So, I’ve never really had a personal website. For the last seven years or so, I used the Generic Website as a placeholder for a site that never came. Sure, there were always little nooks and crannies hiding under that blank page, but I figured it was finally time for something a little more substantial.

I can’t promise I’ll keep to these, but here are the rules:

1. No journaling, unless it’s relevant to people who don’t know me. Example: “Today I went down to 7-11 and bought a Slurpee. Strawberry is my favorite flavor!”

2. No tired memes, unless I have something to add. Example: “Take this quiz and find out which Smurf you are! I’m Jokey!”

3. Be original.

Thanks to the close friends who, until this point, have put up with my endless links and web commentary in instant messages and e-mail.

Phil just came up with a clever variation of Andre’s spambot-defeating e-mail trick. On his old site, Andre dynamically displayed the current date as his contact e-mail address (a la [email protected]), and wrote a procmail script to weed out e-mails sent to addresses older than a week.

Instead, use SSI and environment variables to include the client’s IP address in the e-mail address. So, <!–#echo var=”REMOTE_ADDR” –>@example.com becomes @example.com. Now that you have the spambot’s IP address, do something creative with it.

Photos from the Fanime 2001 anime convention, where fans dress up as their favorite anime characters. I admire their passion for the genre, but I can’t help but laugh. (Found from a Google Image search for pinchy, looking for images of Mr. Pinchy.)

The 1983 Video Game Olympics, held at the Twin Galaxies arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, pitted nineteen players against each other in five events: Frogger, Millipede, Joust, Super Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong, Jr. The three finalists went on to compete in the Video Game Invitational, hosted by ’80s car-wreck That’s Incredible. Thanks to the original owner of the Twin Galaxies arcade, the full episode is now online in Quicktime format.

A tape glitch skips over the moment when the winner reaches the high score on Buck Rogers and crosses the finish line, but it’s still well worth watching. Don’t miss John Davidson and Cathy Lee Crosby’s in-game color commentary of Cosmos, Burgertime, Millipede, Donkey Kong Jr. and Buck Rogers. (“Now comes a swarm of bees and Ben gets stung!”) Thanks to Mathowie for the tip.

I created this in response to Mat Honan hassling me about not wanting a storTrooper avatar. If you haven’t seen the original, this probably won’t make much sense.

By the way, today’s my 25th birthday. While my mom was in labor, Julie M. Fidler got some stuff from the Donny & the Osmonds fan club and stayed home sick from school, students rallied in opposition to Henry Kissinger’s planned appointment to Columbia, and Josh Brown enjoyed the most beautiful trip of his life.

And I was born at 12 noon. A pretty quiet day, I guess.

The winning performances for last year’s Meow Mix Jingle All The Way To L.A. contest are online, and in an unprotected directory (Windows Media format). These videos are just about as strange as you would think they’d be. Meow meow meow meow!

In a Usenet post written in July 1981, over ten years before Berners-Lee announced the World Wide Web project, K. Richard Magill suggested that combining Ted Nelson’s work in hypertext with “windowing capability, a pointing mouse, and auxiliary 5-key keyset” would make a powerful tool. “Now if only it came packaged in a briefcase-sized personal DEC-10…”

Okay, so five-key keysets never took off, but it’s still an accurate prediction of the modern web-enabled desktop. It’s also the first known reference to the terms “hypertext” and “Ted Nelson” in the Usenet archive. The rest of the short thread is worth reading, too. (On a side note, does anyone know what happened to K. Richard Magill? I wanted to ask him about his prediction, but can’t find any references to him after he sold all his audio gear in 1990.)

It turns out that Google’s Usenet archive is pretty useful for tracking the lifecycles of Internet fads.

August 25, 2004: At Nelson’s request, the data has been updated to July 2004.

Continue reading “Tracking the All Your Base Meme with Usenet” →

I love it when people find the three-year-old blank checkbook you’ve thrown away, and start writing checks in your name. Fortunately my account has long since changed, so they didn’t get a dime, but it’s still unnerving to see someone else signing your full name.

Note to potential thieves:

I don’t sign my middle initial, and I don’t write like a girl.

Note to self:

Shred unused checks from now on.

