Today’s weird Internet find

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“FLIP (Floating Instrument Platform) is the US Navy’s oldest, and most unusual, research vessel. Commonly referred to as the FLIP ship, it is actually a 355ft long, spoon-shaped buoy which can be flipped from horizontal to a vertical position by pumping 700t of seawater into the ‘handle’ end whilst flooding air into the ‘cradle’, causing it to rise up out of the sea.Once the 28 minute transformation from horizontal to vertical has taken place, 300m of the buoy are submerged underwater, keeping the 700 long-ton mass steady and making it perfect for researching wave height, acoustic signals, water temperature and density, and for the collection of meteorological data.“.

They don’t really want what they say they want

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Or, why restating the problem can be the best possible thing you can do. The context of the link is software development, but upon reflection it turns out that there’s pretty much always some benefit to be had by turning the problem around a few times.

(Of course, my answer to the actual dilemma linked would’ve been “join,” but that’s because I think in Perl.)

Andy Sullivan Gives The Smackdown

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This time, the victims are the TeaPartyTards. Check it out.

I spent the better part of an hour earlier today scanning the various sites and blogs to try and understand what specifically the Fox-Pajamas tea parties are about. Having absorbed about as much of the literature as I can, I have to say I’m still befuddled.

Option 1: It’s a protest of the bank bailouts orchestrated by Bush and now Obama. But surely these tea-partiers understand what would happen if we didn’t bail the banks out. Are they advocating letting major banks fail? Or are they advocating a Krugman-style government take-over? No idea.

Option 2: It’s a protest against tax hikes. But there have barely been any! Are they arguing that the planned return to Clinton era marginal rates is an outrage worthy of the colonists … only months after an election in which the winning candidate ran on exactly that platform?

Nice. As Jon Stewart said earlier this week, all these hysterical wingnuts seem to have confused “tyranny” with “losing.”

This is the coolest thing EVER

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Pervasive computing is getting there, but the problem right now is that getting to the cloud of data involves the awkward process of hauling out your phone or laptop and doing a manual query. What if you didn’t have to, and what if you could solve the problem without spending more than $400?

I can’t possibly explain how cool this is. Just go watch.

(Yes, the MIT Media Lab is made of WIN.)

Catan goes Mainstream

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Have you played Settlers of Catan yet? The German-made game has become a global hit; my guess is Heathen Nation probably has a higher percentage of gamers — and thus folks who’ve seen it — than the public at large, but it’s interesting that Wired has noticed. It’s also interesting that Wired’s notice feels late despite the fact that I’ve seen no other mass-media treatment of it yet.

Godspeed, Lord Pomplemoose

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moose-in-blue.jpg Longtime Heathen “Attorney” writes to inform us of the untimely passing of the Chief Mastiff Correspondent Pomplemoose, late of the Sue Barnett district of Heathenstan. Here he is, all ten stone of him, enjoying his native Texas Bluebonnets.

Pomplemoose was not yet 10 when he bounded off this mortal coil on Tuesday, quite unexpectedly. We’ll miss him, as we know all the Acostas will as well — particularly Miss ~.

Why the AP is doomed

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Two from Jeffrey McManus.

First:

The AP’s power used to flow from their role as a syndicator — they would hook up any member newsroom with a communications cable (the literal “news wire”) through which stories and other content would flow. Now that newsrooms (and every single other person on the planet) has a better wire called the internet, there may be no good reason for the AP to exist in its role as a syndicator, except for inertia. To put it in economic terms, it is a classic example of an inefficient marketplace.

Second:

the AP’s chairman decried the practice of aggregators linking to and excerpting AP content and got into some rather nasty name-calling (backed up by a Wall Street Journal executive who referred to “certain web sites” (cough Google) as “parasites”). Danny Sullivan had an excellent response in which he suggested that if the news services didn’t want Google’s attention, they’ve always had a simple way to reject it (through a file that bans search engines called robots.txt). But they won’t do this, of course, which is the reason why they’re now resorting to public whining and name-calling — it’s all they’ve got left. Traditional news businesses are stuck in a bear trap called the internet, and they can’t decide whether to saw their own legs off or slowly bleed to death.

See ya, AP.

What’s the matter with Kansas

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Found on stall floor in client restroom: printouts from the Ayn Rand Institute. Ah, randroid wingnuts.

(Of course, it’s possible the sheets were meant for sanitary use, which would be appropriate if ill-advised; the client’s choice of paper products in said restroom is perfectly reasonable.)

HAHAHAHA

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It appears Microsoft is just not quite able to kill XP after all; leaked HP memos suggest that zombie OS may live on until 2010, nearly nine years after its 2001 release.

For reference, nine years prior to XP’s release, we were all using Windows 3.1 (b. 18 March 1992) — or we were, if we weren’t still using DOS.

Dept. of Good Things

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Adults who love each other can now get married in Iowa no matter what plumbing they have.

