Good news, comrades!
The Supreme Court of the People today affirmed the
power of local soviets to allocate the use of
land in whatever way most effectively
furthers the aims of the Revolution, handing a smarting
defeat to those reactionary running dogs who
would put "private property rights" over
the collective will of the masses!
Local soviets may now freely allocate land not only to the
use of the Party itself, but also to those forward-looking
corporations
cooperatives that do so much of
the hard work of Revolutionary Advancement.
Workers of the world, unite!
You have nothing to lose but your autonomy!
(Sheesh.
Next time I twit Scalia for something, remind me that
he voted the right way on this one.
I haven't read the decision itself yet, but
it can't be good...)
So I just barely got the Sims 2 out of the box last night
and installed it and played with it some.
Very snazzy, a little slow switching between parts of
the game.
Also snazzy but rather annoying built-in interface
to the web site for game updates and downloads and stuff:
annoying because it insisted that the user name that I'm sure
I registered with EA a million years ago didn't exist in their
system when I tried to log on with it, but then when I tried
to create a new account with that name it said that the user
name was already in use.
Okay!
Whoever actually solves this thing about having to have a
different "account" on every stupid little Web site is
going to become rich and famous.
(And I mean actually solve, not just "do something that
sounds like it ought to solve it on the PowerPoint".)
(Eventually I got it to work by going there in a normal
browser tonight and "claiming" my "AOL screen name".
Heh.
But anyway we managed to download and install the
latest patches so that neighbors won't accidentally
kidnap toddlers and stuff.
(Bug listings in virtual worlds can be pretty funny.))
Virtual worlds are Hot (one of the little comic
progress messages that goes by while the Sims 2
is loading says "blurring reality lines").
(See not only the Sims, but Second Life, which
involves virtual interactions with real people.)
And naturally people are taking photographs in
the virtual worlds that they hang out in, and naturally
those photographs show up on flickr.
flickr
photos tagged with "secondlife"
(889 of them at the moment).
And the
Second Life
Photo Pool (great fun as a
slide show,
with your browser in full-screen mode).
flickr photos
tagged with "sims2".
(See also
flickr photos
tagged with "sims", although they're a mix of The Sims, The Sims 2,
and people and other things that are inconsiderately named "Sims".)
I was a
Tom Cruise Body Thetan.
Awhile back I was impressed to be able to buy
a book
from Amazon for eleven cents (plus $3.49 shipping and handling).
Then just today I was looking for
another
book, and it turned out to be avilable used for one cent
(plus $3.49 shipping and handling).
Too bad that "Amazon Prime" free-shipping thing doesn't work
for the used books...
On our quest for interesting podcasts,
a reader writes
Oooooooooh how I *wish* I could recommend something for you. I 'tried
again' recently and was knocked down by boredom and astonishment.
Almost everything I listen to is just *awful*.
You can be sure that if I do ever find anything half-good, I'll let
you know.
which is very kind.
In the meantime, we found
a page
about podcasts about sex
(also here);
at least it's not about podcasting.
We tried a couple, and they aren't bad; but
we like Susie Bright
better.
We'll close by passing along a big podcast recommendation
from reader Jonathan Flynn.
The Dave Winer, Adam Curry stuff is terribly dull -- I guess it made
the blogs and so landed on your radar? Every time I've checked those
guys out they're just podcasting about podcasting.
Here's everything to which I'm subscribed, in order of preference.
I've sampled a lot of podcasts.
My personal favorite source of content is www.itconversations.com
As long as your portable player of choice can delete on the fly, I've
found it's far easier to subscribe to the 'everything' feed and just
sort it out on the device than to pick and choose on the site.
Another alternative is to subscribe to the announcements feed, which
will give a podcast with a 5 minute roundup of the shows from the
week.
I think it'd be wise to put a few of the betters ones on your portable
to get off to a running start. So I guess I AM linking to some
specific mp3s, but the idea would be that you encounter future shows
in true podcast fashion. I've gotten used to skimming the content on
the big feed just like scanning channels on the radio. You can
usually tell if you'll be interested in a minute or less. Here we go:
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less'
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail252.html
'Human Nature'
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail231.html
Lessons from Game Design by Will Wright
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail195.html
Ontology is Overrated
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail470.html
Personal Fabrication
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail460.html
My favorite music podcast of the moment:
http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=956
Only offers an AAC feed unfortunately, so you have to setup a
conversion script if you don't have an ipod. Likely very hit or miss
depending on your musical preference.
http://webjay.org/by/tomwsmf/boingboingfoundsounds.xml
This is a feed with all the audio content linked from boingboing.net.
I like it because it's random. One day you get a Beethoven symphony,
the next an interview with Chuck Pahlaniuk. Since it's often
referencing other podcasts it's also a good way to find shows you
might like.
