Chaos Magnet

Interactive tables

Picture this: you're in Vegas. You just lost a lot of money. You had a few drinks. And a few more drinks. Then you lost some more money and had a few more drinks. So you decide to go to the lounge to sit it out for a little while. You get the lounge, you put your hand on the table, and it bursts into flames. Or at least, it looks like it bursts into flames, right where your hand is. Move your hand, the flame moves.

Now, I don't know about you, but I would not stick around to see how that worked. I would run, not walk, to the nearest alcohol rehab center.

But seeing as how I am not in Vegas, didn't lose a lot of money, and am completely sober, I find these Human Locator interactive tables absolutely fascinating. Apparently they shine a projector down from the ceiling for effects similar to those videogames you wave at at Walmart. Only way more trippy.

Just be advised that some of these videos will crash Firefox if you let them get to the end.

A bad day in the Empire

I'd hate to be Darth Vader calling home to explain that the Death Star's been blown up by ... well, just watch it:

And kudos to Techrepublic for managing to tie this into a discussion on Disaster Recovery and meeting ettiquette.

Stop! Or my mom will blog!

Well, it was bound to happen. For years, my mother has been saying that she doesn't understand what I do, and there's no point explaining it to her. When I was a teenager, I had to stick pieces of masking tape with numbers on them to the computer so my parents could figure out how to turn it on. But she always listens patiently as I talk, with the occasional "is that good?" thrown in so I know she's listening.

Occasionally, I think about whether or not to blog something, and I think "would I want my mother to see this?" Then I think, hey, my mother will never be a blogger. She's never gonna read this.

Well, the time has come. My mother's a smart cookie, and this afternoon I spent some time talking her through what a blog is and setting her up with her own, Ramblings by Judy.

So the question is, when your mother starts blogging, does it somehow become less cool, like if she likes your music? Do I have to pretend that I don't like blogging now? Will anybody see it if I roll my eyes and put a safety pin in my keyboard?

Actually, she does seem to have at least some sense of what this is all about. Her first post is about the difference in people's brains before and after morning coffee, and I definitely should not be surprised. Let me tell you, when she says that she's a bear before that morning coffee, she means it. I'm not sure about that hypothesis of hers, though:

I wonder if anyone has done a study on morning personality. When coffee drinkers are grouchy in the morning and they have their coffee they are fine. Non-coffee drinkers that are grouchy in the morning are grouchy all day.

You keep telling yourself that, Mom. :-)

She's just got the basic setup right now, while she gets used to it. Later, I'll introduce her to blogrolls, RSS feeds, and all of that stuff.

But not until she's had her morning coffee.

Current TV

This could be a dangerous new addiction. I just discovered Current TV, an online and satellite network that airs viewer created content, as voted on by viewers. (Actually, right now about one third of the schedule is viewer content, but I can see that changing pretty quick.) The schedule is broken down into small chunks of just a few minutes, and from what I can see, those chunks look pretty interesting. Check out Firestorm, a time lapse view of 28 hours of the Simi Valley fire:

Revisionist Compromise

Oh, for the days when all we had to worry about were shoebox dioramas of great moments in history.

Hehehe.

Squidoo makes some money, and Sarah breaks the Top 100!

I had been getting just the tiniest bit discouraged with Squidoo, but that's over now. The monthly reports came out, and it turns out that only the royalties from clickthroughs such as Amazon show up on the reports. Sarah and I both made a little bit (and I mean a little bit) of money off the general royalties! (OK, it was a very, very little bit.) But it's important because it means that there is money to be made here, even for topics that don't necessarily lend themselves to cross-marketing.

Plus, Sarah's Quick and Easy Cooking lens is now #46! Her Off the grid and Frugal Gardening lenses are doing well, but I'd like to see her Geneaology lens do a little better. Ditto for my JSON lens, which is starting to drop again, but is still doing pretty well.

All in all, a good day.

Star Wars meets Lord of the Rings

I actually found the several days ago, but the server was so overloaded it was eventually taken down. So here it is again, this time from its original source. I'm not really quite sure what to say about this particular piece. I'll just tell you it's pretty funny, and that somebody has way too much time on their hands. (And I've never considered the idea of Han Solo disco dancing.) Download Starlords, or I found a streaming version.

I do have to say that I am amused by the idea that they have taken clips that are normally seen in their entirety and sampled them, then set them to music that is normally heard sampled but is here played in its entirety. Just the kind of convoluted thinking I like.

US border patrol under orders to encourage illegal immigration

okay, maybe that'll will strong, but check out this report that the U.S. Customs and Border Protectionis under orders to notify the Mexican government of Minutemen positions. the Minutemen, as you may or may not know, our civilians who have taken it upon themselves to patrol the border and keep out illegal immigrants:

According to three documents on the Mexican Secretary of Foreign Relations Web site, the U.S. Border Patrol is to notify the Mexican government as to the location of Minutemen and other civilian border patrol groups when they participate in apprehending illegal immigrants -- and if and when violence is used against border crossers.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman confirmed the notification process, describing it as a standard procedure meant to reassure the Mexican government that migrants' rights are being observed.

Am I missing something here?

I should point out that the border patrol agents are just as upset about this as you probably are.

Open source DRM

Yes, you read the title right. Sun is proposing DReaM, and open source Digital Rights Management system that ties assets to a person, and not a device. Check it out: Wired News: Reasons to Love Open-Source DRM

This is your brain on the computer

I thought about this when I was in college, but I never had the opportunity to carry it out. Scientists are working on ways for disabled patients to control a mouse with their brain, or by thinking about moving various body parts: Wired News: Now That's Using Your Brain

Net neutrality fails in the House

Net neutrality, in case you haven't heard, is the concept that all traffic on the web should be treated fairly and equally. In other words, companies should not have the ability to give content from some providers special treatment while degrading (ie slowing down) traffic from other providers. Now Intel backs 'Net Neutrality'. According to this Wired article:

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce on Wednesday voted down an "net neutrality" amendment to a telecommunications bill.

With the defeat in the House, attention on the issue is expected to shift to the Senate, where Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota) plan to introduce a net neutrality bill.

Telephone and cable companies have argued that the internet should remain free from regulation, and that tiered service would provide a fair way of funding their build-out of internet capacity to accommodate streaming video and other high-bandwidth traffic. They have emphasized that they don't intend to block any website or degrade any internet service.

I say bull. If you didn't intend to do it, you wouldn't be fighting so hard for the right to do it. We're not talking about personal freedoms, here, where you stand on principle. We're talking about big companies using political capital to get what they want. And they don't do that without a reason.