In the spirit of Leslie Harpold’s recent Verisign debacle and David Gallagher’s successful campaign to get his name back, I’m starting a Googlebombing campaign of my own.

Help me defeat Scott Baio and get my name back! Burn, Chachi, burn! (Baio! Baio! Baio!)

Denoser is a Perl script that filters out the noses from emoticons. And you thought Ben Trott’s Silly::Die module was useless…

In 1992, Sabeer Bhatia posts a classified ad from his Stanford e-mail account offering his ’88 Toyota Tercel for sale. In June 1996, Jack Smith mentions Hotmail for the first time in Usenet. One month later, on July 4, they publically announced the product they created. Three years and eight million users later, they sold Hotmail to Microsoft for $400 million. It’s a good story, if you haven’t read it already.

A Playstation 2 emulator for Windows/Linux is being developed by the authors of PCSX, a Playstation 1 emulator. It only runs some simple demos at the moment, but it’s amazing that it exists at all. No word on a functional Xbox emulator yet…

Unethical idea of the day: ‘The Forbidden Web,’ a search engine that only indexes files disallowed by robots.txt files. For example, CNN’s robots.txt file asks search engines to avoid their transcripts, jobs, website statistics, and development directories. The Forbidden Web would index only those forbidden (and often intriguing) directories. Evil, isn’t it?

A glance at the robots.txt files on some popular sites: New York Times, Google, Hotwired, eBay, Slashdot, Verisuck, Kuro5hin, Filepile, ZDNet, Epinions, IMDB, BBC, IBM, USA Today, Jakob Neilsen.

You can search Google for more robots.txt files.

Occasionally, there’s an idea so simple and powerful that you have to drop whatever you’re doing and implement it immediately.

Yesterday, I read the Jon Udell article that’s making the rounds (via Mefi and Flutterby). I didn’t immediately grok it, but seeing it in action (1, 2, 3) did the trick.

Visually, I was inspired by Mark Pilgrim’s concise display, but didn’t want to periodically parse through my Apache logs. I wanted real-time results without limiting myself to one particular web server log format. So I wrote a Perl script that’s now included on every entry page via SSI, using flat files to store the data.

As a result, there may be some issues with scalability on heavily trafficked sites, but I’d think most weblogs wouldn’t have a problem. Anyway, if you want to try it, all it requires is Perl, server-side includes, and a world-writable directory to store the files in. Download Waxy Backlinks now. Installation info inside.

Continue reading “Backlinks” →

A Google search for “onion” doesn’t return The Onion homepage anywhere in the results. A little more digging reveals that the Onion homepage isn’t in the Google index at all. Any idea why? Maybe Aaron knows.

It looks like the days of the well-funded secretive tech-related startup aren’t completely over. There.com has $30 million in funding, a swooshy logo, a newly-installed climbing wall, and a mysterious homepage (a la Transmeta and Red Swoosh).

I’d dismiss it as hype, if it wasn’t for three things:

1. Interesting founder. The company was founded by Will Harvey, the creator of several old Electronic Arts games, like The Immortal, Music Construction Kit, and Zany Golf. (He also ported Marble Madness to the Apple II and IIgs.)

2. Good team. David E. Weekly, the talented programmer who deconstructed the Napster protocol and helped people bypass Napster evictions and port blocking, started there at the end of March. He says that the work involves “remarkably exciting technology” and the team is “very bright.” Other notable team members are AI-expert Jeffrey Ventrella (try Brain Maze and Gene Pool), Amy Jo Kim (author of Community Building on the Web) and Organic’s old creative director, Janis Spivack.

3. They have a Vice President of Fun. (Unfortunately, it’s the same guy who helmed A Fork In The Tale, the full-motion video adventure game featuring Rob Schneider and bundled on five (!) CD-ROMs. The game was an expensive mistake, Any River Entertainment’s first and only release.)

I’m going to guess that they’re planning some sort of multi-user game community, like Habbo Hotel meets Everquest. Any guesses?

