mcgees.org

Neighborhoodies.com. Custom-lettered clothing, no minimum order, lots of choices in clothing styles, real designers designing every piece. T-shirts are about $20. Looks wonderful. Anybody have experience with the company?

(Coupon code “BLOGGER” for 10% off, according the the ad on MeFi.)

Some years back, someone was offering a neat service. If you had a high-traffic file on your website, you could create a link through this service — say, http://www.foo.com/mirror?url=http://www.mcgees.org/some.file. The first five (or whatever) times that someone tried to download it, foo.com passed the request on to mcgees.org. But on the sixth or subsequent times, foo.com would make a copy of the file and they would serve it for you. Anyone remember who offered this service, and anyone know whether it’s still offered? Maybe it had something to do with archive.org?

Anybody know a way to report a bug to Yahoo! Mail?

<campvoice> It’s all just soooo reassuring! </campvoice>

Google begins to digitize paper books.  Amazing potential.

Cartograms give more realistic election data than geographic maps, and most states are purple anyway (this is really good — if you follow only one link on this page, make this it.)  More on cartograms, and one of the world that will lead you to the conclusion that, as a first-order approximation, the whole world is Asia.

Daily cash withdrawal limits from your PayPal debit card are either $300 or $400, depending on your service level. You can see your limit by going to your “Account Overview” page and selecting “View Limits”. Remember this, because when I forgot and tried to withdraw $500, I ended up locked out of my account (presumably for the rest of the day, although I won’t know that for sure until tomorrow.)

Why was I trying to withdraw $500? To deposit into my checking account. I know it costs $1, rather than being free (as a bank transfer is), but I hate having my funds in limbo for four days, absent from my PayPal account but not yet in my bank account.

I made a $60 eBay error. I listed an item as “immediate payment required when Buy It Now is used,” not realizing that that forces the item to be “ship to U.S. only.” Be warned of this.

Jordon from The World of Stuff is craving links, so here is an (unrequested) link back to him.  He always has nice things to say about mcgees.org, so it’s really the least I could do.  Best of luck, Jordon.

“A tiny bottle of Scope is a lousy substitute for a real vagina, especially when you are traveling.” (safe for work)

This guy takes requests for songs to write and record. The preceding bit consisted of excerpts from a song that is the opposite of a diss track. He also undertakes severely constrained writing assignments, such as writing a Christmas song about falling down the stairs using only words beginning with B, E, M, P, and S: “Similarly my back’s sore probably pained ever since sliding so effervescently past seventy stairs … So everybody better buy me some super excellent presents.” But that’s not quite as cool as the constraints on False Impersonation — read the Songs To Wear Pants To page for details.

Great print quality on any paper, even sandpaper (up to 300 grit) … Quick printing at up to 9 pages per millisecond in black and 7 pages per hour in color

“Never ascribe to seething hatred that which can be adequately explained by simple contempt.”

Sometimes e-lynchings in the blue are fun to watch. Really, go grab a beer. I feel no obligation to be tolerant of 111’s bigotry, any more than I feel a need to be tolerant of Nazi propaganda. Matt makes an interesting point that precisely because the post is so absurd, it does not need to be deleted.  I disagree.  Hate speech is not timecube, and while I’d support 111’s right to march on public thoroughfares, I can find no justification for allowing it on a moderated site.

Overstock.com’s prices on books are amazing!  They undercut Amazon on every item I wanted to buy.  I thought that there would be no way they could undercut $10.50 for Eats, Shoots & Leaves (that’s 40% off list), but Overstock just wants $7.87 for it (55% off list).  Unbelievable.

A few unconnected notes:

1. Blogger has been redesigned.  Check it out.  You’ll like the round corners.
2. I got a modified CueCat barcode reader in the mail. Very cool, but I wish it would read in book UPC codes as ISBNs rather than UPCs.
3. I forgot how exciting it was to have auctions running on eBay.
4. The last post, my “feeling better” one, was the 500th mcgees.org post.

Not too weird to be quoted in a scotch whisky forum.
Weird to be quoted in a British Mac forum, a British “silver surfers” forum for older internet users, a New Zealand religion forum, and a forum for O.J. Simpson fans.

The online demo of the Analogia face recognition system determines what celebrity you look most like. It’s very flattering. Good way to sell face recognition systems, I guess. I submitted two headshots: for the first, older picture, the closest matches were Val Kilmer, Pierce Brosnan, and Ben Affleck.  For the second, later, creepier picture, Russel Crowe, Bruce Willis, and David Duchovny. The only person among the list that I think I look anything like is Duchovny.

(I don’t have the beard any more.)

Weirdest.  Thing.  Since.  ToHearADuckQuackPressSeven.

I hate those period-delimited descriptions.  Can’t.  Stand.  Them.  But nothing else will prepare you for subservientchicken.com.  Don’t ask questions.  Don’t Google for information.  Just go and tell the chicken what to do.

OK, since I’ve been asked multiple times: You may have gathered from internal syntactic clues, such as the discontinuities in image and lighting between the end of an action and the neutral state; or from internal evidence from room objects jumping around untouched; or from external reasoning such as “with multiple people visiting, he can’t be reacting to every person’s request in real time”; or from his inability to perform certain tasks; or from Eliza-like errors of extracting keywords from larger phrases and using them in the wrong sense (”turn into a newt” causing him to turn in place); or from the inability to precisely refine or repeat actions (”jump twice” yielding a single jump, “turn around three times” not being performed three times) — But the answer is, no, there’s not a live guy in a chicken suit following your instructions.

You have almost certainly seen the late-nineteenth century motion study work of Eadweard Muybridge before, even if you did not know what it was. There’s a great online exhibit.

