Monday, November 28, 2005

Google Click-to-Call: Free calls on Google

We're testing a new product that gives you a free and fast way to speak directly to the advertiser you found on a Google search results page – over the phone.

Here's how it works: When you click the phone icon, you can enter your phone number. Once you click 'Connect For Free,' Google calls the number you provided. When you pick up, you hear ringing on the other end as Google connects you to the other party.

Hell hath no fury like a Deadhead scorned

So here is our resolution. You want to change the rules as you go along, so will we. We don’t care anymore; We’ve lost all respect for this organization. Between the utter disgust of your decisions with Jerry’s guitars, and now taking away our access to the music we care about most, we refuse to support any aspect of GDM until we see change. No more CD’s, no more tickets, no more merchandise. We ask all deadheads to join us in this protest.

GDM, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
Have you forgotten all you have taught us?

If you plant ice
Your gonna harvest wind

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Web-enabled Fender Telecaster? Just stop.
World's ugliest dog dies. Pictures don't lie.
[The Man Who Sold the War] For Bush Administration-hired "perception managers" like John Rendon, war is a business opportunity that must be courted, planned, and ushered in after careful orchestration of evidence - whether or not its real. (Rolling Stone)

Indeed, Rendon is already thinking ahead. Last year, he attended a conference on information operations in London, where he offered an assessment on the Pentagon's efforts to manipulate the media. According to those present, Rendon applauded the practice of embedding journalists with American forces. "He said the embedded idea was great," says an Air Force colonel who attended the talk. "It worked as they had found in the test. It was the war version of reality television, and for the most part they did not lose control of the story." But Rendon also cautioned that individual news organizations were often able to "take control of the story," shaping the news before the Pentagon asserted its spin on the day's events.
"We lost control of the context," Rendon warned. "That has to be fixed for the next war."

Monday, November 21, 2005

The Soda Museum. They even take a stab at the original Coke and Pepsi recipes.

I, Caleb D. Bradham, do solumnly swear that the foregoing is a true, complete and correct formula for making or manufacturing "Pepsi Cola" as heretofore made and manufactured and sold by the Pepsi Cola Co., and is the formula for said Pepsi Cola as originated by me and same is now in the property of said Pepsi Cola Co., Bankrupt.
Guitarist Link Wray dies at 76.

Friday, November 18, 2005

Taking my personal demons out to lunch at the Olive Garden (McSweeneys)

Thursday, November 17, 2005

If you're going to be out there with the ducks, for God's sake master the basic quack.

Wednesday, November 16, 2005


A nice gallery of fruit crate images from cratelabelsonline.com
How to build a google maps service, including source code and mysql schemas.
This isn't the Real America by 39th president Jimmy Carter, about the insanely violent and corrupt Bush Administration. (login req'd)

Bugmenot login here.

Excerpt below...

IN RECENT YEARS, I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican. These include the rudimentary American commitment to peace, economic and social justice, civil liberties, our environment and human rights.
Also endangered are our historic commitments to providing citizens with truthful information, treating dissenting voices and beliefs with respect, state and local autonomy and fiscal responsibility.At the same time, our political leaders have declared independence from the restraints of international organizations and have disavowed long-standing global agreements — including agreements on nuclear arms, control of biological weapons and the international system of justice.Instead of our tradition of espousing peace as a national priority unless our security is directly threatened, we have proclaimed a policy of "preemptive war," an unabridged right to attack other nations unilaterally to change an unsavory regime or for other purposes. When there are serious differences with other nations, we brand them as international pariahs and refuse to permit direct discussions to resolve disputes. Regardless of the costs, there are determined efforts by top U.S. leaders to exert American imperial dominance throughout the world.These revolutionary policies have been orchestrated by those who believe that our nation's tremendous power and influence should not be internationally constrained. Even with our troops involved in combat and America facing the threat of additional terrorist attacks, our declaration of "You are either with us or against us!" has replaced the forming of alliances based on a clear comprehension of mutual interests, including the threat of terrorism.Another disturbing realization is that, unlike during other times of national crisis, the burden of conflict is now concentrated exclusively on the few heroic men and women sent back repeatedly to fight in the quagmire of Iraq. The rest of our nation has not been asked to make any sacrifice, and every effort has been made to conceal or minimize public awareness of casualties. Instead of cherishing our role as the great champion of human rights, we now find civil liberties and personal privacy grossly violated under some extreme provisions of the Patriot Act. Of even greater concern is that the U.S. has repudiated the Geneva accords and espoused the use of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, and secretly through proxy regimes elsewhere with the so-called extraordinary rendition program. It is embarrassing to see the president and vice president insisting that the CIA should be free to perpetrate "cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment" on people in U.S. custody. Instead of reducing America's reliance on nuclear weapons and their further proliferation, we have insisted on our right (and that of others) to retain our arsenals, expand them, and therefore abrogate or derogate almost all nuclear arms control agreements negotiated during the last 50 years. We have now become a prime culprit in global nuclear proliferation. America also has abandoned the prohibition of "first use" of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear nations, and is contemplating the previously condemned deployment of weapons in space.Protection of the environment has fallen by the wayside because of government subservience to political pressure from the oil industry and other powerful lobbying groups. The last five years have brought continued lowering of pollution standards at home and almost universal condemnation of our nation's global environmental policies.Our government has abandoned fiscal responsibility by unprecedented favors to the rich, while neglecting America's working families. Members of Congress have increased their own pay by $30,000 per year since freezing the minimum wage at $5.15 per hour (the lowest among industrialized nations).I am extremely concerned by a fundamentalist shift in many houses of worship and in government, as church and state have become increasingly intertwined in ways previously thought unimaginable.As the world's only superpower, America should be seen as the unswerving champion of peace, freedom and human rights.
The U.S. Patent and trademark office issued a patent for a warp drive space vehicle (pdf)

