Commando Bear 2000!!!!!!

Originally uploaded by willgorman.

So Jolayne’s parent’s are in town this weekend and we’re taking them around KC and we happened to end up at the City Market today. We were looking around at an Asian market when I saw the most amazing thing in the world. Commando. Bear. 2000!!!! Holy crap. It’s an energy drink, obviously. No one’s going to name a fiber shake Commando Bear 2000. Although until today I thought no one would name anything Commando Bear 2000 so that shows what I know. I can only imagine this beverage being named by a room full of coked-out marketing execs on a deadline. “Ok, so this drink is like a dude who’s a commando by day but at night he turns into a bear! Or maybe a talking bear commando! Whatever! The point is he has to go back in time to the year 2000 to save the world! And he needs this energy drink to do it!” Commando Bear 2000 is an clearly an energy drink with a back story.

Comments

Comment by Neal on 2005-07-03 19:45:30 +0000

Don’t you know that the year 2000 is always in the future?!

Comment by Ben Lewis on 2005-07-24 21:19:01 +0000

But we’re gonna party like it’s 1999.

To me, Google Maps/Earth and Flickr are the 2 most interesting things going on with the web right now, so combining them would be just like mixing peanut butter and chocolate. That would make Geobloggers the new Reese’s peanut butter cup of the internet. Taking advantage of the open APIs on both Flickr and Google’s ends it’s a jaw droppingly cool combination that allows you to tag your Flickr photos with their coordinates on a map and then plots them as pins (with thumbnails even) on a Google map. It’s easy to get started, and by using the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox it allows you to conveniently select the coordinates for a photo from a Google map, which it then adds to the photo as Flickr tags. There’s even a simple visual walkthrough of how to geotag your Flickr images. Or if you’re lucky enough to have a camera with built in or external GPS that writes the coordinates to the EXIF data, it’ll automatically pick those up for you when you put them on Flickr. That’s cool enough that I’d seriously consider looking for that feature in my next camera. I’m completely hooked on this and I’ve gone back and updated a bunch of my pictures with geotags, and here you can see all my geotagged photos. Right now the KC area is pretty sparsely populated in Geobloggers so I’m hoping to fill it up a little more soon.

As an additional measure to help fight the steady tide of comment spam, I decided to close off comments on entries more than 20 days old. While every now and then I do get a legitimate comment on an old entry from some random search, 99% of the time it’s spam. However since I haven’t upgraded from MT 2.661 and since I’m not using MySQL (I know, I know. I need to switch over but I’m lazy) I was having a hard time finding a way to close old entries as a batch operation. Initially I thought that the mt-close script might do it, but as it turned out that required MySQL as well. Fortunately, someone posted a change in the comments on that page to get mt-close to work with a BerkeleyDB install of MT. Now hopefully I should see a significant decrease in the amount of comment spam I get.

Comments

Comment by Brett on 2005-07-02 13:03:29 +0000

I’ve thought about doing this. I’ve been getting more ping spam than comments spam recently, though. I think I’m going to wait and try to update to 3.x before taking such drastic measures. I mean, come on! Closing out comments on entries that never got comment initially! That’s crazy talk!

Google released Google Earth today, and holy crap is it amazing. It combines the already cool functionality of the recently acquired Keyhole with the yellow pages and directions services of Google Maps. It’s definitely quite impressive. Granted, as a Windows only (for now) application, it does lose a little of the convenience factor of the browser based interface of Google Maps, but makes up for it with smoothness and style. It’s pretty much just the same image data that Google Maps uses, so you’re not really seeing anything new there, but being able to seamlessly fly around from place to place, rotate, tilt, zoom, and search for new places to see is somewhat addictive. Even cooler is the ability to mark certain locations, save them, and share them with others. For example, you can see the church where Jolayne and I got married (requires Google Earth to be installed, obviously). Additionally, there are shared points of interest on the map that were marked by users of the service back when it was just Keyhole. These points often show things that just look cool from the air, or provide additional information about a location. One helpful tip though: you should definitely increase the amount of memory that it uses to keep a cache of the images. The default is just 32MB, which can cause it to have to redownload the images if you move away from and area and come back and that can be a little slow. I bumped it up to 256MB so now it should hopefully almost never have to reload image data of an area I’ve already visited in the same session. You can also increase the disk space that it uses for caching, up to 512MB (from a default of 400) which is probably a good idea as well.

