
When you spend most of your life in Canada, you tend to forget that it’s kind of weird that our milk comes in plastic bags (via Cynical-C). To us it’s no weirder than picking up a jug or a carton full of milk.
It also never really seemed wrong to be leaving the bag open in the fridge. I guess it’s probably not safe if as long as you’re not performing some sort of science experiment.
The Lock Busters
Wired article on a Dutch lock-picking competition. ¶

The current Conform Project series just ended, so I decided to try a different process while I work on a new backend for the site. I’d like to take this moment and introduce you to the new Conform Project group on Flickr. The group is open to anyone who wants to participate (you can get a free account with 10mb of upload/month).
To take part, grab a conform image from the Flickr group (or the conform tag) or one of the first series images from the Conform Project site. Use that image as a base for the new one that you create. Upload it to Flickr, give the image the tag *conform* and add it to the group pool. Use your description or comments to link to the original image that you used as a base and/or add a comment to the original piece.
Some guys throw a girl through a basketball hoop
Impressive, considering most people can't put a basketball through. ¶
New Conform Project image posted
This one is #20 by Chris Huban, it's the last one in the current series. ¶
The Oscar nominations were released today.
Jamie Foxx is nominated for best actor and best supporting actor. As far as best pic goes, The Aviator is a bit too frantic to win, Clint Eastwood is depressing, I’m assuming Ray is a character piece, if the voters are in a sappier mood they’ll go with the feel-good Finding Neverland, otherwise they’re likely going through a midlife crisis and will go with the lighter Sideways.
Free Radio Linux
A radio station broadcasting an audio version of the Linux kernel. ¶
Technorati Tag Spam & NoFollow Sucks
The rel=nofollow solution seems pretty half-assed to me. ¶
Johnny Carson dies at 79
NBC said Mr. Carson died of emphysema at his Malibu home. ¶

Went to the Death From Above 1979 show at the Grad Club last night. It was pretty solid, they sounded even heavier live, the building was shaking. When you look up at the tiny stage, it’s hard to believe it’s just two guys making those sounds.
I took a bunch of photos, most of them aren’t that great, but I put up a few of the better ones. It was nice to get out to a show, I don’t think I had seen any good live music in awhile.
Update: A better review of the show. Apparently, the lead singer for Nassau (one of the openers) was a former GBV drummer, although they’ve been through enough of those.
Man, it’s not easy to do 3-column css layouts. There are a bunch of guides and stuff around, I decided to go for the hack method. Basically, I just created a second el-sidebar-grande div, through the old sidebar and the flick bar as floats into that. Anyway, that’s my solution for now.
A Simple Book Repair Manual
Guides for repairing books. ¶
Enthusiast compositions of the Huygens images
Apparently amateurs processed the raw Titan data faster than any of the major agencies. ¶
Did a little hackjob on the site, although it’ll change again soon enough. It seems like all I do is post saying I’m working on the site design. That and quicklinks. Quicklinks are my crutch right now, I should break them off onto the sidebar again. Or not. Blah.

On a separate note, I must express my utter disdain for web-based educational software packages. Namely Knowledge Forum and WebCT. For now, I leave you with this WebCT screenshot. Learning without Limits provided you’re using the right software.
Why Cryptic Crosswords are Civilization
No-one teaches you how to do crosswords. It is passed on - often within families - from generation to generation. ¶
Elegy for the humorist
"A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge." ¶
Haggisclopedia
The most common mistaken belief about the haggis is that it is some kind of pudding made from sheep innards. ¶
Marathon for Dummies
Marathon was a first person shooter for the mac, Bungie released it for free today. ¶
This is a hacked-up version of the Kubrick theme that meshed with my old layout. I need to change things up a bit and implement some of the neato things in WordPress. I was getting a lot of comment-spam, so I installed a plugin called Trencaspammers that generates a code that you have to enter (prevents a lot of the robots).
Now I just have to get rid of the spam in my referer logs, riz has provided me with his hacked together script, i just haven’t tried running it yet.
20 Year Google Usenet Timeline
Includes the first mention of Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, ¶
Atlas of Canada
Everything you want to know about Canada and it's maps. ¶
Friendship and Relativity
An essay on the relationship between Einstein and Godel. ¶
Looking back at 2004
WordPress was awarded web application of the year. ¶
The Command Line in 2004
An authorized annotation of Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line. ¶
MoneyWallet
How to make a wallet out of 20 $1 bills. ¶
Apple introduces Xsan
Up to 64 systems on the storage area network (SAN) can read and write to shared storage simultaneously ¶
Ashlee Simpson is 20 years old???
I would have sworn 15 from the way she acts on her show. I saw part of an episode awhile ago and thought it was some sort of weird special, couldn't believe it was a series. ¶
The BitTorrent Effect
A Wired interview with Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent. ¶
Well, Drupal didn’t happen. But WordPress did.
I didn’t have a whole lot of trouble installing Drupal, it actually went fairly smoothly, despite some comments that indicate otherwise. My biggest problem was that I had about 1700 main log and quicklink entries that needed to be imported into the new system. It became a pain-in-the-ass with Drupal, but was pretty simple with [WordPress][3].
And I respected Riz’s comment, eightface forever! I’m thinking that davekellam.com will just be a portal for now, it’s kind of dumb to have it mirroring everything on eightface. They’re on the save physical server, so it’s not acting as a redundant backup.
Some notes, I decided to go with a CVS build, rather than the default install. So, I’m currently running 1.5-beta1, which has some nice aspects to it. The theming is pretty cool and it was pretty simple to get an asides/quicklinks style thing going. I ran into a problem with the quicklinks, mostly in relation to how I set them up in MT and imported them into WordPress. I could have come up with some sort of hack or legacy thing, but I didn’t. I’m going back and formatting each post with Markdown.
Markdown is pretty handy if you like working with text/text-editors. Basically, it saves a bunch of time by avoiding having to type out the same code over and over again. Some people like the mouse and clicking on a button to insert tags, this is easier (hands don’t have to leave keyboard).
Things might look a bit ugly around here as I switch over to the new system and templates.