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BREAKING SURF
Things at the Olympics are moving fast, and with our weekly publishing schedule we obviously won't be able to cover the games minute by minute. While the TV is fine for watching the competition, there's a lot more going on behind the scenes. This being the age of the weblog, naturally there are quite a few blogs covering the Olympics, many of them written by athletes and other insiders. The mis-information.net site has a list of about 40 regularly updated Olympic weblogs. Given that we found this list at the last minute we'll shamelessly confess that we haven't had time to look at all of them or to point you at the better ones. However, this list has a short synopsis of what's in each blog and should help you to find something of interest quickly.http://miss-information.net/blog/archives/000971.html
eBay Snags a Piece of Craigslist
eBay now owns a piece of Craigslist, but it didn't happen how you probably think it did. Back when Craig Newmark incorporated Craigslist, he gave some stock to a co-worker. The unnamed fellow decided to sell his stake and eBay expressed interest in buying it. eBay politely approached Newmark and asked if this was something he'd be OK with. It was, and eBay now owns about 25% of Craigslist. Business Wire has the press release (at our press time, eBay did not have it on their web site - a taste of big clueless corporate things to come?) while Newmark has some comments in his blog about how this came to pass. Much discussion has taken place in the Craigslist forums. So far, the community seems skeptical of eBay and the general feeling is that Craigslist will be ruined because of this.Craigslist: http://www.craigslist.com/
Business Wire: http://tinyurl.com/45f5b
Newmark: http://www.cnewmark.com/archives/000265.html
Craigslist forums: http://forums.craigslist.org/?forumID=20040813
Julia Child Puts down Her Knife
Not many people can be fingered as one who changed the course of history. Julia Child did - cultural history, at least. Every American foodie owes her a debt of gratitude, for without her influence, gourmet cooking, at home and out, might not be quite so prevalent in the US. She taught that cooking is a matter of good enough, not of perfection. She encouraged multitudes to leave behind standard pot roasts and meatloaves for more adventurous, tastier cooking. Child was almost a caricature of herself - a giant woman with a quaky falsetto, once working for the spooks of the OSS (cooking up shark repellent, no less), who only learned to cook in her mid 30s and 20 years later had a cooking show on TV. Her fame is exemplified by the fact that the Smithsonian Institution has her kitchen on display. The San Francisco Chronicle has a wonderfully biographical obituary, and PBS offers video clips of the "Julia Child: Lessons with Master Chefs" series.Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/08/14/MNG51886851.DTL
Smithsonian: http://americanhistory.si.edu/juliachild/
PBS: http://www.pbs.org/juliachild/
ACLU Report on the Surveillance-Industrial Complex
The ACLU has released "The Surveillance-Industrial Complex", a report (and associated Web sites) designed to educate individuals on how the US government collects and uses information about them. The ACLU coins the title phrase to highlight that it is private corporations that are compiling data on US citizens, primarily to allow the government to skirt laws that protect privacy. Wired has a quick summary of the situation, while the ACLU has a press release in addition to the report itself. "The Surveillance-Industrial Complex":http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=16224
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,64492,00.html
ACLU: http://www.aclu.org/Privacy/Privacy.cfm?ID=16229
At least one NSDer still gets an occasional chuckle from reminding his adult children about the slide rule he used throughout university. To them (and to him, too, now), a slide rule is mysterious, weird, archaic. Popular Science's Larry Smith, however, might now have a different opinion. Smith dared spend ten days living with the technology of 1954. How easy would it be, he wondered, to eliminate computers, debit cards, drip coffee makers, and a long list of other inventions and devices without which life as we know it is inconceivable? Smith found life not altogether terrible. In some ways, little things appear to have been the worst; coffee percolators, for example, brewed a beverage thin and insipid to modern taste buds. Smith read a lot more than usual and by the end felt less frantic and harried. In his account, Smith's informative and fascinating footnotes explain exactly when various modern contrivances came to be. The technology we've come to take for granted over the last 50 years might surprise you and might perhaps lead you to a greater appreciation of the old fogies who managed to survive under such primitive conditions.