'Theory of Everything'
http://www.toeradio.org/
This show is wack. Hard to describe, perhaps best enjoyed if you dive
in without knowing anything. Might want to hit the archives.
http://www.groks.net
http://www.groks.net/groks.rss
A science news show run by two stoners who fill it up with tons of
so-lame-they're-kinda-funny jokes.
A BBC show: 'In Our Time'.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/mp3/podcast.xml
Very, very British people discussing things like 'The Assassination of
Tsar Alexander II - did his killing cause the Russian Revolution?'.
Perhaps not technically a podcast in the 'amateur' sense.
Isn't that generous?
I'll have to try some of them sometime.
What's your favorite podcast, if any?
Happy Fathers' Day to all (fathers and otherwise).
We went out to that new Hanada Hibachi place for an early
dinner.
It was Way Fun, with the guy swirling the knives around
and tossing bits of cut-up zucchini at us, and making
little volcanos out of onion rounds and flaming saki.
And the food was fresh and good.
For dessert I had Mango Mochi Ice Cream, not having any
idea what it was.
Turns out it's mango ice cream wrapped up in sticky
rice paste (mochi).
The little daughter had Green Tea Ice Cream. She said
it was strange to be eating something that color;
sort of like eating a bowl of wasabi or something.
Everyone else had the Fried Ice Cream.
I decided to follow up on the "make your syndication
feeds look reasonable in a browser in case someone clicks on
the little icons" idea that I encountered months ago,
so I typed "rss css" into Google and
one of the
first hits had some good examples and stuff.
So now
the
syndication
feeds
all do something halfway useful if you click on them
in Opera.
In Mozilla the first one gives a confusing "what do you
want me to do with this here RSS file?" prompt, but the
second and third do the same better thing that they do in
Opera.
And in IE the first one gives a "this might be a dangerous
file containing nasty viruses that will cause your computer
to explode!" warning, and the others appear as a blank white
page.
At least at the moment, on this machine.
I'll probably keep poking at that a bit to see if I
can get more browsers to do righter things.
(I changed the feeds' MIME types from "application
slash whatever plus xml" to just "text slash xml",
but it doesn't seem to have helped any.)
Right now it's just a CSS formatting of the feeds anyway;
maybe someday I'll learn XSL (which looks like a
Very Silly Language so far) and make it even cleverer.
(Why do browsers contain embedded XSL engines anyway?
How often do they get used?)
I finished and
wrote up
Bova's "Saturn".
I wasn't impressed.
The mytob
virus
writes rather amusingly:
Subject: fhgnonhjjuhw
Dear user log,
You have successfully updated the password of your Davidchess account.
If you did not authorize this change or if you need assistance with
your account, please contact Davidchess customer service at:
webmaster@davidchess.com
Thank you for using Davidchess!
The Davidchess Support Team
In other davidchess news, I added a Google sitesearch to
the search page, but I was too
lazy to get the page to validate; that particular bit
of momentuum seems to have worn off for now.
For
Fathers' Day I got a copy of "The Sims 2", and
the guidebook.
Looks to be an order of magnitude more complicated than
"The Sims", and very different in general.
Individual characters age and die, so it's more about
cultivating families over the generations than about
cultivating individual characters during an eternal Now.
(Although the hardcopy manual that comes with the game
reveals the "cheat" that turns off aging.
Is it really a Cheat if the manual tells you how to do it?)
1 person
recommended Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers
in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean instead of
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger [DVD] [DVD-VIDEO]
A reader writes:
I go to Indian Brook, and Quest for Spinach was
written by a small band of Tamarack Farmers in the '80s.
(See a couple of
years ago at about this time.)
Which reminds me that next weekend it'll be time to drive
the little daughter off to Vermont again, which is
always fun (modulo being without the little daughter for a month).
I do love Vermont.
- 6 for "iris chacon"
- 2 for "american community survey"
- 2 for "how to hack yahoo webcam"
- 1 for "chess clipart"
- 1 for "halle barry"
- 1 for "naked pictures of helen"
- 1 for "princess leia organa"
- 1 for "sexy videos"
- 1 for "toga"
- 1 for "troops"
We are pleased to note that
those Notebooks
that we recommended
all
those years ago
are still going strong.
And there's an associated
weblog that
you ought to read.
See also
A Simple Model of
the Evolution of Simple Models of Evolution, and the
page
about psychoceramics which led us to the
page about
Medawar and thence to
a
review of Chardin's "The Phenomenon of Man" that makes us feel
better about the fact that we've never
finished reading it, although we started
a really
long time ago.
And finally,
flutterby
points us at
the 78RPM jukebox;
yes, they have "yes, we have no bananas".
Or at least one cover of it...
