http://pi.ytmnd.com/ [SFW]

'Cause I haven't seen this on my f'list yet, and it came up over lunch today with chezmax : Do The Test is a clever ad.

Via dpolicar.

Advertising slogans? Pfaw. Movie quotes all seem to work with my user-name.

"You had me at 'da'"

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a da."

I think there's a little person back there, choosing them.

That's what I think.

I just completed something that has been on my plate (and that of fyddlestyx) for a few years, and it feels really good.

Friends for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Concerns has long had a commitment to collect the Minutes of Quaker Meetings affirming same-sex unions.

Minutes are a primary document by which a Quaker Meeting will document their discernment of God's will, as agreed upon by the entire Meeting. Different Meetings will have different openings to God, and their Minutes will record their collective understanding at that time.

So these Marriage Minutes are living documents of this discernment. They range back from a document from Illinois in 1974, to one in Australia in 1984 and a number from the late 1980s and many more from the 1990s and on.

A few years ago, I discovered an article in Friends Journal magazine, written by a man in rural Pennsylvania, Wallace Cayard, who reported he had done a complete survey of American Quaker Meetings and whether they had a minute which affirmed same-sex marriages and commitments. He did his survey in 1997 then again in 2004. As far as I can tell this project was entirely done by this elderly man and his wife Leonora.

He sent me a typewritten copy of his report, which looked like it had been done up on an ancient Underwood. He had records for 207 Quaker Meetings. Our group had records for about 100 Meetings at that time.

I've finally gotten around to merging them together and we now have records for 228 Meetings on the web- 128 minutes and 100 names of Meetings without the text of the minutes. Just having the Meeting names for them is a great start; we can send volunteers out to get those. And if someone is googling for information, they might get what they need just from finding the name on our site.

I've got lots of other things to do, but this gives me a pretty great sense of accomplishment, even if I should really be in bed right now.

And also, it's rather touching to be editing a document that includes statements such as:

"We joyfully affirm our willingness as a Meeting to sanctify celebrations of marriage for both same and opposite gender couples. We intend to follow the good order of Friends in arriving at clearness for all couples who are led to unite under our loving care. We call upon the state to give the same legal recognition to same and opposite gender marriages."

That, from Brunswick Maine Monthly Meeting. Thank you Friends...

I was just googling for documentation on Twiki. I'm investigating setting up a structured wiki for our Quaker Meeting (as part of a Local Foods project). I know it's going to be easy to install, since I'm running Ubuntu; the question is how soon the problem gets tricky. I'm a bit rusty on how Twiki works under the hood. Well, my google search was fruitful- I found an article I was paid to write, on debugging Twiki. I'd entirely forgotten I'd done that. :)

Out of curiosity, I just googled "ssh tricks". My article on it is still (unaccountably) highest ranked. C'mon people, hasn't somebody had something more important to say on the topic in 4 years?!

Natural selection is so cool. The Dec. 24 issue of the Economist has a neat article about humans' shift from hunting to agriculture; how it was in a sense a desperation move as they hunted the big game to extinction. Such as the rhinoceroses in France. 30,000 years ago. That's... amazingly recent. When they ran out of rhinos, they went on to elk and bison. When they ran out of bison, agriculture seemed like a good idea. OK, I'm bastardizing the story a bit, but it makes a fun story that way. I'd link to the article, but the Economist didn't put it on their website.

On Thursday, the_infamous_j showed me Gankutsuou. It's a sci-fi anime in 24 episodes retelling The Count of Monte Christo. After watching two episodes and reading up in Wikipedia, I want to read the (English translation of the) original. I may come back and watch the anime- it's got a different perspective, starting the story with the young aristocrat Albert and his friend Franz, piecing together the Count's story in flashback in a much less sympathetic fashion. Other interesting bits I learned from yon wonderful time-sucker wikipedia: two other stories whose plots were heavily borrowed from CoMC: Sweeney Todd (which I know some of you liked) and Stars My Destination (by one of my favourite old sci-fi authors, Alfred Bester).

Thirdly, from epi_lj: The Complete New Yorker on DVD has dropped in price from $100 to $39.99. That's cool enough- $40 is a very fair price- but if you order with coupon-code 'WINTER25' it's $29.99. Wow. I'm going to buy a copy for my parents; perhaps then they will throw out the great big stacks of the magazines in their house?... Yeah, it's unlikely, but I suppose I can hope. ;)

And now maybe my brain will quiet down a bit and let me get to sleep; though I won't complain, because the evening was pretty great. Not the least of which: for dinner d. made duck burritos and lemon bars. Yum!

If you have something that needs doing in the next 15 minutes, do not check this out:

http://www.nekogames.jp/mt/2008/01/cursor10.html - Cursor is a game where it will take a few times through to realize the big hook, which I think is quite clever. I haven't quite solved it, because I'm slow on the mouse.
[edit to add: solved with *three* cursors left, and 50 left on the timer. Whew!]

And if you do not want further procrastination, avoid this link as well:

http://screamingduck.com/doodle.html - Doodle... isn't your standard flash doodle game. Experiment!

We're in the SAS Lounge in Heathrow. We were up way too early for a trip to the airport, but at least the coffee has kicked in. I'm amused that a few of the people on my friends list might be just getting to bed now.

On the tv I just saw a neat dominos-with-cars-and-books Guinness ad.

Yesterday was first-rate- we spent the day with frankie_ecap and rhythmaning, wandered the South Bank, Fleet Street, St. Paul's, Cheapside, and a bit down Lombard Street. And there was tea, coffee, pastries, much laughter, and some introspective thinking. A wonderful day, and I feel quite lucky for it!

My only regret is that I had to message publius_ovidius and tell him I was too exhausted to meet him for drinks, which is a shame since I was looking forward to meeting him face-to-face. Next time.

