Author: gulley

The Mailinator

Want a quick and anonymous email address at no hassle? Send a note to fizzbin@mailinator.com. Now go to the Mailinator site and enter the email address fizzbin and you’ll see the email you just sent. No password, no privacy, no problem. Any account name will work. Try it!

Mailinator was invented as a sort of tax dodge. Go to a site that gives you something for free, and it’s very likely that they’ll demand your email address so they can market to you later (that’s the tax). They’ll demand a working address by making you click through the email they send you. Mailinator avoids this problem by displaying (insecurely, by the way) any mail to anyone. And if Mailinator gets spammed as a result, well, that was the whole idea. If you always retrieve your email within an hour or so of receiving it, Mailinator can function as a perfectly reasonable free email service.

It’s hard to outsmart the web.

Newsmap

If you haven’t seen it yet, take a spin past newsmap, a news visualization program. It’s designed to take advantage of the space-dividing treemap algorithm made popular by SmartMoney’s Map of the Market. The big idea is that the amount of ink a story is getting in the national press is reflected by the amount of area dedicated to that story in newsmap interface. It’s a nice idea because we are in desperate need of landscape views of our shared information space.

Huge amounts of information won’t wreck our brains or make us babble incoherently. It’s just that we’ll be inefficient and stressed-out until we solve this problem of taking it all in. What we need is some altitude.

Aggie vs. FeedDemon

I’ve been talking up the benefits for RSS aggregation, but it’s been a while since I reconsidered my choice of aggregator. I use an old horse called Aggie. It looks like it was thrown together by a grad student, but it’s been working very well for me despite its plain appearance. Last week, someone at work was singing the praises of Nick Bradbury’s FeedDemon. It costs $30, as compared to Aggie (free) and another highly rated aggregator, SharpReader (also free). I’ve been trying FeedDemon for the past couple of days, and it is a nice piece of work. Slick-looking, and fast, it only has one problem. It’s built like a newsreader, and I hate newsreaders. Specifically, I dislike having to mark things in great big lists as having been read or not. I only want to see what’s new since the last time I ran the program. FeedDemon lets me do that, but I’m constantly having to select lots of entries and mark them as read. FeedDemon is a well-executed design built on the wrong model. Aggie is three-cylinder amateurish-looking design that is built on exactly the right user model. I haven’t seen anybody else using Aggie’s build-a-single-HTML-page approach, and I don’t know if Aggie has any staying power. I hope they do… or that someone else picks up their model. In the meantime, I’ll save myself $30.

An absurdity of animal plurals

Here’s yet another list of animal congregations, as in the query What Do You Call a Group Of…..? What I want to know is, who makes this stuff up? I mean, really, was there ever a time when people found it useful and pertinent to refer to an ostentation of peacocks? I don’t believe it.

Some people love lists like this. They will inhale sharply if you purpose to say “a bunch” of kangaroos rather than the more appropriate “mob” of same. These people will correct your grammar and then pointedly observe that they completed their taxes before Valentine’s Day this year. Last year too, in fact. Haven’t you? Of course you have.

People like this constitute a smarm of smarty-pants. Or perhaps a tedium of busy-bodies.

My theory is that some clown in the 18th century penned the phrase “exaltation of larks” and once the door was propped open, every frustrated writer with an axe to grind rushed in and tacked up his own absurd plurality. The more ridiculous the better! No one will question you! Here are some more supposedly genuine pluralities. A parliament of owls. A clowder of cats. A singular of pigs. Make up one yourself and swear that you saw it in Spenser’s Faerie Queen: A coagulation of kittens. An effluvium of eels. A lot of used car salesmen.

By the way, the list refers to an unkindness of ravens. I believe proper term is a murder of ravens. Sniff sniff.

Everest from orbit

When you fly across the country on a jet, you’re used to seeing an oblique view of the landscape with the horizon plainly visible. Most pictures you’ve seen from space, on the other hand, are taken looking more or less straight down. But this turns out to be a matter of convenience and convention more than anything else. Planes don’t have glass-bottomed viewing galleries, and satellites don’t look sideways at the planet. But the International Space Station does offer spectacular airplane-like views of Earth. Look at this picture of Everest and Makalu from NASA’s Earth Observatory Newroom. Be sure and click on the full-size image link… it’s mesmerizing. The view is from Tibet, and Everest actually looks like the second tallest mountain in the picture. I remember years ago looking at fanciful National Geographic diagrams of what a view from this vantage might look like. To actually see it naked before you like this is almost… pornographic.

