Saturday, May 29, 2010

Oil Spill Fighting Technique or Sex Slang?

Hint: You've probably seen the latter referenced on a sitcom.

  1. Top Kill
  2. Mexican Halloween
  3. Hot Richard
  4. Junk Shot
  5. Rusty Trombone
  6. Top Hat
  7. Operation Sombrero
  8. Dirty Sanchez
  9. Bottom Kill

Answers:
1. Oil Spill Fighting Technique: used by BP to fight recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
2. Sex Slang: featured in the Halloween episode of Community, "Introduction to Statistics."
3. Sex Slang: featured in 30 Rock episode, "The Funcooker."
4. Oil Spill Fighting Technique: also used by BP to fight recent Gulf spill.
5. Sex Slang: featured on multiple comedies.
6. Oil Spill Fighting Technique: also used by BP to fight recent Gulf spill.
7. Oil Spill Fighting Technique: name given to a technique similar to the "Top Hat" employed in fighting a 1979 oil spill highlighted on Rachel Maddow segment showing that spill fighting technology has not improved much since the 1970s.

8. Sex Slang: featured on multiple comedies most notably The Daily Show.
9. Oil Spill Fighting Technique: another name for the "Dynamic Kill" method which uses relief wells to take the pressure off of the main well.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Tracy Jordan's Non-sequitors in Emanuelle Goes to Dinosaur Land

[In the copy shop stairwell remembering his childhood.]

TRACY: It's all coming back to me! Oh my God!
I slept on an old dog bed stuffed with wigs!
I watched a prostitute stab a clown!
Our basketball hoop was a rib cage. A rib cage!

Why did you bring me here? I blocked all of this stuff out for a reason.

Oh lord! Some guy with dreads electrocuted my fish!

DOTCOM: Tray, use this pain to get your Oscar.

TRACY: I hate pain! I'm doing Garfield III and as soon as I make some copies of my passport I'm never coming back here! Move!

[On the movie set.]

Well, I'm sorry Sean and child actor whose name I can't remember. You haven't walked in my shoes. All my life I've tried to forget the things I've seen.

A crackhead breastfeeding a rat.
A homeless man cooking a Hot Pocket on the third rail of the "G Train." The G Train Nermel!
There's something inside of me that needs to come out! And if Garfield III: Feline Groovy can't tell my story, then I'll win my Oscar elsewhere. Or I'll die trying!

[Back in the stairwell.]

I've seen a blind guy bite a police horse!
A puppy committed suicide after he saw our bathroom!
I once bit into a burrito and there was a child's shoe in it!
I seen a hooker eat a tire!
A pack of wild dogs took over and successfully ran a Wendy's!
The sewer people stole my skateboard!
The project I lived in was named after Zachery Taylor, generally considered to be one of the worst presidents of all time!
I once saw a baby give another baby a tattoo! They were very drunk!

Saturday, May 8, 2010

zcorder Brings Voice Recording to webOS

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One of the major omissions from webOS phones like the Palm Pre and Pixi is a lack of a voice recorder. While MotionApps has made its Voice Memo app a free add-on for users of its Classic PalmOS emulator, it has the disadvantage of needing to be run from inside another relatively slow-loading application. Worse yet, I personally have never been able to get Voice Memo to work properly on my Palm Pre.

I've never been a huge user of this feature but I do miss it. And some people swear by it; so the arrival of zcorder onto the webOS Homebrew scene should be welcome.

Zcorder records both voice and sound from other running webOS applications. It is a very simple application. Your recordings are saved as MP3 files to a folder on your phone's internal memory and while you can browse them when you connect your phone to a computer in USB mode or use the Homebrew app Internalz to browse through them but you cannot manage your recordings in zcorder as you can with a true "voice memo" application.

But it works and for now it is the best bet for voice recording on webOS.

Zcorder is a Homebrew app and is not available through the official Palm App Catalog. It can be installed through Preware or with WebOS Quick Install.

Friday, May 7, 2010

Yahoo Thinks it's Still 1998

Gizmodo posted recent Yahoo ad where they take aim at Google: Yahoo Bitch Slaps Google In $85 Million Ad Campaign - Yahoo vs google - Gizmodo. I found the ad to be very striking but perhaps not in a way that bodes well for Yahoo. The thing that struck me was how retro it felt. Yahoo is basically promoting itself as a "web portal" even if the words never appear in their commercial. And for good reason, web portals were wiped out in the early 2000s by the bursting of the Dotcom bubble and by a new search engine called "Google."

Portals were all the rage in the mid to late 90s. They were huge, bloated pages that expected you to slog through tons of ads and links just to type in a few search terms. The result was huge, slow loading home pages at a time when most people still connected to the Internet through relatively slow dial-up modems. But they had "everything you need in one place"—never mind that if all you want is one thing, you'll have to wait for everything else to load and put up with numerous distractions.

And now Yahoo is for all intents and purposes trying to bring the concept back. The truth is that they never really abandoned the concept. When Yahoo started out it was more of a directory of websites than a real search engine. And they've stayed true to that concept even as the rest of the Internet abandoned it.

The bottom line is which page looks cleaner and easier to use?

This one?


Or this one?


Good luck Yahoo. I hope this turns out better for you than it did for these guys.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Brightness Unlinked

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Brightness Unlinked is a Hombrew app which solves two common problems for users of the Palm Pre.

There is no way to adjust the brightness of the Palm Pre's keyboard independently of the screen's brightness. Normally this is not a problem but sometimes—particularly in low light conditions—you want to turn down the brightness of the Pre's screen as much as possible. But when you do this, the backlight on the Pre's keyboard can become so dim that it becomes hard to type. Enter Brightness Unlinked. With Brightness Unlinked running, you can crank up the lighting on your keyboard while cranking down the lighting of the screen.

But for me the best feature of Brightness Unlinked is the fact that it can turn off the Pre's screen when it is sitting on the Touchstone charger. In theory, the Pre can double as a bedside clock while sitting on its charger but in practice its screen—even at its lowest level—is far too bright for anyone who wants to get a good night's sleep. So while you may never find yourself typing away on your phone in gloomy twilight, Brightness Unlinked is a must have app for anyone who keeps their Palm Pre by their bedside.

There is also a patch which will allow Brightness Unlinked to run every time you restart your phone but I found that it seemed to make the phone sluggish when you are low on memory. I never quite figured out if it was because of the patch or simply because my Pre was low on memory. But in any case, I found the patch to be rather redundant since Brightness Unlinked can reside the webOS Dashboard and can continues to run even if you throw away its card.

Brightness Unlinked is a Homebrew app and is not available in the regular Palm App Catalog. It can be installed through Preware or with WebOS Quick Install.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Something Else to Take a Look At...

While browsing through books at Borders, I came on a surprising juxtaposition. Near the top left of this picture is Sarah Silverman's book The Bedwetter. Near the bottom right is a biography of Mao Zedong. For some reason I find the similarity between the covers of these two very different books to be absolutely hilarious.

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Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Bean Bombed by Birds

Look closely at the picture below. At first glance it's just another picture of "The Bean" at Millennium Park. But a closer look shows that it has taken bird droppings in at least five places. It's just something I noticed today....