Mon 30 Jan 2006
A link from my past. This artist takes drawing from young children and recreates their imaginations with a more intense graphical interpretation.
Internet
Archived Posts from this Category
Sat 28 Jan 2006
Who would win in a race between a tortoise and a hippo? It’s one of the fundamental questions plaguing modern society. Until we can answer that, here are some pictures of a 100 year old tortoise adopting a baby hippo.
NAIROBI (AFP) - A baby hippopotamus that survived the tsunami waves on the Kenyan coast has formed a strong bond with a giant male century-old tortoise, in an animal facility in the port city of Mombassa, officials said.
The hippopotamus, nicknamed “Owen”, and weighing about 300 kilograms (650 pounds), was swept down Sabaki River into the Indian Ocean then forced back to shore when tsunami waves struck the Kenyan coast on December 26, before wildlife rangers rescued him.
“It is incredible! A less-than-a-year-old hippo has adopted a male tortoise, about a century old, and the tortoise seems to be very happy with being a ‘mother’,” ecologist Paula Kahumbu, who is in charge of Lafarge Park, told AFP.
“After it was swept away and lost its mother, the hippo was traumatized. It had to look for something to be a surrogate mother. Fortunately, it landed on the tortoise and established a strong bond. They swim, eat and sleep together,” the ecologist added. “The hippo follows the tortoise exactly the way it follows its mother. If somebody approaches the tortoise, the hippo becomes aggressive, as if protecting its biological mother,” Kahumbu added.
“The hippo is a young baby, he was left at a very tender age and by nature, hippos are social animals that like to stay with their mothers for four years,” he explained.
Apparently there’s a book out now about Owen and Mzee.
Fri 23 Dec 2005
A few years ago I wanted to write a post about how much SPAM I get. Sure, everybody gets a whole bunch of SPAM. Depending on the source you hear from, the average person gets 8 to 13.3 junk emails a day. Depending on the number of legitimate emails one receives, that’s a high percentage of total emails that’s junk.
Now the number of SPAMmy emails I receive is getting absurd. To be honest, I receive every email that’s sent to my domain regardless of whether it has a POP3 account associated with it, because I tend to use email pseudonyms when I register online (e.g. aa@nachoworld.com or crazymonk@nachoworld.com). Pseudonyms work quite well in cases where the evil corporation (American Airlines or crazymonk.org) decides to sell my address. I’ve caught a few unethical email sellers (I get some non-Morpheus related junkmail through musiccity@nachoworld.com) this way. However, even if I did simply get rid of my ‘catchall’ within the nachoworld.com domain, I would still be inundated. Sometimes spiders grab my Tufts email address from the public directory posted at directory.tufts.edu - I have never put my Tufts address into a web form. (Impressively there have been spiders that grab just Indian names from school directories in Boston and New York in order to send Indian party junkmail.)
When I used Eudora, I created a number of filters on my desktop client that deleted those SPAMful nachoworld.com email address messages as they came. The program also had a statistics generator which could tell me how many total emails I was receiving and the projected number for the year. I used to be impressed with that projected number. The problem was that the projected number for the year would rise every month. Now I use the full version of Outlook because it’s faster, but even now after I wake up and “check email” it takes a few minutes for the program to filter.
Now I pose this question to you guys. How many junk messages do I receive a day. I can guarantee no one will come close to guessing the correct number.
Wed 21 Dec 2005
Ever wonder about the origin of the rabbit with a pancake on its head? Yeah, me neither. It’s supposed to be an intricate balancing act? Can’t you see it?
Sun 11 Dec 2005
Gamespot’s Greatest Games of All Time. Unlike IGN’s list, this one is a running list and its associated benefits or disadvantages. I was pleased to see Actraiser on there.
Thu 8 Dec 2005
Photoshop contest of awkward video game scenes.
Thu 1 Dec 2005
Official version of Mozilla Firefox 1.5 out yesterday. I’ve been trying to get the Sage RSS feed reader working effectively but to minimal avail. I also added the medical dictionary search engine. I couldn’t believe they had it since it’s a relatively obscure, but comprehensive website.
Wed 30 Nov 2005
Single letter domain names being released. $1M+? Maybe I should have hung onto nwx.com.
