Map of Parking Tickets in New York City. Useful if you want to engage in some risk management, although it wouldn't have prevented the $165 ticket I got last Saturday. Not surprisingly, given The Downturn, the City is looking to tickets to get more revenue.
Via Waxy.
posted this | this entry's link | 2 comments
| Maps | New York City
For a while I've been using I Want Sandy, an "online assistant," as part of my GTD system. I liked using Backpack as an online to-do system, mainly for its ability to create a to-do item via email. Thought of something to do? Just send it in an email to the right address and boom! it's on your list. But sorting items was needlessly complex (why can't I drag items from one page to another?) so I dropped it in favor of Sandy, which did the same thing, was simpler, and was free. I mostly used Sandy as a capture system, not an organizational tool, but I got very used to creating to-do items and calendar events just by sending email.
Alas, Sandy is quitting. She's been acquired by Twitter and they'll be shutting off the service in two weeks. Wherever shall I go? Whatever shall I do?
| Web Tools
I've long wanted to be able to automatically import feeds from other posters' blogs (hence the little-used "On Our Blogs" category) directly into Ish. There are a few MT plugins that are supposed to do that, but I couldn't seem to get anything to work. So I tried Pipes, the mash-your-own-feed service from Yahoo! Check out the results over on the sidebar. Boring "how it works" stuff below the fold.
| Feeds | Regex | Yahoo! | Yahoo! Pipes
Posting here has still been light as I've been working under the hood to get everything just the way I likes it. One of the things I've been working to get fixed is the Tags, discussed at length in this previous post. Upgrading to MT4.2 meant that I no longer had to hack keywords to act like tags since it comes with native tag support. (For anyone following along, I used the Keywords as Tags plugin to convert all my old keywords into the new tags.)
But under the old system, I could easily produce a list of tags for the most recent entries as a "What We're Talking About Lately" feature. MT's tag function, though, will only produce a "most used tags" cloud. The Tags.App plugin has this functionality -- but the out-of-the-box tag cloud it creates is difficult to style. (I could set a minimum font size, but not a maximum, resulting in GIANT TAGS THAT ATE MY BLOG.) So I waded into the variable functions of MT, in order to set the size correctly for the sidebar. Here's the recipe:
<MTTags latest="20">
<MTSetVarBlock name="addsize"><MTTagCount></MTSetVarBlock>
<MTSetVar name="tagsize" value="7">
<a rel="tag" href="<MTTagLink>" style="font-size:<MTGetVar name="tagsize" op="add" value="$addsize">pt; text-decoration:none;"><MTTagName></a>
</MTTags>
Incidentally, I'm finding that MT's documentation of their latest version isn't that great -- and worse, the community doesn't seem to be as active as it once was. Lots of forum searches turned up questions with no answers.
More to come: fixing the tag results page, category-specific tag pages, and the uber-tag cloud.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Tags
Analysts may look to bellwethers such as Vigo County, or Guam, but for my money, you can't do worse than picking the coolest Secret Service code name to predict an election. Just look at the following match-ups:
Timberwolf v. Peso
Cavalier v. Rawhide
Ramrod v. Eagle
Deacon v. Passkey
Minuteman v. Trailblazer
Renegade v. Phoenix
Searchlight v. Lancer
Tumbler v. Sundance
Without even knowing which name is assigned to which candidate, can you guess the winner of these elections? They're out of chronological order, so bonus IshPoints if you can ID who each one is. Answers in first comment. No peeking.
posted this | this entry's link | 3 comments | Presidential Elections | Secret Service
I suspect we'll be taking two individuals of a certain age to see this...
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Monsters | Trailers
Check out Brooklyn's youngest band, T-Rox!
That's Gillian Harwin, our Child Technician and Music Professor, on the guitar.
... kids these days are little whippersnappers, let me tell you. I received a press release the other day (a press release!) about a record-release party for a band calling itself T-Rox. The album, "Burnt Marshmallow," is the product of 7-year-olds Ben Everett-Lane and Max Kessler. The duo sent me their CD, which I promptly converted to 8-track so I could listen to it -- and I was blown away! The song "TV Rots your Brain" is an instant classic. The record-release party is on Nov. 1 and I was told there would be veggie booty.
You can hear more songs on their MySpace page and see more videos from the release party for "Burnt Marshmallow".
posted this | this entry's link | 2 comments | Gillian Harwin | T-Rox
HOAX! See below.
