New Year's Meme

Here’s another one of those "your music player is a fortune teller" memes. The rules are simple: put your music player on shuffle, press forward for each question and use the song title as the answer.

Oh, great and powerful Amarok, tell me the answers to all of life’s mysteries.

What does next year have in store for me?
"Veritech Attack" by Pajama Crisis
Maybe these will be miniature, human-sized Veritechs piloted by Space Littles.
What’s my love life like?
"Dick Tracy" by The Ventures
Comic-strip Film Noir meets Surf Rock. Great.
What do I say when life gets hard?
"Bob’s Theory of Ten Storied Houses" by Phil’s Finest Hour
"Bob would claim the world was run by robots. He came to this apparent understanding while watching the metrics of LSD."
What do I think of on waking up?
"Why Am I Treated So Bad" by Cannonball
It’s probably for constantly claiming that the world is run by robots.
What song will I dance to at my wedding?
"Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (reprise)" by The Beatles
Assuming that the Space Littles in their miniature Veritechs don’t get to me first.
What do I want as a career?
"Evening at Lafitte’s" by Squirrel Nut Zippers

That’s a place where everything’s so fascinating
It’s a place for dancing and romancing
That’s a place where you and me should go if we were lovers
Stealing an evening at Lafitte’s

So I want to do… what, exactly?

My favorite saying?
"Act I: Garibaldi’s Nightmare" by Christopher Franke
"And so… it begins"
Favorite place?
"Minuet in Jazz" by Raymond Scott
Apparently, my favorite place is some kind of Loony Tunes fantasia.
What do I think of my parents?
"MegaMan2" by Minibosses
Can I switch the last two around? No? Whatever.
What’s my porn star name?
"Hell" by Squirrel Nut Zippers
I don’t want to be known as the Squirrel Nut anything.
Where would I go on a first date?
"Fight" by JunkieXL
I guess going to see a fight is better than going to Hell.
Drug of choice?
"Tschaikowsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, Op 64 – Andante cantabile" by Tschaikowsky
Apparently, it’s to be a snob.
Describe myself.
"Babyface" by U2
Hey, Amarok picked it, not me.
What is the thing I like doing most?
"Sea of Sorrow" by Alice in Chains
I think it means looking to the future rather than wallowing in the past. Okay, fine.
What is my state of mind like at the moment?
"Cool Runnings" by Crying Out Loud
Sorry, what? I was too busy watching the paint peel and the grass grow.
How will I die?
"One Tree Hill" by U2
As a martyr to the idea of freedom of speech? Well, crap. I guess it beats choking to death on a ham sandwich.
December 31, 2007 | Posted in: amusement | No Comments »

Plugged Back In

Hello again! Spending a week in freezing weather, with neither Web nor e-mail, with not even a reliable cell signal, at Christmas, with family, is… very nice indeed. Here’s to next year, but here’s hoping it won’t be that long.

Plugging back in, I ran across this "incredibly loony scrolling video-collage of found GIF animations." William Gibson was wrong– this is Cyberspace! Not populuxe monuments of data, but a roaring, seething, shouting mass. Brace yourself, here comes the Intarweb!


via pinktentacle

December 29, 2007 | Posted in: amusement | No Comments »

Happy Holidays

It occurs to me that the phrase “Happy Holidays” may have an additional meaning. As you probably know, what we in the US call a “Vacation” is called a “Holiday” on the other side of the Atlantic. Therefore, the phrase “Happy Holidays” could be used not only a one-size-fits-all season’s greeting, but could also be used as a sort of “bon voyage.” So, whether you’re traveling this season, or staying home, happy holidays to you.

December 22, 2007 | Posted in: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

BERZAP! ZUURCH! KABLOOT!

Somebody sent me an interesting quiz on Sci-Fi Sound Effects. I thought it was pretty easy, and I’d probably have scored a little higher if the sound hadn’t been so choppy.

Take the Sci fi sounds quiz I received 93 credits on
The Sci Fi Sounds Quiz
How much of a Sci-Fi geek are you?

And, just for fun, here’s another one that I’ve been holding on to for a rainy day.

NerdTests.com says I'm a Cool High Nerd. What are you? Click here!

December 21, 2007 | Posted in: amusement | No Comments »

Link-O-Rama

Pink Tentacle brings us the 2007 Robot of the Year. The winner is a food-safe pick-and-place robot that can handle up to 120 bon-bons per minute. Lucy, you’re fired.

