Dan Dickinson: The Primary Vivid Weblog

The big news today, if you haven’t heard yet, is that Cornell, love of everyone’s life, made a unbelievably large snafu when they emailed 1700 applicants to tell them they were accepted. Of course, this included over 500 kids who had been rejected for early decision in December. Whoops! Oh well…it’s a welcome diversion from all the “Save Slope Day” crap (yeah, NOTHING bad happens on Slope Day) that’s been eating up pages in the Sun lately. And it’s not like the other Ivy’s haven’t been having stupidity issues of their own (link is NOT safe for work).

Misterrogers.org – “We are very sorry to deliver the sad news that Fred Rogers died on February 27, 2003 after a brief battle with stomach cancer. We are grateful for the many people, young and old, who have cared about his work over the years and who continue to appreciate Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on PBS. We hope that you’ll join us in celebrating his life by reflecting on his messages and taking them into your everyday lives. ” CNN – “Television’s “Mister Rogers,” the cultural icon and kindly neighbor to generations of American children, died Thursday at the age of 74.” PBS Kids “For Parents” Page – “One of Fred Rogers’ on-going messages has been, “There’s only one person in the whole world like you.” So we understand that every child and adult will experience this news in his or her own unique way, from their own relationship with him and from their developmental level.” Truly a sad day. :(

Rory found this product page at VisionTek for their new ATI Radeon 9500 board, which makes me wonder if people have learned anything over the past few years about marketing. The text reads as follows: Freak’n KICK ASS performance Xtasy 9500 Pro, powered by ATI’s RADEON(tm) 9500 PRO VPU with 128MB DDR memory WILL BLOW YOU… AWAY! ATI’s TRUFORM(tm) technology makes heaving orbs more ample and well-endowed… while HYPER Z(tm) II saves bandwidth for mo’ righteous performance in your more demanding sit-e’ations… ATI’s SMOOTHVISION, anti-aliasing, KICKS THE CRAP out of ‘visual distortion,’ and sends that BI-A-TCH crying home to mama! That means better, smoother looking images. HI-RES 32-bit, 3D gaming up to 2048×1536 means that when ‘intense applications’ leaves his house… THE 9500 SLAPS THAT PIG DOWN, SAYS “GIMME MY’ MONEY BI-A-TCH!” BITCH’N Visual Effects SMARTSHADER(tm) 2.0 provides FREAK’N AWESOME lighting effects. The 9500 PRO supports DirectX�� 9.0 and OpenGL�� ATI’s CHARISMA ENGINE(tm) II fronts ‘Transformation and Lighting’ (T&L) at 62.5 million triangles per second… “62.5M per second?” YOU BET YO’ ASS 62.5M PER SECOND! PIXEL TAPESTRY(tm) II, 3D rendering engine, powers an AWESOME 2.4 gigatexels/second for fill ratesat 32-bit HI-RES. Ever have TWO MONITORS at one time? Throw in DVD support and you have yourself a threesome. ATI’s HYDRAVISION(tm) supports ol’ school CRT monitors, digital flat panels and TVs while VIDEO IMMERSION(tm) II enables integration of unbelievable digital video stuff, including advanced de-interlacing for FREAK’N SICK video quality. You just connect to a digital flat panel anddig crisper images and ease eyestrain directly. Reminds me a bit too much of Daikatana’s “John Romero Wants To Make You His Bitch” ad campaign.

Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while will remember my initial impressions of the Segway sounding a lot like this: “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA”. You remember the Segway, don’t you? The device that was hyped for 2 years as being “bigger than the internet“, and was code named “It” and/or “Ginger”? And then, after all the hype, it was finally unveiled with a big press blitz to be…a scooter. “Oh, but Dan, it’s a really COOL scooter, that can go 10 MPHs and go over any surface!” – right, especially here in Ithaca, where ice/snow/horrid weather tends to be the normal operating procedure. Never mind the hills. Never mind the fact that the range on these things is only about 20 miles, as I recall. Oh and hey, if it goes 10 MPH, that means I can get to Barnes & Noble in half an hour, if I don’t get nailed while on Route 13 by some soccer mom in an SUV. But I digress. Doing my standard boing boing browse this morning, I discovered an article detailing Dean Kamen’s latest efforts with the Segway. As you may recall, part of the pitch for these $5000 “revolutionary” devices (Internet law requires I now add “available exclusively at amazon.com, begins shipping in March!”) was for government workers – mainly postal carriers. Dean has decided to go one crazy step forward and now pitch the Segway at the military. He said the Special Forces have tested Segways to transport the “infantry soldier of the future.” Toohey said the Segway can traverse almost any terrain — including desert sands — and travel over land mines without detonating them. Picture this. You’re at war, holed up in a bunker in the desert, awaiting enemy forces. The heat is extreme, making your forehead feel like liquid. You haven’t been in high spirits since you kissed your spouse goodbye two months ago. And then, suddenly, over the horizon, you see…soldiers riding scooters. Quick quiz: If a battalion ever DID ride on Segways, and they DID win a battle, what would be the primary contributing factor? A) The Segway’s top speed of 10 miles per hour. B) The ability to effortlessly travel over any terrain. C) The ability to zip over land mines without setting them off. D) The instant crippling laughter that will debilitate enemy forces seeing you. Why not dress up as clowns? Hell, hire the killer klowns from outer space. If we don’t, the terrorists have already won.

