the shrewdness of apes

the wife has jumped headlong into a project to completely digitize our music collection. since starting up with iTunes a couple years ago, we've made incremental progress, adding things in bursts, or when we felt like hearing something specific (we're pretty much without a stereo these days, so the computer is the main listening outlet). in that time we convereted over 9,500 songs, so when we started going through all the albums starting with "A" and adding those that we hadn't already, i started wondering what number 10,000 would be. Friday night, we got the answer: "Fuck This Shit" by Belle and Sebastian from the Storytelling soundtrack, an album whose existence made the NME posit that "the most hardened fan(s) of dreary Scottish indie....must be preparing to stab themselves repeatedly in the eyes with their Hello Kitty badges in order to stay awake for the whole thing." i couldn't hum it for you on a bet (it's an instrumental), but we got a pretty good laugh out of the profane title. now we'll have to see what #11,111 ends up being.

Posted by Jamie at 09:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i have been bestowed with what i will call an honorable mention in Daniel Radosh's latest New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest. the bar has now been set for the rest of you.

Posted by Jamie at 11:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

dear Hulk,

i know that bringing this up puts me in danger of severe bodily harm, what with your rage and your strength and your smashing and your Red Bull superdrink, but i'm afraid that i am going be forced to take legal action against you for your infringement on my intellectual property. to put it in terms you're sure to understand: Hulk stole idea from puny human, now Hulk must pay. if you would like to avoid a messy lawsuit (or a messier assault case), i will happily settle for a 10% cut of the income generated by your site. or for an autographed pair of those cool purple pants - your choice. don't make me break out the gamma rays.

sincerely,
t.s.o.a.

cc: Bruce Banner

Posted by Jamie at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

via the Smoking Gun, t.s.o.a. has learned that the US Postal Service is poised to allow third part vendors to produce postage that users can customize themselves with any uploadable image and then use on their angry letters to TV Guide, blackmail payments, ransom notes, &c. stamps.com is one of the first places you can do this. what a fantastic idea; i can't believe it's taken them this long to come up with it, though it opens a Pandora's Box of possibilities for the creative, bored and sociopathic. the folks over at TSG naturally already had some fun with this during the trial run, which leads me to believe that there will be some censorship involved. the press release merely says that "USPS will require vendors to produce a product that meets current postal regulations and conclusively prove that all images produced and services provided abide by all federal laws, including copyright laws", so what that means is open to interpretation, but i doubt that i'll be able to get any stamps with this photo on them:

Posted by Jamie at 11:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

as Google's march to world dominance continues (their news maps service blows the competition away), it occured to me that there was one service that they weren't offering: e-mail notification when someone types your name into their search engine. all you would have to do was sign up with a name and e-mail address and they could send you a message to let you know that someone was looking you (or someone with the same name) up. of course it would work better for people with uncommon names, but it might be interesting for Emily Jones to see how often her name gets typed in as well. if perhaps that volume of e-mails is a bit much to be sending out, they could send out a weekly or monthly tally of your relative popularity; even if it's just you typing your own name in over and over again to boost your stats.

Posted by Jamie at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

some completely unrelated items:

Bob Nasatanovich's horse racing blog/site is now up and running (heh), but it's pretty hard core so don't go there looking for hijinx or the like. do go if you'd like to know how The Bohemian Girl did in the 9th race at Oaklawn Park on Friday.

remember Sniglets? apparently they're still going strong. Banterist published some with a Starbucks theme today (though he didn't use that particular name) which made me wonder how prevalent they were on the internet. this turned out to be a bad idea as they are everywhere with numerous themes from computers and frisbee golf. perhaps the best was the "Infertility" sniglets i came across which included entries such as "'The Sperminator' - nickname for any friend of your husband's who insists on extended sauna sessions after playing squash" and "Preggozone - the magnetic area around all infertile women that draws expectant mothers into close viewing range; the first day of any cycle has the greatest magnetic field, closely followed by any day on which an infertile womans fails a pregnancy test." does Rich Hall still get royalties from these?

finally, a big Happy Birthday to my wonderful mom, who is celebrating her (3x + y)th birthday where x is your score in bowling if you make a spare in the first frame and then roll a "clothesline" and y is 3 times* the square root of the square root of x. hey, she's a math teacher and a bowler - it seemed appropriate.

* in what can only be called an unfortunate miscalculation, my original equation added in some extra years to the answer. sorry, mom. that's got to be disappointing on a couple of levels.