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/computers/article/0,12543,642505-1,00.html
How the Internet Movie Database Became Indispensable
You might say Cole Needham is a bit of a fanatic about movies. He watches so many movies, often ten in a row on a Saturday, that in 1989 he started a database to keep track of which he'd seen. With the work of others', the database grew into the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), a resource that can answer nearly any question about any movie ever made and anyone who had anything to do with one. IMDb is a worldwide virtual workplace that employs 100 people and relentlessly adds and revises information to keep current, accurate, and indispensable. In 1996, the IMDb went commercial. Visions of a profitable enterprise with millions of hits a day did not get it started, but some things find a way to transmute into useful surprises. In 1998, Amazon.com acquired IMDb, but Needham continues to run it as a separate entity. Although the database started concentrating on completed movies, nowadays the site also contains information about movies in production or even just under discussion. Keeping that accurate and avoiding Hollywood hype is a tall order. LA Weekly looks at IMDb's amazing transformation.http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/37/features-finke.php
Amazon.com is one of a mere handful of dotcoms that have thrived and become household names. And there's little doubt that Jeff Bezos is largely responsible for that, taking the company from brash challenger of the status quo to gargantuan online retail presence. Bezos has had more than his share of luck, yet through Amazon.com's rise, his intuition and vision have been uncanny. This Fast Company article gives us a clear picture of one of the most consistently innovative and thoughtful entrepreneurs of recent times. While his laugh is notorious and hard to ignore, those who work with Bezos recognize that he means business. Many of his ideas are simple but effective, even if sometimes counterintuitive. In the article, Bezos has some sharp and penetrating things to say about the focus of business. In Amazon.com's case, it has remained firmly focused on providing value to the customer. That explains many of its innovations, such as allowing critical reviews, opening its pages to others who can sell identical goods at lower prices, and the profound Search Inside the Book. Bezos has survived critics and doubters, yet he's often highly attentive to them and thoughtful about criticism. His business principles and Amazon.com's rules are worth thinking about also.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/85/bezos_1.html
Money Can Buy Happiness - but It Doesn't
Everyone has heard that money doesn't buy happiness. Skeptics that we are, your loyal servants at NSD stand ready to put this concept to the test. Robert Frank, a professor of economics, thinks money can buy happiness, as long as you spend it on the right things. In brief, sinking that money into pointless tangible items like a bigger house or gold-plated garden shears is unlikely to increase your overall happiness, but if you spend your cash on items that reduce stress or on pursuits you enjoy, money just may buy you happiness after all. Frank distills his hypotheses in a Daedelus article in which he tries to explain why happiness does not increase as a society's overall wealth increases. The problem is that members of societies have to compete on a relative level for limited resources - such as, for example, top-notch private school places for their children - and this quest to compete forces individuals to abandon the budgets that would result in most happiness. read this and you'll come away with all sorts of insight, including why mommas shouldn't let their children grow up to be bus drivers.http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=6&tid=14403
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has released data on the rollover ratings of various cars, trucks, and SUVs. The data has been added to the ratings for head-on and side crashes. The ratings give the rollover risk of the vehicles and numerical indications of vehicular stability. There's a two-tiered system at work. Vehicles are given a star rating (e.g. 4/5 stars) and more detailed numerical values for various crash configurations. The Web site has explanations if you want to look up a car you own or want to buy.