Usenet has the tendency to provide a public forum for those who would normally be scribbling in a closet. For example, take Daryl “Shawn” Kabatoff. For the last few years, he’s methodically gathered “statistics” from various sources, ranging from local newspaper obituary pages to the food court of the Saskatoon Midtown Plaza mall. With all the raw data he’s collected, he’s attempting to prove daily that our full names are in “mathematical harmony” with our birthdays.

His rants normally focus on a single individual he’s met or read about, starting with calculations related to their birthdate and full names, blending in whatever other personal information about their family members, spouses, birthplace, and career he’s been able to glean. From there, it descends into a mix of numerology, religious zealotry, and personal torment. I’ve never seen anything like it.

With all the prime numbers, Fibonacci sequences and biblical references, it’s like reading the notebooks of Maximillian Cohen and John Nash combined. Unsurprisingly, several posts unfold to reveal a history of painful mental illness. If you have some time, take a look. I’ve detailed his posting history and a several sample posts below.

August 9, 2004: The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix published an article about Daryl and his encounter with one woman.

September 22, 2004: Does anyone have a photo of Kabatoff? If so, please e-mail me.

Continue reading “Dar Kabatoff's In Town” →

Last night, at Dana’s party in West L.A., I met Eric Zimmerman and Frank Lantz from the New York-based Gamelab, quite possibly the most talented Shockwave game developers around (artist’s rendering). Their work is consistently brilliant: Sissyfight, Blix, Loop, and my personal favorite, Junkbot. (Try them all, if you have a day or three to kill.)

Also, I had a brief conversation with Justin Hall, the original personal weblogger. We almost met once before while I was working at Gettingit.com when he dropped by the office to talk with our illustrious editor-in-chief, R. U. Sirius. I didn’t know it at the time, but Justin told me that R. U. had asked him to submit cool links for publishing daily on the site. (He was trying to avoid heavy computer use at the time, so he turned it down.)

Anyway, Justin and the Gamelab guys were in town for the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the computer/videogame trade show held at the mammoth L.A. Convention Center. Andre had snagged me a guest pass, but Frank kindly gave me his E3 badge last night so I could skip the hassle of pre-registration this morning. The show was overwhelming. I feel like a little kid who’s been overstimulated to the point of exhaustion.

My highlights included: Animal Crossing, Metroid Prime and Mario Sunshine for the Gamecube; Kung Fu Chaos and Outlaw Golf for the X-Box; Sly Cooper, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Contra Shattered Soldier and Tony Hawk 4 for the PS2; Deus Ex 2 for the PC; and XIII for all four platforms. Gamespy seems to be the definitive source for information about the show, with previews and screenshots for all the games I mentioned. Time for bed.

This weekend, I found that there’s an obscure sequel to one of my favorite games from the early 1990s, Out of This World (released as Another World in Europe). Only released for the short-lived SegaCD system, Heart of the Alien (front/back cover) lets you play the original game as a second character, much like Opposing Force and Blue Shift allow you to see Half-Life from new perspectives.

The game is playable on the PC, but it’s a small pain in the ass. You’ll need the outstanding GENS SegaCD/Genesis emulator and the American Mega CD BIOS v2.00. Then download the 224MB ROM from The Underdogs. (Update: Here’s a guide to burning the ISO/MP3 archive to a CD for playing on your official Sega CD system.)

Unzip the ROM archive, then use WinRAR to unpack the RAR files inside. If you want sound and music, you’ll need to burn the BIN file to a blank CD-ROM, using a burning application like Nero. If you don’t care about sound, just point GENS to the BIOS file in the Options->Directories menu and then load the BIN. It’s just that easy!

Now, does anyone have a copy of Night Trap hanging around?

Make a fist. That’s the size of a regular kidney. Now hold your breath and take a look at this. (Warning: Icky medical photo.)

That’s a photo of Dedair’s father’s polycystic kidneys, which were successfully removed a year ago. Weighing between 16 to 18 pounds combined, they were the second-largest set of kidneys the University of Pennsylvania has ever seen. The staff retained them for teaching purposes. Blecch!

After installing SpamAssassin last March, the spam on my 7-user server dropped from roughly 80-100/week to one or two a month.