Peter pointed me to a comic listed on boing boing this morning described thusly: Same Difference is an indie Web comic by Derek Kirk Kim that’s just posted its final installment. It’s a slice-of-life story about two Korean gen-xers in San Francisco, and it’s very, very good. The artwork is fine, the dialog snappy, and the story ends with a Daniel Clowes finish that completely blindsided me. I just read it from cover to cover, and I heartily recommend it.

(Edit for context: Have you seen ready.gov yet? It’s a site, put up by the US Government, to “help” “assist” citizens in case of “terrorist action”. The creepiest part, by far, are the airline safety-card-esqe pictures in the “Be Informed” section showing you just what to do in case of a threat.) After glancing at Erik’s take on ready.gov, and more parodying from boingboing, I just couldn’t resist. So I grabbed a mess of the graphics, wrote my own captions (ironically, a lot of them ended up being strikingly similar to the ones on idle words, even though I hadn’t read them before I wrote my own), and they’re now embedded in the bottom right of this very page. A random one every time you reload. I’ll probably get tired of them in a few weeks, so get them while they last.

While poking around this evening (read: early morning) trying to find even more interesting blog resources, I finally stumbled upon something truly great: Erik Benson’s blogisphere reading tracker, All Consuming. So what’s it do, you ask? A number of things, which I will try to explain in non-technical terms because I’ve been told I’m confusing people a lot these days. First off, All Consuming scours the weblog directories (such as weblogs.com or blo.gs) and picks up any comments made about books on nearly any blog out there. Thus, off-handed comments I made about Nick Tosches in an entry at the beginning of the month are included on the appropriate page. That’s EXTREMELY cool, since it allows for multiple opinions to be seamlessly added to a central repository of book information. Second, if you create an account, you can add books to your reading list, which through some careful data manipulation, can appear on your own personal blog. Thus, the new “Currently Reading” portion of the sidebar. That’s entirely XML driven. Finally, as a nice community driven feature, you can mark other bloggers as “friends” and thus get recommendations based on what those people read. Very cool stuff, and a great practical example of what the whirlwind of technology I learned about in 502 last Spring could lend itself to.

Finally got to catch 10 minutes of the end of an episode of Bullshit! after flipping away from SNL tonight; and as it could’ve been expected, Penn & Teller are doing a wonderful job with their new venue. For those who didn’t know, I’ve actually been a P&T fan (off and on, of course, since it’s not like they’ve been churning out oodles of new books/movies a year) since 1991. Definitely a good influence to have when you’re growing up and very easily molded. I blame Penn for planting the seeds of sarcasm in me.

One of the things that the MT upgrade will break is my LJ syndicated account. So, until LJ figures out a way to let people change the feed source on said accounts, all you LJ people may want to remove me from your friends list, since there’s not going to be any updates on it. The new XML feed is to the lower right, just like the old one.

Okay, I admit it. I have been razzle-dazzled by the unbelievable shininess of MovableType. This, compounded with my frustration with the drupal upgrade process, has let me to a precarious position – do I stick with what I’ve spent nearly a year using, or do I throw caution to the wind and move to MT? Although it may be hard to tell (since I’ve done SUCH a spiffy job of recreating my theme; or, alternately, you never read my blog anyhow), this is MovableType. As usual, there is content I haven’t moved over yet – particularly the book pages and the quotefile. But all the blog entries are here, the blogroll is sort of here, and all in all, it’s not that radical of a change. Which makes me quite happy. If you see anything really screwed up (banner at the top looks completely wrong, sidebar going too long, etc), please, let me know immediately.