December 2004 Archives

Sometimes I need to pimp my own stuff in flickr...and now is one of those times.

Before	After

Technique? Nope...randomly picking Photoshop "Image Adjustments" and moving sliders around until it looked presentable.

"How do we expect the same people who can't make things stop getting worse to make things better?"

Stop. Hurting. America. Stop making dorkwad movies. Please.

James Wolcott with one of his reliably dead-on take-downs of a wingnut mythos.

This "fear of Christmas" is a phantom menace conjured every year so that certain crybaby Christians can adopt victim status and model a pained expression over the sad fact that not everyone around them isn't carrying on like the Cratchits.

Indeed. I'm about to choke on the amount of Christ in Christmas this year. Why don't they complain about all the non-denominational people like myself who only take part in the crass consumerism of the season? At least that would be legit.

I would also like to know how many of the folks that are getting their panties in a bunch know the real story of Christmas and would they be willing to fight Oliver Cromwell to the death to celebrate it? After all, this country wasn't founded by "Christians," but by Puritans. You know, the dudes with the funny hats? Yes, I know that makes me a hater, but I'm just sayin'...

Found on First Draft

A soldier on leave has been accused of having his cousin shoot him
so he would not have to return to Iraq, the police say.

The soldier, Specialist Marquise J. Roberts, 23, of Hinesville, Ga., suffered a minor wound to his left leg from a .22-caliber pistol on Tuesday, the police said. Specialist Roberts was treated at a hospital, then arrested after he and his cousin admitted having made up a story about the shooting, the authorities said.

After giving differing accounts of the incident, "they just broke down and confessed that they concocted the whole story so he didn't have to go back to the war," Lt. James Clark of the Philadelphia police department said on Thursday.

Real hacks Fair Play and sells tracks that can play on an iPod. Apple then disables said hack. Real looks for another hack.

Wrong approach, asshats! And by "asshats" I of course mean Real.

The answer is mp3 or aac files, sans DRM.

BRILLIANT!

The invoice for my extravagant consulting fee is in the mail. Payment in full will be thanks enough.

The Washington Post allows you to e-mail full text copies of articles to people. I will often send myself articles to my gmail account so I can have a searchable archive of articles that I've read, or at least wanted to read. Well, this became a tedious process and what do Mac users use for automation? That's right, AppleScript.

tell application "Safari"
	set theUrl to the URL of document 1
	set theArticle to do shell script "wapo.pl " & theUrl
end tell

That's it! Oh...except for that little perl script. What does it do? Everything.

First, put wapo.pl in you path. It takes a URL from the AppleScript, which needs to be a Washington Post article, grabs the article ID from the URL and then posts all the right info to the Post's mailto cgi. So what's the big deal? Well, WaPo is a registration only site...so the perl script has to talk to it and be you. How does it do that? It uses your browsers cookies. As long as you use a cookie file from a browser that you've already authenticated with, it should work just fine.

If you try and use it and run into problems, you're probably better off not contacting me. This is crappy code, but like all good code it works for me.

So I go to donate to the FlickrExport plugin for iPhoto through PayPal and see this:

PayPal's Exchange Rate as of Dec. 11, 2004:
1 U.S. Dollar = 0.509535Pounds Sterling

Emphasis mine. But Mr Speirs, who is in the UK, would like to be paid in Pounds, not worthless American dollars. Who can blame him?

He is, of course, his brilliant self.

I mean, dudes marrying isn't even in the top 10 commandments. Adultery is a top 10'er, but that doesn't seem to be, you know, an issue. It's very -- it's interesting that these type of divergents, the culture wars I think are, there's something real there, but we don't ever actually deal with that. We deal with the sort of whether or not the 10 commandments can be posted in a school. I mean, if you think the 10 commandments being posted in a school is going to change behavior of children, then you think employees must wash hands is keeping the piss out of your happy meals. It's not.

By all means read the whole thing. It's quite good. He's got some new lines.

KING: So you don't have any source of getting the results yourself? You don't employ any exit crews.

STEWART: What are you kidding me?

KING: I'm serious. I'm a little hurt by that.

STEWART: I'm wearing the same sweater I always wear. What do you think goes on at our show? I buy my own sodas.

No, we don't have any kind of a budget or anything like that. That's our excuse. What's yours?

KING: You've got a good point.

STEWART: Thank you.

A year ago I was wondering about some "world changing" apps. What have they been doing since then?

The Chandler chaps are hiring and the Remail people are still publishing papers.

Sometimes things move fast, sometimes they don't. Sometimes your perspective on how fast things are moving is wrong.

Please watch House on Fox. Don't let it get cancelled. It's an awesome show. I swear.

I love speeches with happy endings

Election by election...

State by state...

Precinct by precinct...

Door by door...

Vote by vote...

We're going to lift our Party up...

And we're going to take this country back for the people who built it.

Give 'em hell Howard!