Posted by Jamie at 07:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Arcata, California is a small town along the northern coast. as such it's home to its share of burn-outs and transients and a lot of just general weirdness, all captured nicely in the Arcata Eye's local police log. it's creatively written and almost always a fun read. to wit:

Friday, July 30 10:10 a.m. A bicyclist reported an unproductive encounter with a bus at the bus station a couple of hours previous. Transportation officials checked the security video and said it appeared the biker was "playing chicken" with the bus when he sustained rear tire damage.

8:52 p.m. A woman reported that she was feeling "out of it."

Posted by Jamie at 04:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

t.s.o.a. correspondent Alena checks in with this bit of news: Duke to Provide Freshman with iPods (registration required).

IPods can store other kinds of data as well, and Duke students will receive models stocked with school-related information, including freshman orientation details, the academic calendar, campus tours and even the school's fight song.

Lisa Merschel's Spanish class will use the iPods to listen to textbook exercises and Spanish songs. Sally Schauman plans to have students record field interviews on the ethics and science of urban water conservation.

that's a pretty genius move on the part of administrators, but i'm afraid it's going to do very little to heal Duke students' reputations as a bunch of smarmy, priggish future country club members. but does anyone know about the iPod's ability to act as a digital tape recorder? someone in the office was just asking me to look into such a thing earleir today and if i can convince them to buy an iPod for the company, that would be pretty great.

Posted by Jamie at 03:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

after reading about it in TimeOutNY last week, NYWiki could be my new obsession. essentially the site is modeled after such entities as the Wikipedia - the free online encyclopedia that let's users create and edit entries. the concept here is similar: users build the site from the ground up, adding information as they go about everything from neighborhoods to newspapers and restaurants to cemeteries. the site has only been public for a little over a week, and it's still pretty spartan so i encourage everyone to go and add something about something. it could be cool to look back in a few months and see something useful that you've helped to build and i know there's a fount of knowledge out there pining away for some sort of relevance.

more info on the Wiki concept here. apparently the name is adapted from the Hawaiian word for "quick".

Posted by Jamie at 05:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

so i suppose on some level i should feel good about the fact that every couple of days some spambot sprays their comment diarrhea on some random posts from 6 months ago. that they've deigned t.s.o.a. worthy of infestation must mean that they think people will see it right? still there's something about it that is disturbing beyond the level that involves me having to delete the comments and ban the IP addresses from posting comments in the future. i don't know how they pick which postings to comment on but i'm guess that there must be some sort of trigger words that it uses. but he strangest thing is the way the comments are written, either complimentary as in "that was interesting" or weirdly philosophical like "man constantly strives for a perfection he doesn't understand with tools inherently flawed." occasionally i catch myself trying to figure out the meaning before realizing that it's all just a trick to lead me to cheap prescription drugs, penis enlargement and pyramid scheme websites. i rarely notice these things on other blogs though. is there some sort of proscriptive blocking mechanism that i'm not aware of?

but do you like what i've done here? now when the bots append nonsensical comments to this post about nonsensical comments in a couple months it will create this seriously meta entry guaranteed to blow some minds. dig.

Posted by Jamie at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

from around the country, a couple interesting links have hit the 'ol Inbox recently. these may be old hat to those of you who live entirely in the binary and hexadecimal worlds, but i thought they were pretty cool. first, a compendium of 365 mp3s put together last year that is a true treasure trove of the forgotten, the obscure and the just plain terrible. in that last category, check out the song from my birthday (2/28) which features Richard Dawson (yes, *that* one) doing a bizarre tune that one can only hope found him in an altered state during recording. another highlight: "I'm a Mormon" a rousing march that must subliminally contain a message prompting the listener to move to Utah. there's the obligatory William Shatner tune as well.

the other fun site i'll plug now is humanclock.com, a project that displays the time through pictures that have been sent in over the months. viewers are welcome to submit their own photos which will be incorporated into the site and displayed during the proper time as well - i just got a good idea for one. i don't see anything about military time on the site, so don't get too cute there smart guy.

thanks to Jeff and Barry.

Posted by Jamie at 03:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

it's nice to know that across this vast digital expanse, a simple Google search can lead you to the strangely pointless, the confusingly intriguing and the unintentionally funny.

(assist to The Morning News)

Posted by Jamie at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

today is photo day:

pictures of cicadas (and a heron?) from the DC area. link courtesy of Jim.

the ruins of New England, photographed by Rob Dobi. link via The Morning News.

Marc and Dan have both been busy posting photos recently.

Posted by Jamie at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

GMail has been polarizing since it was first announced at the beginning of April, first as people worried about the targeted ads that would be placed alongside messages, and now as the tech community argues whether this really represents a big leap forward or whether it's simply "webmail with a really big quota" (read all the comments for some industry insider sniping and some good counter-arguments).

while recognizing that there's nothing revolutionary here, the more i see and read about it, the more i'm excited to leave Yahoo! and its ilk behind. perhaps shmoo can let us now how her Beta testing experience is going. now comes the hard part - picking out a username.

