March 2008
27 posts
House to probe shady Pentagon contract given to... →
Times story reveals that the Pentagon gave an inexperienced 22-year-old a $300 million contract to provide ammo to Afghanistan. The shady deal resulted in decades old, substandard munitions being…
Ultimate Fighting Intramural Non-Competitive Fun... →
CARTHAGE, Mo. - Ultimate fighting was once the sole domain of burly men who beat each other bloody in anything-goes brawls on pay-per-view TV.
But the sport often derided as “human cockfighting”…
Haiti Weather Report →
From Pod: NewTeeVee
Added By: newteevee
Ira Glass, entropy, and software development →
All web apps are trying to suck. They are trying to be bloated. They are trying to be unstructured. They are trying to be confusing. You are the stopgap. You are the one who stands between order…
F the FCC →
Note that the FCC’s empty case against Fox and the FCC continues as Fox refuses to pay a fine for improper use of whipped cream. This was the basis of my FOIA and exclusive reporting that only three…
from faux to real - the rise of kiddie phones →
Standing in the toy section of a store in the Hong Kong airport, I was fascinated by the wide array of faux laptops made for children. These machines were designed to look like laptops,…
Paranoid Park →
In Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant’s characters wander aimless and blank-faced—haunting Portland’s Northwest locales in a state of dazed apathy. Just like the moment when you burst from underwater…
Muxtape. The Simplest Mixtape Service Yet. →
Music search engines are getting more simple, as are mixtape creation tools. We went from an overabundance of music social sites to an avalanche of simplified music search engines all aimed at…
Why students make terrible social media marketers →
Have you ever tried to learn a language from a native speaker? How about being taught a sport by someone with incredible natural talent? I had a college roommate who was nearly a savant when it came…
Food fight! →
[Link: Food fight!] [Hat tip: VSL.]
Food fight! →
[Link: Food fight!] [Hat tip: VSL.]
Opportunity of a lifetime →
So, there’s plenty of bad economic news floating around. From the price of oil to Wall Street to bailouts to the death of traditional advertising. Which is great news for anyone hoping to grow or…
Some Old Man Still Churning Out Marmaduke →
Cartoonist Brad Anderson in a press shot from circa 1921 or so.
Or It Could Be That I Look Like Chopper Read →
A couple weeks ago I was at a bar and this drunk couple came up to me really excited. Well the guy was really excited and the girl was really embarrassed of the guy. He asked me if people always…
weird break-in →
Assume the Position →
With all of the of the hypemen, yes-men, weed carriers, roadies, groupies, managers, and agents that Weezy F. Baby keeps in his entourage, you’d think one of them would have said that an ad…
The Thing of the Thing
For information to be free, the coordinates of the information must be free. Not the thing itself, but the thing of the thing. The mixtape of the mixtape. When a Bittorrent tracker becomes a commodity to build, and efficient tracker data portability is implemented, everyone can run their own tracker, clone their own tracker, merge trackers and remix trackers. Sheeeet. The scale is suddenly...
Where's Podcast Remixing As A Service?
I’m looking for a web service that can take an RSS feed with mp3 enclosures, like http://cinch.blogtalkradio.com/dave, and another feed with other mp3 enclosures, and combine mp3s into a combined “digest” feed. Tons of tools available for remixing feeds, but never for enclosures within them. I think that some very cool things could come from such a tool. Journalism comes to...
The Coming Death of Paper as an Information... →
The other day I was sitting in the bank watching a clerk copy information off a paper bank transfer to initiate a new wire transfer. Being a busy person I hate inefficiencies, and this was just…
enough already! →
Last night, I turned off NPR in a state of complete disgust. It wasn’t just the ongoing hellish pledge drive that drives me away from NPR for months at a time. (I _want_ to give to NPR, but the…
Googlers vent: Working here sucks, too [I Hate It... →
Last quarter, Google hired 889 people, bringing the total headcount to 16,805. What do all these new employees do? Stab each other in the back, apparently. A tipster writes: “The…