May 2009
48 posts
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Backseat Driver ©2009 Leif Chappelle
Another...
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Decoding antiquity: Eight scripts that still can't... →
A very intriguing, very well written article about undecipherable scripts from NewScientist.
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“The Age of the Shandy has commenced.
…I like saying...”
– A combination of Nick and Sarra. SHAAAAANDY.
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Obama Is Changing the Art on the White House Walls... →
Good article on how the the art is being changed, chosen and challenged in the Obama White House. Out? Lots of pastoral (read: Texan) landscapes and portraits of white dead guys. In? Lots of African American and women artists, along with a bevy of more modern and abstract work.
Line of the article: “You shouldn’t have to look at Mrs. Hoover’s face over your bed for four years if you don’t want...
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Writer (Seattle)
Reply to:job-ntrmg-1188824801@craigslist.org Date: 2009-05-25, 8:44PM PDT I will write your obituary. Call 206.363.1497
Location: Seattle
Compensation: $20 each
Saw this on craigslist today, in the job-search category. That’s where businesses post job opportunities, not where people post what services they offer, just to clarify. That’s about all the...
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Woodland Alien Music Launches! →
After several months of hard work on the site, Woodland Alien Music has finally found completion and has launched as the new home of my music on the ‘net!
The front page is set up very much like the blog here, except I’ll be posting exclusively about either gaming or music related topics, most of which will be cross-posted from Cloudherder.
The key attraction, however, is the Music...
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All I want for Christmas...
OK, we now have a few manufacturers making genuinely awesome espresso machines. Will someone please make a grinder that is better than merely adequate? Please? Bueller?
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Only a little bit ambivalent, though.
So, yes, I work in coffee (hang on: work in? work with? live? something) which means that, inevitably, I am asked how I feel about Starbucks. So how do I feel about them?
In a word: ambivalent.
First off: they’re not my competition. We’re in fundamentally different businesses. My business is exploring the boundaries of coffee flavor and technique in order to better highlight the...
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Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
Stay tuned.
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Lasers!!!!!!!! →
I was unfortunately not cool enough as a kid to be a proper recipiant of a LASER!!! portrait. It was all various cloudy blue or green backdrops in the cafeteria. However, this blog of amazingly 80’s and early-90’s portraits featuring LASERS!!! is just enough to make up for this severe oversight in my upbringing.
Hell, even Dora of Questionable Content has her very own laser portrait.
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“[Melky Cabrera] was rewarded with a pie in the face from pitcher A. J. Burnett,...”
– Some days, I love my team. The days when the kids brought up from the farm system like Cano and Melky make good, and the superstars sit back and marvel.
It’s why I loved the ‘96, ‘98, ‘00 Yanks, who were a bunch of great personalities who hadn’t been tried and tested...
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Scene--The Cloudherders stand on a corner, 10.45pm.
A CAR pulls up, filled with too many drunken, shrieking girls. Some are in costume, and inexplicably, some are in blackface.
A girl (to Nick): OH MY GOD, YOU LOOK JUST LIKE TOM CRUISE!
Various, assorted girls, each shriller than the next: Oh my god, he does!! Is he? Are you Tom Cruise?! Can I have your autograph? Oh my god!
(As we cross the street in front of them): I LOOOOOOVE YOU!!!
Note of interest--Nick does not look like Tom Cruise. Not even a little.
The cloudherders won LoTR trivia, by the way :)
Trivia Host: What is the name of Faramir's father?
Me: ... Fathermir!
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Seattle Transit tunnel: It won’t be the same →
Oh, online remnant of the Seattle P-I, you are so provincial and cute. Holy wow, guys, there’s-a-gonna be trains in the bus tunnel! It won’t be the same!
Enthusiastically describing the changes to service in the downtown bus tunnel, the P-I states: “Michael Avery, rail section manager for Metro Transit, said Seattle’s is the only known transit tunnel in the world where buses and...
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New memory material may hold data for one billion... →
If this is possible, it definitely gives us hope for the ultimate sci-fi fantasy- stumbling upon the records of some ancient alien civilization. As storage media gets smaller and storage capacity grows, will some limit eventually be reached? The natural limit seems to be recording data onto particles themselves. A long-dead alien civilization might leave nothing behind but a single computer...
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Pervy Elf Fanciers, Unite?
Hi, folks. Sit down, gather round. I have a story for you.
A few years back I was working in an area of Seattle that is a gigantic tourist hub. Anyone who walks off a cruise ship, drives in for the day or wanders around heads straight for this area, and most of them will find the place where I worked. I saw a lot of odd things, met a lot of unique folks. But one group beat them all.
A handful of...
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Glass Water Bowl And Sun Start Fire At Washington... →
The first hot weekend of the year, and this is what we get from it. The Northwest clearly just isn’t designed for sun.
(I originally mis-typed that as “fun.” But that just ain’t true. I mean, come on, the U District Street Fair was this weekend, and they had a guy impaling himself on a bed of rusty nails. Last year’s impaler-guy used sterile nails. Do we know how to...
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Chinese City Is Chilly to a Sex Theme Park -... →
This is seriously unfortunate. I was really looking forward to China having a sex-themed theme park, which would not only educate about safety and condom use, but would have giant nude dioramas and tips for better sex. And I wasn’t looking forward to it just because it’s a novelty: I wanted to be able to use it as evidence that even a country like frickin Communist China has better and...
Michael Coolidge - Mini-Bowl Transformodrome →
Mini golf + Bocce ball? I have to play this! It could be a fun summer project to build a course like this somewhere. Hmm..
Life’s First Spark Re-Created in the Laboratory |... →
Mind-blowing Thursday, Part 2. This one really speaks for itself.
Introduction to Wolfram|Alpha by Stephen Wolfram →
Mind-blowing Thursday, part 1. This is a search engine technology that performs intelligent analytics on a vast, ever-growing heap of data - Google intelligently links, this intelligently analyzes. It certainly looks promising.
Uncovering the Secrets Beneath the Surface of the... →
For all you New Yorkers out there- some of the strange things that have been found or gone missing in the harbor.
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Whirled →
Arounder is part travel site, part interactive panorama archive. I’m more interested in the panorama part, being that it features some great photography from interesting locales in European cities. Fancy a nighttime jaunt around the Ponte Sant’angelo, the lights along the Tiber ablaze? Or a spin around a Cyprus beach, the rocks picked out in digital detail? Give it a whirl.
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Night Run II, 1st Half →
You know me and timelapse videos. Here’s one of a container ship..
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The Hunt for Gollum →
I’m not big on fan films, per se. They’re usually woefully under-funded, badly acted, and rely on help from snippets of source material that only serve to heighten how terribly produced the fan film is. ‘Painful’ does not usually begin to cover it.
That said, go spend 40 minutes watching the fan film The Hunt for Gollum.
Based on the appendices of The Lord of the Rings,...
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“Ok, maybe I shouldn’t have taken off my pants.”
– Nick.
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Celluloid - ©2009 Leif Chappelle
After posting...
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Never Learn Anything From History →
It has finally happened: “History Comics” author Kate Beaton has published a book! And between her announcement of it earlier this week and today, it has already completely sold out. How I wish there were a holiday coming up so I could ask for this book. But, there isn’t, so I guess I’ll just sit and mope like a Pope.
Why, hello Eleanor of Aquitaine, don’t you look...