Posts from March 2010

• Looking for free WiFi access? There is, of course, an app for that.
• Great idea: Are You An Asshole? (.com)
• I really need to get my tickets for the 10th Annual Kickspit Underground Rock Festival!
• You’ve seen the Periodic Table of Candy and the Periodic Table of Booze, of course. There are lots of periodic tables of things on the ‘net. That’s why someone made a Periodic Table of Periodic Tables.
• It’s Literally, A Web Log: An English language grammar blog tracking abuse of the word “literally”.
• The big, unspoken problem with immortality is that eventually we’ll run out of room on the planet for any species that doesn’t die. Luckily (?) for us, there’s lots of room in the world’s oceans, because scientists have recently discovered a jellyfish that lives forever. I, for one, welcome our new jellyfish overlords.

• That’s What Bea Said!
• Avoid customer service prompts and long hold times with GetHuman.com. (And, of course, there’s an iPhone app for that.)
• The graphic Jish found depicting a Visual Explanation of Family Relationships is the first I’ve ever seen that made sense.
• If you live here, you already know this: Los Angeles is a lonely city.
• “If you believe what you read in scientific literature, you shouldn’t believe what you read in the scientific literature.” This is (probably) why everything you think we know might be wrong.
• Behold! The Periodic Table of Science Fiction!
• Chris Coyier explains the genius of asking for the hard part first.

And if you care about football and the NFL Draft at all, ignore what all the pundits are predicting and make sure to read what Cold, Hard, Football Facts says in A Tale of Six Quarterbacks:

Tebow not only passed the ball far more effectively than any of these No. 1 overall picks (Peyton Manning, Tim Couch, Eli Manning, JaMarcus Russell, and Matt Stafford). It pays to remember that, in his spare time, he set the SEC career record for rushing touchdowns. Oh, and he won a Heisman Trophy and two National Titles. Other than that, he didn’t do much.
But Tebow didn’t just put up big stats … he put up supremely efficient stats. He was more accurate, and produced more big passing plays, and was more likely to put the ball in the end zone, and more likely to keep it out of the hands of opposing defenders, than any of the recent collection of No. 1 passing phenoms to come out of the SEC.

• What kind of drug are you?
• If you have an iPhone and a guitar, you simply must get the Gibson Learn & Master Guitar app.
• James Dean was seriously one badass dude.
• The Japanese apparently have a game show for every conceivable challenge. I never realized that the old “yank a tablecloth” trick was something you could turn into a competition.
• “The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled that once emails have been received by a third party, no Fourth Amendment protection applies to any copies.” Maybe this will be the first step in getting people to stop adding those absolutely ridiculous and pointless signatures to their messages.
• Let’s just say that — for whatever reason — you’re the first human ever to make contact with an alien civilization. Are you prepared to handle it? Make sure to read this handy tip sheet so you won’t make us look like idiots.
• Tons of terrific tales can be found at the Illinois Poison Control Center blog. There’s the story of the woman who accidentally grabbed toothpaste instead of lube when having sex; and don’t miss the episode about the boy who super-glued his fingers into his nose!

There’s an excellent Kia Sorento commercial right now featuring a sock monkey and a monster (and some other kid toys). They go bowling and the sock monkey gets a tattoo. The best part, though, is the song. It’s How You Like Me Now, by The Heavy. You can find it on the album The House That Dirt Built on iTunes.

Sidebar: I just noticed that the latest version of iTunes now lets you easily post a song or app to Twitter or Facebook. (Savvy guys, those Apple engineers.) But here’s something extraordinarily odd: The URL that iTunes provides for the link is absurdly long. The one for the song mentioned above is http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the-house-that-dirt-built/id328490302, which is seventy characters. Twitter only allows 140 characters! Why in the world isn’t Apple running their own URL-shortening service?

• Hugh Hefner: Teen Cartoonist
• Have you ever ordered any of these secret restaurant menu items?
• Congratulations to the Gators, who won their first NCAA Indoor Track Championship this weekend. (It’s nice when the football team has a running back who spends the offseason being one of the fastest sprinters in the nation.)
• A solar-powered iPhone charger is a pretty cool idea.
• Almost everyone I know uses a computer on a daily basis. Almost nobody I know understands the differences between files, applications, and websites. That’s why Apple is doing the smart thing by hiding all of that.
• “Bad programming is easy. Idiots can learn it in 21 days, even if they are dummies.”
• The best way to learn about database design is to design databases. It sounds simple. It gets more complicated when you try to design a database to manage gay marriage.
• There are quite a few pearls of wisdom in the 2009 annual letter to shareholders from Warren Buffett.
• Somebody needs to buy me these boots. They are awesome. Size 11, please.
• This was a sort of depressing headline to see in my feed reader: Once-revered South Carolina lawmaker freezes to death alone.
• “Faced with a flood of headlines on an ever-increasing variety of topics, we shut off. We turn to news that doesn’t require much understanding — crime, traffic, weather — or we turn off the news altogether.”
• I’ve been looking for a way to run three displays from my MacBook Pro for over a year now and not found any that weren’t ridiculously expensive. And then I came across this guy running four displays!
• Geek out with this awesome CSS3 Generator.