“We used their surface and projected the truth onto it.”
He didn’t actually say that but the sentiment is there. They also got his age wrong. A few years prior they wrote an article about the high school he went to. The reporter talks about him a bit but only has once quote.
“So, is there a proposal, or did you just want to open the discussion?”
And again a number of years prior (this is like 10 years ago now) we have a quote from an article about the boy scouts in Park Slope.
“Not really”
I’m fairly certian he’s mentioned in one more artcle about a town meeting her went to that was on domestic violence in specific communitites, but I’m sure I’ll be corrected soon enough. The quotes don’t do him justice, but the articles might, they’re not bad reads. I’m proud of him. Not for being in the newspaper but for doing things that he believes in. It’s just cool that they’re newspaper worthy.
-Francis
PS (I got more updates in the works but I’ve been a bit sick.)
Miracle fruit or berries makes sour things taste sweet. An effect that apparently is quite amazing.
From the supplier’s website.
The active ingredient in the Miracle Berry Fruit, known as Miraclulin coats the tongue and blocks out the taste bud receptors which are responsible for sour, bitter and acidic flavours. The outcome is that all foods which taste sour, bitter or acidic miraculously come to taste sweet.
Once I was told you could solve the problem with transporting “Miracle” berries by freeze drying them (they spoil quickly) and that you could buy said berries online for $20 dollars, I immediately bought them.
It comes with 10 pills each formerly being 3 berries. Think geek says you should cut them in half for twenty servings. The official supplier claims that even fresh berries start loosing their effects due to age and that problem doesn’t exist after it’s been freeze dried.
Even with my brothers involvement, I haven’t really touted what’s going on Tibet and with the controversy with this year’s Olympics. Even though one my favorite bands (Radiohead) came on stage the other night with a their instruments draped with Tibetan flags after they had a professor from Columbia talk to us for about half an hour about what’s going on, even though I know the issues, I still have been silent. At least here.
I do talk about things in public, to strangers, to coworkers, to family members, there is a place in my life for it. I don’t think Roborooter is a good place though. I do however think that Roborooter is a place to talk about abusive copyright practices.
Take down notices are becoming a problem. A big problem. It started with a way to keep people from posting copyrighted materials on their personal servers. Send the server a notice and they take the content down. Sort it out later. No big deal.
When that started there was no way to know, to fathom, that every single person’s computer could host content. At the time they were very effective. These days content makers owners who wish to protect their copyrights have to send out thousands of them to keep up with things like youtube and myspace (which is evil and must be destroyed) and the people that run content sites get flooded and instead of assesing what is valid and what is not they cover their asses and remove everything.
This means if I don’t like your work, it is very very easy for me to have it removed temporarily and maybe even permanently regardless if I have cause or not. With the nature of the internet if you get removed from the net while you’re popular you’ve lost out incredibly.
This leads me into a video created by the Students for a Free Tibet about their NYC Chinese Consulate Projection Action, which was removed from youtube because the IOC (International Olympic Comity) said it violated their copyrights. It looks like fair use to me, but even so, you can’t watch it right now on youtube.
Vimeo on the other hand, has not responded the same way. Vimeo also has nicer higher quality videos that we can all enjoy.
Educate about what comcast was doing (blocking torrents)
Complain that while the torrent’s flowing nicely a bunch of specific people had trouble torrenting it. Specifically the Comcast customers.(Not a complete lie, the torrent had about 250 downloads as far as I could tell and at one point 17 seeds. But if you were a comcast customer using torrents you knew what was going on and wouldn’t complain to me.)
Come clean, off the full download via http and remark that I actually do have the bandwidth to spare to host a large file. Probably enough to spare to host 10 full and popular audio books, but probably not 100, where torrenting could go into the 10,000’s easily. If people were so interested.
I told people what I was up to and then no longer felt like I had to do it. Almost like success.
I didn’t do it all at once - I’m not sure if that was practical but it would have gotten it done while I had the drive.
I never wrote down my plan until now.