Although the medical runners-up are performing noble work, I’m intrigued by the Miuro, which is essentially a rolling boombox. Could it, I wonder, be programmed to barge into my room early in the morning and begin a specially crafted playlist designed to wake me up gently? Could it also be programmed to evade my inevitable groggy attempts to capture it? If it can do that, the surely it can also begin playing a "Time to Go" song at just the right moment to urge me out the front door on time.

It just wouldn’t be a proper Link-O-Rama if I were to cover only one subject. So here’s amusical teacup:


Theremugfrom KyleMcDonald on Vimeo

| Posted in: link-o-rama, robotics, video | No Comments »

Look, a robot!

Toyota recently unveiled its robotic violinist. Like many commercial Japanese robots, the violinist is designed to be clean and friendly in appearance, the better to project the image of a helper and friend.

Had this robot been built in the United States, it might have looked abit more like this.

Robot Devil

On the other end of the complexity (but perhaps not evilness) scale isEvil Mad Scientist Laboratories’ latest creation, the Bristlebot!

Isn’t that cute? Kind of reminds me of one of these.

Scrubbing Bubble

When I was little, I begged my parents to buy Dow Bathroom Cleanerso that I could capture a Scrubbing Bubble and keep it as a pet.One day, my parents bought a can of Dow and let me spray it intothe bathtub. I watched the resulting pile of foam and waited forthe first Scrubbing Bubble to emerge. But, of course, nothing of the sorthappened. I angrily demanded to know where the Scrubbing Bubbleswere. I was patiently told that I was looking at them. My bubblewas, if you’ll excuse the pun, burst.

December 20, 2007 | Posted in: link-o-rama, robotics, video | No Comments »

Continuing Vexation

Since I apparently believe that beating my head against a brick wall is a perfect evening’s entertainment, I continued yesterday’s experiments with OpenID. Today, I decided to start out by installing my own OpenID server.

Enter phpMyID, two PHP scripts that, once uploaded, provide identity service for one. "It can’t possibly be that easy!" you may protest. True, you do have to run some text through a commandline utility and then edit a file. The enire procedure took all of about ten minutes, and that included the reading of the entire README file.

Unfortunately, I had a problem. phpMyID worked as advertised until it actually came time for it to do something useful. Then all it would say was, "Missing expected authorization header." Apparently, this was a problem with the Web server itself. The scripts came with an .htaccess file that had three suggestions to solve this problem, but needless to say, none of them worked. While I’d like to experiment with this program a bit more on a Web server that I actually control, until then, it’s time for plan B C D.

I signed up with another OpenID provider, myOpenID. While lacking some of the features that made ClaimID interesting, this service does allow users to create multiple "personas," which allow the user to present a different face to different online services. For example, I can choose to show the "Cosmic Flurk" persona to Blogger, and voila, my comments are signed as Cosmic Flurk, and point back here. Unfortunately, this doesn’t quite work with LiveJournal, which still insists on printing the OpenID URL as entered.

Just for information’s sake, then, I delegated the LiveJournal OpenID to a page on my site and tried using that as an ID. Perhaps not surprisingly, even that showed up as the full URL on LiveJournal, and as the filename of the page on Blogger. And of course when delegated to the main page, the domain was again used instead of a friendly name by both services. Tsk.

This all seems like an awful lot of work to have gone through to remain just this side of anonymous, but without coming off as some sort of impersonal self-promoter when commenting. On the other hand, it’s always early adopters that get bitten. But then again, it’s hardly early any more.

December 18, 2007 | Posted in: misc, news | No Comments »

OpenID, You Vex Me So

As previously mentioned, in an attempt to avoid opening an account at Blogger* I instead took the OpenID fork in the road. I chose an OpenID provider and then delegated the ID to my domain. That was all relatively easy. Unfortunately, something doesn’t seem to be working as it should. When I do post a comment as an OpenID claimant, it appears that my domain name is shown as the author of the comment, not my username at the OpenID provider, and not the allegedly real name that I provided to them.

I’m not sure where the actual problem lay. Is the OpenID provider that I chose simply not responding in the desired fashion? Are the OpenID clients misinterpreting the returned data? Is this humble user completely misinterpreting the OpenID standard, and thus expecting an unlikely result?

