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Well, this will be short and sweet, but here goes. I just ran into a really interesting and great way to do web2.0 politics. Its called Govit. For all the political mumbo jumbo I rant on about, this program forces me to vote on the very same issues that I rant and rave about. Not only that but it is a social network that compares your ideas to your party, your representatives, your friends and everyone else on the govit site. Like I said, this is SOCIAL people. I want all my faithful readers to get on this and sign up and friend me. I want to see how we all stack up. You can find me by searching for prodaea or my FULL name.

Some neat software and games stuff today. Politics are stupid and boring.

Wired has a great article about what really makes GTA IV a great game. I have been staving off my temptations to get the game because of the many freelance jobs I picked up earlier in the year that I must focus on and finish by the summer. Also, I’m planning a wedding, and that always trumps video games. Besides, Bully is still really entertaining to me. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to the day that I can play GTA IV uninterrupted and explore the sprawling landscape of Liberty City. …sigh… Though I’m not sure how long sandbox genre games can survive without being MMO in scope. Just a predictive tidbit.

Freeware genius just put out a little ditty on a piece of software I’m planning on trying out called Xneat. I’ll let you, my faithful reader know how it goes. Its supposed to help manage your windows. We’ll see about that.

Finally, a web2.0 grammar checking site called gramlee. I’m gonna put this post through its engine to see what kind of filth it spits out. I’ll get back to you on that as well.

*edit* BUT WHOA! for gramlee it appears that you have to pay per word. Apparently real people are editing these. To that I say:

1. That’s not web2.0
2. People are so out, computer programs are so in. Get with it.
3. Also, pay-for services are lame.

***Here’s what gramlee thinks of my first 100 words***

There’s some news about neat software and games today. Politics are stupid
and boring.

Wired Magazine has a great article about what really makes GTA IV a great
game. I have been staving off my temptations to get the game because of the
many freelance jobs I picked up earlier in the year. My deadline for the
deliverables for these various jobs is this summer. Also, I’m planning a
wedding, and that always trumps video games. Besides, Bully still entertains
me. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to the day I can play GTA IV
uninterrupted and explore the sprawling landscape of Liberty City.

***Funny right? I think so***

So after that little foray into the deeply political or the deeply disturbing (totally interchangeable), I’ve got some light hearted techie interests for you all.

The site Muxtape lets you upload and manage a playlist, for your friends to check out. Its outrageously simple and a fun way to spread what your listening to.

Also for those of you who love Facebook (I’m not thrilled about it), and have a million and one feeds that you update like a fiend (that’s me!), there’s BlogIt. Its a new Facebook app that will let you update your million and one blogs/feeds from one place. Its new and is lacking on the features, but it has a lot of promise.

Two articles on the same topic, from the same associated press release with two very different titles. I don’t really care to speculate on what gives. All I’ll say is, source matters. And also, it’s pretty clear that 1) the government is totally clueless about what it does and 2) people are dumb enough to trust this government with things like their healthcare and their retirement. I’d get the links for all that, but I’m lazy and you’re smart: FIGURE IT OUT. the sad thing is that of all the things we shouldn’t trust the government to do, protecting us and our borders is one of the things we should trust them to do. guffaw, guffaw.

And while I’m on the topic of the government of the people, I HOPE YOU PEOPLE VOTED TODAY. Whining on and on about how you aren’t properly represented. I know state and local elections are a lot more confusingly gray as opposed to the highly media-cized presidential popularity contests, but seriously if you care so much about your government and your rights start at the local level. You’ll thank me.

From the psycho teen angst department, I read this today in the headlines. I’m just gonna go out and say it here, that kid needs to be checked in. Look I know we all get dis-associative at times, but this is a little ridiculous. Plus his mom at least seems likable based on what I read in the article. And to the mom who took him to the hotel room: ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Ok, telling his mom was the right thing to do, but helping him get into that situation in the first place. I’m betting that if that hadn’t have been a cop, you could be an accessory at worst and at best you’d find yourself wading in a pool of your friend’s blood. You get the gold star for the day.

Also, unless I’m mistaken, FOX or some idiot scientist/numerologist/statistician/whatever needs to check the math on this one. While it certainly is an interesting useless factoid, 1 in 10 IS TOTALLY DIFFERENT FROM 407 out of 7634.

I must do this because I’m bored. Some kid in VA won the right to have an anti-abortion club in her school.  Now look I’m all about not killing babies, but some of these religious fanatics (I’m one of them… on some issues), need to get it in their skull that just as much as they have the right to an anti-abortion club, some smart-aleck’s gonna have the right to a pro-baby killing club. That’s the way free-speech swings and if you don’t like it, TOO BAD.

