Occasionally, there is a shift in the significance of everything; during such periods of anomie, do not be alarmed. Momentously lost?
You can either swallow with a mouthful of (what might be) pills (or bugs), or you can spit, but you'll miss the benefit of a full mouth of medicine. Tote a lily stayed away all this year, I could've been in California, but I came back to man age my way through this.
Four fifty a six pack, joints, roaches, and rats chewed through all the wrapping paper she'd packed away. A blank, signed check for his fifty-forth birthday, the year she died. The week everyone died. Some day, a million years ago.
We have no time, no budget left, with which to be pretentious. Ask me anything. Anything you want to know. But you think, and there's nothing you'd want to know that certain. It's better to live as an imprint. Don't possess to impress.
What want wonts? Health, is my best guess. Sex a sin isn't exercise and I only know how to fall off of bikes, so I'll work on wait training. Patience, doctors. I have to see if I pass this drugged test.
Do you know which link paid to be included? A correct answer could win you an iPhone! (Or a Whataburger Shirt, or ExStink.) Leave your answer in the comments. All entrants receive a free General Zod for President shirt.
Late night with Neil Nite follow up: recommendations from the local weeklies for Prom Nite's CD Release this Wednesday, August 29th.
Austin's four-man Prom Nite returns with a full-length that's even more worth of congratulatory remarks. Where Is It? There Is It! is nine solid songs of scattershot post-punk, the kind that makes you throw yourself against a wall. — Austin Powell, The Austin Chronicle
While it may be too eager to please for the '77-heads and too pissed-off for the danceteria types, Prom Nite's new Where Is It? There Is It! offers plenty of arguments for meeting in the middle for a glorious, bloody scrum. — The Onion, Austin
We spent the afternoon, Prom Nite and I, printing their new CDs' cases; tediously completed one side of 100 cases, with the other side to be done today. After discarding the irregulars and mistakes, I hope we have 90 left.
Everything that doesn't exist I miss. I'm a hundred places at once, except here. Accept her. Isn't it just? Delusions? It doesn't matter, it all is moving. It moves me, stops me up, and then I'll never start.
Some tait hurts. Some tait heals. For real, with a z, I'm the only place that exists in my mind. Now, I'd like to exit, but as fast as I can run past it, I'm still presented with this:
Stay in the groove long enough and you might end up in a rut. If you're in the trenches you shouldn't put posters up.
I hate my phone. I didn't eat alone today. I didn't eat it all.
I wish I could live life in one moment. Conjure it up and go, super nova. But for now I sit in stasis, stranded in paradise. An oasis playing bad music. Do you want sustenance, or a nuanced existence?
I have scores of journals filled with shit like this. I'd love to make it public, but I know they're still spying on me. Preemptively redacted.
Fits that if I could spell it all out, I'd school you on work. Work you through school. You'd quit your job, live with your parents and enjoy it. Hone your instincts.
Instincronize yourself you beast. You're just a monkey with words. You could be an artist if you'd learn to exist. Humbly have a hobby.
Want more word salad? I have more here, then I can eat alone.
Oh, I also put up pictures of the Peel tour on Flickr. So I haven't totally lost it, yet.
But old habits Die Hard. I'm just not used to posting. I thought about using PAYPERPOST as a TAAS-style writing prompt. It requires full disclosure anyway, so you'll know when I'm shilling.
Tonight, just now, Peel played a show with Ben Brown's brother (and my host-slash-roomate) Alex. He's really too good for us. After the show the band decided the one bit of advice we had to give Alex was: be less good.
I don't know if they meant to put her full name, but I like that as much as Dakota's Myth.
Gmail productivity tips I already knew (you can learn to be really productive when you have time).
However, this was new to me:
Gmail query syntax is pretty flexible. You can rewrite (from:alice@example.com OR from:bob@example.com OR from:carol@example.com) as from:(alice|bob|carol)@example.com
#1 - The one most viewed, but the least informative of the bunch. He refers to "video pods".
#2 - "Between a half and a third of everything that we try, we'll go out, we'll get the tape, and then we kill it."
"If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you could get super lucky."
#3 - "We get into this because we have good taste ... but for the first couple of years you're making stuff, it's not that good ... but your taste is good enough that you can tell what you're making isn't good to you ... a lot of people don't get past that phase."
#4 - "The first time we get a camera we want to sound and act like people we see on TV... there's a real Ted Koppel on the same TV you're going to be on."
