In very depressing news, author Michael Crichton died today. He had recently been discreetly battling cancer. This news absolutely devastated me, as this is the man who got me into fiction. After reading “The Andromeda Strain” in middle school, I started a streak of reading great sci-fi that continues until this day. Michael Crichton completely changed my life for the better, and I owe him a great debt. May he rest in peace.
On last night’s episode of the Daily Show, Jon Stewart basically called out a massive amount of hypocrisy. This is just too hilarious and poignant to miss.
I kind of feel weird about pushing politics on here, but this video feels a bit too important to me to skip. If you’re not familiar with Lawrence Lessig, he’s a damn genius. He was one of the founders of Creative Commons and is currently a professor at Stanford. He was also instrumental to Barack Obama’s innovative tech policy.
This video does a great job explaining net neutrality and why it’s so important, which has been a big deal to me for quite a while now. I’m kind of curious to see his take on Obama VP Candidate Joe Biden’s stance on technology. I’d like to implore anyone who sees this to take a few minutes to watch this video, as it’s a great explanation about the potentially dismal future of the internet.
[Link] via LessigBlog
I’m not sure how many of you have used Pandora, but it’s an absolutely wonderful service. It’s basically allows you to create your own radio station, and it’s a great way to find new music. However, it seems to be that the service is in danger of dying. It seems that SoundExchange (Shockingly, a division of the RIAA) wants to impose drastically higher per-user fees on each song. The fees are currently $0.016 per user per hour. Their aim is to almost double their fee to $0.0291 by 2010.
If this goes through, Pandora will be paying almost 70% of their revenue to licensing fees, effectively putting them right into the red. Tim Westgren, the founder of Pandora, said that they would have to pull the plug if that happens.
You may have noticed a new little widget on the side of the site (unless you subscribe to the RSS feed). Generally, petitions and emailing companies do nothing except make people feel better, but dammit I want to feel better about this. If you want to try and do something to help save this great application, email someone who can help from the sidebar!
[Link] from ArsTechnica
Widget from iHeartPandora
Is voicemail dead? Honestly, I hate checking my voicemail. I check it on my personal phone maybe once every other week. Not only do my emails go directly to my cell phone, but services like Jott and Twitter will get ahold of me almost instantanously as well. SMS is usually a better bet of getting hold of me than voicemail.
Hell, I even hate leaving people voicemails. When did we get to the point where we thought it would be appropriate to add 5 minutes of a computerized voice telling me what I should press?!?
So, I figured I’d ask all zero of my readers what they thought. Vote below:
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I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with ImprovEverywhere, but they’ve restored my faith in humanity. They first came to my attention with their Best Buy Prank. Their latest prank is probably the nicest and sweetest thing I’ve ever seen. I don’t want to say too much, but their latest prank is called “Best Game Ever” and the IE agents show up at a little league game with a ton of amazing surprises in tow. The link below goes to ImprovEverywhere’s site for the stunt, and it’s an amazing read.
Link [via Gawker Media]
I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with the Temple of the Jedi Order, but it’s a Canadian church that follows the Jedi led by Barney Jones. Barney was giving a TV interview yesterday, when all hell broke loose. It all started when Darth Vader showed up with what can only be described as some sort of metal Lightsaber. Yes, Darth fucking Vader.
For the more skeptical audience out there, it was some drunken guy in a Darth Vader get up wielding a metal crutch who proceeded to beat the bejeesus out of poor Barney. If only this was a joke.
Pepa Quin over at brickpics.com fulfilled a dream for me I never even knew I had. He’s completed a model of Planet Express entirely in LEGO, with everything from the ship to the floating billboard and the entire Planet Express crew.
This morning I downloaded ScribeFire for Firefox, which looks like it could be really handy. It allows me to post directly to my blog from within my browser. We’ll see if this won’t lead to more updates.
I was watching an episode of Cranky Geeks today, and midway through the episode Sebastian Rupley pointed out something rather depressing.
”The other day I was looking at my mouse, while I was working, and I realized I spend more time with my mouse than I do with any person”
I know for me, this statement holds true. I’m kind of curious how this holds out for other people. Let me know in the poll below.
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