Josh and King are likely sick of hearing me gush about Battlestar Galactica. It’s likely the best scifi series. Evar. Deep stories, without glossing over stuff or throwing in expendable Red Shirts or resorting to transporters or holo-decks. I won’t give any spoilers - just don’t let your revulsion over the resurrection of the ’70s camp original series get in the way. At least watch the miniseries…
The first season actually had plot twists and conflicts that I didn’t see coming, and didn’t feel formulaic or rushed (unlike nearly every other show ever made). It’s way more than the hottie f*ckbots (played by a small-town Alberta girl no less). There’s riffs of spirituality, humanity, politics, ethics, honour, deception, etc… The last episode of the first season completely blew me away. I mean, I was literally stunned. That’s never happened with any other TV show before.
I just tried my hand at rolling a Memory Map using maps.google.com and Flickr. Seems like a pretty powerful way to document a childhood (or a vacation, or whatnot). It would be even cooler if you could link photos in Flickr to notes or locations on another image…
Watching the footage of the Pope’s funeral, I was struck first with how wide a cross section of the planet attended. Not just Catholics, but Jews, Arabs, Hindi, etc. all coming to pay respects for sprituality in general, and a great man in particular. This was followed closely (and sadly) with this thought:
Perfect target for bioterrorism. A vial released in the middle of the 2 million-strong crowd, if it took a week or two to kick in, would be spread undetected into almost every community on the planet within a week.
I saw a post from yesterday, by Michael Heilemann (the guy that created the Kubrick theme for Wordpress). He was advocating against “advanced” spam blockers (like link counters and bayesian voodoo), and was suggesting just using a simple funky-looking-comments-go-to-moderation strategy, as an easy way to let people post comments without interference by well-meaning software.
So, I gave it a shot today. After months of absolutely zero spam on this blog, I turned off my spam blockers, and tried Michael’s technique.
OK. So, assume that AdScam is going to nuke the Liberalminority government, and they don’t have a chance for re-election when it’s called. They’ll be written off (correctly or otherwise, it’s irrelevant now) as a corrupt, mob-riddled bunch of money launderers.
What are the options? NDP? Not likely (at least in a majority government). It would seem as though Liberals would go to them in droves, but the NDP is too expensive to get elected as a ruling party.
I just found out (almost by accident) that the U of C has decided to block ping. I knew ping wasn’t working - hasn’t been for what feels like forever. I just heard today that it was a deliberate move to block the port used by ping - to prevent hacking of unsecured Windows boxes using those ports.
So, let me get this straight. You’ve got a bunch of renegade unpatched Windows boxes on campus. Possibly 0wned. And, instead of, you know, fixing the problem by patching and securing the boxes, you block frigging ping. Great. Because, of course, ping has no useful purpose aside from hacking lazily managed Windows boxes. It’s not handy at all for doing things like diagnosing network problems, or monitoring servers, or whatnot.
UPDATE:this is just a blog post. if you want to see your house, go to Google Maps, or Bing Maps, or any of a bunch of other places. This site can’t show you your house. Stop putting your home addresses into the search field on my blog in the hopes of seeing a satellite photo of your house. Seriously. People. Stop.
There are a lot of things converging together at the moment, and I don’t think it would take a huge effort to give the pieces a little nudge to form the loosely-joined personal and professional publishing platform we’ve been bouncing ideas around about for the last couple of years.
These are some of the things I’m watching (or hoping to participate in) in the coming year. This is a rough list, with no relevance to order. I’ll be revising it at will. I’m also pretty sure I’m missing something important.
Excellent news! Carl Berger, the Gandalf of EDUCAUSE and Merlot, has (finally) started blogging! Thanks for doing that, Carl, and I look forward to reading your posts!
It’s even cooler that Carl is blogging as part of the Apple Digital Campus initiative. I listened to the EDUCAUSE NLII podcasts, and it sounds like they’re going to be doing some very cool stuff in the next year.
That would be nice, because I’ve got to put a whole bunch of code there in the near future, and it’s all under SVN control now. Being able to do an svn export would help quite a bit, since I don’t want to lose all commit messages…
Every year, it’s the same crap. Websites trying to be clever by inventing “funny” fake items for April 1. Every year, my RSS reader gets filled with silly, inane little stunts. And it takes a few seconds for my crapfilter to kick in.
Maybe I’m just turning into a cranky old kurmudgeon (maybe? definitely?), but I don’t find 99% of these pranks even remotely funny. The Google Juice one was entertaining. And James Farmer’s “job offer” from WebCT. That’s about it this year. And all of the posts with interesting, but otherwise unusual content having to have “This is not an April Fool’s Joke” disclaimers is just frigging annoying.
They weren’t kidding when they said they were increasing the mailbox size of every GMail account! Their login page jokes about planning to roll out “infinity +1” gigabytes of emaily goodness. That was the April Fool’s part of the announcement. The rest of it goes basically “we plan to keep slapping hard drives into The Beast, so you’ll keep getting more room in your inbox, until the global marketplace has been drained of hard drives.” Or something like that.