Twilight of the Elves

The dramatic explosion of interest in Elvish tattoos seems to have faded. The Oscars are safely over, Elijah Wood hardly appears in People magazine anymore, and babies are being named “Frodo” far less often than in months past. For those sturdy souls out there who are still interested in learning how to write Elvish (and partly to decrease the load on me for bespoke Tengwar calligraphy) I created the page Write Your Name in Elvish in Ten Minutes. I’ve looked at a lot of Elvish language web sites and they all seem to talk about how “real Elves” might write rather than providing a simple usable solution for people who just want to write their names. For the record, though, the best site I’ve come across for a credible and scholarly approach to the problem is Tolkien Script Publishing.

In case you’re wondering, I’ve written out something like a hundred names and phrases for people over the past few months, and I have discovered that if you send someone something first and then ask them to pay for it, they are actually quite unlikely to pay for it (even if they are a “SUPER HUGE LOTR FAN”). Still, it’s been a fun experiment… something like running a lemonade stand in cyberspace. My shingle is still up, but traffic is down.

Airport code origins

Ever wonder why Newark International Airport has the three letter code EWR? This article explains it all: Airport Codes: History and Explanation. In the case of Newark, it turns out that the Navy lobbied to have the initial letter N all to itself, so Newark had to make do without it. Similarly the letter W is off limits as a first letter. Why? Because the FCC says that radio stations east of the Mississippi get to start with W. Fair enough, but I wouldn’t have guessed that airports codes had to swim in the same bathtub as radio stations. As a result, the Wilmington airport in North Carolina limps by with a flaccid ILM. I always wondered…

Props and pikies: define

It seems that funny names for Britain’s underclass are much in the news of late. Over at Ben Hammersley’s blog I came across this list of labels: Chavs, Neds, Townies, Kevs, Charvers, Steeks, Spides, Bazzas, Yarcos, Ratboys, Kappa Slappers, Skangers, Janners, Stigs, Scallies. He rounds off the post with a mention of Pikies. Wondering what the connotations of this last were, I asked Google, who sent me to the UrbanDictionary.com. It’s an idea that I very much like: anyone can submit a definition of a slang term, and people vote for the definitions they like. Who better to compile the people’s dictionary than the people? There are things in here that Meriam-Webster just won’t tell you. The number one pikie definition is: “a term used for a common, unfashionable looking youth, usually wearing unsurpassable amounts of gold jewellery and reebok ‘classics’.”

To see if this urban dictionary was any good, I tried out the word “props”. This is a slang term that appears in phrases like “mad props to my peeps, yo.” I understand it from context, but where does it come from? I was pleased to get a satisfying answer: props = proper respects. So: mad props to the urban dictionary, yo.

Are you a ned?

My friend Judy pointed me to Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words. It’s a great site for learning things like where the phrase tripping the light fantastic comes from (John Milton. Who knew?). What Judy sent me was an entry that says, among other things, that neds are young louts in Scotland. Google for “neds” and “Scotland” and you’ll find a load of stuff from the BBC’s Chewin’ the Fat show. They have an “Are you a ned?” test with a post-test Nedometer to tell you how you’ve done. There are also the NedOlympics (including a game in which you try to smash windows with bricks). But I most enjoyed the Neducation page. It has a variety of helpful phrases translated for your convenience. I’d transcribe one of them here, but I couldn’t understand them.

By the way, according to the Ned Test, I’m only half a ned. I was told

You could do dot tae dot on yer coupon that you’ve that many plooks, ‘n’ ye can handle yer buckie ‘n’ yer jellies, but you’d be keechin’ in yer joggies if it came to a proper square go.

Eye-brain pain

I am about to show you a simple doctored photograph of a woman’s face. But it has been so artfully rearranged that your brain will insist that your eyes are malfunctioning somehow and it will fight to resolve the image into something that it isn’t. If you’re anything like me, this process will give you a headache very quickly. It all goes to show what an active process seeing is. You think you’re just passively taking in the world, but in fact you’re busy busy busy constructing it all the time. It takes an illusion like this to drive that point home.

Here you go: Are U drunk.