Comments

Comment by Tobin on 2005-06-29 13:14:58 +0000

I agree, this thing rocks. You have seen San Francisco and the 3D buildings, right? Pure genius.

Comment by Will on 2005-06-29 14:08:55 +0000

Yes that’s awesome too, but of course I must now point out that Kansas City gets 3D buildings, while Columbus (sadly) does not. Ha!

I know it would be a huge job to get the image data, but can you imagine how cool it would be if the buildings had textures instead of just being wireframes?

While I was intially dismayed to hear of the Supreme Court’s ruling against Grokster, after reading some of the details of their decision I don’t think it’s really as bad as it seems. If I understand correctly (and to be fair, there’s a good chance I probably don’t since I’m not a lawyer or anything) the ruling makes it illegal to distribute software that allows for copyright infringement with the intent of promoting it for those uses. Granted the definition of intent is still nebulous enough to be a cause for some nervousness but it seems like as long as you’re careful in how you advertise your application that this wouldn’t necessarily stifle innovation. For example even though BitTorrent is frequently used in copyright infringement, its creator has always been clear that that’s not its intended purpose. And indeed it does have many legitimate uses, from distributing Linux ISO’s to putting out patches for World of Warcraft. Now if the results of this decision are used to go after a protocol such as BitTorrent, now that’s cause for some serious alarm. Still, hearing the result of this decision reminded me to do something that I’d been meaning to and put off far too long: supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Since they’re out there every day fighting for saner intellectual property laws and the like, I figured it was about time I chipped in.

…and then promptly went out and blinded someone with it. Oh. *ahem* Right, so I contributed to the MIT Weblog Survey (which I heard about from Dave). It asks you questions about randomly selected links posted on your blog. I think the idea is to get a sense of what other content you link to and why, but the whole random selection thing means that sometimes it gets links that don’t seem to really fit in to the categories that they’re trying to assess. For example, the generated links to Amazon in my Recent Tracks list. It happened to grab one of those for me and try as I might I couldn’t figure out how to properly describe it given the options they provided. Anyway, it should be interesting to see the results.

Today is the day that I’ve been waiting for ever since I got my PSP (which I don’t believe I mentioned before but Jolayne got it for me as the Most Awesome Wedding Gift Ever. She gave it to me the day before the wedding and its a good thing it didn’t come with a game or I probably would have been playing it at the altar). Anyway, it’s a gorgeous piece of gadgetry on its own merits and the screen is just amazing (no dead pixels on mine, thank goodness) however as with nearly all Sony devices it’s burdened with a ridiculous amount of DRM features, namely its restriction against running unsigned code. I just don’t understand Sony’s fierce desire to keep people from running homebrew apps on the thing, which is obviously the PSP’s greatest calling in life. To that end they’ve been updating the firmware to make it more secure, but as a of today there exists a “workaround” for the 1.5 firmware (the initial version that shipped in the US) to run your own programs off a memory stick which means that I can at long last run SNES and Genesis emulators on my PSP. That’s the only reason I ever wanted one in the first place. Sony is likely to force upcoming games to require newer versions of the firmware to run, but I won’t be upgrading mine unless another way to run your own programs is found. That just seems like a pretty basic requirement to me. Now if the whole PSP Linux thing could just get going, I’d be set.

UPDATE: It’s occurred to me that if I could travel back in time with this and give it to my 13 year old self, I’m pretty sure I could give the younger me a heart attack and cause an interesting space-time paradox.