The airline industry sucks. I don’t know why it’s still around. Oh wait, yes, it’s coming back to me… consumers are idiots. Between the FAA’s ridiculous regulations and people practically dying while they’re trapped for hours in a plane taxiing around a totally inefficient runway system, the airlines are trying to take away your little peanut snacks. But apparently they’re getting better at leaving on time. Woooooo you also get a gold star for the day. I hope you airline moguls are happy.

I give up. I’m so burnt out on being negative and edgy that I just can’t go on. Here’s the rest of my links for this post sans-witty commentary.

Moron the farm bill – excuse me… More on the farm bill.

Radiohead goes out on good faith and the cheap punks take advantage of them. I said I was done commenting, well I lied. Now I download albums, I’ll be the first to admit it (as long as the moochers over at the RIAA aren’t knocking at my door). But seriously, what did you think would happen. Most of the people on the torrent networks are LEACHERS. And I’ll reasonably bet that the 60% or so who didn’t pay for the album are the punks that don’t share on the torrent networks.

And now for some software.

Visuwords – I really like this. Particularly because it’s like a thesaurus, but better.

Mofuse – This looks interesting, especially if you’re big into accessibility/mobility. I used to have my blogs compatible with the iPhone and some Mobiles at one point.

And finally, of interest to some in my close circle: This dude lived in Trappe.

i’ve had netvibes for some time. i just now took the time to add a good number of news feeds to it. i’m thinking this will be an improvement in my blogging process since i can see at a glance what’s being talked about on the news line and i don’t have to deal with the ranking crap of reddit and digg (but i do have digg in my netvibes, never know what you’ll find)

First up today, girls gone wild? well, yes, but on facebook. probably NSFW, I braved it, though somewhat suspiciously. Now I haven’t been able to check the credibility of this, but I at least can say that I haven’t noticed anyone in my network of friends posting that stuff. I myself am not exempt either. I just post it elsewhere for everyone to find it.

Science blog article from wired about dumping urea into the sea to offset CO2 by stimulating the growth of O2 producing algae. To me it seems like environmentalist infighting. Here are some people who have an idea of how to fix a problem, and the people who want the fix are saying “not really gonna let you do that.” It’s oversimplification, I know. But the topic warrants looking into the source article referenced and the related topics as well.

Is the human race mutating? No not really, actually it was probably pretty insensitive of me to say that, but I digress. This is a pretty popular story among the news outlets. This girl was born with 8 extra limbs. I can’t really tell from the picture which ones they are. If I had a say I wouldn’t take them off unless it really adversely affected her health (it does, I’m just saying..), because hey, who hasn’t wanted to be a human spider? I kid, I kid.

This is just one of many many articles analyzing Google’s announcement of Android – an open mobile technology platform. I just happened to find this one. I’m psyched about this if it pans out. I’ve always been sick of ATT et. all locking phones up and limiting my choices as a consumer through contracts. I recently shelled out a good wad of cash just to say FU and bought a phone not sold as a contract package by ATT. Yay me, right?

I’m really not a financial expert, but if the dollar keeps falling I’m gonna be pinching for my vaca this winter. It seems this is largely based on irresponsible borrowing and lending. With our GDP so high, what gives?

Ahh yes, a site, and a huge wikiTrail.

Graspr? I guess if you would like to grasp how to do something like build a house or cook a certain meal – via social video blogging.  I’m not really big on teaching people how to do stuff, even though I should since I did get a Masters in Instructional Design. I guess I considering teaching more work than fun. At any rate, I’m thinking about putting together some tutorials on Reason and Ableton Live. You can look for them here. (I can’t wait to use the new Thor module in Reason!)

So on to the real business of things. I do haiku chats on tumblr. I don’t title them, I number them using roman numerals. This is where our story today begins. Roman numerals. I was just looking around about ordering stuff (you know how many I’s before X) and down at the bottom I saw two things that catch my attention. The first was LXX or the Septuagint (LXX=70)  and the second thing I saw was pandigital numbers. I was more interested in some of the links from the Septuagint – being a biblical reference.

Basically a pandigital number is a number that contains all of the digits of a base counting system. So in base 10 1234567890 is a pandigital number. They don’t show cases for other base counting (like hexadecimal, base 16 – used with computers… commonly color references on the webernet).

The Septuagint refers to the 72 (rounded down to look nice as LXX ) scholars who translated the Hebrew old testament into Greek. In the third paragraph I checked out the links to two books not in the Protestant bible I’m used to, just to see what they’re about.

Maccabees is a set of books about a Jewish family that rebelled against the government around the first or second century BC (interesting note, this date is BC, not the usual BCE according to Wikipedia… more on that some other time). I looked briefly at the article on 1 Maccabees and the summary of the contents is very interesting. But also very interesting for me personally was the toolbar on the side that listed old testament books and what sects include them in their religious texts.