http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/ncap/
"We the Media" Looks at Tech's Effect on Journalism
Dan Gillmor, the San Jose-based tech journalist who numbers among the most influential in the industry, has a new book, "We the media", on the emergence of grass-roots journalism in the form of blogs and other creative projects. O'Reilly has published Gillmor's book under a Creative Commons license, which gives anyone the right to copy, distribute, and modify the text. Remixes are already appearing, including the rapid translation into several languages. You can read the book by PDF chapters at O'Reilly and learn more about how the license is working at Gillmor's We the Media blog.O'Reilly: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wemedia/book/
We the Media: http://wethemedia.oreilly.com/
Newsmedia Appreciate Blogs - At Least, as Ads
Blogging unofficially entered the mainstream consciousness with the Democratic National Convention's welcoming and accreditation of bloggers. Increasingly, mainstream press are posting their own weblogs and encouraging bloggers to link to their content. This represents an about-face from the policy previously adopted by many media outlets - much to the lament of the lawyers, we suspect. It's not that the traditional media companies suddenly feel the love; it comes down to sheer numbers. The traffic generated by blogs that link to online news articles has been sufficiently compelling. While some mainstream journalists disdain the concept of blogging as journalism, no one can debate that bloggers can drive more eyes to view their work. Online Journalism Review has a brief but well done article on the state of the dance.http://ojr.org/ojr/business/1091660781.php
Having invented dogging (recall NSD 10.12), British mobile-phone users are taking phones and SMS to new heights of culture. British punk bands are using the Web and SMS to organize spontaneous concerts in pubs and subway cars, among other places - known as guerilla gigs. Bands have never lacked venues, and we'd assume that a planned, advertised session would both sound better and draw more people than a guerilla gig, so whats the attraction? The thrills of spontaneity and community, say the musicians in a short Wired piece. Guerilla gigs again confirm Howard Rheingold's smart-mobs thesis. First, mobile mobs met for fun, then for hook-ups and now for gigs. What's next? Elections?
NSD 10.12: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v10/nsd.10.12.html#BS11
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,64451,00.html
The US Postal Service (USPS) has just unveiled a new program that lets you put your own photo on a stamp. It is joining with Stamps.com, which already allows you to purchase and print your own official USPS stamps, to establish the PhotoStamps program. The USPS is a bit late to the game; Canada Post has been offering this capability for years. You upload the photo you want, create the stamp design, pay for the stamps, and the USPS will send you sheets of your stamps. A typical sheet of 20 stamps (at 37 cents each) costs $17, so you gotta really want to spend the extra $10. Naturally, you must have rights to any photos you use and you can't use images that are "obscene, offensive, blasphemous," and a dozen other adjectives. Please note that if you ever send us an envelope with either a baby or a cat on the stamp, we will hunt you down and make you eat it - unless, of course, it has a subscription check in it, in which case we'll just put you on our mailing list, which is punishment enough.
http://photo.stamps.com/
Internet Explorer Use Declines
Are the browser wars back? Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) has declined slightly in market share, and some contend that this portends a shift in how we access the Web. The idea seems a bit shaky, all the more so when we consider that a 1% decline in browser market share is hardly a severe diminution of popularity - IE still commands pretty close to 95% market share, after all. Nonetheless, we think the Guardian's well written and thought-provoking article is worth a read. That 1% may not be a lot, but for every 100 people using the Web, that's one who is just a little happier.http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1260994,00.html
Having Fun with Local Yahoo Beta
Keeping up with the Joneses - er, Googles, Yahoo is now getting into the local directory business. It has unveiled a local search site to compete with Google's version of the same thing. This sort of utility is good if you're looking for, say, a nearby dry cleaner. To illustrate the usefulness of the service, Yahoo encourages you to search for "casual bars" in San Francisco. But a moment's thought later we were compelled (by Satan no doubt) to try "leather bars". Sure enough, there's the list of 14. We were then equally compelled (by God?) to seek "leather bars" in Washington D.C. and found seven. Empirical proof that Washington is only half as sadomasochistic as San Francisco? You decide.http://local.yahoo.com/
Microsoft is experimenting with a Web interface to its MSN Messenger instant messaging service. It's exactly what you would expect, a Web interface that lets you talk live with other MSN Messenger users. You need a supported Web browser (including Netscape and Mozilla!) and you need to disable pop-up blocking - a mind-boggling decision in this day and age. Could Microsoft not have engineered this any other way? Though quite functional, the Web interface is very much a beta site, with support for only a limited number of simultaneous users and a request for feedback. The final service will launch later this year.
