Ready, Aye, Ready

Link: http://www.eblong.com/zarf/lolgrues/

Following on from the Infocom post (and indeed the earlier LOLwhatevers one), I give you LOLgrues. You can now die happy (in the pitch black.)

The "Pure Moods" series from Virgin is a real mishmash of styles and artists. Comprised of the like-named "Pure Moods" (one through four) and "Pure Moods: Celestial Celebration", the albums are linked by a feeling -- a "mood" I suppose -- but it feels more like a compilation someone threw together because he liked the individual songs.

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Link: http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/25/electric-motion-systems-e-electric-bike-3-495-for-two-wheels/

Yeah, not that I can afford a $3500 electric bicycle but the geek-lust is there all the same.

Link: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2006/5/5bryan.html

McSweeney's with another fine piece of fiction.

(Via Kottke)

Link: http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize/index.php

On Windows boxes, there's a program called TreeSize that is an excellent tree-based representation of disk usage. When I migrated to OSX I looked for an equivalent. I'm glad to say I've found it: WhatSize. Looks good, works well. It's shareware but not of the ridiculously expensive kind at $12.99.

Take a look.

Link: http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200805/so_that_happened.html

This word initially appeared -- as far as I can tell -- in a comment on a blog posting about the effect of being Digged (dugged?) and Slashdotted and having one's website brought down under the awesome load of a fully armed and operational battlenet.

There are no Google hits on either "successtrophe" or "succestrophe" as of the writing of this note so I guess mubay gets credit for this one.

(Via Dr. V)

Link: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/04/tulsa-june-28-and-suchlike.html

This one's courtesy of Neil Gaiman's blog, er, Journal:

Obviously I'm still English. If I'd become American I would have stopped drinking coffee.

Ouch.

Link: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/22/msn-music-customers.html

Microsoft's shutting down their DRM validation servers for their retired MSN Music store, and thus rendering all music purchased through it unusable should the registered machine associated with the DRM license ever be altered or replaced. This reminded me that I actually had some DRM-contaminated music lying around that I'd never burned to CD.

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Link: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/calgary/story/2008/05/05/cgy-cleanup.html?ref=rss

More than 1,600 volunteers scoured the banks of the Bow and Elbow Rivers and Nose Creek for litter on Sunday, collecting roughly 7,000 kilograms of trash.

The three-hour pickup, covering roughly 160 kilometres, was part of the 41st annual Calgary Pathway and River Cleanup.

Event organizer Kevin Forster, with the City of Calgary Parks Department, told CBC News that volunteers collected more than 3,400 bags of garbage, not counting oversized litter such as tires, wheel rims and shopping carts.

Wow. That's a lot of litter. Definitely the volunteers who did the cleaning up deserve a round of applause.

Link: http://gizmodo.com/387597/legal-snafu-makes-thousands-of-patent-rulings-since-2000-invalid

Apparently the judges that make decisions for the patent office in the US were not properly installed rendering their rulings invalid.

For *thousands* of patents.

I'm definitely interested in seeing how this one pans out.

Generic email forwards invariably annoy me. This recent one about the "death of Common Sense" was particularly nauseating. I had a bit of a problem with this reactionary screed and needed a new blog post, so hello there, fodder.

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense,
who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was
since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape.

Oooh. Strawman alert! When you start a rant with an ad hominem, you can tell it's only going to get better.

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Link: https://64.22.124.245/viewfrag?id=6047

I'll have to concur with Stephen on this one: backscatter spam (wherein the source is forged (legitimate domain name plus random collection of user names) is incredibly annoying. For a while I had my domain set to put all email that had no real mailbox home into one account for verification; recently I went away for a weekend and came back to 11,000 bounced spam messages. That's eleven thousand replies from other mail servers refusing delivery of spam because it's spam or because the user it was being sent to doesn't exist. Just think how many others are correctly configured not to send out the acknowledgments on spam receipt and the sheer mass of emailed crap jumps out at you.

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Link: http://www.herringtoncatalog.com/t479.html

I like this idea: a screwdriver with a built-in light.

(Via Gizmodo)

I recently picked up the "Essentials" collection for Bruce Springsteen, mostly as it had some tracks ("Blinded By The Light", "For You", "Spirit In The Night") that I'd only previously heard as cover versions done by Manfred Mann's Earth Band.

Perhaps it's the curse of having heard the others prior to the originals but, um, wow, Springsteen's versions are almost unlistenable.

Link: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/story/2008/05/02/qc-chipshockey0502.html?ref=rss

Those spoilsport dentists... Foo.