4 Comments

SF has a public transit problem. Muni has great coverage, but travel times across the city are unbearably long. BART and CalTrain are OK for getting to the burbs, but what if you want to go to the beach? Taxis are only for the incredibly wealthy, and they won’t come to my neighborhood on weekend evenings.

That’s why I created the San Francisco Subway. Completely underground, the SF Subway never gets held up in traffic. I can get from my house to the gym in one stop, or to the datacenter in two. Dogs are allowed, and Fort Funston is only a 12 minute ride from Bernal. Instead of traveling at Muni speeds (5.3 mph!), the SF Subway reaches speeds of 75mph between stops!

I drew the map in Gliffy, so let me know if you want to add a stop or a line, and I’ll send you the edit link.

Filed under: cartography, map, san francisco, subway, transportation · 4 Comments

A place devoted just to pie! They’ve been around for a year on 25th and Mission but I never knew. I came across it on my way home the other day so I stopped in and had a slice of banana cream pie. It was yummy! Creamy but not too heavy or sweet with small banana chunks. Also, what’s really neat about this place is that the proceeds from the shop support a farm in Pescadero which in turn supplies the ingredients for the pies…and the teenagers who work behind the counter also work at the farm once a month to grow the ingredients and help make the pies. It’s an inspiring project!

Filed under: bay area, food, mission, pies, snacktime · 0 Comments

Here are some pics from my recent trip! I did an 8 day trek in Torres del Paine called the Paine Circuit which is in southern Chile. It was beautiful! It was also really really hard. I can’t lie…there were many times I wished I were lying on a warm beach in Bali that week…especially when I was kind of lost, at the edge of a precipice, and the wind was so fierce, I had to grab hold of a tree or my makeshift trekking poles that I dug into the ground to keep myself from being blown off the mountain. The wind was UNREAL. I had to stop whenever I heard it coming behind me, hunch down close to the ground, and prepare myself to get hit. it came in phases like mini-tornadoes.

The weight of my pack also made it difficult for me to put one foot in front of the other sometimes. I’d never gone on such a long backpacking trip before and at the end of the first day, my back hurt so much, I gave my SLR to a chilean woman at the refugio by our first camp. Luckily I still had a small pocket cam which I used for the pics above (hooray for small pocket cams!)

The crazy wind and weight of my pack aside, the trip was great! I met lots of nice people, and learned a lot. It was one of the most beautiful places I’ve been to and I’m glad I went when I still had knees. I’m fairly certain they’re done for now. They’ve just told me that they will no longer be in on anything I decide to do this year. They are going on stike!

Here’s a map of the trek.

The penguins were at a penguin colony on Seno Otway, about an hour from Punta Arenas. To get to Torres del Paine, you have to fly to Punta Arenas (about 4-5 hrs from Santiago, Chile), take a bus to Puerto Natales (about 3-4 hours) and then another bus to the park (about 2-3 hours). It takes a while!

Filed under: chile, excursions, patagonia, photos · 0 Comments

a magellanic penguin, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

This little guy just woke up from a nap, crawled out of his hole, and flapped his wings/flippers a few times before waddling off to jump in the frigid straits of magellan. In punta arenas now. Will be home in a couple days.
-may

Filed under: Uncategorized · 1 Comment

Here is a map of the places the TR crew went in 2007! Let me know which cities I missed!

Filed under: cartography, excursions, map, subway, transportation · 7 Comments

Glacier Grey, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

I’m in puerto natales now, back from an 8 day trek in torres del paine. Happy new year!!
-may

Filed under: glaciers, patagonia, Uncategorized · 2 Comments

We are back from India! Happy New Year’s to all!

Filed under: excursions, india, photos, TajMahal · 1 Comment