Hacking Knowledge article that was published on my birthday. I love any article that tells me to go to bed and eat breakfast. I always forget.
I was down in Corpus Christi this weekend, to visit my mom (my real mom, not my adoptive mother).
She had this giant intimidating desk, about seven feet tall, with cubbies and storage and a light. Made out of laminae covered particle board, I think it once was a NASA Simpit Simulator, used in training astronauts to see if they were ready to see if they were ready to handle the real thing.
Now, I love a good desk. Something that makes you want to sit down and work. I want to be invited to sit down and start something.
I suggested she use the antique writing desk. The transfer was simple, but when we were done, cables cascaded down from the desk on the wall, like some tropicable waterfall. I realized concealing cables had been done and over done already, with greater effort than I was willing to give.
I put a poster Underneath to hide cables Problem f'n SOLVED!
Woah. I KNOW! This sort of ingenuity is why I am in business for myself.
What's that? Would you like to be in business for myself? Watching our recruiting (recruitment?) video? It may show you compelling reasons to apply yourself? I'm not sure about this paragraph?
Who cares? Who are we? We call our company May2007 Enterprises - THE FUTURE FOR NOW!!!!!!
It doesn't matter. We are May 2007, literally the future. We are also a solution and a mixture). And as long as I'm here, could I crash on your couch for while? I don't wanna mooch or become a fixture, I'll be gone in a month.
When The Neal Pollack Invasion made it all the way to Washington D.C., Neal thought it was the appropriate time to play some sort of weird elite, awkward, house party, book/cd selling event.
Peter Bergen was there; that guy up there was there. Neal even said, "CNN Terrorism Expert Peter Bergen is doing The Ostrich!" (I'll warn you, that link leads to a video of The Pseudo Neal Pollack Invasion playing The Ostrich at a reading for Neal's new book, Alternadad. It's the most authentic clip of the band, ever.
Flickr - The fantastic, Yahoo-owned photo sharing site. It lets you organize your photos with tags! If you have a digital camera and want to share pictures, the pro account is well worth the $25 they charge.
Just don't be Chinese. And if you take pictures of a Nintendo Wii, they will steal them and put them here.
YouTube - Google Video 2.0. Upload a video or record it right from within your browser window. Don't expect any of it to make sense.
del.icio.us - A web-based social bookmarking service. Allows bookmarks to be sorted with tags, which can make things less (or more) complicated than using folders.
Blogger - I've been using Blogger for about 100 years. Easily the simplest setup, especially if you have no idea what you are doing and don't want to customize it too much.
Clearly that is not my problem.
I think Blogger is the best web publishing platform on the market. It was the start of my man crush on Ev.
Twitter - Lets you share a 160 word status with the world, or just your friends. Can be updated via IM or from your mobile phone.
Practically pointless, but I have a crush on Ev, who Obviously runs Twitter.
Odeo - Odeo is ... well, it WAS a podcast creation and sharing web-app, which even let you leave voicemails from your cell phone and later release them to the world. Now I use it to let people leave me a voice mail.
New users cannot even upload audio at the time of this writing. I've been a member of Odeo since it started, but I've never uploaded anything. Mostly joined out of obligation to my man-crush on Ev. Odeo is another Obvious product.
Feeddigest - Feed processor which no longer allows new user sign ups. Which is a shame since not only is it easy to use and understand, the support staff was terribly responsive, and even implemented a feature at my request.
HOW?
As they come in, each post is placed in a div; the div is given an id based on the name of the source. This allows me apply styles depending on the original source, and accommodate links as well as photographs or videos. To accomplish this with FeedDigest, I set the class using the name of the source of the post using the following template: <div id="%SOURCENAME,3NODOTS%">
Within FeedDigest, %SOURCENAME,3NODOTS% takes the name of the source and truncates it to three characters (see: TemplateTags). FeedDigest used to truncate and leave an ellipsis, showing the post had been truncated. The NODOTS option removes the ellipsis and gives each feed a unique id. That was the request the FeedDigest team so eagerly implemented. (Thanks Peter!)
For the front page, the FeedDigest template is simpler:
Each div can be styled and positioned on dakotasmith.org however I choose.
WHY?
I still haven't found exactly what I want, but this can come very close. I've tried using Reblog, and really loved it, but ultimately it was smarter than I am. I also tried to use Google Reader, and though it was easier to set up, also fell short of my full expectations.
