Magazines as wallpaper by Elding Oscarson
So what did the other two little pigs build their houses out of? Crumpled newspaper and EZ-Lite Briquettes?
On Super Bowl Sunday 2009, I announced a live-tweet of the greatest sporting event of our time:
Tonight only: @dwineman’s toenail clipping extravaganza. Live-tweet beginning at 6:28 EST. If you hate football, unfollow everyone but me.
Several hours of stupidity followed shortly thereafter, and it only cost me half a dozen followers. Since it reads better forwards than backwards, and it’s hard to go back very far on twitter.com anyway, here’s the whole dumb thing. I’m very sorry.
“The universe is beautiful. It’s something like a new woman that I was going to date. You’re dark, and you’re massive, and you have a black hole, and all of those elements I want to explore, just like you would explore on a new date: you want to dive deep into them, and feel around, and just see what’s going to come out of that.
“The time it takes to get from one star to another star is — you need to travel at the speed of light, and us humans can’t even fathom the concept of that kind of time, because it’s really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really fun to think about taking a speed-of-light ride.”
I have to show you something that happened in San Francisco.
We were at an Indian restaurant on Polk, my wife was holding the baby, and I was sitting across from them. I had my big stupid camera with me and I kept picking it up and pointing it at them. Each time I did so, the ridiculous tiny human you see pictured above would hop up, hold this expression, and squeak.
She’d never shown any particular awareness of the camera before. Probably she thought we were playing peek-a-boo, since my big stupid lens hides most of my face when I’m behind it. But she seemed to know that it meant hold still and be cute, because that’s what she did. Four times in a row.
Smile practice.
Lazy Tumbl:
I paid $40.00 for a Season Pass of the HD version of Lost Season 6 from iTunes. What I didn’t know was that before it would download the actual episodes, iTunes would insist on downloading ELEVEN GIGABYTES of promotional/recap horseshit (pictured above).
I can click Pause All and then just resume the items I want, but the paused items stay queued and just resume whenever I have new downloads available. Every time. For the rest of my life.
I could just let it go overnight and then delete everything, but fuck that. Does anyone know how to remove this pointless drive-filling garbage from my download queue, permanently?
tj:
For whom the bell tolls
Revolutionary HTML 5 video! Huh. I guess at least it’s a nicer piss-off icon than I get with Flash on my iPhone. Still.
Apparently the problem is that I’m using a boring, outmoded browser (Firefox 3.5.7).
(via faruk)
The problem is that Firefox is taking a Richard Stallman-esque position on H.264
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_freedom_a.html
and, as zealots, are refusing to find ways to use an h.264 decoder that you already have on your computer, nor will they license H.264 because VIDEO WANTS TO BE FREEEEEEEE…
Because, as you know, Mozilla is open source and therefore doesn’t make any money so they can’t afford to license anything..
HAHAHAHA, no, just kidding. In 2007 Mozilla made $75,130,722.
But licensing fees?! Those are for suckers.
It isn’t just about the fees. In the article you linked, it’s explained pretty clearly:
Based on this, tj, your anger seems misdirected. Zealots they may be, but Mozilla is one of the very small number of well-funded groups actually fighting to keep the web open and free. Apple’s anti-Flash position also works in the service of that goal, but only by coincidence: Apple’s and Mozilla’s interests happen to align there, because Apple doesn’t control Flash. In this area, they don’t, because Apple does control QuickTime.
The Mozilla Foundation are the good guys. They led us out of the Dark Times when nothing worked on any browser but Internet Explorer. Let’s not forget that.
Modulator-demodulator
When I was in high school, we lived on a road that full-sized school buses couldn’t access, so my sister and I and the neighbor kids all had to wait around for upwards of ninety minutes after school for the only vehicle the district had that could make it around those tight turns. In other words, yes; I rode the short bus. So now you know that about me.
During those interminable wasted hours I often had nothing with which to amuse myself other than a row of pay-phones. I had memorized the 800 number for GEnie, which at the time was the closest thing to an internet my parents were willing to pay for. So I would call up General Electric’s friendly modem bank and whistle the carrier tones at it. I got pretty good: I could negotiate most of the way through the connect sequence before the machinery on the other end would start over or hang up.
I dreamed of performing this act onstage one day. I’d take requests: “Yes, you sir, how many data bits? Parity or no parity? Did someone say V.32?”
I’d be the enigmatic crooner who blew into town for one bourbon-soaked night, leaving at dawn in a cloud of dust and legend. No one ever got close enough to ask his name, but the likes of his CRC-32 ain’t been seen since the days of ZMODEM.
And some nights, when the moon is new and the wind is blowing just right, if you listen — if you really listen — you can just barely hear that melancholy wisp of a voice:
+++ATH0
NO CARRIER.
