In the ongoing Hans Island saga, the BBC is reporting that Mr. Harper has told the US Ambassador to piss off:
The United States defends its sovereignty, the Canadian government will defend our sovereignty.
Apparently, we're going to build three new armed ice-breakers. You hear that Denmark? Your elite figure skating brigade will be useless now.
Update: Richard pointed out that a
Canadian Sea King helicopter was forced to ditch off the coast of Denmark this evening. I don't know what these shifty Danes are up to.
Feb. 2nd ¶
I've seen lots of weblogs around with Rollyo search boxes, maybe it's better than the built-in search functionality of most blogging software. Unfortunately, the site is powered by Yahoo -- they don't index my site. So, it's impossible for me to use the service.
Update: At long last the power to move mountains in mine, muahahahaha! Or at least my ability to toy with the unwitting fools who stumble into this steaming pile via Yahoo has increased. That's right, Dave Pell has added eightface to the Yahoo index. Break out the fireworks, it's been years in the making. ¶
Stairway at St. Paul’s is probably the coolest music video that I’ve seen in a long long time. Jeroen Offerman spent three months learning to sing Stairway to Heaven backwards and recorded his performance on the steps of St. Paul for confused spectators.
This film comes via the first issue of Wholphin, a new DVD magazine by the folks at McSweeney’s. With a level of pretension that we’ve grown to expect, Jeroen’s contributions to the magazine are used as dvd menu items. It’ll come on eventually if you leave the DVD menu playing, it happened to Tavis and I while we were playing some Mario Kart DS. It was a weird experience.
(more…)
Google -- circa January 2003
The world's biggest, best-loved search engine owes its success to supreme technology and a simple rule: Don't be evil.
Google --
circa January 2006
Leading internet search company Google has agreed to censor some of its services in China in order to satisfy Beijing's restrictions on free speech.
Three years? Seriously, that's all it takes for Google to crumble? It's been more than fifteen years since
Tianamen Square, guess it's all buttercups and roses now. I could be wrong, but I'm guessing Larry and Sergey have figured out how to harness the slow moving tanks of democracy.
¶
I’ve been tagged for four things by Matt, it’s been awhile since one of these meme’s floated around. The site has more readership now and I’ve been slacking with the personal sections, so here goes.
Four jobs I’ve had in my life
- Carny
- Janitor
- Teacher
- Web Designer
Four movies I can watch over and over
- Braveheart
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
- Run Lola Run
- The Shawshank Redemption
(more…)
In the increasingly esoteric global struggle against the enemies of freedom, the insurgents have struck back, releasing a poetry tape by Bin Laden's deputy. Rumour has it that Cheney's holed up in an underground bunker somewhere, working on a coffeetable book called The History of Bacon and a sequel to Sisters. ¶
Now that Zeldman’s on board we can get past this icky Web 2.0 nonsense and move on to the next version.
As for me, I’m cutting out the middleman and jumping right to Web 3.0. Why wait?
Sounds good to me, but we should really stop dicking around. Unfortunately, Web Infinity sounds like a bad car name, so in true playground fashion we’ll go with Web Infinity Point Oh Plus One. We can even shorten it to Web iPopo for marketing and a nice conference namey feel.
A duplicate of a Chinese map from 1418 calls into question the European discovery of America. There are authenticity issues because the map is actually a reproduction from the 1700's. Much of the recorded history surrounding Zheng He's voyages has been destroyed over the years by other Chinese dynasties, so we'll probably never know all the details -- there was a recent National Geographic feature about his voyages. Regardless of the map's authenticity, if the Chinese were capable of exploring Africa, and Austrailia, I don't doubt that they were able to reach the Americas. ¶
What’s black and white and red all over? You guessed it, Fork for K2. And what is a K2 you ask? Other than the oft-neglected peak situated beside Everest? If you’re familiar with WordPress, K2 is the successor to Kubrick, the popular default theme. It aims to be a bit more than a standard theme, with out of the box support for a number of plugins and a slew of built-in options. You can download the latest K2 beta via Binary Bonsai.
Lots of people are running K2, it’s a decent option if you don’t want to get into the php/css guts of a WordPress theme. That said, the stock look might be getting you down. That’s where Fork comes in. You should be able to drop it into a default K2 install, enable it via the options panel and have a dirty greyscale theme without any real work. It should also offer a little bit of insight into the theme’s visual customization.
(more…)
This is Domino, our new cat. She’s seen here showing an affinity for boxes — emerging from a hiding place she’d been keen to get out of hours earlier. This is probably the first of many inevitable cat photos.
(more…)
The audio player plugin for WordPress looks pretty sweet, minimal but it's got everything you need. Might be nice for running an mp3 blog. ¶
If you're looking for some light afternoon reading, check out the document formerly known as MIT's guide to lockpicking. After that, here's a set of instructions for creating a cheap vibrating lock pick. And no, I'm not planning something. ¶
He who struggles, and endures, will be a ninja. Fuggy Fuggy. ¶
Here we go with another visual roundup of the latest and greatest 5Q interviews from Seal Club. Five more sets of questions, featuring a good whack of talent that we abuse by probing the most mundane aspects of their existence. Go read them now (and check out the first five interviews if you missed ‘em).
Thanks to: Paul B. Drohan, Khaled Abou Alfa, Dave Shea, Greg Storey and Matthew Good, for helping us out this time around. Hopefully, we’ll have more Seal Club action coming at you soon. It’s been slow over the last month or so.
Ingo Renner has created a flickr extension for TYPO3 based on my flickrRSS plugin for WordPress, go open-source. You can grab the extension from the typo repository. ¶
The 1.0 release of the web developer extension for Firefox is out. If you're remotely interested in CSS design, this is a must have (it's probably one of my most used apps). ¶
How to order a bottle of wine without looking like an asshole.
26. Its wine, not the Blood of Christ. Don’t worship it. Enjoy it.
And for the love of God, don't smell the cork.
¶
Finally got around to updating the flickrRSS plugin for WordPress. I had been meaning to do it for awhile, but kept putting it off. Now that WordPress 2.0 is out, I figured it would be a good time to break the plugin. Yeah, that’s right break it. I changed around a bunch of the options and how the parameters are handled, so you’ll need to set it up again.
As an end user, you won’t notice a lot of the improvements. The interface makes more sense now (compare a 2.0 screenshot vs 3.0 screenshot) and should be easier to use. The options panel has been moved into Presentation, which makes more sense I think. At least that’s where I usually went looking for it. The image sizes now reflect the actual flicker image sizes too.
(more…)
Hello 2006. Bring it.
I won’t get into a huge retrospective, but the past year has been pretty damn good. Some highlights: moving to WordPress, graduating from Teacher’s College, the popularity of the flickrRSS and myStatus plugins, having site designs appear on a number of CSS Gallery sites, Alanah moving in and receiving a Digital Rebel for Christmas.
As they say, the new year is a time for growth and rejuvenation (but I could be wrong, maybe it’s Spring they’re talking about). In the spirit of growing, it’s time to rip the site apart and start again. If you’re new to the neighbourhood, it happens a lot.
(more…)