FeedDigest's team really allowed me to take this tool and run with it, and while it still isn't as open ended as I would hope, it's obvious they are suffering under the weight of their own success. They have not been accepting new users for quite some time now.
CAVEATS
FeedDigest isn't perfect. It lacks the ability to just have 1 post from each feed. To get around this for the front page, I had to create three feeds: one of only the most recent Twitter status, one of only the most recent Blogger update, and one combining the two. Since user accounts are limited in number of feed digests you can create, this trick eats 3 digests, which wouldn't happen with a "limit 1 post per feed" option.
Updates from FeedDigest seem to have a lag of between 10 and 30 minutes. Which, I'm in no rush, but you might want your digests UPDATED NOW ALREADY!
FeedDigest does take a while to set up and modify, and unless you have a clear goal in mind, it could be rather confusing as to why you would want to use it. I've found some of their default templates are lacking as well, and have only been well-served using my own custom templates.
Likewise, since I cannot program, I have to use a Javascript include to put Feeddigest's output on an html page. This seems like overkill, since Javascript is slower to render than HTML. It also does not allow the text to be searched by the GOOG.
InstantFeed will instant message you as a feed is updated. With FeedDigest's delay, this is less reliable than I like. In situations where a fifteen-plus minute delay is acceptable, this could be very useful with combined feeds which require responses and attention, such as a Basecamp project and a collaborative Google notebook.
RSS2PDF seems nearly useless, too, but at the very least can give a feed a nice, unified look when printed.
CONCLUSION
What I've created is purely ephemeral. You cannot have an archive of /recent/ but I hope I am creating a window into all of the photos I take, movies I make, or links I save. The rate at which I add to it means if someone returns to find something, they will probably be forced to go to my bookmarks on del.icio.us or photos on Flickr.
This might be a problem if I had some interest in keeping people at my website, but I would rather they join Flickr and add me as a contact, or stalk me and try to steal my ideas from reading links posted to del.icio.us, or make their own crazy movies on YouTube and show them to me and the Internet at large.
As sign-ups are closed, I guess this is useless for anyone who hasn't already signed up for FeedDigest, but perhaps you can put your noodle to it, and use these as a springboard to your own solution. I hope someone buys FeedDigest soon, so they can have more horsepower and really cut loose. It seems like such an obvious move.
If I forgot and left this sitting around, I guess I could get in trouble. Especially once it has some Aqua Teen Hunger Force LED OH WAIT THIS JUST IN !!!
Boston went on high alert, closing bridges and roads, after 38 battery-powered devices were discovered around the city on Wednesday. Source: Boston ad stunt scare duo charged, 1 February 2007.
Anyway, this was plastered all over CNN. Which made it really funny, when it turned out more Turner (Ted Turner) owned property. Seems like a round about way of advertising the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie.
The media continues to refer to them as hoax devices. What's a hoax device?
For the purposes of this section, the term “hoax device” shall mean any device that would cause a person reasonably to believe that such device is an infernal machine. For the purposes of this section, the term “infernal machine” shall mean any device for endangering life or doing unusual damage to property, or both, by fire or explosion, whether or not contrived to ignite or explode automatically. For the purposes of this section, the words “hoax substance” shall mean any substance that would cause a person reasonably to believe that such substance is a harmful chemical or biological agent, a poison, a harmful radioactive substance or any other substance for causing serious bodily injury, endangering life or doing unusual damage to property, or both. Source: General Laws of Massachusetts, Chapter 226. CRIMES AGAINST PROPERTY Section 102A1/2
The law goes on to make the point that, if convicted the defendant is liable for restitution to the government for any financial losses incurred in responding to the hoax. The city's overreaction and ignorance cost about five to seven minutes of Iraq war.
Cartoon Network issued an apology because their lawyers told them to. The youths charged gave a fantastic press conference, because their lawyer told them not to talk about the event (thanks, Andre).
These artists, made these things and put them up, and the Norms find them threatening and shut down a whole city. Recovered light boards are selling for up to $2000 on eBay (thanks, Andy) which is also presently awash in topical tshirts (none as good as the ATHF is the bomb shirt at Raplica. (thanks, Sean).
I have never wanted to be a performance artist more in my life!
If you want to check it out yourself, look up a word using answers.com, then click either the Digg or Del.icio.us icons near the top of the page. The links and images are transposed! Oops.