Really, that's mostly my only regret for the trip. I could've done with another day for museums, but I wouldn't have tried packing more museum time into the days we were here. I could've happily wandered for another day, and we agreed we'd like to leave the city on our next trip.

I didn't manage to get to any Science Fiction bookstores- I was going to try and look for some British SF, but I suppose that can be ordered. Also, I didn't come home with a Sonic Screwdriver, though that's really OK.

Hm, I should find an electrical outlet. See you back home again!

For the guy in my life who has spent a bit of time recently rolling things up:

Here we have an apparently naturally-occurring snowball, roughly 6m wide, in Antarctica, as viewed from satellite photos. This picture makes me happy. :)

You know contextual ads- such as Google Adwords- choosing the ad based on an article's text. Well, here's how to Get It Wrong, both in unfortunate contexts of outdoor ads, and online contextual ads.

http://ineedawriter.com/blog/2007/10/contextual-advertising-mistakes.html

I'd seen a few of these, but most were new to me. I think I like the bus ad the best.

I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my work Windows machine from Firefox 1.5 to 2.0. I was holding off because I didn't know if it worked with my extensions (in particular: Tab Mix Plus, Session Manager, and del.icio.us). However, FF has been reminding me daily that they are no longer supporting security fixes, so I figured it's a good time to upgrade.

In case anyone else has been a fence-sitter as long as I have; c'mon in, the water's fine. FF feels much snappier (even with lots of tabs open). Pages load faster, scrolling is smoother, and I like the text box spellcheck.

On the installation it asked me once whether I wanted to replace Tab Mix Plus's session manager with Firefox's, I said "no", and everything proceeded to work just as it had, with minor aesthetic differences.

I bought catandgirl some tea. And soba noodles. And a cantaloupe.

See?

The original ink copy showed up in the mail yesterday, and it looks identical to the web version, which surprises me, and surprises me that it surprises me. I'm very happy with it!

Google has a beta real-estate search. http://maps.google.com/maps/mm?mapprev=1

Click on mapplets, choose real-estate search. It works in three random areas I tried (Canada & US). Nice.

Better: this is just one of the new features of their "mapplet" API, to add mashups directly to google maps. http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2007-05-29-n38.html.

I seem to have a pile of things bouncing around in my head, mostly in the not-useful state. But this bit has shaken out, and I want to record it for my own sake, if not for anybody else's.

Remember that "Pi" song and video? The band has an entire album, and a few more fun videos on their site. (Warning: these links are currently worksafe, but much of their site isn't. Just sayin'.) The music is mostly cynical bluegrass, which sounds to me like an untapped market. The song about patriotic dinosaurs is great, and so is the "matrix" video set to melodica.

The second musician link: Jonathan Coulton is a guy with a guitar. Kind of a musical xkcd, if you will; a lot of his themes are wistful and pretty geeky. He seems to have a following, and it seems to be mutual: one guy turned his podcast series into a book and a colouring book. Another made a card-game based on his song "Code Monkeys." Anyway, I like his science stuff. And "Re: your brains" is fun; it's about zombies at the office.

Both these bands release music through cdbaby, which has a scary, scary huge assortment of artists I've never heard of, most with samples of their music. CDs mostly in the $10-15 range. They have neat categories for finding music. ("If you're depressed and want to stay depressed", etc.) Where to find the time to browse it all, though?

Finally: the google-borg continues taking over my internet experience. I've been using google's web history for the last month and it's just great. It's an opt-in to let google record the URLs of where you've browsed.

But google also already has the page contents, for things they index; so in effect you can do a google search that only matches pages you've already visited, which turns out to be something I want to do every few days or so. Of course it also includes prior google searches and search output pages. Quite useful.

It requires the Google Toolbar, which has a "no visible toolbar" option so Firefox looks the same, except for the search box, which is slighly google-ified. And with an unexpected feature that the search box "suggested searches" are also useful (eg., catch misspellings before I hit "return").

Since it works on mac/linux/windows, my work and home browsers are recorded somewhere I can get to from anywhere with the net.

Oh right; it also has a "suspend recording" option and you can delete records from the history. And it seems to not record pages that aren't already in the google index; so password-protected stuff is safe. This privacy/usefulness tradeoff is acceptable to me.

I just found a bug in google maps. These directions from the Gardiner to the High Park area seems to stitch in a panel from Hamilton, Ontario instead.

Free custom-printed sticky notes, magnets, postcards, and self-inking stamps. (you pay shipping). No idea of quality, I just found the link.

emusic.com sells mp3s for .33 cents a track, un-copy-protected. Subscription service. Your first 30 tracks are free (if you cancel within a month). They've got a surprisingly broad list of artists; I'm probably going to pick up some anonymous 4, pete seeger, and kings singers.

An ad briefly on dell's website this morning:



Folks I hang with on IRC managed to put in 7 or 8 orders (complete with having their cards charged) before it reverted to $240.

Odds are Dell will reverse the charges and cancel the orders, but it would be quite the deal if they honoured the orders.

I've just added an LJ feed for the one and only peterson_tscano. If you've not read his blog, he's a Queer Quaker Performance Activist who's on the forefront of all sorts of wonderful things at the intersection of gender, identity, and faith.

[cross-posted to queerinterfaith and quakers].

I can't decide which is cooler: World Mapper or Gapminder.

Gapminder receives points for flexibility and animated panache, but I'd like a "guided tour" to suggest statistics to compare or interesting bits of data. [oh. that's what the "help" section's for. Hm, I'll have to investigate further].

World Mapper is not only immediately obvious as to what it's for, there's a lot of well-presented visual and text information behind the scenes. The printable PDFs look top-notch and if I were a teacher, I'd be all over them for lesson plans or posters. The A-to-Z index is amazing, too.