http://webmessenger.msn.com/
ONLINE CULTURE
Memory hardware is so cheap that you can easily afford to record your entire life as you live it. That's the premise of a new trend called life caching. Imagine being able to record all your conversations, all the people you meet, and all the products you buy. Your life cache would be invaluable as an aid to wetware memory and shareable besides. Mind you, sometimes forgetting stuff is integral to living; life caching may be more of a marketing tool than a life-enhancing technology. As Trendwatching.com makes clear, marketers are going to work especially hard to access individual caches. Currently, we can look at existing services, such as Gmail with its targeted advertising, to study the trade-offs between perfect memory and lack of privacy. Microsoft expresses its interest in the trend with its MyLifeBits (which someone somewhere is already calling MyLifeBites, we suspect). Life caching is both interesting and disturbing. Doesn't all this miss what made the novel "Possession" so deliciously bittersweet?Trendwatching.com: http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/LIFE_CACHING.htm
Microsoft: http://research.microsoft.com/barc/MediaPresence/MyLifeBits.aspx
The question under consideration is, to quote Danny O'Brien, "How many people do you need to be famous for?" O'Brien is wondering about the nature of fame. He posits that there used to be a time when you were either famous or not, but with the enormous social connectivity brought about by the Net, this once binary state has become smeared into a spectrum. Now, there are many people who are somewhat famous, who lie in the spectrum somewhere between anonymity and Madonna. O'Brien defines the new middle class of fame as "a whole world of people who aren't really famous, but could spend their days only talking to people who think they're fucking fantastic (or horrifyingly notorious)." Think of semi-popular bloggers or, as in O'Brien 's example, a small-time band with a small but fanatical fan base. O'Brien's blog has more, and we wanted to bring this to your attention, because he christens yet another Net-mediated cultural phenomenon.
http://www.oblomovka.com/entries/2004/08/08#1091959020
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The (mis)Behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward
Coming Clean: The Best and Worst of DailyConfession.com
The Last Alchemist: Count Cagliostro, Master of Magic in the Age of Reason
Electronic Gadgets for the Evil Genius: 28 Build-It-Yourself ProjectsSURFING SITES
Spidey-mania crested again this summer (and in the spirit of brevity we will again, as always, callously dismiss the Southern Hemisphere). The webbed crusader has adorned buses, Kool-Aid, and just about anything geared toward kids - which is a bit surprising considering the adult quality of "Spider-Man 2". Hundreds of fan sites and spoofs inundate the Net, and perhaps the most intricate and inventive is this Lego adaptation of the latest Spider-Man movie. Directed by Tim Drage and Tony Mines, this mini-movie is pure creative genius. Every inch of the landscape in this world is made from Lego, including the cars, streets and even fire hydrants. The details are remarkable given the medium. This gem can be viewed in either Windows Media or QuickTime format. Total running time is just under four minutes.http://movies.yahoo.com/movies/feature/spiderman2.html
It's a sad reflection of the times we live in that when someone mentions a Web site called Women and Dogs, you automatically think of something rather unpalatable. Rest assured that although you may want to scrub the URL from your cache after visiting, this site is nothing more than a charming, if eccentric, online photo album of pictures of women and dogs. The site's creator, Marcus, found his interest piqued by a photograph he found in a second-hand book in 1998. A couple of months later, he discovered an old photograph of a woman and a dog while rummaging in a thrift store and a collection was born. This is all quixotic fancy, but heck, that's what makes the Internet the wonderful place it is. Besides, these photographs provide a wonderful springboard for Marcus's whimsical imagination - the captions are wonderful "This woman and dog look like they want to go off together and have fun, but the stern man looks like he will stop them."
