Mr. Rogers: piss off

Well Mr. Rogers has gone and done it: totally screwed the pooch with the iPhone's intro to Canada. The rates for voice and data, especially data, are way out of line with US, UK, and in fact most of the rest of the world. He's caused some pretty serious rage out there in blogland ...

Fuck You Rogers

Phun for Mac OS X is out

Cool!  You can get Phun on the Mac now ...

http://phun.cs.umu.se/wiki/Download

Phun - 2D physics sandbox

I can't wait for the Mac OS X version!

Link to Phun website ...

"Radio Ladio" - Metronomy

The 80's have returned in glorious colour!

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/zMjmxF58wFc"><img alt="No user-serviceable parts inside: " radio="" src="http://img.skitch.com/20080209-pp4xnhk92sppuhfy2j6gtcyhgy.jpg"/></a>

Headline of the year?

Source: The Language Log

Eat Krispy Kremes, save taxpayers dough

Dutch researchers found that the health costs of thin and healthy people in adulthood are more expensive than those of either fat people or smokers.

Link ...

Ch-ch-ch-changes ...

This is very well put together. Bravo!

Symphony In SLANG

Fake Steve Jobs on Real Steve Balmer

FSJ may be fake, but his insights are real. Here's his take on the Microhoo! buyup plan. Brilliant.

[...] here's the really dark part of all this. He knows it won't work. He has to know this. He's not stupid. The cultures will never fit together. And the deal is too big. It's not manageable. And it's completely anathema to Microsoft. It's totally out of character for them. It goes against everything the company has ever stood for. Ballmer knows this, and he's doing it anyway. Because this is exactly what every old-guard CEO does when all else fails. I mean it's right there in the official playbook that you get in business school. And ultimately, smart as he is, Ballmer is an old-school kind of guy. He's not really a tech guy. He has a mindset that was formed in Detroit, where he grew up. He's a Big Three automaker kind of guy. And this is a Big Three move. It's Ford buying Jaguar and Land Rover and Volvo because they can't think of anything else to do.

So if the deal happens -- and I'm not convinced it will -- Ballmer will have bought himself maybe two years before it becomes clear to the entire world that it has failed. By then maybe Ballmer will be gone and someone else will have to mop up the mess. [...]

Link ...

Post to instapaper (AppleScript)

Update (26-Jun-09): This script doesn't handle more recent versions of InstaPaper very nicely. Another NNW-to-InstaPaper script, "NNWInstaPost", has appeared in the meantime and I suggest that you give that one a try ...

Update 2 (29-Jun-09): Also checkout Logan Rockmore's little Javascript which promises to be even faster ...

Here's a little script to post the currently selected headline in NetNewsWire (my favourite Mac OS X newsfeed reader) to your instapaper account.

You need to create an instapaper account before using this the first time. The script is not very good about errors, so just correct the issue and retry the script. It creates a short summary by "un-HTML'ing" the description, but it does this naively (using a long sed invocation), so it's restricted to a subset of HTML entities -- basically common Western ones.

To install this, select and copy the script from the box, paste it into the AppleScript Script Editor and drop it into NNW's script folder.

(*
* Submit NetNewsWire headines to instapaper for later reading.  See http://www.instapaper.com/
* Create an instapaper account first, select a news item in NNW, then run this script.
* Assumes you're using Safari. Doesn't handle all html entities; works best on English feeds.
* Doesn't check if the submission succeeded, so you need to keep your eyes open. :-)
* -- Bruce Walker <bruce.walker@gmail.com> -- Feb 1, 2008
*)

on unhtml(html)
 -- remove markup, convert common entities to ascii (the rest to "?"), nuke blank lines & restrict length
 return do shell script "echo " & quoted form of html & "| sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g' -e 's/&nbsp;/ /g' -e 's/&mdash;/--/g' -e 's/&lsquo;/`/g' -e 's/&ldquo;/``/g' -e 's/&#8220;/``/g' -e \"s/&rdquo;/''/g\" -e \"s/&#8221;/''/g\" -e \"s/&#8217;/'/g\" -e \"s/&rsquo;/'/g\" -e \"s/&#39;/'/g\" -e 's/&[^;][^;][^;]*;/?/g' -e \"s/'/\\\\\\'/g\" | tr '\\r\\n' ' ' | dd ibs=1 count=192"
end unhtml

