Spotted in Borders earlier this evening: Milton Bradley 1000 piece Barack Obama jigsaw puzzle.
Being age 12+ I am tempted to blow most of my $30 gift card on this gem.
March, 2009
21
Mar 09
Yes We Can (solve this jigsaw puzzle)
21
Mar 09
AIG internal memo on pitchfork avoidance
If you’re on Twitter you might have seen the #pitchforks thread blow up with the news of the AIG bonuses.
Consumerist.com got its hands on an internal memo circulating around AIG on how to avoid the backlash from torch-wielding mobs that might try to get some vengeance.
20
Mar 09
The greatest moment in the history of broadcast television (except for maybe the fake moon landing)
I like to claim the title of “Amateur Expert” in almost every area, but if there’s one thing I know, it is television. The clip is below.
I think I’ve watched enough television to be able to spot it’s high water mark, and I would have to say it’s this performance by Alec Baldwin and Tracy Morgan on NBC’s 30 Rock.
The show has the illuminated premise of a situational comedy about itself. It’s adequately answers the question, “What would reality tv look like if it were created by Lewis Carroll?” It’s a mockumentary about what goes on behind the scenes at the network’s television headquarters. And that’s just for starters.
It’s got Alec Baldwin, who, after a long stint in feature films, has exploited his TVQ and returned to his roots in television acting. There’s a phenomenal team of writers powering the teleplay, Tina Fey, Tracey Morgan, and a fantastic supporting cast.
Anyway, enjoy.
20
Mar 09
Offensive signage for laundry in West L.A.
Whew, it was tough wording that post title – took me right back to Mrs. Passaglia’s AP English class. “What’s ‘offensive’ in this sentence? The signage or the laundry?”
I found this weird sign while I was jogging earlier today. I’ve heard the term before, but I wonder when language like “Chinese Laundry” became inappropriate. I hate to ask, but I don’t know what it means.
This sign is on the back of a laundromat on the northwest side of Cheviot Hills.
19
Mar 09
Upside down Amigo
This Isuzu Amigo must have hit the curb on its way onto the I-10 eastbound from Overland Avenue in Palms.
I got video of the tow truck righting the overturned vehicle. The car gets flipped about thirty seconds in.
17
Mar 09
HOWTO: Send Twitter updates to your Facebook wall
In this modern day of mashable web services, we sometimes get caught up in what the latest app or web service is enabling us do. All for the simple price of our e-mail address.
Sometimes we just want to do something simple, like have our Twitter updates go to our Facebook wall – rather than using the Twitter Facebook app to pull our Facebook status updates from our Twitter posts.
In such a case, one could easily overengineer the problem. Fortunately, enough functionality is exposed by the two websites to allow us to do this with just the slightest effort.
The first thing you are going to need is the RSS feed for your Twitter updates. You can find it at the bottom of the right toolbar on your public Twitter page. It will look something like this:
You want to get the target for the URL. For most people, that will mean right-clicking on the link and selecting, “Copy Link Location,” or something like that. For instance, the URL for the RSS feed for the updates to the QuantumTom user account is http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/14244238.rss. If you click on that link your reader is going to try to subscribe to that feed. Hang on to this URL for a second (copy it to your clipboard maybe?).
Go sign in to Facebook then navigate to your Profile tab. Click on the “Settings” link as is shown in the bottom right corner of the following screenshot:
This should open up the “Stories Posted By You” settings starting with the “Imported Stories” section.
In there you should see a bunch of links that automatically import activity from other sites. One of these is for generic “Blog/RSS” activity. Click on that one to open up a text field. Paste the Twitter RSS URL in that field, click the “Import” button and you should be good to go.
16
Mar 09
Bike versus Volvo
This morning I came upon the aftermath of what looked to have been a fairly nasty traffic collision at the intersection of Colorado Avenue and Princeton Street in Santa Monica.
I can’t tell much about what happened. If I had to guess, I’d say the motorcycle struck the Volvo. I’d bet the Volvo was trying to turn left onto Colorado from Princeton and didn’t see the bike. The motorcyclist probably didn’t expect the Volvo to pull out in front of it. The bike must have been going pretty fast when it struck the car as there was a great deal of debris in the street.
16
Mar 09
T-shirt is FAIL (nerd alert)
I’m sorry, but the statement on this shirt is misleading and totally incorrect. I wish it were cooler, because it has so much potential, but whoever made it doesn’t know the first thing about how a base-2 numbering system works. They obviously just asked a CS major in their dorm what “2″ is in binary. What they fail to grasp is that 2 to people is actually three to computers.
The shirt says, “There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.” The statement implies that everyone falls into one of two categories. What’s misleading is that if you wanted to write an Arabic two in binary it is in fact 10.
I know it’s confusing. Let’s consider an example where you have a computer over for dinner. You and the computer enjoy a wonderful meal and for dessert you plan to have ice cream. If you tell the computer that the number of ice cream flavors in the freezer is “2″ it’s going to think there are actually three different kinds.
Now, the computer’s not trying to be difficult. There’s actually a good reason for this. When a computer needs to count a series of something it starts at zero, not at one like all of us sensible human beings do. If you wanted to tell the computer in binary that there are three flavors of ice cream you would need to tell it there are 1 (sic) flavors.
That being said, if you starting counting at one, as all sensible people would, decimal 2 would be 1 in binary. It really doesn’t work as a joke, even when you consider that “computer” number series start at zero, unless you state otherwise. Zero is always zero whether it’s in binary, decimal, octal, hexadecimal, or some other really weird numbering system. And one is one. But what value you have assigned to those symbols is what really matters. I won’t even tell you what sixteen is in hexadecimal.
The moral of this is don’t buy this shirt if you want intelligent people to think you are a computer nerd. Should you encounter anyone with half a brain while wearing this shirt you will only wind up looking like a fool for being unable to explain why 10 is actually two in binary and why that two doesn’t mean three.
Oh, and sixteen in hexadecimal is F. Just the letter F. F is for Fail.
Kyle Hayes