http://womenanddogsuk.co.uk/
By now, most of you know of Netflix and its neat DVD-rental business model: make a list of DVDs you want to see, Netflix sends you the first three, and as you return them, Netflix mails you more. Knowing a good idea when they see it, the folks behind the Bag Borrow or Steal site have applied this business model to an unlikely item - women's purses (as opposed to the increasingly familiar man purses). Sign up, borrow a bag that catches your fancy, use it until you're tired of it, then return it in exchange for another. The site offers three membership levels: Trendsetter ($20), Princess ($50), and Diva ($100), which differ in the number and quality of handbags available for borrowing. Today handbags, tomorrow... underwear?
Bag Borrow or Steal: http://bagborroworsteal.com/index.cfm
Man Purse: http://www.citypaper.net/earshot/earshot.0997/manstyle.manpurse.shtml
When BBC's "Top Gear" road-tested the Aston Martin DB9, the show simply set it head-to-head against a 200-mph high-speed train. The rules of the contest were quite simple: a straightforward race from Surrey in the south of England to Monte Carlo in the south of France. Ordinarily, the car would not stand a chance, but as presenter Jeremy Clarkson points out, the 190-mph, 460-bhp DB9 is no ordinary car. One would have thought that France's restrictive speed limits would have reduced this to a no-contest, but Clarkson got some help from French police who, instead of pulling the car over, would actually encourage him to put his foot down to show them what it's got. The car's the star of this show without question, but the boyishly enthusiastic Clarkson plays a marvelous supporting role with his fine turn of phrase, describing, for example, the DB9's predecessor, the DB7, as "a Jag in drag, an XJS in a party frock." To see the bit, go to the "Top Gear" site and click on Downloads in the left-hand menu, then choose "DB9 vs Train".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/topgear/
BBC Offers Samples of 82 Years of Interviews
The BBC has amassed an unparalleled archive of broadcast interviews in its 82-year history, and it has made a small selection - interviews of some 150 people - available online. The selection is a diverse one that leans towards the arts and literature but also contains material with scientists, sportsmen, and political activists. Many of the interviewees have long since died, and to hear their voices is to reach back into the past. In an interview with Walter de la Mare, the English writer describes a meeting he had with Thomas Hardy, thus delving further back along the continuum of literary history. Some of the interviews are hugely entertaining, such as the one with Salvador Dali talking of geology, hallucinatory landscapes, and the symbolism of his moustache; some, such as Mahatma Ghandi's 1931 spiritual message to the world, are uplifting. All are utterly fascinating in their own way.http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/
Orphans and Waifs in Turn-of-the Century Britain
Hidden Lives focuses on the work of the Waifs and Strays Society, an organization that cared for disadvantaged children in England and Wales in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Web site offers a history of the organization and articles on the issues surrounding poverty, family life, and the social conditions of the period, but the most fascinating feature of the site is the archive material. You can browse case summaries of some of the 22,500 children the society looked after and see scans of letters, court orders, and other source material together with, perhaps most touching of all, photographs of some of the children. The files are searchable by keywords, such as "abandonment", "neglect", and "disability", which give something of a clue as to the wretched conditions these children lived in before they were taken into care.http://www.hiddenlives.org.uk/
"Preparing for Emergencies" Parody
HM Government (that's the Brits) recently published Preparing for Emergencies, a pamphlet and associated Web site meant to prepare individuals for emergencies of a terrorist or other nature. One threat the government did not foresee was that someone might buy an extremely similar domain name and spoof the site. The spoof contains similar content as prepared by HM Department of Vague Paranoia. Some knowledge of the British is useful, but everyone will find plenty of truth and plenty of understandable humor on this site. While neither site descends to the level of the US Department of Homeland Security's advice to use duct tape and plastic sheeting, the parody still achieves a wicked defense by humor.Real: http://www.preparingforemergencies.gov.uk/
Parody: http://www.preparingforemergencies.co.uk/
We all think we have a unique spin on life, a vision of how the world should be were it ideal. Plenty of us love to articulate our worldview to our friends, particularly with beer in hand. But have you ever thought that perhaps someone beat you to it? You can check whether someone did at the Ethical Philosophy Selector. Answer 12 multiple choice questions about morality, happiness, and how you believe people should behave towards each other, and the site compares your statements to database summaries of various philosophies throughout the ages and informs you of the closest matches. The list of results contains each philosopher's key points so you can read them for yourself. If you agree that they thought of your ideas first, you don't have to tell anybody. Just read the recommended books, then wow your friends at the next party by actually making sense.