The LA Times reports:
Cameron, the Fox beat reporter for the Republican presidential ticket, said he had been told by unnamed sources -- and on the condition he not report the details during the campaign -- that Palin could not name all of the countries that are part of the North American Free Trade Agreement.He did not mention which one (or ones) she whiffed on, but there are only three: Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.
Nor, according to Cameron, was Palin aware that Africa is a continent. (Perhaps she was hamstrung by the fact that no part of that land mass can be viewed from her homestate.)
(Emphasis added. Via Cynical-C.)
Update: Apparently, she doesn't even know what a real moose looks like either:
Update Update: Egg, meet face. The whole thing was a hoax perpetrated by Martin Eisenstadt, a fake advisor to the McCain campaign. I done got taken in. At least I wasn't the only one. Curse you, MSM, and your bad-fact-checkers!
posted this | this entry's link | 7 comments | Geography | Hoaxes | Sarah Palin
And there was much rejoicing.
When I was dropping the kids off at school today, there was an elderly black lady standing in the lobby. A stream of children, some gleefully shouting "Obama is President!", parted around her and ran off to class. She was silently holding two photographs: one of Frederick Douglass and one of Booker T. Washington.
I got the feeling that she wasn't showing the photographs to the children. She was showing Washington and Douglass what this day, this morning, finally looks like.
| Barack Obama
Well, after a loooooong hiatus -- caused first by spambots that brought down our server, and then by my busy busyess, and then some technical issues, and then the arrival of the alien invasion, which totally threw me off, and then more technical issues, and then my having to recode all these templates -- which I am not finished with, but the main index and the post pages seem to be working OK now -- because I upgraded to Movable Type 4, and a bunch of things are different, a lot of it better so I don't have to hack my tags any more, and it's all modular, etc., so I'll have to redo the indicies later, but for now this seems to be mostly functional. Let me know if there's anything broken.
Thanks again to Trip for helping get Ish back online.
Excelsior!
(Oh, and while the blog was down -- apparently there's some sort of election happening today. Go vote if you haven't yet. I'm taking cookies to the PTA Bake Sale.)
posted this | this entry's link | 6 comments
Thanks to everyone who finished off the latest Ishbadiddle Challenge projects. I added a few more and upped the goal!
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind
I picked up Wired at the airport and read this really terrific story: High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Ships
BoingBoing reports that Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of Eliza, has died:
> Hello, I am Eliza.posted this | this entry's link | 1 comment* Hi
> How are you today.. What would you like to discuss?
* Joeseph Weizenbaum, the man that made you.
> Say, do you have any psychological problems?
* Probably, but that's not why I'm here.
> Did you come to me because you are here?
* I guess that's one way of looking at it.
> What does that suggest to you?
* I just wanted to tell you that the man who created you died yesterday
> You're not really talking about me, are you?
* Yes, I am.
> Do you believe it is normal to be ?
* Are you sad that Joseph died? Don't you care?
> Perhaps in your fantasies I am sad that Joseph died? Don't me care?
* I would like to think that you would be sad.
> We were discussing you, not me.
* I can understand why you wouldn't want to talk to me about this.
> You're not really talking about me, are you?
* Goodbye, Eliza.
| Obituaries
Say this for Eliot Spitzer's judgment: it's gratifying that NY may soon have the first legally blind governor in U.S. history. Give Spitzer the "bone"-headed at least one point for choosing David Paterson as his running mate.
Maybe something good will come of this. Besides 1001 wisecracks and "Love Gov"/"Eliot Mess" headlines.
Y'know, I don't have a water cooler here in my home-based workplace. So permit me to observe among the weirder ironies in all this: Spitzer is one of maybe 347 males in NY state ever to have learned that inducing a prostitute to cross state lines is a greater crime--a *federal felony*--than picking her up on the street corner.
And maybe the only one to discover that detail before getting arrested. (Granted, I'm just presuming that someone who has prosecuted two prostitution rings would have absorbed this....)
From the wisecracks: my wife's pal Bill Bragin observes that it's a shame that Spitzer couldn't stick to his campaign promises—the governor at least could have patronized a brothel from some economically depressed town upstate.
Donkey Kong and Me is a blog post by the guy who programmed Donkey Kong. For the Atari 800. Some insight there as to why the company tanked, and on the importance of decent comments in your code.
Zach is currently obsessed with Super Mario Galaxy which he plays at the local video game store (but just once a week, we've had to ration him). I wonder what he'd make of Atari Mario?
