All Things Considered did a piece on Passing Strange.
Passing Strange was written and performed by indie-rock musician Stew, whose real name is Mark Stewart. With his band, The Negro Problem, the self-proclaimed “rock ‘n’ roll lifer” has toured around the world, putting out albums of what he calls “Afro-Baroque cabaret” music.
Next time I’m in New York I’m going to try and get tickets.
Besides being a distraction, Twitter is now full of spam and MLM.
I’ve been getting into yoga and meditation lately and find things like Twitter are the opposite of a centered, focused workday.
Guess following 500 people isn’t such a good idea after all. I do like what I’m seeing with the lifestream aggregators though, waiting to see which ones emerge as the most popular.
I don’t remember mine either. I have to look it up every time I want to use it on one of the five websites that actually let you login with it. I know, there are thousands, but I never come across them. Clickpass to the rescue.
They are an OpenID issuer first. But they are also trying to make using OpenID much simpler for the user. First, they are partnering with sites like Plaxo, GetSatisfaction, Pownce and many of the Y Combinator startups. Those sites will show the ClickPass button, and users can sign in via OpenID with a single click (and they don’t need to remember their OpenID URL). If it’s your first time with OpenID, Clickpass will ask you if you have an existing account at the service you are trying to log into, and pass that information back to the site to join the accounts.
As you add sites to your ClickPass OpenID, you’ll see them listed on the Clickpass site. You are given a distinct OpenID URL for each site that you can use to manage multiple identities, all tied together on ClickPass. And if you choose to fill out profile information on ClickPass, they’ll autofill that information on new sites you join. Clickpass also ensures privacy controls by letting you choose what kind of information you want to share with the site. Conceivably the service could serve as a node for your personal data, connecting it between different website accounts.
I interviewed Vidoop a while back, I like the image-based authentication scheme. Much easier than Open ID.
Letting everyone become an OpenID provider is confusing and the integration tools are still pretty rough around the edges for the most part.
I’m still waiting for Microsoft’s Cardspace, when oh when is that going to go live?
Goodbye to The Wire, best show on tv the past few years. I’m more upset than I expected to see it go. Watched it every Sunday night without fail for the entire series. Good news is that the creators are working on something new. I can’t want to see what they bring us.
David Simon wrote a wonderful letter to fans this morning.
Shout outs to McNulty, Bump, Bubbles and the rest of the crew. I miss you guys already.
1. “Bioethical� violations such as birth control
2. “Morally dubious� experiments such as stem cell research
3. Drug abuse
4. Polluting the environment
5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor
6. Excessive wealth
7. Creating poverty
Since when is excessive wealth a sin?
Via The Lede@NYT.com.
Thought you couldn’t read PDF’s on the iPhone? Thanks to the data:URI feature in Safari, converting PDF’s to URI’s to read in Safari on your iPhone is easy. Create a bookmark with the URI in Safari, sync with iTunes and you’re all set.
There’s a new type of Captcha in town. This is good news, as I am growing tired with the new sets of captcha images, its almost impossible to read the letters. Don’t get me started with audio captchas.
Here’s how hotcaptcha works, take people from HotorNot, place their images on a 3×3 grid and ask people to identify the three hot people. There’s your new captcha. There is even a “meet me” link under some of the people.
Google’s Kevin Marks talked to CNET at the Future of Web Apps conference about the interaction between public performance and private interaction on Myspace:
One of the things that MySpace has that is interesting is that you can install applications both on your profile page and on your user page. So you can have applications that are sort of performing to others, and applications that are shown only to yourself so that you can analyze things. If you think about the social networks, there is this split between public performance and private interaction. Some sites are all public performance and everything happens on the profile, and some sites there’s much more of a reflective view of showing the user what’s going on. MySpace has both those pages.
And OpenSocial has these abstractions that will tell you where your app’s running and what the context is. So you can write the same app but it will give you different things in both contexts. It’ll do one thing when it’s on your profile showing to the world, and another thing when it’s on your page just showing things to you. One will be outward facing, one will be inward facing.
Interesting. The rticle has some though-provoking insights into openID, OpenSocial and just how open Google wants it to be. Thats a whole lot of open.
Reading about a guy who did a blindfold test between expensive Monster Audio Cables and coat hangers!
… an experiment on him and four other audio aficionados listening to a new CD from a new group blindfolded. Seven different songs were played, each time heard with the speaker hooked up to Monster Cables, and the other time, hooked up to coat hanger wire. Nobody could determine which was the Monster Cable and which was the coat hanger. The kicker? None of the subjects even knew that coat hangers were going to be used.
My favorite quote, from the comments:
Specs and statistics are like bikinis. What they show is very interesting, but what they hide is vital!!
So true, so very true.
The world’s largest supercomputer, the Ranger platform at the University of Texas at Austin’s TACC (Texas Advanced Computer Center), is being used to simulate the creation of the universe. At 504 teraflops, Ranger’s capacity exceeds that of all other National Science Foundation granted supercomputing facilities combined.