tell application "NetNewsWire"
 set NNWURL to URL of selectedHeadline
 set NNWTitle to my unhtml(get title of selectedHeadline)
 set NNWSummary to my unhtml(get description of selectedHeadline) & " …"
end tell

tell application "Safari"
 -- submit to instapaper using Safari's saved session/account cookies
 set foo to do JavaScript "window.open('http://www.instapaper.com/b?v=3&u='+encodeURIComponent('" & NNWURL & "')+'&t='+encodeURIComponent('" & NNWTitle & "')+'&s='+encodeURIComponent('" & NNWSummary & "'),'t','toolbar=0,resizable=0,status=1,width=250,height=150')" in document 1
end tell

Enjoy!

Cartoon (Мультфильм)

Manic animation -- whack music. What's not to like?

Criminally nude

If they outlaw foreign strippers, then only outlaws will be stripping ... or something like that.

 MPs Mull Proposal To Ban Foreign Strippers 

Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote

Seriously kewl!

Da Shatner Funk

William Shatner and Conan O'Brien remixed.

"They know. They're onto something." "Fear! Woo, woo."

Google Blogger Data API

The Blogger data API allows client applications to view and update Blogger content in the form of Google data API feeds. Your client application can use the data API to create new blog posts, edit or delete existing posts, and query for posts that match particular criteria.
Here are some of the things you can do with the Blogger data API:

• Add a running list of blog posts and comments to a site.
• Create a desktop application or plugin that allows users to create and post entries from the desktop.
• Create a blog aggregator application.

Link ...

Blogger widget for Mac OS X

I'm just trying out the Google Blogger Widget from my Mac's dashboard.  Here's the link ... 

ZENN

Too cool: Zero Emissions, No Noise ... 

First and last Canadian political comment

[Paul Martin and Stephen Harper are two dudes both vying for top spot in Canadian politics. Martin so amused me with his recent highly negative public characterizations of Harper, that I just had to imagine what further things he would tell me about Harper if I called him up personally ...]

I called up Paul Martin today and he told me a number of things about Harper that they were going to reveal, but had to pull at the last minute:

Stephen Harper habitually kicks dogs.

If you play any one of Stephen Harper's speeches in reverse, you can just make out the words, "I buried Medicare."

Stephen Harper and Osama bin Laden are drinking buddies.

Stephen Harper casts no shadow. Stephen Harper cannot see his own reflection in a mirror.

Stephen Harper is paying thugs to create a gun problem in Toronto so he'll have a good campaign platform item.

Stephen Harper bites the heads off of bats.

The Rolling Stones song Sympathy for the Devil was originally written about Stephen Harper, but they were forced by the record label lawyers to rewrite it so they wouldn't risk obscenity charges.

Stephen Harper is a direct descendent of Jack the Ripper.

Paul told me more, but it gets much, much worse.

Moronic interrogatives

Something that bugs me a lot is the increasingly common speech impediment that causes speakers to turn simple statements into questions.

"So I was with my friend? And we were like in Starbucks? And the barista had these velvet pants?"

According to some British websites it's known as a ...

Moronic interrogative: coined by British comedian Rory McGrath to describe the use of intonation at the end of a sentence that is not a question.

I hear this daily on one of Toronto's "all-news" radio stations. 680News, unhappily, feels it necessary to interview people on the street regarding subjects about which they are woefully uninformed.

680: I'm here at Union Station and I asked Brittany why she looks so wide awake this morning.

B: Really, I'm not? I'm just on my way to work?

Aaaaargh!

It suggests that a lot of people are tremendously insecure and need constant reassurance that they aren't mistaken about ... well, most everything. "I've just said something, but I could be wrong, so please nod or smile and blink or something -- ok good, you nodded -- where was I? Oh yeah: velvet pants ..."