Here’s one of my favourite titles for an academic paper: Webster, P. J. et al., 1998: Monsoons: Processes, predictability, and the prospects for prediction. J. Geophys. Res., 103, 14451–14510. Isn’t that awesome?! I think so. 🙂
I’ve also noticed that papers published in Nature or Science often have sensational, not-so-boring titles. I’ll keep my eyes open for more.
Here’s a horrible account of two paramedics trapped in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and what they did to survive. Their greatest enemy ended up being the police who lied to them, stole their water and food, and fired their guns at them. Their summary:
Throughout, the official relief effort was callous, inept, and racist. There was more suffering than need be. Lives were lost that did not need to be lost.
[via]
Streaming sucks, at least when it’s your only option. I mean, who wants to be tied to a wire when you could otherwise be walking around with the MP3 in your pocket? But sometimes you want to listen to an MP3 right away, without having to wait for the download to finish first. Well, in Winamp or xmms, you can just open the URL of the MP3 and it’ll play as it downloads. Hence, you’re streaming it. But I don’t recommend this method—it doesn’t give you enough control, like having the MP3 on your hard disk once you’re done.
Rather, in Linux, start the download with wget and then open the partially-downloaded file in xmms. You can play it as normal, as long as the downloading stays ahead of the listening. This works because Linux allows you to read a file as it’s being written. It does the Right Thing (TM). If you need to skip around in the file as it’s playing, you might have to quit and restart xmms, though.
From OSNews.com we get this cool announcement about Linux in Asia:
Japan’s Miracle Linux Corp., China’s Red Flag Software Co. and Haansoft Inc. of South Korea are teaming up to release Asianux 2.0, a Linux distribution meant to compete with Microsoft Windows in their home regions.
That’s cool!
Lance Anderson’s recent Verge of the Fringe stories are brewing with the brilliant series entitled “The Pakistan Files”. Download the mp3s and hear Lance tell the tale of “The Twin Towers, The FBI and Goofballs” that suddenly showed up in his life, and just as suddenly, disappeared. If it happened to him, maybe it could happen to any one of us…
It was fashionable in my day for parents to ask, “If a friend told you to jump off a cliff, would you?” Well, it turns out, I would.
During my recent trip to Canada, I reconnected with my childhood friend Scott Crabbe, whom I hadn’t seen since about 1988. In fact, I found him on a poetry site via a Google search. Surprised to find that his two-year-old email address still worked, I got a reply back from him in the form of a poem, no less, which referred to things we did as kids.
THE NUMBER’S ON THE WALL TONIGHT
KXL!!! –
and the smell of back alley tree lots
the sound of the pop
when you lost the plot
and bounced the bottle
off the head of the littlest Hawk
in the daze of our youth
we were the sleuth
the criminals reared
not necessarily feared
and most likely (at times) smeared
our names
upon the walls
surrounding urinal stalls.Yeah,
it’s been a long day
at 1:30 in the A. (I’) M.
fine
tired
wired
from cigarettes and beer
but it’s all here
three screens
two guitars
a husky
a hussy writing letter’s to her fantasy out easta beast of a belly
swelly
from a meal of
chicken veal
spag bog bluAnd this moment was for you.
Not having much time during my stay in Canada, I took 24 hours out of my schedule to drive to Jasper for a visit. Currently, Scott is the manager of the Jasper International Hostel. How convenient. And how cool! We hung out for the night, ate an awesome breakfast wrap in the morning, swapped stories, and basically had a great time catching up. I brought a cassette tape of a “radio show” that we had recorded when we were about 8. A good laugh, and I was impressed at the sharpness of Scott’s memory. He showed me a postcard I had drawn for him in art class from about the same time. Good times.
Before I had to go that afternoon, we went for a short hike, and then Scott took me to Horseshoe Lake to get “baptized” Canadian style. It was a 10-m drop into a crystal-clear, bottomless lake. And so cold I stopped breathing. Awesome! Here’s Scott’s performance:
![[Scott cliff jumping at Horseshoe Lake, Jasper Alberta]](/darren105/cliff_jumping_collage.jpg)
Thanks for the great time, Scott. It was awesome!
Right before I discovered or understood podcasting, I came across this November 23, 2004 Engadget article entitled How-To: BroadCatching using RSS + BitTorrent to automatically download TV shows. Essentially, the article explains how one could use the RSS feeds from BitTorrent TV sites to automatically receive TV shows of one’s choosing as they become available for download. At the time, it thought the idea was brilliant.
The word “podcast” isn’t mentioned in the article, but it does appear in the comments. I was probably only a few days away from understanding the whole RSS / Enclosure miracle of podcasting. The first podcast I ever listened to was the November 11, 2004 episode of Evil Genius Chronicles. But I don’t think I understood what it was until a few episodes later.
Since that time, I haven’t ever made use of RSS for catching TV shows, but I have become an active podcatcher of audio content. And Evil Genius Chronicles is still my top show.
In an article entitled The Limitations of Googling, Paul Dunne beautifully illustrates just how much misinformation can be found in a web search. Definitely worth a look and some consideration.
Here’s an amateur film that shows the fun you can have with a multi-track recorder. It’s absolutely creative and delightful, both the subject of the film and the film itself. An in-depth review of the film (as a film) can be found here. The link to the download page of the film follows. All I can say is “Wow!”.
Justin Chapweske has created a Large File Support Hall of Shame on his weblog. Basically, he lists mainstream software that cannot handle files larger than 2 GB (or in some cases 4 GB). I was surprised to find the Apache web server at the top of the list, considering that it is the Internet’s most popular web-serving software. It will be interesting to see how this page evolves as instances of this problem are discovered and/or fixed.