Tolweb’s Tree of Life web project is so cool, you wish it was 1000 times as detailed as it is. Among other things, you’ll learn that they don’t teach you about Archaea in high school (or didn’t me), bats are more closely related to humans than they are to rodents, penis worms and peanut worms are different, and water bears aren’t nearly as cute as you’d hope.

I found a site called Gender Genie, that “uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author.” So I decided to do a controlled experiment. Taking publicly-available blog entries, it predicted that I am male, my brother is male, my brother-in-law is male, and Bob Mike is male.  Not bad, I thought.  So I tried the other set.  And the genie predicted that my wife is male, my sister-in-law is male, my brother-in-law’s girlfriend is male, and Bob Mike’s girlfriend Chelsea is male.  Not a bad algorithm, methinks, as long as you only feed it texts written by males.

Interesting thing is, I am nearly certain I could identify the sexes of each of these people by even a small sample of his or her writing. This implies that I’m doing something semantic (likely), some more sophisticated syntactic analysis (less likely), or both (oddly, I guess this is likely.)

It’s painfully self-aware pop art, and I love it.  Check out the globe.  Everything is, unfortunately, sold out.

You know, I went to school with guys like this.  Everyone wanted to kill them, not just the military.

This is really unsettling.  Who is doing research on me?  And who is offering information about me?  What kind of information are we talking about?

Here’s the pitch of the company:

Obviously, there must be some people in our world that have previous experience with almost any particular
individual.  The problem is that you may not know them, or know of them.  Furthermore, many times the people
you know are reluctant or unwilling to share information with you because they lack anonymity.  For
example, one person may not be comfortable sharing information about another person because of fear that
same person would later discover he or she shared this information, and so on and so forth.

Yikes.  This is terrible.

(Note added 26 July 2004: Oh, I see, it’s a scam.  Clever.)

The Onion personal of the day:

Down, boys, she’s looking for “That nicefunsexysmart girl who knows which way the wind blows, so she can whisper it in my ear.”  (No, really, Jenn, they put it on the homepage.  The one with the humor on it.)

One question: if she’s 33 that makes this picture, what, 10, 12, 14 years old?  Or is she just the youngest looking 33-year-old I’ve ever seen?

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Liquidmetal alloys are amazing.  Watch the ball bouncer demonstration, then visit the website (the latter only if you have a high tolerance for marketing-speak.)

Regular readers of mcgees.org will know what high regard we (that’s a royal “we”) have for the idiots in the ranks of the religious right (the religious right is bad enough, but their idiots are especially bad.)  One of their recent crusades?  Janet Jackson’s publicity-stunt exposure at the Super Bowl.  To begin, here is one of their mighty savants.  Read on, but make sure you invest in Sic Industries first:  “Mr. Powel [sic], I don’t consider myself to be a finatic [sic], but i [sic] do fear the wrath of GOD if our country continues it’s [sic] moral decline.”  The author speculated that if we allow a bare breast to be shown at the Super Bowl, in a few years half the population will be walking around naked.  The author goes on to acknowlege that this “sounds a little extreem [sic]“, but is adamant that what happened to “Sodom and Gamora [sic]” will happen to the United States.

Another petitioner penned the disarmingly honest sentiment that “to mix sex/violence like this gives a really wrong message”.  Surely it is not what was intended, but isn’t that the basic point?  How dare Janet Jackson pervert our celebration of violence with a hint of sexuality?  Regular readers of mcgees.org will know our (that’s a royal “our”) high regard for the Super Bowl as well — no need to cover that ground again — but allow the brief quote of someone who found not at all alarming the introduction of a breast into “a ‘game’ where men are paid huge sums of money to essentially beat each other up”.

Of course, idiocy and inarticulateness is not reserved for the right — note the amusing but not terribly erudite imprecation “Nazi government daughter of an illegitimate street walking hooker from hell“, which I believe should be shortened in casual correspondence to “NGDoaISWHfH” — but the right is always more fun to make fun of.

Does anyone else think the “Simple English” Wikipedia page is much harder to understand than the standard page?  Not to mention just plain wrong in parts?  Try to parse “The rule of all the Wikipedias, including this one, is that everything that is put onto the Wikipedias cannot be under copyright.”  Does that mean that some of the items put into a Wikipedia can be copyrighted?  Or how about “This is a difference license to GFDL”: exactly what language is that supposed to be?  British Substandard, I think it’s called.  Or try understanding “The changes you make are more than just making the words correct, so copyright is not kept” on the first pass.  Sure, the “simple” version doesn’t use Latinate words such as “requirement”, “permission”, and “obligation”, but reducing something to clunky Anglo-Saxon doesn’t make it easy to understand, it just makes it clunky.

I’ve added a note to the page.  Visit the “Talk about this page” link to make your own comments.

I found these on my own, screwing around, but it seems other people have found them too:
tinyurl.com/dick takes you to the White House homepage of Dick Cheney, and tinyurl.com/cunt takes you to the page of his wife.  (Yes, it’s somewhat embarrassing that I found these.)

My Google search, run after I had found these sure-to-be Easter eggs, found Evan Hunt’s blog, where he points out these as well as three more that are probably just accidents: tinyurl.com/lazy takes you to an Amazon page for the book How To Make Money In Stocks, tinyurl.com/dork takes you to a job posting for a Quality Assurance Engineer, and tinyurl.com/head takes you to a picture of bright red hair.  And while nowhere good as most of these, tinyurl.com/acts takes you to a news story entitled “U.S. moves for single Iraq resolution”.

Can you find any more?  Before you try it, ‘fuck’ is empty.