ProcrastiBlog

I now have a man-crush on Ted Turner. (I'm going to have to get in line behind Charlie Rose.) Charlie tries and tries, but Ted Turner has no truck with interrupters.

My favorite part is where they debate whether he should invite Rupert Murdoch to his birthday party. I'm not kidding! It's starts around 19:00. At 12:45, he sings an entire verse and chorus of "My Old Kentucky Home"! And Charlie just sits there with dewy eyes, like a bleach-blonde skank being serenaded by Bret Michaels!

UPDATE: The embed seems to have died, but the video is still at the Charlie Rose website.

Here's a video of me talking about Flashdance—a movie I had never seen before and plan to never see again—with my old friend Jonathan Betzler.

You know, I don't think I've seen myself on video in ten years or more (I like to remember things my own way. Not necessarily the way they happened) and I find this... surprisingly un-excruciating. Maybe it's a trick of the light.

Jonathan is threatening to do 23 more of these through the end of the year. (Last week was The Right Stuff. The rest will be posted here.)

Annie G. was voted only the second cutest dog in Baltimore, coming in behind a frankly not-that-cute mutt that had the good sense to yawn for the camera. People, you're making me look like an asshole. How am I supposed to bring home the bacon if I can't deliver votes?

This is awesome. As H says, there's nobody better than Martin Scorsese:

I'm obviously not going to shoot them as I would, but... can I shoot them as Hitchcock? I don't think so! So, who will I shoot them as? This is the question. This is the question and this is the process.

This is my friend Mike's dog Annie. Annie is the kind of dog that will jump up onto the couch and lay her head in your lap and look up at you with just exactly this look in her eyes. In short: she's cute. But is she the Cutest Dog in Baltimore? I'd say so, but it's not up to me. It's up to you: the people of, um, Baltimore. Vote early and vote often.

This is pretty much exactly how it went down when I upgraded to Gutsy.



Consider this a standing endorsement of xkcd.

Noted without comment: as of now, this blog is the #5 result (of "about 1,040") for the Google search "irresponsible assface".

Hey, look, official Funniest Man Alive John Hodgman has a blog:

I actually admire the sheer, misanthropic brio of those Lockhorns. After all, it can't be easy to distill all the drunken, marital loathing of WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? and pour it all into a single, hate-filled funny pages panel day after day after day.

Wow, that was my longest blogging gap in the post-India era. And it's going to get longer, unfortunately. I've been really busy with pretending to be a graduate student, plus my mother is having brain surgery (feel free to do whatever you think may help in this Godless, wicked world... perhaps you could envision a healing light), plus I'll be gone for a few weeks touring the Continent. I promise all my slobbering fans I'll be back in September with outraged liberal me-too-ism, boring posts about OCaml, and Top Chef finale-blogging*. A più tarde, i miei amici...

* I would've put Tre at 3-to-1 to win the whole thing. The smart money is now on a Hung/CJ final. (Casey would be a contender if she could chop an onion.)

The last few posts have been delayed because Blogger thinks I may not be a real human being, but rather a sophisticated spambot sent back from the future to corrupt everybody's .emacs file.

Is there a way to give feedback when Google Maps gives you a bum steer? This morning, I was driving from Westfield to Murray Hill in New Jersey and Google Maps advised me to turn North on Union Ave in Scotch Plains and cross Route 22 (here). The only problem is that there's a concrete divider on Route 22 at Union Ave (which is clearly visible here) and it's not possible to cross there. I had to go a few miles East on 22 to Glenside Ave. Luckily, I knew where I was at that point; if not, I would have been screwed.

Now, I'm the kind of good citizen who fixes grammar on Wikipedia and blogs about bugs in GCC. I'd like to tell Google about their terrible mistake and give them a chance to make it up to me. But I can't find any email address or web form that seems appropriate.

It may be the case that they don't want feedback. After all, why should they trust me on this? Oh, well.

Oddly enough, Ubuntu has a web page about the names. Apparently, it just didn't occur to them to go in alphabetical order until after breezy. But why did they skip C?

I think Adjective Animal would be a great name for their 27th release.

Quote of the Day: "Twentieth century? Why, I could pick a century out of a hat, blindfolded, and come up with a better one." -Oliver Larrabee, Sabrina (1954) (not the compromised second draft)

The security guard in my building, who let's me walk by with a nod 9 times out of 10, chooses today, when I've got a bag and an umbrella and a hot cup of coffee, to ask for ID? Really?

I never know where I stand with these people. Am I supposed to do chit chat? I hate chit chat.

Not good treadmill music.

Mr. Kellner (who else?) wins the prize, which is no prize. Bonus points if you know where it came from. BTW, my browser doesn't even render this script properly. Something to do with the right-to-left text.

Blogger snuck a Hindi transliteration feature into the post composer. Why? I don't know. Does it work? Beats me. What does it say above? Does it make any sense?

This documentary is now at the top of my Netflix queue. I suspect---just this once---Hilleary won't mind.



The quick summary: man is attacked by bear, man spends years building anti-bear armor, man seeks out Grizzly for a re-match, and then... ? I'll just have to wait and find out!

(Via Dave-of-the-Long-Box)

Yahoo Pipes is pretty cool, though not, I suspect, as easy-to-use as advertised. The idea is that you can take RSS feeds and other "Web 2.0" content, process them in non-trivial ways, and end up with your own filtered, re-mixed, or mashed-up data stream. Things like: personalized Ebay price watches or Flickr photos inspired by New York Times headlines.

I've concocted my own, decidedly less ambitious Pipes: Overheard in New York w/o the Wednesday One-Liners (there's too many!) and Tapped blog posts by Mark Schmitt or Ezra Klein (all those other earnest liberals get boring). Here's another one, just for kicks: Grace's posts on design*sponge and BizBox in one feed.

If anybody can figure out how to make a Pipe that attaches headlines to headline-less RSS feeds, that would be sweet.

P.S.: I should probably give a "via" credit to TWiT---as if they need it---since I was inspired by their idle yapping to check this out.

If you set Firefox to block pop-ups, you get this message when a page requests a pop-up:

This is accompanied by a Preferences button with the following options:

Why only "allow pop-ups for this site"? Why not "allow this one pop-up that I'm pretty sure I want to see, but protect me from future nefarious pop-ups"?

This properly belongs in Bugzilla, but I'm sure the developers would tell me I'm stupid and ignore me. See, e.g., this bug that I voted for, like, two years ago.

UPDATE: As I suspected, Bugzilla has entries for why this isn't really a bug and why you don't want what you think you want.