Penny Hero (dot) Net

Reading digg and jumping to Wil Shipley’s blog post slamming Larry Bodine’s essay on why he hates Macs… is hazardous to my attention span.

Yes, if you insist on running a ten-year-old browser on your Mac instead of any of the five or so alternatives, some web sites may not work. In other news, if you spread rotten shit on a hot dog, it doesn’t taste as good.

Can’t… stop… laughing.

Basically, it’s a case of Bodine being both totally incompetent and a crappy writer. None of his claims are substantial or substantiated, it’s obvious to anyone who knows ANYTHING about technology that his few “real” complaints are actually Microsoft’s fault, and not Apple’s, and he implies that the things people claim are great about Macs (like the whole “less viruses” and stuff) are not true, but doesn’t address one way or another if he had a problem with it.

Anyway, i’ll let you read the article yourself. It links to Bodine’s essay.

I’m just… very disappointed that someone like this is a member of any kind of Law Technology News Editorial Advisory Board, although his other title is “Law Firm Marketing Consultant”…(oh and he can be reached at Lbodine@LawMarketing.com btw.)

Jeremy of Mozmonkey.com is my hero for making this extension.

It’s such a small, simple thing, but it brings me so much joy.

The fact that it can become the default copy function is what really makes me swoon.

*wiggles*

If you’re on last.fm, you should add me to your friend’s list. :)

Just ignore all the Nightmares on Wax and Animal Collective I apparently listen to. Back when I had no idea what I was doing (like a year ago), I left a music player on loop for a while… oops. Can’t edit it now apparently. I still love them, just not as much as last.fm thinks I do.

Anyway, I’m stoked about the open source client, all the plugins that will scrobble anything from pretty much any player out there, and the suggested 3rd party apps like Yamipod for uploading tracks you listened to with an ipod. Haven’t played with that too much yet, but it seems really great.

For the record, I’m also a fan of pandora, but for different reasons. I love pandora for being minimal and for being a pretty intelligent recommendation/radio system. On certain days, I’ll use both last.fm and pandora–one to find totally new music based on what their database picks (pandora), and the other to learn more about my friends’ tastes and to explore tagged music (last.fm). Last.fm is becoming highly addictive, but on days when maybe I just want to chill and take a break from omg! social networking! web2.0! rounded corners!!11!!, pandora rules.

Different monsters, both awesome and world-rawking. :)

*cringe*

but because the field is in its infancy it is not yet clear what kind of stem cells will provide the results

For an article in favor of stem cell research and critical of Bush’s veto, that was a REALLY bad pun.

(link)

TikiBarTv is awesome.

Someone tell me who they really are? I’m 99% sure they’re from Vancouver BC… seeing as how they once had cast from BATTLESTAR GALACTICA on the set and their webdesigners are from Vancouver. But weren’t they in something else? Lala is wayyy too hot to not be a model or an actor or something else that would allow her to make a living off of her… um… “charisma.”

They’re just way cool and they need to make more shows. So addicted. They also need to get Sixth on the show. haha.

Dear everyone on my friend’s list.

My friend is conducting research for his Master’s degree on the use and understanding of wi-fi and wants people to take his survey. Don’t ask me about this method of “spread the word” survey distribution. I’m sure that will come up in the analysis of his data.

It’s about 3 pages long (just a few screens of questions).

Whether you’re interested in wi-fi or not, this is an official call for participants:

Click here.

And, spread the word if you’d like to help him get a larger number of respondents. His research is very worth supporting, in my opinion. He’s interested in making information about public and private wireless networks more easily obtainable. in other words, identifying what information about accessibility and laws is not easily available to users and maybe even coming up with ways of making that available.

Before I met him in the writing center, I had no idea about this kind of problem but now I’m really really interested.

The Corvallist recently wrote about Nathanael Blake’s recent anti-islam piece that yesterday incited peaceful protest by Muslim students on campus. The Corvallist’s blog post is a much more serious criticism than mine is, but I did write about it too in my blogspot blog. I really want to cross-post it here, but I know how annoying that is to some people. So i’m just going to link to that post: (linky)

Bottom line is that I think Blake is like a terrorist of the pen, and while I’m NOT calling for censorship in the barometer, I do wish they’d have a higher level of intelligence and critical thinking standards for their staff.

