Arrrrr! Today be Talk Like a Pirate Day! On this most excellent o’ days, I hope that everyone has a good time annoyin’ their mateys and payin’ tribute t’ those heroes o’ yore. So tie some fuses in your beard and light ’em up, and go scare some landlubbers.
Arrrrrr!
Mark from BoingBoing tells this story about a friend who meets the next identity crisis early: what do you do when there’s bad information given about you, and you have no recourse?
What interests me is that this whole phenomenon is only just beginning to get rolling. Criminal background checks are still a little too expensive right now for most apartment landlords, home-owner associations, and employers. That obviously will not last, since apparently those millions of paper documents in county court houses have been largely digitized. Now that the data entry has been completed (competently or otherwise), information just wants to be free, right? Certainly it wants to be cheaper than $78. In a few years (or maybe months) from now, when you can check any job applicant or prospective tenant for $5, or maybe for free if the service is supported by context-sensitive popup ads, everyone will be checking everyone. Already it costs me nothing to view a map of the alleged child molesters living in my neighborhood. (I wonder how many errors are in _that_ database.) Can other felons be far behind?
Maybe one of your readers has some ideas on how this can be fixed. I don’t see any way. It makes the fuss over Wikipedia look pretty trivial; John Seigenthaler certainly didn’t have to submit a set of fingerprints to get _his_ error corrected, and it didn’t deprive him of a place to live, either.
This is as much about information management as it is identity. I’m not sold on this answer, but what if we owned the information about ourselves? That is, any information that was a formal measure of my identity was owned by me in the same sense that I can own copyright on something I write. I could then license said information to those institutions I wished (the government would have built in license for identification purposes, I suppose, in a limited scope) and could sue organizations that used my information illegally. We solve junk mail and the many-database problem all at once. Of course, the cure may be worse than the disease…
This is brilliant. Potentially NSFW.
I really, really don’t understand Germany. Or Germans. I give you: The Dreamship Surprise!
Space in the year 2304: in a UFO that crash-landed in the Nevada desert 300 years ago, mankind found the scientific guidelines which were used to colonize Mars half a century later. Now the descendants of the first colonists are on their way back to Earth. Led by their unbelievably wicked Regulator Rogul and his unbelievably even more wicked disciple Jens Maul, they are up to no good. In fact, the Martians are planning to subjugate the blue planet to the red one. With a huge array of spaceships, a conquest of Earth seems imminent. And only the crazy crew of Dreamship Surprise can “helpâ€: Captain Kork, engineer Shrotty and first officer Mr. Spuck. But instead of fighting intergalactic crime, they´re busy with their choreography for the upcoming “Miss Waikiki Pageant”. With the help of the space cowboy and taxi-pilot Rock, they set out to save the earth from invasion…
Watch the trailer for the ultimate in gay space heroes. The only one I could find to embed is in Japanese (with German audio)…so be warned. Wonderfully off-kilter gay sci-fi movies…there’s just not enough of them.
I dare anyone to find a more homosexual sci-fi picture than this:
Just another example of the sort of thing that would never happen here. This film had the largest theatrical opening in the history of Germany. And it doesn’t even have The Hoff in it.
The newest Web 2.0 tool in my expanding arsenal of webilicious goodness: CrazyEgg. With registration and a simple addition of a bit o’ code you get:
Pictures as soon as I get them. I’m using it for two sites, currently, and need to figure out where the code goes inside WordPress…not as easy to find the right place in the PHP. But I’ll get it working soon.
…but rockin’ on the blue note.
I’m going to miss my lime green iTunes icon…but the new blue makes up for it:
New iPods! New iTunes! Movies! The new iPod shuffle is seriously the size of a quarter…it’s amazingly tiny. And we’ve got a space jump up to 80Gig, which is double the storage of my 3rd gen iPod.
And the biggest thing isn’t even out yet…iTV, the much-rumored set-top box from Apple that will stream wireless video signals to your television.
Lots of questions, like: what codecs will the iTV support? Can I play my divx videos across it? Will it support 5-channel sound wirelessly?
Here’s a test-post from Windows LiveWriter…I’m just seeing how well it handles WordPress, and images, and such. Not a huge fan of local blog editors normally, but I thought I’d see how well Microsoft has handled this.
So what am I up to these days, besides being too busy to blog as much as I’d like:
Preparing classes
Writing stuff
To make up my regrettable silence to all my valued readers, I leave you with a too-cute-for-words picture of Summer Glau (River Tam from Firefly and Serenity) from DragonCon:
I’ve spent the last 24 hours in Atlanta, GA at DragonCon. I thought I would share with you the single picture that is the essense of all things DragonCon:
This time to DragonCon, in Atlanta, GA. I’m gonna go get my geek on, play some games, run some tournaments, grab some schwag, sell some cards. More as I’m there and when I return.