Super Tuesday of the FUTURE

We're getting really close to the future of the internet I saw coming over a decade ago. Check it:

Watching TV. Multiple channels of it. At once. Without commercials. Themed. On my computer.

Extra bonus: Uploading a video for you to see it!

It's really like this!

A snippet from our gmail conversation just now. It's easy to see why I'm marrying her.

5:17 PM Jenn: no

5:21 PM ok babe

im off

see you at home

love you

me: yeah

lucky

love you

ride safe

5:22 PM Jenn: i will

you too

me: i will

someday

Jenn: :(

me: in some far and distant future

Jenn: i am going to whole foods

bc i need an ingredient for my planned dinner

you want anything?

me: i'm going to die in this chair. i've been here 134 years already today

Jenn: aw

:(

sorry honey

me: no, really. it's the year 2142.

5:23 PM Jenn: :(

me: everyone's still using gasoline, though

Jenn: ok well! try to have fun with that!

see you at home

love you

ride safe

bye

me: the pigeons have mutuated, however

they're REALLY big now

Jenn: mutuated?

me: shut up

Jenn: yeah

ok bye!

me: keyboard keys have gotten smaller in the future

love you

Jenn: love you

I'z in ur meem, postin mai rezultz

Your Score: Serious Cat

35 % Affection, 21 % Excitability , 60 % Hunger

Hungry for knowledge in any internet forum, you demand decorum. Any off-topic remarks, absurd statements, or tomfoolery on the interweb is deeply frowned upon by you. Truth has no room for drollery.

Link: The Which Lolcat Are You? Test written by GumOtaku on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

The Web pulls a Cool Stuff hat-trick

First Score: Last.fm. From November 2003 until last March, I ventured into the world of personal music charts with the Milboard iTunes Top 40. It eventually became too much of a task compiling the thing, though I did have a considerable system for getting songs ranked. The big failing of the chart was that when I went through a period of not listening to music at all, a weekly chart becomes pointless. So the chart went away. Almost a year later, thanks to last.fm, the chart is nearing a return.

Last.fm will, provided you install a plugin to your favorite music player, keep track of what you listen to, and give you daily updated rankings of your favorite tracks and artists, as well as checking out what folks who have similar listening habits are listening to. The database is fairly comprehensive, and updates almost live (recently updated tracks appear within about a minute of their playing).

You may not get as excited about music charts as I do, but trust me, this is awesome. On the Awesome scale, this is easily a 9.6.

Assist on the first goal goes to Grandmaster Strobe.

Second score: The South Park Studio. The character to the left is my own interpretation of myself in South Park stylings. All the elements are there in the Flash-based Studio to do the same for yourself, including outfitting yourself in a Butters t-shirt weilding a light saber. Awesome scale reads: 9.1.

Third score: The Advertising Slogan Generator. Plug in what you want to sell, click Sloganize, and voila!

My favorite result has been to Sloganize Grandmaster Strobe's name. The results are a fitting tribute:

• You Deserve a Dann Brown Today.
• Pure Dann Brown.
• Only Dann Brown Can Prevent Forest Fires.
• It's not TV. It's Dann Brown.
• The Curiously Strong Dann Brown.
• etc. etc.

Awesome scale reads: 9.9, provided suitable input. Hours and hours of fun. Kevan dot org gets the assist.

Something completely different

Heh. I liveblogged. Afterwards, I needed a respite, so I went upstairs and spent time with the cat help babysit during the week. She fell asleep on my chest. Cats falling asleep on me turns out to be way more important than the stuff that went on down the street last night.

Today, I took some kind of personality test. The link to it is below the results graph, which you will see right... now:

Advanced Global Personality Test Results Extraversion |||||| 26% Stability |||||| 30% Orderliness |||||||||| 40% Accommodation |||||||||| 36% Interdependence |||||||||| 36% Intellectual |||||||||||||| 56% Mystical |||||| 23% Artistic |||||||||||||||| 63% Religious |||||||||||| 50% Hedonism |||||||||||| 50% Materialism |||||||||||||||| 63% Narcissism |||||| 30% Adventurousness |||| 16% Work ethic |||||||||||||||||||| 83% Self absorbed |||||||||| 36% Conflict seeking |||||||||||| 43% Need to dominate |||||||||| 36% Romantic |||||||||||| 50% Avoidant |||| 16% Anti-authority |||||||||||| 50% Wealth |||| 16% Dependency |||||||||||||| 56% Change averse |||||||||||||||||||| 83% Cautiousness |||||||||||||| 56% Individuality |||||| 23% Sexuality |||||||||||||||| 70% Peter pan complex |||||||||||| 43% Physical security |||||||||||| 43% Physical Fitness || 10% Histrionic |||||||||||| 43% Paranoia |||||||||||||| 56% Vanity |||||||||||| 43% Hypersensitivity |||||||||| 36% Female cliche |||||| 23%

Take Free Advanced Global Personality Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

Stability results were low which suggests you are very worrying, insecure, emotional, and anxious.
Orderliness results were moderately low which suggests you are, at times, overly flexible, improvised, and fun seeking at the expense of reliability, work ethic, and long term accomplishment.
Extraversion results were low which suggests you are very reclusive, quiet, unassertive, and secretive.
trait snapshot: messy, depressed, introverted, feels invisible, does not make friends easily, nihilistic, reveals little about self, fragile, dark, bizarre, feels undesirable, dislikes leadership, reclusive, weird, irritable, frequently second guesses self, unassertive, unsympathetic, low self control, observer, worrying, phobic, suspicious, unproductive, avoidant, negative, bad at saving money, emotionally sensitive, does not like to stand out, dislikes large parties, submissive, daydreamer

There are some results here I don't agree with. That trait snapshot really does paint in flattering strokes, doesn't it? But there it is, based on a 120-ish question exam where you fit yourself on a 5-point spectrum. Anyhoo, go, have fun.

Hat tip: Suzie Lightning.

Huh III

Huh.

No words for this one. You're just going to have to watch it. There's a bit o' language for you sensitive types. So turn your speakers down for the love o' Pete.

Best. Garfield. Ever.

Courtesy of this page, I discovered why Garfield is so good, even after 83 years. To wit (click to enlarge):



Jim Davis (or whatever goo-in-jar that is keeping his brain alive) is a freakin' genius!

Actually, that strip is a mashup of actual strips. The link above takes you to a script that randomly takes three Garfield panels and randomly assigns them a spot in the sequence. Most of the time the results don't make any sense, but occassionally it's comedy gold. You can, as I did, prevent certain panels from being replaced (whatever the lead-up to it is, something about Jon asking nervously about a blender is funny). You can't, however, save your strip or in any other way preserve it for posterity unless you capture your screen and trim the fat in your favorite image editor. But whatever.

Hat Tip: Boing Boing.

So funny I coughed up a lung.

It's shit like this that restores my oft-waning faith in humanity.

White House denies spying without Warrant

I'm a bigger geek than you. Well, not you Lincoln.

I'm such an enormous geek, in fact, that this blog can no longer contain it. Behold: Checkypantz.

This new blog is the exclusive home of my travails in learning ColdFusion. Not the scientific process, but the software. I set it up to prevent the great majority of you from getting bored to tears by my upcoming discussions of parameters, behaviors, problems with the Verity engine or whatever else I happen to be struggling with that day. You can thank me later.

Anyway, if you're a glutton for punishment, it's located over here.

IM Archive: 17.June.2002

Occasionally I'll save good bits of IM conversations and revisit them when I'm feeling particularly vapid. Tonight I came across this gem, a conversation clearly growing out of the overwhelming boredom with my job that I was experiencing. Bourgeois Deviant is the other party here.