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Giant Ape!
Odd collage of cattle brands from one of the barbed wire museums. Another good site and article on branding.

Sunday, November 13, 2005

War in ASCII
Finger DJ

Friday, November 11, 2005

Teeth-cleaning chewing gum
In another petulant, vitriolic rant from the neo-Con vomitorium Fox News, the hate-consumed Bill O'Reilly openly wished for acts of terrorism on American soil. Frustrated with democratic process in a recent San Francisco referendum vote, O'Reilly used our commonly owned, and licensed-in-good-faith airwaves to invite al Qaeda to destroy heavily visited city landmarks.

"Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead," O'Reilly went on. "And if al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead."
So intense is the fundamentalist hatred of Science, that Pat Robertson is making apocolyptic threats against Dover, PA, who recently booted the board who sponsored intelligent design in classrooms.

"And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there," he said.

Because, you know, God hates evidence, reason, analysis, and structured method.

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Tugging Asteroids out of of a collision-course (Nature)

So Lu and his fellow astronaut Stanley Love propose a spacecraft that simply hovers over the surface of the asteroid, using gravity as a towline. In this week's Nature1, they calculate that a 20-tonne craft could safely deflect a typical 200-metre-wide asteroid in about a year, assuming there is 20 years of warning to launch and get into position.
Kansas: No to evolution; Yes to intellectual-backwaterdom.

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

A photo-site of old radio dials at the onfocus photoblog
Sony is secretly installing a rootkit on customer's PCs as a hairbrained DRM measure, and they're getting away with it. If it was a 14 year old kid who wrote and propagated a rootkit, you can be sure that he would be branded as a black-hat criminal hacker and lawyers would be ruining his life right now, but the same standards don't apply to corporations in bed with the RIAA and MPAA.

A bobble-headed Sony exec interviewed by NPR:
"Most people don't know what a root kit is, so why should they care about it?" has to be the most idiotic statement I've heard this year outside of politics.

Some background on Sony's cynical attempt at user control is here.

Monday, November 07, 2005

Even the Vatican Catholics are coming out in favor of Evolution...
Beautiful wood tube radios from a gallery at radiophile.com

Sunday, November 06, 2005

Like any decent political-culture blog, the Daily Jive researches stories from any number of reputable media outlets - then we > . Lone Lantern has a huge collection of online video dedicated to such subjects as Illuminati, chip implants, NWOism, and that old stand-by, alien intervention in world affairs. Enjoy.

* I was contacted by Lone Lantern's site manager who objected to my characterization of his site. Commentary was removed. Site manager had this to say about his site's intention:

Those are propagandized stereotypes that defeat and discredit those of us who are truly working to bring truth to the fore.

I would like to ask that you change that statement in your blog and reflect that we are people who are seeding truth to a generation of people who have let mainstream media and cable television wash over them.

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

House To Vote on Political Blogging Rules
Sounds like a neoCon scam to get money via sites like Gannon's.
This is insane. The MPAA and RIAA want to inflict proprietary, closed DRM hacks on EVERY analog I/O device commercially sold - within one year, and their lawyers are writing laws on our behalf to make it happen. This is a must-read. How did these clowns come to hijack copyright law?

Feel free to flick through this new Halloween document: it's a legislative draft proposed by the MPAA for a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, on the topic "Content Protection in the Digital Age: The Broadcast Flag, High-Definition Radio, and the Analog Hole," on November 3rd.
On Thursday, they'll be no doubt declaring this law's passing to be vital to the entertainment industry's survival, just as Jack Valenti told the same committee that
the home video-recorder would kill the film industry.
Here's what the proposed law says, in a nutshell:
Every consumer analog video input device manufactured in the United States will be, within a year, forced to obey not one, but two new copy restriction technologies: a watermarking system called VEIL, and a rights system called CGMS-A (we've covered
CGMS-A before; we'll talk a bit more about VEIL soon).

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

MouseSong (Nature)
Defend yourself against the coming robot rebellion