http://selectsmart.com/PHILOSOPHY/
Not that long ago, it wasn't uncommon for thieves to break into offices, steal computer memory chips, and leave everything else untouched. Memory was an expensive commodity, but times have changed. It's not free quite yet, and we like to get the best performance for our money - which is where TrustedReviews comes in. The site invited memory manufacturers to submit a couple of 512-MB memory modules at budget and/or "enthusiast" levels for a bit of friendly testing. The testers received 18 modules and proceeded to run them through rigorous benchmarking analysis. The resulting 33-page document is online and contains some surprising bits of insight: we were surprised to learn that the units submitted by Crucial, one of the world's largest memory manufacturers, came in dead last. For those bearing the geek gene, this will make for reading worth blogging and bickering over. For the rest, perhaps the most telling line is this: "That' s not to say that faster isn't better, it's just not as critical as some would have us believe."
http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?head=83&page=1249
Every consumer can recall really bad or amazingly good episodes of customer service and well priced products they've bought. Imagine the power consumers would have to influence products and suppliers if they pooled their knowledge for the common good. That's the theory behind Preferred Consumer, which believes that each of us has the right to privacy, good service, and great value, and that all this can be achieved via the Net. Articles supplied by readers and researchers cover most consumer decisions from "How to Choose a Lawnmower" to creative ways for teenagers to earn cash to advice on how to find a suitable work/life balance. The most bizarrely titled article at the site has to be "Zen and the Art of Ferrets", but that just proves that the site is as comprehensive as it should be. All articles are well researched, often with additional links for further reading. This could be worth a bookmark.
http://www.preferredconsumer.com/
Infomercials are a staple of late-late-night television that seek to prey upon the sleep-deprived consumer. Sadly, they now invade daytime TV, too, and even have entire channels devoted to the form. Characteristically, the fast-talking, trite hosts appear astonished at the miracles wrought with a seemingly simple product. Infomercials have peddled everything from the Ab Sonic to the Gutter Flusher. We've all been exposed to these advertising marathons and, at the very least, you've probably asked yourself whether the products work. The Infomercial Reviewer site, though comatose for a year and a half, still offers its reviews of some of the most popular infomercial products to appear onscreen. Browse through visitor-submitted ratings and comments for a testament to the real deal behind such "as seen on TV" products as the FlexiHose, Magic Wallet, and Torso Tiger. Unfortunately, some of the products listed here have yet to be reviewed. We hope the site revives - it's kinda like a Consumer Reports for insomniacs.
http://infomercialreviewer.netfirms.com/
Outragedmoderates.org may be this site's name, but the audience is really moderates who are not about to vote for President Bush. These folks may not like John Kerry much better, but Bush has them outraged. The site is a combination of news items and blog sections. For the most part, the opinions expressed are moderate, but solidly partisan. It's an excellent place to get away from the rabid attack-dog mentality of most of 2004's political sites, and the primary reason we include it is its selection of documents that point out, among other things, the incredibly wasteful practices of Halliburton in Iraq. The site's quotes section is also particularly good. The Four Things America Agrees On section should be read to every politician before every political appearance. Maybe some of it would eventually sink in.