So it’s not a big surprise that e-mail marketing firms are getting nervous, starting with a smear campaign against SpamAssassin. Gord Sears’s column in his marketing newsletter calls it a violation of free speech, demanding a law against server-side filtering software. Paul Myers, in his You HAD Mail column on Talkbiz.com, claims that SpamAssassin could bounce valuable mail like “discussion list posts,” “newsletters that you requested,” and “LOTS of personal emails from friends and family.”

I want to clear up a couple misunderstandings: First, the recommended SpamAssassin configuration flags e-mail as spam before forwarding it to the user, allowing for simple filtering in the client. It doesn’t delete the mail, although you can configure procmail that way, if you like. Any ISP that quietly deleted e-mail without consent wouldn’t be very popular for long.

Second, Spam Assassin has to be tailored for the individual. For the first week after installation, I had to add a few newsletters and discussion lists to the “whitelist,” which tells Spam Assassin never to filter e-mails with a particular “From” address or subject. After that, Spam Assassin very rarely accidentally flagged good e-mail as spam. And it has never once mistakenly flagged an e-mail from someone I know as spam.

It’s not a perfect system, but it’s a depressing necessity.

Get free DVD/VHS rentals from Blockbuster Video until August 15. Just fill out this form, preferably using a temporary e-mail address from a site like Spamgourmet or Spamhole. They’ll e-mail you the URL for a free rental coupon. Repeat as necessary. Enjoy! (Thanks, Phil!)

Update: The promotional offer has long since passed.

While in Arizona this weekend, I managed to drop by SonicBlue’s branch office in Scottsdale. I scored a refurbished Rio Riot jukebox (20 gigs!) out of the visit, and a few great photos of their office and internal paraphernalia.

Don’t miss this poster spelling out their corporate motto: AWESOME. I guess it could be worse.

Continue reading “SonicBlue is Awesome” →

The Onion has some interesting keywords in the meta tags on their front page, with references to Smoove B, Marilyn Manson, Phish, the NBA, “All your base,” ferrets, and Taco Bell. Keyword jamming like this is common, but particularly dumb in this case. If the Onion is trying to attract search engines with keywords, then why are they excluding all search engines from indexing their content?

March 6, 2004: In hindsight, it’s so clearly a joke. It’s hard to believe I ever took it seriously. I just checked, and they’ve updated their meta tags with more relevant keywords. It’s very odd.

Continue reading “The Onion's Meta Tags” →

My new Rio Riot, unlike most other portable MP3 players on the market, ignores paths and filenames when determining artist/album/song/genre information. Instead, it relies exclusively on the ID3 identification tags for artist/album/song/genre organization.

So it goes, only a small fraction of my 60 gigs collection has normalized ID3 tags. (For some reason, the folks on Audiogalaxy and Kazaa don’t seem care much about metadata.) Editing them all by hand would’ve taken months, so I started looking around for a good ID3 tag editor. By far, the best I’ve found is Tag&Rename. It’s fast, usable, and feature-rich. One of the more inspired features is the ability to import album information from Allmusic.com (including genres, album reviews and cover art). It can also export your collection to comma-separated values, query CDDB/FreeDB, rename MP3s/paths based on ID3 tag information (and vice-versa), and so on.

That’s hard to beat, but if you’ve found a better ID3 editor, speak up.

Well, this is depressing. Meaty.org, the real-life event organizer for online communities that I started developing last August, is now completely pointless. Today, Meetup.com launched. Designed by some of the most talented people in the industry, it’s exactly what I envisioned, with a couple extra neat features I didn’t think of.

They finished the entire thing in three months of dedicated work with a full staff, while I worked alone in my free time for the last eight months. I was totally outgunned. Note to self: Next time you have an idea like this, quit your day job and devote yourself to it full-time.

But, on the lighter side, it’s an outstanding site. The interface is perfectly designed, though I wouldn’t expect anything less from 37 Signals and Eric Costello. Kudos to the Meetup crew on a successful launch, you bastards.

The film adaptation of Po Bronson’s The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest is slated for a limited release on June 28. Originally written in 1995, it sounds like the screenplay was heavily changed to avoid being horribly dated. The story now takes place after the bubble burst instead of during the long short boom, and the product has changed from a sub-$300 computer to some sort of “hologram machine.”