Posted by Jamie at 05:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

we all know the litany of reasons why Office Space is such a classic movie. now you can constantly remind yourself with the Lumbergh Soundboard, where pithy quotes are just a mouse click away. i'm not sure if distracting yourself from your soul-crushing office job by playing clips from a movie about how soul-crushing office jobs are is ironic or meta, but it should get you through to happy hour.

link via Productshop NYC

Posted by Jamie at 04:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

while we're pimping new blogs, we'd be remiss not to point you to Jim's new endeavor. you could even help give it a clever name, like Blogostar Gallactica or, my personal favorite, the Jimstown Flood. either way, he's actually been paid to write before so the quality is top notch.

Posted by Jamie at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

the NYTimes fans the flames of the technological divide today, with an article about how computer "geeks" are quickly tiring of the idiocy of those who unleash viruses by clicking on strange attachments or install spyware on their machines simply because they don't know any better. it goes on to describe the increasing exasperation of those who are called upon to help the clueless both at work and home:

Mr. Rubenstein, a member of the technical support staff at a New York City law school he thought it best not to identify, is not at liberty to dispense such advice at work. Instead, he answers endless calls about malfunctioning monitors that turn out not to be plugged in, and broken printers that start working again as soon as he removes the single piece of paper obviously jamming them.

these types of problems are very typical, at least in my office. i can't tell you how many times i've been called to someone's desk about a problem only to have it mysteriously disappear once i arrive, or to have things work perfectly when i try to recreate it. things not plugged in, or loose connections are the culprit more often than anything else. (as if to drive this point home, i just went to help someone who couldn't get a modem to dial out, only to discover that the splitter that his computer hooked into wasn't actually plugged into the phone jack, thereby explaining the lack of a dial tone. and to think that i almost got on the phone to Verizon to get them to send someone out here!).

meanwhile, there are those who simply won't trust themselves to be able to learn, retain and apply technological knowledge, exemplified by this quote:

"There are these MP3's and PDF's and a million other things that you don't even know what they are," Ms. Tauber said. "I don't feel like I need to figure out computers, because my instinct is there's just no way."

this woman is 24 years old, by the way, so she has no excuse about not growing up with computers or some such bullshit. sorry miss, but your instinct is completely wrong here. no one's asking you to build and program your own computer - just understand how it works a little bit. learn where it puts files in different circumstances so you can find them later. learn how to install programs properly. learn how to indenitfy harmful elements that might damage your computer, or make it more annoying. take steps to keep your computer in good working order, etc. would you buy and operate a car without some training in how to do it properly? of course not, yet people frequently pull a computer out of the box and expect it to magically perform to their expectations with no effort on their part.

the following is an exchange that transpired between a co-worker and I about 2 years ago:

her: [ambling over to my desk] jamie, how do i paste something into a document?
me: just hit control+V and it will place it wherever your cursor is.
her: oh right, thanks!

her: sorry, Jamie, is the shortcut for paste control+P?
me: [forehead vein throbbing, voice rising, sphincter tightening] no, it's control+V!! it's on the "edit" menu if you forget! [to myself] jesus f-in christ! what have i done to deserve this fate?

and this is an educated woman who had been a television producer. so she had to be familiar with problem solving techniques and troubleshooting. and yet in the face of technology she just decided that she didn't know anything and was therefore completely helpless on her own. she even saved all of her files on floppy disk because she couldn't figure out our very simple filing system on the file server.

at any rate, the point i want to make here is that it's really not that hard to learn a few basic things about your computer that will help improve your experience using it and prevent a host of problems from occurring. if you think that you just don't understand how they work, or that it's too much effort to learn, you are wrong. trust yourself - if you're smart enough to have earned enough money to buy a computer, you're smart enough to operate one successfully on your own. here's a good site that covers a wide range of topics.

Posted by Jamie at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

now on the scene: wonkette, yet another nick denton financed blog that aims to be for DC and politics what gawker has been for NYC and "real estate porn". marc will love that they've already linked to a story from the fredericksburg paper. i've already got it in my "favorites" section, which unbeknownst to me most people don't even use. huh.

people are using Google in new and creative ways though, bombing it with links that then result in such things as searches for "miserable failure" resulting in the top result being the official white house biography of george w. bush. of course, that's not something that would normally be typed into a search engine, so the whole point is to make it happen just so you can send an e-mail around as some sort of pathetic political statement that will only provoke your enemies into like-minded smallmindedness. stellar.

Posted by Jamie at 05:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)