From the unanimous Iowa supreme court ruling:

“We are firmly convinced that the exclusion of gay and lesbian people from the institution of civil marriage does not substantially further any important governmental objective,” the court said in an opinion written by Justice Mark Cady. “The legislature has excluded a historically disfavored class of persons from a supremely important civil institution without a constitutionally sufficient justification.”

Dept. of Weird Observances

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Today is the 99th anniversary of my great-grandparents’ wedding; visitors to Heathen Central can see an April 3, 1910 picture of Ike and Dell Farmer in our entryway.

Another tiny thing about Windows vs. Macs

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This one’s not a right or wrong thing; it’s just different.

On the Mac, scrolling instructions from scrollwheel equipped mice are directed at whatever window is below the cursor without regard to the current focus. This means one can have (say) a Word doc for notetaking open over a long web article, and scroll the article without clicking on the browser window and taking the focus away from the Word doc.

On Windows, no input is ever directed to a window unless it has focus. Using the scroll wheel on my mouse will scroll, or attempt to, whatever window has focus regardless of where my mouse cursor is.

I’m honestly not sure which I like better, but I sure DO wish there was a preference I could set on one or the other of them to make them both act the same.

(It seems likely that someone has developed the old X-windows focus-follows-mouse trick for both platforms, but seeing as how that paradigm makes me crazy, I won’t be going that route.)

Goofus and Gallant at the Kansas City Airport

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In this context, read “Goofus” as “the Continental terminal” and “Gallant” as “the Southwest terminal.”

GOOFUS assumes travelers are content with off-brand prefab food, a standard-issue airport bar with Sysco burgers, and a single Starbuck’s.

GALLANT at least provides a Sbarro and a McDonald’s, and God help us if we’re viewing that as “the nice option.”

GOOFUS hides outlets under furniture.

GALLANT has biz-traveler friendly desk-counters with outlets in the waiting area for laptop warriors to plug in and work while waiting for their flight.

GOOFUS has dodgy wifi prone to signal drops at the slightest provocation.

GALLANT’s connectivity is rock solid.

Unfortunately, GALLANT requires me to stop in Dallas, so GOOFUS it is. Basically, the answer is that there’s no way to go to and from Kansas City that doesn’t suck in some way.

Dept. of Windows Boneheadedness

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So I went to lunch, and since I was on battery, I closed my laptop before I did so.

When I came back, opened the Dell, and restarted my aircard, Firefox and TBird were back in business. However, Outlook threw an error stating, basically, that it was working offline now, and that to get Outlook back online, I should start Internet Explorer and tell IT to stop working offline, and that then Outlook would play nice.

Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot. Who writes software this way? I’m beginning to understand the isolation common to MS developer types, since there’s no way you could get away with behavior like this if you were exposed to proper developers.

(What’s also amazing is the level of talent I see from MS in the field, via their consulting organization, where I meet genuinely brilliant people frequently embarrassed by their employer’s products. Somebody oughta figure out this disconnect.)

The more Windows changes, the more it stays the same

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In order to resolve the USB boradband modem problem on the MiniDell I mentioned earlier, I had to:

  • Un-install the modem driver
  • Un-install the AT&T management software
  • Reboot
  • Re-install the driver
  • Re-install the management software

Ah, Windows. It’s like I never left.

(I should note that in 2+ years of using modems like this on my Macs, this problem has never happened; further, in 10+ years of using Macs, this sort of take off and nuke the site from orbit problem-solving approach has been applicable maybe once or twice ever, as opposed to standard operating procedure. Sigh.)

Well, that didn’t take long

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The mini-Dell is already causing me grief: all of a sudden, it’s refusing to recognize my 3G modem. Worked fine last week, and has worked fine for more than a year on the Mac. Ah, the joys of Windows.

“Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.”

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The extremely smart and usually right Clay Shirky breaks down the newspaper problem for you. Hint: Unless they realize what business they’re actually in — which is to say, not selling paper — they’ll die. The digital world has brought changes that are unavoidably destructive to the old way of doing business as a newspaper, which depended on it being hard to duplicate and distribute information. There’s no way to undo that, and there’s absolutely no sane reason to want to.

But, as recent events have shown, no newspaper firm yet understands this, and so they continue to fail, fail again, and fail some more, all the while refusing to alter their business plans — and while this is happening, good people are being put out of work as a direct result of the failure of management vision.

Remember, the railroads weren’t broken by the automobile. They were broken by the mistaken belief they were in the railroad business. What their customers wanted was transportation; how the package moves from St Louis to Denver is completely irrelevant to the customer.

Made of AWESOME and WIN

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Nine Inch Nails and Jane’s Addiction are touring together this summer; the branding is all about NIN|JA, which is beautiful. (With them on most dates is Tom Morello‘s new gig Street Sweeper, adding to the overall grooviness.)

Problem: No dates convenient to Houston. For this lineup, though, I’d fly; the principal bands here are up there with Willie on my persona list of “acts I’ve never seen but desperately want to.” Right now, the only really good candidate for me is the Charlotte show. Mike?

(Yes, really Jane’s; the lineup is Farrell/Navarro/Avery/Perkins, or the same lineup as the seminal EP and Nothing’s Shocking.)