They should have tried to create a snapshot of the era instead of hopelessly modernizing it. I mean, who funds hologram machines these days?

Tom Jennings, the creator of Fidonet and all-around renaissance guy, will be speaking this Saturday in downtown Los Angeles. This Wired article from 1996 gives some background on the man that made my first taste of the Internet possible (indirectly, through a Fidonet news/mail gateway). He’ll be speaking about his Story Teller project, an experiment in obsolete computing that prints and vocalizes text and symbols stored on punched tape. Time and directions inside, if you’re interested.

Continue reading “Fidonet creator Tom Jennings in Chinatown” →

The Usenet alt.binaries.* newsgroups have been a haven for file trading since 1993, but never received much attention because of the learning curve and limitations of ISP’s Usenet feeds. Even if you manage to install a newsreader, locate your news server and figure out how to decode multipart attachments, there’s no guarantee that your ISP carries the binary newsgroups or has anything more than a day’s worth of files.

Easynews provides a web-based interface to the Usenet binaries archive, with roughly 40 days of retention for all groups. A staggering number of albums, software, movies, and images are posted daily to Usenet, decoded by Easynews, and placed for download from the Easynews website. $10 gets you six gigs of downloaded files per month, and it’s the best $10 I’ve spent in a long time. The free trial gives you a one gigabyte quota and three days to play around with the interface, which I highly recommend. My comments are inside.

July 26, 2003: The free trial is no longer available. They’re up to 10 GB/month for $10, though their retention is closer to 21 days as Usenet traffic increases. Still highly recommended.

Continue reading “Easynews” →

Two strange Star Trek-related tidbits:

1. The short-lived cottage industry of Y2K survival books and videos probably isn’t doing so well these days, but the materials are still available if you’re interested. These ranged from the alarmist Y2K Millennium Meltdown: The Silent Bomb (“science fiction has become a science nightmare”) to the outright paranoid Y2K: Hidden Dangers of Martial Law and a Police State (“Will President Bill Clinton use the Y2K computer bug crisis as a pretext to declare martial law and usher in a brutal Gestapo police state?”). Compared to others in the genre, Leonard Nimoy’s Y2K Family Survival Guide seems almost rational. Almost. Anyway, I uploaded the short introduction video that I found on Usenet (6 meg AVI). If you want to see the rest, you can still buy it on Amazon. ($7.50, cheap!)

2. Another recent Usenet discovery is the little-known album recorded by Brent Spiner, most famously known for his role as Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Maybe he was jealous of Spock and Kirk.) Ol’ Yellow Eyes Is Back, released in 1991, features everyone’s favorite android crooning his way through twelve Tin Pan Alley standards. “It’s A Sin (To Tell a Lie)” features backup vocals by fellow cast members Levar Burton (Geordi La Forge), Jonathan Frakes (Commander Riker), Michael Dorn (Worf), and Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard). The album is long out of print, but you can hear “It’s A Sin” here (4 meg MP3).

Continue reading “Spock and Data” →

A couple new improvements to the Waxy Backlinks script. It can now be called from PHP scripts, referrers from some search engines are now excluded by default, and you can set the maximum number of backlinks to display and the minimum threshold of hits before a link gets displayed. Any of these options can easily be changed in the script itself. Many thanks to Joe Utsler and Ben Trott for bug reports. Download Waxy Backlinks v0.05 now! (Installation and configuration details inside.)

Continue reading “Waxy Backlinks v0.05” →

Question: Why does Amazon.com have a dog named Rufus on their 404 error page? Travis Smith, editor of Variety.com and generally nice guy, found out the short history of Rufus, the Amazon dog.

It took a while, but my Metafilter Statistics page has finally been updated again, after resting peacefully since last November. Regardless of how you feel about Metafilter, these charts give you a three-year glimpse into the changing trends of a popular online community. It looks like traffic has finally seemed to level off a bit, after a period of long growth. (It’s also a convenient way to spot cult threads.) I posted a thread about it on Metatalk, the forum for discussing all things Metafilter.

