I’ve been tempted before to buy those dubious books that you can find on eBay with the fantastic-sounding titles: “One Million Dollars In One Year”, “Knife Throwing Techniques Of The Ninja”, etc… I’ve never bought one, though, because I figure they’re scams; however, my curiosity lingered.
Well, I’m curious no more. This site has all those scammy eBay books online so that you can see what’s in all those books. Neat.
Engadget’s got good live coverage:
I’m still betting the “And one more thing…” is Leopard, thus scooping Vista.
I’m pretty neutral about birds but now that a dozen or so are dead due to mysterious circumstances in downtown Austin where I work maybe I should care more.
I came in yesterday to work on some stuff… at one point while I was smoking in the parking garage I was staring at the birds that cluster in the three trees in front of the Omni hotel and thinking about nothing really. If only I’d known that I wouldn’t see them alive again.
So I drive in today (I come in from MoPac down fifth street), a little late due to extremely bad allergies and lack of sleep, and the police have shutdown Congress. I think, Must be a marathon, and keep driving in a long loop down to first so I can come back up Brazos. By the time I get to my floor in the garage I realize that this garage is empty—there’s really a dearth of other cars about. I pull into a primo parking space, thinking about bomb threats and anthrax scares but not really concerned (I just don’t worry about terrorist attacks… not very productive kind of thoughts). When I get into the office it’s a ghost town and I finally get the news.
If I get any pictures of guys in hazmat suits on my phone I’ll post them in a flash. ( =
The person of the year, according to Time magazine is you. Aren’t you glad? ( = Time made some weird, arbitrary choices about who they actually wrote about inside the covers, but I heartily agree with their basic statement—user-generated content is huge right now and for the foreseeable future.
Wired has a neat article about crowdsourcing and user-generated content (ugencon?) in Second Life. The success of Second Life is entirely built on what its users can provide… surfing that wave is working really well for them and that makes me glad. One company, Cambrian House is even getting explicit about this idea by directly basing its business model entirely on user-generated content (UGC?) and crowdsourcing. Seems to be a sort of paid open source…
And in other news, humans smell like bacon.
Found this fantastic link to small sample movies of Ray Harryhausen’s creatures. Apparently it’s an exhaustive list.
Mr. Harryhausen was one of my biggest influences in my love of myth and storytelling… I can’t imagine who I’d be if I hadn’t seen Clash of the Titans when I was wee. All the fantastic creatures this guy brought to life (Medusa! Pegasus! And, yeah, okay, even the damn owl!) made a big, big footprint in my brain.
I was talking to Ryan and he asked me what RSS reader I used. “Nothing,” I replied, “I just visit the websites themselves.”
“What?” he exclaimed, flabbergasted. “You visit websites?” Jesus, I thought, when did visiting websites become old school?
So I’ve been taking Ryan’s suggestion and using Google Reader. It’s a pretty nice piece of work and has definitely decreased the amount of time I spend catching up. As I remember to add sites that I frequent (Boing Boing, 37signals, the various friends’ blogs I read) I’m reminded of just how much information I try and take in every day in an effort to raise my cluefulness.
In that vein, one thing that caught me by surprise today was a post on BoingBoing about phishers sending out pink-slips. Apparently when someone sends out targeted spam with the intent of defrauding someone (installing malware like keystroke loggers or the like) this is called spear phishing.
That is awesome.