Tue 29 Nov 2005
Last Sunday’s episode of “Family Guy” just reiterates my love for the show. “The Simpsons” were never so brazen (but it was funny in another way). “Family Guy” gets its humor from the strange, absurd, or uncomfortable things that it shows. Like a 2 minute chicken fight, or the PBJ time song. But it’s clear that “Family Guy” is in tune to internet culture. After Tara Reid’s nip slip on the runway a few months back, the internet was abuzz about her wretched boob job and really big areolas (not in those words). So when Peter is performing Tara Reid’s boob job, drops a pepperoni on her breast, and says that “it’ll work,” you can imagine what thousands of geeks were thinking. Sure, a few people that have seen the Tara Reid photos might have caught on her pepperoni nipples, but it’s really the forum-frequenters and BB, Fark, and SA readers that’d get it.
Brian’s Peanut Butter Jelly Time video.
Mon 28 Nov 2005
An update to crazymonk’s link to Common Census is in order since the map has been updated many times since its post due to the number of links that it’s been getting from blogs.
The map has become a lot more accurate. All of New Mexico isn’t covered by Albuqueque. People of Hobbs generally idenitify with Lubbock, TX, which is now a cultural center. Southwest NM is covered by El Paso, TX and northeast NM is covered by Amarillo, TX. Not only do these Texas cities provide the airports for these regions, but these peripheral towns of NM go shopping and chill in these relatively large Texas cities.
More interesting, though, is that the cultural areas of some smaller cities do not cover the actual city itself. People living in or just near Santa Barbara, CA and Portland, ME identify with LA and Boston respectively. It’s only when you get much further out from LA and Boston in the direction of Santa Barbara and Portland into the rural areas, do the cultural areas of Santa Barbara and Portland come into play.
Sun 27 Nov 2005
A British headline from my bookmarks:
Man fingers daughter in Elvis eBay cock-up.
There was an Australian headline a week or so ago on Fark.com about a sports team having to swallow [their pride over their loss to] the black cocks, but I can’t find it any more. Obviously doing a Google search for that news article leads nowhere.
Mon 14 Nov 2005
Do not open at work: From my list of bookmarks, a German site dedicated to “surprising” Japanese people. There’s no sound, but you should probably open this at home.
Fri 11 Nov 2005
Probably offensive to most: oh yeah, the nazi forest. WARNING: has sound and is an annoying YTMND thingy. Other good YTMND thingies include the picard song and nigga stole my bike. It’s one of my favorite websites, but you need to be a little ingrained in internet culture and geekery to enjoy it. It’s based on a famous line from Sean Connery’s Finding Forrester
Thu 10 Nov 2005
During my first year of undergrad, I got hooked on Ultima Online, the first successful massive multiplayer online RPG. I remember playing for hours without embarrassment even as my roommate (you may remember him, doorframe) wondered what the hell I was doing. After a few months, I realized even with my massive amount of free time, there were always other people that had more and would power up their characters with 11 hours of day of “playing” (i.e. button mashing to power up). Others took the easy way out and used programs to do the button mashing or cloned special items illegally. I wasn’t that talented nor did I play 11 hours a day (I played 10), so I’d always get my ass kicked.
Near the middle to end of UO’s heyday, I would search eBay and see people selling their powered up account or even individual items for real money. Sometimes even for a couple thousand dollars! REAL money for fake items and intangible accounts (after money was paid through eBay, the seller’s online character would give the buyer’s character the money).
Now I see this item. Double-you-tee-eff-question-mark $100,000?
About a year ago I heard about Project Europa. It wasn’t as nicely designed or had as good graphics as Everquest, which was the new popular MMORPG at the time, but it allowed to you to trade items in the game to a central computer for real money. The exchange rate was atrocious. But it became famous because alot of “celebrities” played the game, including Alec Baldwin and various directors. The gimmick was that you put in a few hundred or a few thousand real dollars and then cull that into hundreds of thousands of Europa dollars by farming or shit. Then you trade those dollars 10:1 for real dollars, netting you a profit.
Basically, after reading up on it, it was the most interesting and complex pyramid scheme I ever saw. People that put in “only” a few thousand dollars would basically lose it. Only the top 100 or so people actually made money. So this $100,000 of real money that this guy put in for the fake space station will undoubtedly net him a few hundred thousand profit off what are basically the indentured servants of the game, the minor players.