Continue reading “Metafilter Stats Databased” →

I’m probably going to regret this, but I found the full video clip of Katie Couric battling conservative psycho-pundit Ann Coulter on the Today Show. It’s been in the entertainment press recently, dubbed the Couric/Coulter Catfight. Needless to say, it’s uncomfortable and strangely compelling. Download the 8 MB Windows Media video, or the rushed transcript from Drudge. (If anyone can mirror this video, post the link in the comments. Thanks to Moatmai for the clip.)

After expiring last September, Baio.net was finally released back into the wild yesterday and I snapped it up! I’d been patiently waiting for months, so it’s a relief that nobody else registered it (like the Scott Baio fan club.)

Now, I can give out vanity e-mail addresses to my dad’s side of the family, if they ever got around to getting computers. Also, I was thinking of setting up a family weblog a la Utsler.net. Any Baios (Baioes? Baioii?) around the world who want a free e-mail address, give me a buzz.

Gene Kan, founder of InfraSearch/Gonesilent.com and Gnutella’s most vocal spokesman/developer, passed away on June 29, at age 25. I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere, except for a single post by Wired reporter Brad King on the Pho music list. Brad informed us that Gene was found dead in his apartment around June 27-29. There was a note found alongside his body, but no additional details are currently available. I expect this will soon be picked up by Slashdot, Wired, and the usual suspects.

I had the privilege of working with the XCF folks, but never managed to meet Gene. Here’s his musings on open services from last September, an audio interview on NPR, some haiku from his personal homepage, and his resume. Also, you should read Joey DeVilla’s Letter to Gene Kan.

Continue reading “Gene Kan, Dead at 25” →

Back in the day, I used to tell my little sister about new music. Now she not only hears about new artists before I do, but she becomes friends with them. (See: photos with Momus, Mirah and Khaela, Phil Elvrum from the Microphones.)

So, at her recommendation, we went to a party in Pasadena last night at some-guy-named-Dave’s house. In the muggy living room, local band Katie the Pest and Katy Robinson from the San Francisco-based Dear Nora entertained 20 or so musigeeks with acoustic tales of hope, heartbreak and baby kittens. Best show I’ve seen in ages. (Thanks, sis.)

NetControl, some sort of old Greek magazine, cached thousands of random homepages between 1994 and 1997 and never took them offline. The result is a strange surfing experience, like randomly browsing the Wayback Archive for homepages.

If you like, you can skip their obfuscated navigation entirely and go straight to lists of the cached homepages (1, 2, 3, 4).

Like the Wayback Archive, it’s a great way to see old and ugly versions of popular sites. It’s also a great reminder of dead design trends, like “adjust your browser” notices, full-color backgrounds, rendered animations, giant imagemaps and splash screens, pages enhanced for Netscape Navigator 2.0 or optimized for 640×480.

Also, a CNNfn capture from July 1996, with the Dow up and Nasdaq at just over 1000. And graduate student Philip Greenspun and First Lady Hillary Clinton.

I went through and pulled out some of the best, so you won’t have to.

Continue reading “NetControl Archive” →

I updated my Dictionary Domain page, a list of all available com/org/net domains that are words in the English dictionary. As domain squatters slowly shrivel up and die, these domains are finally getting released back into the wild. The good .com domains are still scarce, but there’s plenty of great .org and .nets available. Some of my favorites from this round are below. (turd.org!)

Continue reading “Dictionary Domains” →

Courtesy of Matt Haughey, the best bootleg remix I’ve ever heard: Eminem goes ragtime (2.6 MB MP3).

Continue reading “The Eminem Rag” →

Congratulations to my good friend, Crazy Uncle Joe Utsler, for successfully impregnating his wife. Nice work, stud!

There are several outlets for extremely obsessive fans to vent their creativity, including fan fiction, fan art, and slash. Or you can follow the lead of these fans of the Dark Shadows series, and start re-enacting roles and episodes online in real-time chat.

Meeting regularly in an AOL chat room, they pick an episode or a setting, take on the roles of the show’s characters, and improv the dialogue. If that’s too mainstream for you, try combining two TV universes… Like, say, Dark Shadows meets Scooby Doo, Where Are You?