For the record even without my help (ha!) Comcast got smacked around by the FCC. It’s not law (and we’ll have to fight to make it law) but it’s a big first step towards net neutrality.
I’m still coming to terms with how wordpress deals with tagging. I think they’re stuck between categories and tags and they need to drop one (categories) as they are basically the same thing and usability suffers with too many options.
To aid in my tagging I got a wordpress plugin called Simple Tags which lets me see all my previous used tags when choosing tags for a new post. (Which is genuinely useful!) It’s also got a bunch of things I don’t want or need. Like auto tagging, and suggesting tags. I thought I’d play with them though.
The suggested tags for my post on the Quick and the Dead were: Movies, gene hackman, story overview, life of crime, assassins, ill gotten gains, entertainment industry, and typos.
Despite my title referencing worth 1000 this photos comes to us from Gizmodo’s own Photoshop contest. (Click the image to see more of it). I find this kind of stuff cute, but I think other people think I find it offensive. Not that I’m a great defender of art, but I’m a great believer in less surveillance. As England is proving, we as humans don’t know how to manage ubiquitous surveillance. Recordings are lost, they don’t seem to stop crime, and most footage nobody looks at. And even if we did, figure most of that out, who gets to watch everybody? Maybe they could make it a premium channel.
Back to art, Worth 1000 is a trove of quality “Photoshops”, they have themed contests, I highly recommend checking them out.
I’m not sure why they’re doing it, but the british now in america healthy food sandwhich and salad shop Pret A Manger has started printing recipies on the backs of their paper bags. The important part is they look delicious. Even though I’ll never understand the need to use fancy words to try to make food sound more delicious.
Prosciutto Artisan Baguette
Ingredients 1/2 artisan baguette - or a malted grain wholewheat baguette
1 dessertspoon of real mayo
4 slices of tomato
2 slices of prosciutto
Shaved Italian matured cheese (enough to cover the prosciutto)
Cut the baguette almost in half lengthways (leaving one edge still attached) and spread the mayo over the bottom half.
Arrange the tomato slices, followed by the prosciutto, the cheese and finally the basil leaves along the bread.
Close with the top half of the baguette, pressing down gently to keep everything in place.
Eat in the sun with eyes firmly shut and you may just believe that you are in Italy.
I’m not a professional writer or part of some fancy marketing department but I would have called it “Prosciutto and cheese on a roll”. Still delicious sounding to me. =)
I had a brief lived application on facebook. It mostly worked right and would load all your photos and put them in a big FB random tag and stick it on your profile. I had it upgraded by Koudelka who played around with Facebook’s javascript subset and got a little Ajaxy (+) link that would load a new photo. After that I ignored it. =)
Until it broke, and you had to hit the + to get a photo at all.
It was shitty hack. Code that was never planed. I killed it this morning. I’m backing it up but.. you don’t want to see its code. It was a mercy kill. It will be tough but.. the 16 people who were using it will have to move on.
I like to think that in a world of fb apps that include inviting friends to be zombies or go out on hot virtual dates with bumper stickers and snowball fights, my app was a little bit of hope. Hope for functionality without advertising or annoyance. Too bad it was broken.
I will miss you “Random Profile Image” but honestly.. not that much.
-Francis
If you really do want to see it’s code let me know.
Update: I had over 3.2k photos logged (I don’t have the photos, I just knew about them so I could pick a random one.) that’s an amazing amazing amount of photography to share.
I’ve met so many good and nice people over the past few days I can hardly believe there is still one more to go. I want to thank the presenters (even the girl who had the Zuse room before me who had trouble with her crowd), I want to thank TELEPHREAK and GiD for the projector, and all the people who learned something from me today. (Including those two drunk couples on the train home. I couldn’t have hoped for a better response to my cards.) I can’t tell you how good it feels to teach something again.
And I’m even invited to a dinner tomorrow night, chemists make wonderful chefs.
-Francis
PS Oh and you better belive I’ve got a backlog of stuff to share.
Koudelka on 
Wizard on 
