Delicious Library
I’ve got a fairly large DVD collection and its a bitch to keep track of it. Its not as bad now, but when I was in college still people were constantly borrowing them, most of the time without asking me, which I thought was called stealing, and never returning them until I went over to their place and stole them back. Not a problem, but with a large collection I can’t tell if some are missing. Whats the point of this story? Well, when I was in college, I would have killed for this: Delicious Library
Run your very own library from your home or office using our impossibly simple interface. Delicious Library’s digital shelves act as a visual card-catalog of your books, movies, music and video games. A scan of a barcode is all Delicious Library needs to add an item to your digital shelves, downloading tons of info from the internet like the author, release date, current value, description, and even a high-resolution picture of the cover. Import your entire library using our exclusive full-speed iSight video barcode scanner, our Flic® Wireless Laser Bar Code Scanner, or (the slow way) entering the titles by hand. Once you have all of your items in your Mac, you can browse though your digital shelves, check stuff out to friends using Apple’s built-in Address Book and calendar, and find new items to read, watch, and play using Library’s recommendations. Delicious Library is coming very soon, so bear with us. We promise it will be worth the wait!
Only for OS X users though, so mac users rejoice! But this thing is really cool, so cool I have come back into thinking that I really want an iSight camera now. (I initially wanted one when they came out, but then I thought “Who would I talk to with it?”, but now there is another reason!)
Moving from Movable Type
I’ve been looking more and more into changing my blogging software away from Movable Type to something else. I’ve looked at Textpattern, but wasn’t impressed. I tried to work with WordPress, but had nothing but problems with the install. I’ve also glanced at a few others including plogger because of my friend’s, Daniel Cole, new blog.
Here is what I would like to see in new blogging software:
1. An easy install
2. Good template system, or at least one that is easy to hack up.
3. Decent searching
4. Good user admin.
5. Good SPAM blocking, if that exists
6. More PHP the better, but I’m not sure I want all dynamic entry displaying, maybe with just the old ones.
7. I would be great if I could import entires from Movable Type
Any ideas? I’m going to start looking harder in the coming weeks.
I’m Covered in SPAM!
For some reason, in the last few days, the comment SPAMmers out there have been just pounding this site. Why? Beats me…don’t they know that not many people actually read this site? The worst part of this recent mess is that I have MT Blacklist (the web app that houses a list of known spammer and blocks them.) installed! In fact some of the IP’s of the spammers that have hit me today come from IPs that Blacklist should be blocking. So now I have to add IPs to the Blacklist’s list and to the internal MovableType IP blocking list. What a pain in the ass.
Have any of your blogs been hit this hard recently? And if you happen to be running MT-Blacklist, does it work? It sure isn’t for me.
I guess I’m going to shave.
F*ck! Congrats to the Red Sox. I wish you could have played the Cardinals when they still remembered how to pitch, how to bat, and how to manage (I would have started Haren).
Thats all I can really say about it now. Its going to take a while for me to even address this loss. But really, you can’t get too mad about the season that the Cardinals had this year, however I can be angry about how that same team played in the World Series.
Great season Cards! And congrats on being picked for 3rd place and winning the National League! Its been a great year.
(Now that I think about it. There shouldn’t be a lot of complaining about this year. I mean I could be worse…I could be a Cubs fan!)
Boston: No More Excuses
Here we sit, on the brink of a World Series Sweep by the Boston Red Sox over my beloved Cardinals. The Cardinals have played fantastic baseball in every game they have played this year, execpt for the World Series. And judging by the constant promos, montages, and comments, if Fox has their way, the Cardinals will continue their crappy play tonight. Intresting that after following this team from top to bottom (How many of you Cardinals fans could string off a list of people playing in their minor league teams?), I’m not even pissed off at the Cardinals, I’m just depressed. However, the sudden “Cubs-Complex” that the Cardinals are afflicited with is not what I plan to discuss tonight.
The way I see it, truly interesting story comming out of this series is now: Everyone in Boston is so focused on making sure their Boston Red Sox don’t blow it, I don’t think anyone has thought about what will happen if they actually win! Think about it. The Boston sports fan has always had this “feel sorry for me” attitude, its been their identity for year upon years. Now what if the Red Sox win tonight? All of a sudden, their baseball team will be the best in the nation, and, I don’t know if you heard, but their football team, the Patriots, are doing everything they can to be named the “Greatest Football Team Ever” with their 20 game winning streak. Poof! Goodbye! Noone feels sorry for you now.
I can hear the Boston fans now: “We don’t want people to feel sorry for us! We want to win!” Well there are two things wrong with that. 1. You have been winning. Although the Red Sox haven’t won a World Series Ring in 86 years, but its not like that have be horrible that long. They have been pretty good in fact. So, I could really do with a bit less whinny all the time…(I’m looking at you Dennis Leary.) Are the Red Sox really underdogs? Fox wants us to believe that they are, becuase it makes much better TV for the causal fan. This “underdog” went 7 games in the ALCS last year. This “underdog” also sports a payroll of $125 Million dollars! This is not a rag-tag bunch of guys that teamed up and became magic…this is a group of very good players that have been paid very well to do just this: Win.
The second point? I think after the initial euphoria, these fans are going to find that they miss saying how much it sucks that their team never wins. They like that security blanket of no matter how bad, or good, they are, they can always say: “Damn that curse!” when they don’t win the series. Its not that their pitcher served up a meatball to Arron Boone, or that Buckner is a dumbass…its the “curse”. And what about the supposed “Red Sox Nation” all across the US and the world that is always the Red Sox buddies, even though many have never even been to Boston? Well don’t you think that maybe the reason people love the Red Sox for no reason (like Tom Hanks, that bastard) is becuase they have this “underdog attitude”. You think they will still have this underdog support with a ring? I would hope not.