Continue reading “Dark Shadows Online Role-Playing” →

Unethical idea of the day: Write a web crawler that grabs the list of recently updated MovableType or Blogger weblogs, and posts a spam comment to every weblog entry. Sound too far-fetched? Maybe not; a porn site recently spammed Andrew Burke’s weblog. I’m sure it won’t be long before someone automates the process and ruins online community forever. (Or at least until someone writes a SpamAssassin plugin for weblogs.)

Set your TiVos: HBO, Monday morning, 4:20am. Leprechaun in the Hood (2000, Horror). An evil leprechaun and a powerful producer pursue three rap artists who stole a magic flute. Features Ice-T, Coolio, and Ensign Travis Mayweather. Not to mention, Willow Ufgood rapping a song entitled “Lep in the Hood” over the end credits (sound clip).

Continue reading “Leprechaun in the Hood” →

If things have been quiet around here lately, it’s because all my free time has gone to the Gettingit.com redesign. This is the perfect exercise in pointlessness: redesigning a defunct, three-year-old webzine that hasn’t published an article since 2000.

Well, not entirely pointless. Webpower, the company that funded Gettingit, finally killed the old story database a couple weeks ago, leaving the entire archive offline. I’d foreseen that inevitability a while back, and whipped up a Perl script to crawl the old site and save the stories locally. I’m glad I did.

Take a look and let me know what you think. Built in a couple weeks with no budget and PHP/MySQL/Apache by my side, I’m proud of it. I did everything except for the monkey logos, which were provided by the extremely talented Goopy.

Continue reading “Gettingit Redesign” →

Only two more weeks until California Extreme, the world’s largest classic arcade game convention! For one weekend every September, the San Jose Convention Center is transformed into 18,000 square feet of pure classic arcade and pinball goodness (big panoramic photo). The games are all on free play, the hall is dimly-lit, and the air is thick with nostalgia.

Last year, the show took place less a week after September 11, so the turnout was smaller than expected, but still bigger and better than the previous year. (See the full list of games from 2001.) This year should be the best yet.

The only problem is that I’m forced to choose between California Extreme on September 7/8 and Fray Day 6 the week after. (Not enough vacation days left to see both, sadly.)

Just launched in the UK, Shazam is a search engine that plays “Name That Tune.” Cell phone owners dial a number and play a 15-second song clip (presumably from the radio or a club) into the phone’s receiver. After comparing a hash of the clip against their database of 1.2 million songs, Shazam returns their best guess via SMS text message.

The audio recognition algorithm was developed by chief scientist and co-founder Avery Wang. His 1994 thesis on sound separation is available for download, which provides some clues into how they may be extracting music from voice and other background noise. (More information about the service from the BBC, The Guardian, and Red Herring.)

How long before someone (Google, maybe) creates a web-based version that allows you to upload sound clips for identification? And contribute properly-tagged MP3s from your own collection? A truly comprehensive database of music would help people like Alan Taylor and all these other poor souls.

The official Steve Martin website has a very active web-based message board where fans of Steve can talk about everything from The Jerk to Novocaine. Poke around for a while, and you’ll undoubtedly run into “Chocolate Lover”: the alias of Texas-based painter Lynn O’Neill.

Most of Chocolate Lover’s 1200+ posts are about her innocent crush on Steve Martin and her love of his work, but her recent posts are far more personal.

On August 20, she writes about a thank-you card she received from Steve. On August 22, she said her greatest fears are “being mistaken for a lunatic,” “annoying the people I care about,” and “failing.”

On August 27, the tone of her posts changed, appealing to Steve Martin directly (although he doesn’t appear to ever read or post). She starts posting very personal information, followed by painful and desperate pleas. “I don’t know why you’ve turned on me.” “I am not a liar.” “I have NEVER been hurt so badly.” “Steve I am for real. Why are you doing this? … I feel like I am dying.”

Her last two messages are the worst. This thread gets continually worse, as she posts several times throughout the night, begging Steve to call her. At around 1am Dallas time, she posts a final goodbye… “I hope Steve doesn’t change his PO Box out of fear of me, I really am harmless, just a little weird. I’m going to the doctor because I don’t want to feel anything for a while, but I will not return after that.” She hasn’t posted anything since.

Continue reading “Steve Martin Fans” →