I could be clever about this, try to make some jokes, but I'm too happy with what we made. The trick where GOOG gives you $10 bucks for buying the Peel CD was clever enough.
I'm really proud of what we were able to put together, and how quickly too. Everything fell into place quickly, like Lvl. 9 Tetris.
It's driving me nuts. The signs aren't as confusing as they were but I still can't make out what they mean.
I would try to sleep if the low pitched hum I hear when I'm here would go away. As it stands, I'm better off staying up. Someone has to steer this house and clean the ship.
If I think hard enough, it feels like I'm sleeping. This doesn't even make sense to me, don't worry. Granite, it's slate, arkose cherts for shale?
!!WARNING SOME LINKS ARE VIDEOS!! — also, I totally did not format these for the web. I mean, the file size isn't too bad, but they don't stream or anything. sorry —
I made a fake bump for the Cartoon Network; Adam and Ben were discussing the new metal Optimus Prime doll, and I would just yell out "IT'S LIKE THE BEATLES!" from time to time, since that's my sense of humor.
Also, the secret to funny voices is slowing down real voices, AND talking in funny voices. Or speeding them up. If that doesn't work, you probably need a better camera.
More people my age (25) watch Adult Swim than CNN. Why? The first answer that comes to mind is: because Adult Swim is different than anything on the air—it’s intelligent, it’s weird.
I was reading this article on the Making of Frisky Dingo, and I couldn't help but want that to be me. I like to think that my friends and I are funny. Externally funny.
But now we are saddled with jobs (well, not me; I'm riding bareback, broke, but not broke back in Mountain View).
Last night I was shooting video and it's like, all top secret valley shit. Secrets are safe with me, I don't have much else I can keep. But the funny parts, are totally funny.
It seems appropriate that when I showed up, I made Tex Mex. Black beans (see: black beans with peppers and bacon, adopted from the CIA cookbook) and spanish rice, among other dishes.
I made it again, tonight, my last night in town. It's nice to know that when I leave here, she'll have some left.
Taxes are imposed, one hopes, to create a source of income for a government. If a source of tax revenue depletes itself, tax laws will need to be re-written to accommodate the loss. If the goals of increased taxes on cigarettes is to generate revenue for a state AND reduce smoking, it will have to do one better than the other (generate revenue) or it will eat its own tail (reduce smoking to 0 persons).
The $1-per-pack increase should generate roughly $700 million a year more in taxes, according to projections by the comptroller's office: $682.6 million in fiscal 2008 and $722.8 million for fiscal 2009. Source: $1-a-pack hike in cigarette tax a few days away Houston Chronicle
Among the options that are on the table, increasing the cigarette tax is clearly the most preferred solution to the state’s revenue crisis. Source: Dimitri Pantazopoulos, some BS polling firm
But what were the options on the table? Reducing funding for road and highway construction OR increasing the state sales tax OR increasing gasoline taxes OR creating a statewide property tax OR reducing funding for health care programs OR reducing funding for public education. Or, as their poll of 500 Texans showed, increasing taxes on cigarettes, favored by 70% of over the aforementioned other "options"
With an estimated 3.3 million smokers in Texas (source: James Gray, spokesman for American Cancer Society, Texas chapter), there are taxes to be collected. Even if 4% will quit when cigarette prices increase 10%, you are still left with over 3 million smokers.
Texans don't have the same opportunities as smokers on the east coast, where DC and Maryland smokers regularly head to Virgina for lower-taxed cigarettes. It'd take too long for most Texans to get across state lines to a state with a lower excise tax on cigarettes. Like most black markets, cigarette smuggling supports crime syndicates, including "terrist" groups such as Hezbollah, and reduces controls in place to limit underaged smoking. (source: Cigarette Smuggling. Brief Analysis No. 423. National Center for Policy Analysis).
I was able to find plenty of places to sell me American Spirits, typically from an Indian reservation, for less than what I pay now. In Japan, I was able to find them for just ¥340. There are certainly ways around this tax, for me.
10. Termination; Suspension. Google may, in its sole discretion, at any time and for any reason, terminate the Service, terminate this Agreement, or suspend or terminate your account. In the event of termination, your account will be disabled and you may not be granted access to your account or any files or other content contained in your account although residual copies of information may remain in our system for some time for back-up purposes.