Comments

Comment by Neal on 2005-06-23 11:25:53 +0000

The reason that Sony (and console manufacturers in general) are so anti-hacker is because they make most of thier money off licensing revenue from games sold for the platform. If you could create a game without licensing Sony’s libraries and their “PSP” stamp on your game box, Sony wouldn’t make any real money off of the deal.

It’s very different from the PC game market, where Dell and Microsoft don’t get any royalties when you come out with a cool new PC game. But the console (and now handheld) game markets have a “give you the razor cheap and sell the blades for a lot” business model. It’s a crappy model, but the only way to make it go away is by hacking all our XBoxes and PSPs. Viva la MAME!

Comment by Will on 2005-06-26 09:53:02 +0000

Ah, that makes sense. It’s still dumb, but it makes sense. Aside from the emulators, it wouldn’t be as frustrating if Sony actually bothered to release any software for it. I mean, the thing has WiFi and it didn’t even ship with a web browser!

Comment by adam on 2005-06-27 16:03:45 +0000

Hi, I am conducting a survey of Kansas City area Bloggers for my Masters dissertation and have selected your Blog from its listing on http://www.kcbloggers.com. Your participation in my online survey would be greatly appreciated and would only take around 5 minutes to complete. The survey can be reached at the following address

http://FreeOnlineSurveys.com/rendersurvey.asp?id=102215

Thank you!

Adam

A poignant tale of a lonely young Tetris block’s struggle to fit in. This and other hilarious blurrings of the line between video games and reality brought to you by Mega64, a bunch of guys that (and I’m going out on a limb here) may be video game nerds. It’s hard to tell. It is though easily the finest, and likely only, video game related public performance comedy sketch group in the world. Also good are their Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell videos.

Comments

Comment by Dan Thill on 2005-06-14 07:32:01 +0000

You also need to see these guys reenacting a Counterstrike game. Absolutely hilarious.

http://www.dumpalink.com/media/1118152812

Comment by Will on 2005-06-14 08:03:29 +0000

…and then Linus, Peter, Schnopfen und Andorz’s mothers told them to stop playing with guns and to come wash up for dinner. It was definitely pretty funny though.

Have you ever wanted to control a webcam on the side of a building overlooking a construction site in Germany? Well, now you can (No, there doesn’t seem to be a machine gun attached or in fact armaments of any kind. Believe me, I checked.) In fact you can find any number of webcams in random places around the world with a simple Google search. I find it strangely addictive to see what’s going on at the University of Helsinki, or some town called Eindhoven, or this French parking lot at any given moment. Beyond just being cool, the practical uses are unlimited. Like maybe you might be going to France and you want to see if there’s any place to park. Done!

Mourning dove nest

Originally uploaded by willgorman.

When we got back from the wedding and honeymoon, we found that mourning doves had built a nest in the hanging plant on our balcony. At the time, the mother was sitting on the eggs and we didn’t have the heart to kick her out. Obviously this meant the end of our hanging plant as we could no longer water it. There are now 2 baby mourning doves and we’re just waiting for them to be able to leave the nest so we can finally get rid of the ugly dead hanging plant and get a new one. They’ve gotten big pretty quickly, so hopefully it isn’t too much longer. Our cat Cleo watches them with interest through the window from time to time but she’s such a housecat that I doubt she even has any idea what to do with them.

Comments

Comment by Seth on 2005-06-14 08:22:08 +0000

Silly doves! Amanda & I had a mom & two eggs that just hatched about a week ago. Maybe it’s been two.

Same exact setup – nest built in the hanging basket, basket dying and drying up. We were away this weekend, and when I returned the whole family, nest and all, had moved out. They didn’t leave a note or anything so I am worried that they may have been evicted by our condo association.

But the geranium seems to have lived, albeit in poor health, and I’ve begun watering it again yesterday. Hopefully it’ll make a full recovery.

Comment by Will on 2005-06-15 07:58:08 +0000

Our birds finally left the nest a couple of days ago leaving behind nothing more than a fair amount of poop on our balcony rail, as is the custom of their people. Sadly, our plant was not as lucky as yours.