In an attempt to answer these questions, I opened accounts at Blogger and LiveJournal so that I could post a number of test comments without disturbing anybody else. It appears that when placing comments at Blogger using OpenID, when my delegated URL is entered into the OpenID field, my domain name is displayed as the comment author. This is consistent with what the Blogger developers showed in their own blog. However, when I used the OpenID URL that was provided to me by ClaimID, the author of the comment was shown as the ClaimID username. While not exactly ideal, since anyone clicking the link would be taken to ClaimID rather than directly to here, this result was a bit more like what I’d been led to expect.

As for the LiveJournal experiment, using either of the OpenID URLs resulted in the URL entered being shown as the comment author, rather than any sort of friendly name. That just Doesn’t Work for me.

Take a look at the blog post linked to by the Blogger blog, OpenID For Non Superusers. Many, if not all, of the OpenID commenters have friendly names showing, not URLs. Admittedly, it appears that the majority of them appear to be using MyOpenID, AOL’s OpenID, or their own PHP OpenID servers. It also seems unlikely to me that interwiningly.net is a Blogger site. (BTW, I think I’d go crazy if I had to use Blogger. Even though it’s a little quirky sometimes, I heart Thingamablog.)

The next step in this experiment, then, is to repeat the above tests with a different OpenID provider and compare the results. I should also, perhaps, locate another OpenID client and test that with my existing provider to see if a friendly name is shown.

Whee! :-P

December 17, 2007 | Posted in: misc, news | No Comments »

Blogger, You Vex Me So

I’m a do-it-yourself kind of guy, except when I’m feeling just lazy enough to want something done, but not so lazy as to not bother. This here blog is a good example. I didn’t want to be bound to a particular blogging service or even to a particular hosting provider, for various boring reasons. That’s why I’m using a client-side application to generate and upload my posts. Just a bit 1990′s, to be sure, but I could pack up my site and move it elsewhere in a handclap. I only bring this up because of Blogger. In the past, they’ve let me post comments (when a blog author allows it) under my name and URL. Now, this option has been removed in favor of OpenID:

We apologize for removing the URL field from the comments form prematurely two weeks ago. That was a mistake on our part that came from launching OpenID support on Blogger in draft. Ironically, our testing of OpenID, a feature that lets you use accounts from all over the web to comment on Blogger, made it appear that we were trying to force you into getting a Google Account. [Source]

Well, they nearly succeeded in doing so. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) some software peculiarity prevented me from opening a (second) Google account. (I don’t want to use the first one for commenting, okay?) While I could have sat myself down and figured out how to set up my own OpenID server, that seemed like a bit too much effort for a weeknight. I instead signed up for an account at claimid.com, which looks like an interesting service. It will not only act as an OpenID server, but will also function as sort of an information hub for one’s online identity. Even though privacy is dead (get over it) one still wouldn’t necessarily want all elements of one’s online identity tangled up into one embarrassing mass, but I could imagine creating a "private" identity (blog comments, gamertag, Flickr account) and a "professional" identity (work websites, resume, portfolio, etc.)
December 14, 2007 | Posted in: news | No Comments »

Breaking The No Meme Rule

I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon in the blogosphere that’s not quite convergent behaviour, but is probably a bit more than coincidence. Given a large enough pool of feeds, one may notice that occasionally two people will post almost the same thing at almost the same time. I’m not talking about the replication of news, or of the old "I’m standing in the midnight line for [xBox|iPhone|Harry Potter]" type of post. Rather, it’s that two people seem to have almost the same idea at almost the same time. For example, today I noticed two posts complaining about the word meme (not the word meme, or even worse, the Word® meme)

He tagged me for this meme… and will somebody PLEASE tell me what the Hell a "meme" is? Why do we call it that? I just understood why we call them "blogs" a little while ago. I’m slow. I need help… [Here]

I’ve seen this little survey (I refuse to call it a "meme"–"meme," to me, is one of those new made-up words that some kid from the popular clique made up and forced everyone to use–I hope he’s like all the other popular kids in high school and goes bald and sells insurance, cheats on his wife and she takes him to the cleaners. Where was I? Oh yeah, the meme) [Here]

I, too, have been a bit annoyed by the use of the word meme to mean a chain questionnaire. A group of questions to be shared is not really a meme, that is, it’s not a unit of thought or of culture. The idea of passing along a questionnaire is a meme. Therefore, if both of the quoted posters have read an earlier third post, in which someone might have made a similar comment, this post may contain a word meme meme.

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December 13, 2007 | Posted in: misc | No Comments »
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