Think of it this way: Wouldn’t it suck if you thought you had cancer? For years your doctor is saying you suffer from a horrible malady that can never be fixed. All your friends helped you out all the time and even your enemies really, deep down felt sorry for you. Now imagine that you switch doctors and he says: “You don’t have cancer. You never did. You are going to be just fine.” After that initial jumping for joy session, you find your friends don’t help you as much and your enemies have gone right back to kicking you when you are down. Sucks huh? That could be your life Boston. …and with that swing and home run from Damon, it could be sooner than you think.
The iPod: In Living Color
The Apple Watchers and Guessers got it right again this year. Welcome to the fold iPod Photo. This new iPod along with the U2 Special Edition iPod were introduced today by Apple. I’m really anxious to go to the Apple Store and get my hands on iPod Photo, with that great color screen, and tv out (That I guess doesn’t do video? That sucks.). However, I really don’t want an iPod Photo though, and I can’t that many in the general public will. Does it matter? Nope. Adding cool features like this on the high end is what Apple does: They intro cool stuff that not many people buy, and by the time the competition does it, Apple releases those cool features in their base model…and that will be I’ll upgrade my iPod.
Apple has really done it again…execpt for that U2 iPod… Who is really going to buy that other than the insane U2 fans out there. But I guess $50 bucks more for a black and red ipod with all of U2′s albums is not a bad price point. I just don’t see a lot of those coming off the shelves.
However, thats exactly what I, and many others, said about the iPod Mini.
Ashlee Simpson: Next Extra in a Jackie Chan Movie?
“I’m totally against it and offended by it. I’m going out to let my real talent show, not to just stand there and dance around. Personally, I’d never lip-synch. It’s just not me.”
Question:
Who recently said the above quote in Lucky Magazine?
a ) Elton John
b ) Ashlee Simpson
c ) Milli Vanilli (or I guess, just Milli)
Answer: If you picked “c”, Ashlee Simpson, then, not only are you right, but you must be enjoying the sweet taste of irony.
Thats right, Ashlee Simpson stated earlier this year that “lip-syncing just isn’t for her” and then on one fateful Saturday night (live), she let the world know that she is certainly cool with it now.
This is not new news, its been all over the blogs…hell check out Feedster. But I thought I would give it a little time because I just love that quote from Lucky magazine, and that the “main stream” (no, sadly Hell Yeah Bitch! .com is not yet considered main stream media) media is finally reporting on it.
In case you missed it: Here’s the video (AVI)
I’ve never had so much fun on a map site
Seriously! I spent way too much time playing with Map 24 today. I was checking out my drive home, I was looking up people’s addresses, just typing in random places… Why the hell was this fun? Map 24′s interface is the key: when you change your route or the address you are searching for on the left, the map applet zooms in and out and all around showing you want you want. Its really very cool, I wish I would have thought it up (and if I did, I wish I knew how to implement it).
This is doubly exciting becuase my old favorite map site, Mapblast, steered me in the wrong direction and made me horribly lost on the way to an interview a couple of weeks back. It kind of figures that is beging to suck since Microsoft bought them a year or so ago. But it doesn’t matter now, becuase I dumped them for they cooler, prettier cousin.
Why haven’t I heard of Map 24 yet? It turns out that they even won a Webby last year!
Bored? Check it out.
VoIP in your home!
Today at work I was made aware of a very cool application that is out there, loaded with features and open source (non-geeks: “open-source” = free). Its called Asterisk and it is just amazing. To put it simply, what it does is give you VoIP (Voice over IP), and cool system that is being implemented is almost all of the major corporations, in your home or small office. Ok, let me back up. What this means that once this system implemented, you will no longer need phone cord all around your house, just ethernet cable that will run both your internet and phone. The beauty of this is that the “IP” is just in your network, you won’t be using your internet connection to place outside calls, that will still go through your existing phone line(s).
There are some costs with this though. You have to buy a PCI card ($125)to put into a Linux box (yes, it only runs on linux) and then of course, you will need VoIP phones($300). But after that, the ideas are limitless. You just plug your phone line from the outside into your linux, VoIP server, and then setup each of your phones. That might sound a bit lame, but check out this features list. It has everything from voice mail to mp3s playing for your hold music.
So far, it looks like I’ll be incharge of the roll out of this technology at work so I plan to document the process as much as they will let me, mainly because this is just the kind of uber-geeky thing that would be so cool to have at my place and it think others might feel the same way.
Political Correctiveness is for Witches too
I wish I could say a story like this would surprise me…
Halloween banned – to save witches’ feelings
US schools have banned Halloween because officials are worried about offending real witches.
Students who turn up in costume could be sent home from schools in Puyallup School District in Washington state.
Officials told a local TV station that followers of the Wiccan religion had complained about the way Halloween was celebrated.
Spokeswoman Karen Hansen said: “School officials have been reviewing the Halloween tradition and decided that time could be better spent.
“Schools are teaching students to be respectful and take account of the discomfort felt by others. Witches with pointy noses are not respective symbols of the Wiccan religion.”
The authority was also concerned that Halloween wasted valuable class time and that the costumes were too expensive for many families.
This is my favorite line: Officials told a local TV station that followers of the Wiccan religion had complained about the way Halloween was celebrated. The “Wiccan religion”? Witches are freakin’ cry babies. What did that weird girl Sarah, that prefers to be called “Sersi, Queen of the Night” mind you, decided that she got tired of writing poetry about how she wants to die, and goes out to ruin some poor kids easy day at school. Could be worse though, I guess she could of showed up on Halloween packin’ heat.