Do you have scraps of gold lying around?
If you have gold, you can convert that into MONEY!!

As Seen On TV!

(second row, leftmost cell)

He was filling a water balloon, dammit.

This copyright-infringing business allows the stream to hit whatever you want.

(via my question on ask metafilter)

I saw that Flickr’s badge was flying the pirate flag. Not knowing what that was all about I did a quick search and found out that it’s “Talk Like a Pirate Day!“. Any other webservices rep-ing the pirateness? How are you celebrating?

A lo-fi hack from Core77’s Hack2School guide:

“There’s a great prank out there where students are able to control where an instructor stands in the classroom. Here’s how it works:

If you’ve got a teacher who likes to pace back and forth while lecturing, coordinate with the class ahead of time that everyone will pay rapt attention when the teacher is on the left side of the room, but will drift their attention (looking at their notes, checking their watch, etc.) while the teacher’s on the right side of the room. In no time, you’ll have the teacher pinned in the corner, and they won’t know why.”

I like it for its quiet fiendishness.

hey all!

join us for an ice cream social!
if you are into localoaf, or are interested in being a contributing writer, we’d love to socialize and eat ice cream in your presence. we’re not going to post the specifics here, so email localoaf at gee male dot cahm or comment here if you’d like to know more.

also, if you have specific flavors you want us to bring, post here!

and now, i give you, a picture of Ben (of Ben & Jerry’s) eating ice cream!

The BBC World Service Business Daily reports that mining companies have recently been using historic colonial maps of Congo housed in Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa, founded as a research institute to aid the colonial effort, and currently a scientific and historical repository (sadly, I didn’t find an image of such a map on their site). The story is fairly interesting, as is the curators’ complete neutrality considering corporate use of their repositories. The reporter does not identify what companies are accessing these maps, or where they’re based.

Things that came from the Congo (according to the radio story):

• gold
• diamonds
• rubber that helped foment the global rise of the automobile
• the uranium in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US

Traveling leaves me amazed at the great variance of the quality of municipal public transportation websites. It seems like the only thing most people want from such a site is to find out “How do I get from A to B at time Z?”.

Some transportation authorities make this incredibly difficult while others have recognized this user need and prioritized it. In Berlin (bvg.de), the trip planner box is placed on the home page, although the visibility could be improved (especially for English speakers, it may not immediately be recognizable as such, and the general page clutter makes it hard to find the “English” link).

New York City (mta.info) and San Francisco (sfmuni.org) provide links to “schedules” and “maps” from their home pages, but which path do I pursue when I am looking for a trip planner? Hint: In SF, click once on “Routes & Schedules”, then on “Trip Planner”, it’ll route you to 511.org. In NYC, a link to the trip planner is hidden in a “Regional Travel” box in the body of the home page.

For masochists, I recommend Montreal’s “Tous Azimuts” - the trip planner for Montreal (stm.info/English/a-somm.htm). I am greeted with a note “If you recently experienced difficulties with Tous azimuts, please erase your browser’s cache memory and delete cookies before you use it again.” From there, the fun begins: The site’s navigation is mainly icon-based (I think some of the text links at the bottom of the page correspond to the icons, but I am not sure). One icon seems to show some kind of super-fast wheelchair rider about to tip over. The start page gives me a map on which I am supposed to select my origin and destination by clicking (the map has different modes, selectable by radio buttons: “Click origin”, “Click destination” and “Click to zoom in”). Of course, the map isn’t pannable, so clicking on the wrong pixel in the overview map is nearly fatal.
By the way, whenever I click on something, the next page takes about one minute to load. Seemingly at random, some links lead to a “proxy error” page (”The proxy server could not handle the request GET /azimuts/recherche.wcs”).
I decide to opt for “Text search,” thinking this will present me with the familiar from-to-when kind of interface. I go on to “Search an address on Montreal island”. The next form asks me to enter a street address and a “civic number”, along with a radio button to select whether I want this address to be my origin or destination. I don’t know what a civic number is or where to get one, so I just enter an address and click the search button. After a minute or so, a JavaScript warning “No civic number!” pops up. I click on “aide” (my awesome French knowledge tells me this means help), only to find that the whole help page is in French. I wonder if this is a political statement (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_sovereignty_movement).
Afraid of getting stuck, I go back to Google to learn that a civic number is something like a zip code, so essentially, Tous Azimuts wants me to help it geocode the address. Via Google maps, I retrieve the civic number for my address (”H4K”). After another minute, JavaScript says “No civic number!”. Does this mean I misspelled it? It doesn’t match the address?

I’m going to stop here, both because I’m tired and because it’s boring to make fun of poor websites. It wouldn’t be so bad if this were 1996 or Montreal were a rural town with only one bus line, but the last time I checked, Montreal’s population was over a million. People depend on this, and it took my girlfriend over an hour to get one routing right. Their public transportation system is fabulous (subways come all the time, night buses every 20 minutes or so). Why did they choose to make themselves look so bad on the Internet?

I had some inkling that there were formalized visual languages for describing dance, but no idea there was a whole Bureau dedicated to preserving notated dance! The NYTimes did, though. Now, I wonder if they’ve notated and archived this, this, this, or this.

Also, will people still be performing Thriller in 200 years?

Photo (cc) inju, aka yet another Kevin Lim.