http://www.outragedmoderates.org/
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
Everybody and their brother's mule has an opinion about the war in Iraq. Michael Tucker brings it to life with his documentary, "Gunner Palace". Get a taste of it here. It's a documentary like none that has been produced to date on the topic. What are you made of? You'll get an idea of that right here.http://www.gunnerpalace.com/
He does. Really. He even has an opinion about the best crayon. And don't you wish you had, like, 800,000 points of articulation? We sure do.
http://www.x-entertainment.com/articles/0913/
Rockwell Automation has an important new product announcement, on video. The introduction of the company's new retro-encabulator displays first-class use of illustrative hand gestures, we must say. Hmmm, didn't someone announce a turbo-encabulator in the early 1940s?
Rockwell Automation: http://media.ebaumsworld.com/retro.wmv
Turbo-Encabulator: http://www.floobydust.com/turbo-encabulator/
This is a series of extreme close-up photographs of ENIAC, one of the earliest computers. The images were captured this year by Benjamin Pierce, who explains his connection to the machine in a preface.
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/photos/2004-eniac.html
CIA Asks Bush to Discontinue Blog
That's the headline of this rather funny Onion article which spoofs blogs, the President, and assorted government flunkies. The article itself refers to a now non-existent PrezGeorgeW blog the unoccupied domain name of which was snapped up by a mischievous blogger named Andy - read the first post.Onion: http://www.theonion.com/news/index.php?issue=4031
PrezGeorgeW: http://prezgeorgew.typepad.com/
Back in March, a little thing called the Sloganator made its debut on a Bush/Cheney campaign Web site. The little toy let you make your own Bush/Cheney campaign slogans. It was pulled quickly. This fond memorial tribute shows why. Hey, a quick Googling found a revived and probably unauthorized copy....
Sloganator Memorial: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~meo232/sloganator/
Sloganator: http://www.bushsloganator.com/
Remember the Subservient Chicken? Well, this is like that, except now it's a guy in a Bush mask. Political propaganda at its weirdest.
http://www.subservientpresident.net/
Fuck You and the Hummer You Rode in on
The people who contribute to Fuck You and Your H2 have some strong opinions about the Hummer. If your PhD thesis involves studying the middle phalange of the human hand, you'll want to check out the impressive database of images.http://www.fuh2.com/
FlyGuy is a little piece of Flash animation that's a cross between a game and a zen koan. You're a little guy waiting at the bus stop who, by the way, can fly. As you fly, you interact with other objects you meet along the way. It's a very relaxing way to spend way too much time.
http://www.trevorvanmeter.com/flyguy/
With hits like "Save Ginny Weasley", "Wizard Chess", and "The Wrath of Hermione", this band is going straight to the top. Harry and the Potters is on tour in the southeast US through the end of this month.
http://www.eskimolabs.com/hp/listen.htm
How to Build a Computer for Almost No Money at All
This is strictly humor, and British humor at that. Do not attempt to actually build the system as described, and you'll be fine. We pretty near burned NSD HQ to the ground following these instructions. Do be careful.http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ashen1/ashen/menu/build/intro.htm
TunesTracker is a neat tool that checks the iTunes Music Store daily for you. Sign up and select some artists, and TunesTracker sends you e-mail when new tunes by those artists appear.
http://www.tunestracker.com/
This little MT Tags applet will get your browser to pop up a reference to all Movable Type tags. MT Tags works one way or another in any browser, and is worth checking out by anybody who uses Movable Type to maintain a blog.
http://www.movalog.com/mttabs/
TAC (Anti) Compression for OS X
If you're embarrassed when your friends come over and see all that empty space on your new terabyte hard drive, TAC is the solution. This free Mac OS X app will process files to create new files a minimum of 10 times larger than the original. Better, meaning bigger, results are common.http://www.taccompression.com/
Who doesn't love baked goods shaped like naughty bits? The site comes (ahem!) with recipes. And no, we don't think yours will need more flour. Really.
http://www.porn-bread.com/