I’m not sure if Nathanael Blake is guilty of hijacking a religion to hurt people, but he IS guilty of hijacking a pen (or an apple computer in Snell Hall) to instill anger and hate. Although the article I’m writing about is almost a month old, the Corvallist drew my attention to this and I’m not going to just sit still and say nothing.

Because I’m supposed to be studying, I’m mostly just doing link-plugging here, but there is no way that I can just say nothing. The Corvallist recently wrote about Nathanael Blake’s recent anti-islam piece that yesterday incited peaceful protest by Muslim students on campus. (Go read the Corvallist’s blog post. It’s much more informative and analytical than mine. quote: “Maybe Blake should start by picking up a history textbook. Maybe then he would learn that his statement “Christianity grew on the blood of its martyrs; Islam grew on the blood of its enemies,” is truly laughable. Maybe he hasn’t heard about the Crusades? Or maybe he is blinded by the rose-colored glasses of his own religion, which really makes him closer to the Muslim extremists than to peaceful folks in any religion.”)

I’ve read all of this and of course I’m pissed beyond belief. Nathanael Blake has a ginormous reputation for having the gall to take very non-peaceful and very anger-inciting positions on many issues. Occaisionally, his view is sound and keeps me from taking an extreme liberal side of things. I do sometimes (secretly) enjoy his articles because it reminds me that my viewpoint isn’t the only one on campus. However, most of the time he misinterprets or re-interprets facts and information apparently just to add to the sensationalism of his argument. I’m convinced he creates these columns with the sole purpose of pissing people off, and not with any redeeming motivation like solving any kind of problem or helping people to think more critically about world issues.

This article on islam is exactly the case. It does NOT help people see Islam in a fair light and it contributes to the already huge problem in this country of mistrusting people from the middle east. It looks like he maybe googled for Koran verses frequently cited as in support of violence against women and violence against others and went no further into the book. Instead of writing about how perhaps some of these terrorists are misinterpreting the core values of their religion with the lines he quotes, his article drops a bomb into a race-hate situation that has always been very unstable in the US since 9-11.

Not to suggest that Blake is ever going to be read extensively by many people outside of this little college community… but I’d say he represents what a lot of hate-filled ill-informed christians people really want to believe about their place in the world in relation to Islam.

I am angry at the barometer for being so irresponsible and letting one of their columnists be this racist and ignorant about the world’s largest religion. He’s a victim of his own ignorance if he thinks that Christianity is built on peace and martyrdom.

I am not calling for censorship, but I do wish that the barometer would have a higher standard of intelligence on their staff and when someone wants to post a column like this, that they do it responsibly and NOT attempt to encourage hate for a people who are already hated enough in this country.

Chris, aka , just sent me a link to this flash video of the hottest piece of technology I’ve ever seen.

It’s a demo video of this touch screen interface. The video starts out with the guy manipulating colored lights and shapes, obviously in order to demo what this thing is capable of as far as graphics, response-time, and manipulatability (is that a word?). It goes on to show possible other uses for it, like for manipulating images, navigating 2d and 3d maps, manipulating 3d-rendered objects, and GAMES!!

Anyway, go look. It’s pure sex on an LCD screen (or whatever this thing is made of).

Anyway, here’s a link to more technical info about it.

I need to be the first to blog about this, damnit. because I’m that much of a nerd. However…

“I don’t think I’ve ever impressed a girl with my yo-yoing skills,” Polvi said

That’s complete bull, and he knows it.

Polvi, you should be proud to be a nerd. It’s never going to change. You’re a gentoo buff, you wear nifty geek shirts. you work for mozilla. Yoyo-ing isn’t going to make you any more of a nerd than you already are, silly. You should celebrate that.

Ok, I’m fired for still not reading my book.

btw, polvi’s blog is here, and the link to the news article is here in case you don’t know how to click on the link in the subject of this post.