Checkypantz (1:31:48 PM): bongiorno!
BourgeoisD (1:32:42 PM): Are you Romanian?
Checkypantz (1:32:57 PM): i am a russian woman
BourgeoisD (1:33:12 PM): Or are you Bulgarian?
Checkypantz (1:33:27 PM): we cannot call them bulgarians
BourgeoisD (1:33:42 PM): Why?
Checkypantz (1:34:23 PM): because that would make the Master of Kittens angry
BourgeoisD (1:36:56 PM): You would be the master of Kittens?
Checkypantz (1:37:08 PM): HEATHEN!
Checkypantz (1:37:21 PM): you cannot see the Master of Kittens.
BourgeoisD (1:37:52 PM): *sees Master of Kittens and giggles*
BourgeoisD (1:40:30 PM): Would the real Master of Kittens please stand up?
Checkypantz (1:41:03 PM): the Master of Kittens casts no shadow in direct sunlight.
BourgeoisD (1:42:12 PM): *Just wants the real Master of Kittens to please stand up*
Checkypantz (1:42:35 PM): the Master of Kittens dances beside itself on the head of a pin.
BourgeoisD (1:43:03 PM): (what the hell IS the Master of kittens?)
Checkypantz (1:45:33 PM): the Master of Kittens has three faces. The first, completely unobscured, represents Reality. The second, partially obscured, represents Justice. The third, completely obscured, represents Equality. Then there is the fourth face, which is not really anything, and represents that which we cannot understand, and cannot be touched by mortals.
BourgeoisD (1:50:34 PM): are you making this shit up?
Checkypantz (1:50:41 PM): yes

Extra Credit: What fictional character am I referencing?

I have seen the future, and it will be... (The Italics Entry)

Part 1, Aperitif: There's yet another new thing over in the sidebar: A little button that says "Skype". If you have Skype installed, it will dial me up. Skype is sort of like Vonage, except there's no actual phone (you need a microphone attached to your compy), and it's free. If you need to know more, it's over at their home page. (Skype is one of those awesome web technologies that will eventually get bought by Google and made perfect, but it does the job pretty well right now.) Caveat: You have to be on my contact list to get through, or I won't even know you called. Email me at "s c a m p i" at gmail dot com, removing the quotes and taking the spaces out of the stuff before the at sign. Then Skype Me.

Part 2, Meat & Potatoes: Back when I was hell-bent and purposefully striding toward a career in broadcasting (circa 1988-1993), I always imagined that I wanted a radio show of my very own. How cool, I tantalized, would it be to have a microphone and studio and all the trappings of a radio show all subject to whatever whim I was harboring that particular moment. There was a certain cache to having the power of the mic at my disposal.

Heedless of any regard I had for the unique power of the voice that I had, technology has now made that power meaningless. Everyone and their mom can (and do) have their own radio shows now. They're called podcasts, and I'm just now getting hip to them.

I'd heard the term bandied about 'round about the time that the iPod started making them popular, but being the old geezer that I am I was content to let this newfangled bit of technology pass me by (as I have with other whizz-bang acronyms like PSP, HD, XM, RSS... the list goes on). Then I came across a news item on one of my chief geek-out sites that led me to this site, that led me to realize that anyone can have a radio show. I don't say that in a necessarily derogatory manner. Just stating the facts.

Anyway, at tfrollout, there's a podcast that they recently introduced where four guys (in four georgraphically disparate locations, sit around discussing stuff that may or may not interest anyone else. And there was a link to get their podcast, and it opened up this whole new world. In iTunes, it popped open the Music Store, which I generally avoid, and then popped to their Podcast section. Also, this new category popped up over where the playlists are kept, called (shockingly enough) "Podcasts". What you see when you get to the Podcast area of the Store, though, is what enthralled me...

Hundreds... nay, thousands of people with their own radio shows. As of this writing there are 417 podcast shows in the Politics category alone (with 21 categories total, like Travel, Arts, Education, Audio Blogs...). Some of the titles are awesome: 101 Uses for Baby Wipes, KCRC Airchecks, and Awful Podcast Showcase, of which I'm downloading an episode as I type.

The whole notion is actually thrilling. I mean, here's just thousands of people sitting around talking - for the most part - to their computers. Sometimes they're all by theirselves, sometimes they have friends "in studio". And as long as they have something to say, regardless of Production Values (or lack thereof), they're entertaining. That's not to say that all of the entertaining ones are my cup of tea (I probably won't be checking out the baby wipes one), but... just damn. How freakin' cool.

I heartily endorse the time wasted browsing around in the iTunes Music Store for the (largely) free podcasts.

Wayback Machine: SU

Remember when Susquehanna's web page looked like this?

I do. It was the very first web page I visited, likely in the spring, but definitely the fall of 1995.

