I hate the tv

So Google talk rolled out an interesting feature a while back, to show your friends which song your playing…You can see it here…

Well they use it to track what people are playing and rank music using it.

It seems pretty cool, so I’m not totally against it, but I bet a lot of people don’t know this is going on. And it’s important to remember that this user information is turned directly into money by companies like google.

I didn’t see them mention this to me when doing the software update. Software license agreements are all hocus pocus….click here and we’ll make the hundreds of pages of nasty legalese go away so you can just use the damn program. At least google’s got some blurb up about how you opt-in and opt-out. They’re pretty cool about that.

Ahahhaa

I don’t know WHAT this is; but it’s pretty fun. The end is amazing.

update 3/8/2008: the video was removed from gootube. Here’s some information on this brilliant animation.

For 100 pounds sterling you can buy a yak for some needy Tibetian children…

I applaud the people who thought this one up….seems like a very concrete, practical way to help someone directly…

It looks like Save the Children has a fairly good rating on Charity Navigator, too.
Found this thru the inq.

Started looking around gootube for some dominos vides. Browsing around, I found some decent stuff:

Billards + dominoes

Too much setup time, but worth the wait: CDs, Cassettes, Boxes, etc.

People (Miller Comercial from a few years ago)

Awesome, looks like its from a kids show

When google calendar came out, I figured it was a privacy nightmare and I avoided it. My main concern was that google would hold a bunch of my information and then get suppoenaed or bought or accidentally leak the information out onto the net or something. Now I’m not an important person or anything, I just didn’t feel like it was a good idea.

So today I gave it a shot, after a friend suggested that I share her calendar. So I took a look and it’s got some cool features. Basically Google is taking a shot directly at Microsoft’s Outlook calendar program, but doing it server-side. It looks good, as their things typically do. The security model they’ve chosen seems fairly straight forward, but I will be that many many people will be bitten by this. I still think this type of program is best obtained clientside, but with the lack of development of non-MS calendars (is Sunbird ever going to pick up the pace?), maybe I will use gCal.

A calendar can contain many juicy pieces of information and google wants this, because it makes their program more powerful. I’m all for that, but again, I think people that don’t understand it will misuse it. Even those that do (like the semi-incompetant me) will probably accidentally post a copy of their social security card or something.

For instance, you can import a flight itenerary into google calendar directly. I haven’t done it myself, but I wanted to see what the process was like so I did a quick search for “google calendar flight”, and found this interesting blog post where a guy stalks (for demo purposes) some lady who left her calendar wide open:

Death By Google Calendar

Use with google with care folks. As they get bigger, we should all worry more.

Here...and they’re not shy about sharing the music (streamable) on their website.

Bullshit. Bullshit! bullshit. This study from the Reason Foundation makes an interesting read for anyone who’s dieing to avoid the obvious facts. There are no numbers produced and no scientific rigor exercised.

So many holes that I won’t even address them, except with this (from this website):

According to the 1999 Reason Foundation Annual Report, top funders include: C. Boyden Gray and David Koch (each individually contributed $25,000 or more in 1999), the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the JM Foundation, Charles G. Koch Foundation, Lilly Endowmet, Scaife Family Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Sunmark Foundation. Corporate Donors in 1999 included: American Farm Bureau Federation, American Forest and Paper Association, American Petroleum Institute, American Plastics Council, ARCO Foundation, BP Amoco, CA Building Industry Association, Chemical Manufacturers Association, Chevron Corporation, Chlorine Chemistry Council, Clorox, Coca-Cola, American and Continental Airlines, Daimler Chrysler Corp, Dow Chemical, Eastman Chemical, Edison Electric Institute, ENRON, Exxon Mobil, FMC Corporation, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Kimberly-Clark, Koch Industries, Koch Materials, Eli Lilly, Microsoft, National Air Transportation Association, National Beer Wholesalers, National Soft Drink Association, Pfizer, Inc, Philip Morris, Procter and Gamble, Shell Oil, Sun America, Union Carbide Corporation, United Airlines, Western States Petroleum, Watson Land Company, Whole Foods Market, Winston and Strawn.

They obviously have an agenda.

I ran into it via this, then this.

Narrated by a Russian tourist in North Korea, this collection of photographs gives a rare look at what would be seen by a tourist to the country.

These are a translation of this page in Russian.
Author/Photographer: Artemii Lebedev
Thanks Militaryphotos.net

When you do a search now for “Sasha Cohen” you get a bunch of results for some girl who aparantly won a gold medal in the 2k6 olympics. The REAL Sasha Cohen, in my opinion, is this guy (interviewed by Robert Siegel on NPR). He brought us Borat, Ali-G, Bruno, and other characters. He rules.

On Kuro5shin, they’ve got a really interesting article on a guy who claims to have intentionally infected himself with hookworms to cure his asthma. That’s not all. He says he went to Cameroon to walk in latrines to get infected. Unbelievable, but very interesting.

Here’s what one looks like:

It brings to mind that story that came out a while back about a parasite, Toxoplasma_gondii, that controls the minds of rodents; it makes them fearless of cats which can kill them. Maybe this hookworm story isn’t so far-fetched.