Must-see TV: Rita edition

(Start @ 3:22 am edt) I want to tip my hat right now to the coverage provided by KPLC in Lake Charles this morning. The folks there moved out of their studios earlier today and went to their shelter-in-place location, the 5th floor of a hospital there (Krista St. Patrick? corner of South Ryan and Foster Street), and have been sitting around a tiny table in a hallway doing their damnedest to continue to provide local information.

The coverage, which I've been watching courtesy of this feed (it works in Windows Media Player in Windows, I don't know about other platforms), has been by far the most intense of the night.

As I'm writing this, they're sitting at their makeshift studio listening to people in the background watching the roof, since another building in this hospital complex has just gone through a partial collapse of some sort. No, check that... a conference room down the hall has just lost its part of the roof. No, just a window in that conference room blew out. The fog of war...

The whole thing is so raw, and so effective and so low-tech, compared to what else is on. CNN and Fox News have their glitz and glamour and their star personnel on the scene and their fancy-schmancy graphics and no soul. The blogs this evening are talking a bit about the Joel Kline memo about an arresting "Category 4" graphic. I wonder if Joel wonders as hard about the actual content of what they're getting on the air.

These folks at KPLC have reminded me, just by telling the story, stripping it free of all the crawls and the rest of the crap that have infested broadcast news, what a good, solid news story is. It also reminds me of a couple of other stellar broadcasts I've seen in my life.

The first really good one I saw myself was on January 16, 1991. David French was anchoring an interview on CNN when he interrupted the interview to say, "We need to go to Baghdad." He threw to Baghdad, and* a very nervous Bernard Shaw came on and said, "Something is happening outside." And for the next 17 hours or so, they were broadcasting live from Baghdad. In the wake of Gulf War II, that sort of thing seems a little provincial (no, there was no live video of the explosions, just the excited voices after feeling the bombs detonate near the hotel... very Murrow-esque). But it was the only link anyone from the West had to Baghdad. Dick Cheney, who was then Secretary of State, even joked (maybe only half-so) that everything he knew about the situation on the ground in Baghdad was coming from CNN. It was that remarkable.

There has been other good news coverage since then. But what broadcasters credit as the beginning of this Breaking News mindset, scrambling resources to cover the story as best you can, was the Kennedy assassination in 1963. In 1988, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the assassination, A&E ran a program they called "As It Happened". It was a brilliant program. It was nothing more and nothing less than the coverage, as it aired on NBC, of the assassination.

NBC News broke into their regular network programming about half an hour(!) after the shots rang out in Dealy Plaza to report that they were hearing that Governor Connally of Texas and the President were fired at, and there were conflicting reports, but it sounded like Governor Connally received the worst of it. The fog of war...

What made coverage of this story so peculiar, so compelling and so revolutionary was the immediacy of it. For the first time, television news was trying to cover a massive story as it was happening and not relying on passing on wire reports as their sole source of information. Frank McGee (the guy at far left in the picture above) was on the phone with their man in the hospital where Kennedy (who they later figured out had been grieveously wounded) was. He would listen to their reporter, who was on one of the hospital pay phones, and then recite, word-for-word, the "copy" the hospital reporter was dictating. Later, as the revolution in Breaking News coverage continued as people watched, Frank McGee was handed some kind of device that he attached to the earpiece of the handset, which he attached, then held the phone up to the mic and let the hospital reporter deliver his material directly.

The reason why I offer this history lesson, and why I'm geeking out about this tonight, is that the strategy KPLC appears to be using (or, at least, had been before their feed was interrupted) is similar. Stripped of the trappings of their studio, they had to rely on their journalistic talents alone. And the singular talent of a journalist, a good journalist, is the ability to tell the story. The way the KPLC anchors were telling the story was to contact their sources (NOAA folks, emergency folks, correspondent folks) by telephone, hold up the phone to the microphone, turn on the speakerphone feature, and let them deliver their reports. It was the struggle and the simplicity that makes for riveting television, and the best reporting on Rita I've seen tonight.

So, even though your transmitter has been knocked over, or your web server has lost power, or whatever has happened that I can no longer watch you this morning, folks at KPLC, bravo on everything you could do.

* At 3:49 am edt, the KPLC net feed just stopped. Switch to KHOU.