Ben Sira, the Book of Wisdom, Daniel, and Esther were other books that I briefly looked at. I was interested to read the histories of Ben Sira and the Book of Wisdom simply to see how they were used in the early church and the removed from the Canon later on. Esther was just some interesting history about Persia. But the Daniel article particularly intrigued me because of the NPOV. Granted biblical topics can be pretty touchy, but books of the bible typically have pretty good, solid sourcing referenced. I took a brief look at the talk page. Not much to see here as far as I’m concerned. Just some squabbling over dates. And their writing is probably overly wordy and not very interesting.

The End.

Phewf, what a day.

GM is officially on it’s way to bankruptcy. I remember hearing stories about exactly how long it could survive a strike before it went kaput, but that was all hearsay. At any rate, UAW went on strike at 11am after GM and the UAW failed to reach an agreement. GM has about a one month supply of cars in stock, so we’ll wait and see what happens. If the car industry is an indication of the national economy, I hope this doesn’t go as poorly as it could.

Remember that Sci-fi Sliders? Yeah they’ve proved that there could be an infinite number of parallel universes mathematically. Duh duh duhhhhnnnn. Maybe I’ll wake up and women are ruling a world where we’ve taught apes to talk and they tell us that they want to eat dolphins.

No cheap, urban wifi? Say it ain’t so. But not like you didn’t see this coming.

I will be using this tool to setup my upcoming new desk space in my new apartment. I also recommend anyone to use this who really hates sitting at their desk because it’s so damn uncomfortable.

I first learned about Jobs and Wozniak when I did a research paper called something like, “The history of hacking: an introduction to monopolies, politics, and phreaking.” (or something like that… it was awhile ago). I found this historical article through Fake Steve Jobs (I’m too lazy to link, just google it). They were hackers before Jobs, Woz and Gates turned evil. (Gates went first, and probably the farthest into user-rights-hell, Woz just got completely lost, and Jobs probably just figured everything was too ugly for him and then realized he could make everything pretty once again and came back… evil).

What I hope will be the ugly-evite-killer. Complete with party to-do lists.

some interesting surfing for you today. though not very exciting. I was listening to my music this morning with my awesome sony headphones when i noticed some earwax. eww. well, i was curious, so here’s some random, probably useless info on earwax via wikipedia.

also via wikipedia, by way of my brother. Fernet-Branca, a liqueur we had last night that tasted like someone mixed whiskey and gin together. I enjoyed, he enjoyed it, and come to find out, its base is a grape, with a lot of herbs and spices (not unlike gin). So good, i think i’ll be getting a bottle in the not-to-distant future.

i have been toying with idea of getting rid of this blog as a link sharing method. my commentaries, while enlightening and witty (i’m sure), can be time consuming and tedious. plus in my social web surfing way of life, i’ve come to be the generator of several social feeds (del.icio.us, etherealnation.net, flickr, digg, google reader, and several others). a while back i found tumblr, made an account, didn’t figure out what it could be useful for, and just gave up. well, in my quest to minimize my data output (more accurately, simplify) i went back to tumblr, and added in a ton of my data feeds. here is what has happened: my tumblr. sorry to say it doesn’t look like it backfills anything, so there isn’t anything posted there. but don’t worry, it will soon be waaaay too full of stuff for most normal people. so eat your hearts out (on glaring lack of privacy). similar, quicker, but not quite as nice is soup.io.

i do a lot of work with people who work with a lot of other people. do you know what this means for me? MAJOR SCHEDULING ISSUES. so i found timebridge. i’ve recommended it to the people in my life who swear that it would take a full day just trying to schedule 30 minutes with 5 busy people. and the good news is they’ve actually started using it, and so far, it’s really nice. simplified, it’s almost like a business version of evite. but, it allows for alternative date suggestions and it can put the agreed upon meeting time into your google, msoffice, or ical calendars.

and finally for a bit of science, check out nasa’s page for a neat article about a sun spot taking on the shape of the trilobite. also, here’s the video. it’s pretty intense. i mean for one thing, you’re watching the magnetic waves emanating from the surface of the sun. and for another thing, according to the article you’re actually seeing into the sun.

i just found this blog/zine/whatever site that keeps track of web-based apps. it is now both in my reader and in my del.icio.us and i plan on reading it frequently to learn of new and awesome apps to use on the web.

another site worthy of a del.icio.us tag, bust-a-name helps you find the domain name that you want and that is available.

i don’t usually link to lew because i typically find the articles interesting enough for myself, but rarely enamoring (or MOtR) enough to post here. this particular article addresses the quagmire that is US involvement with nuclear weapons.

Snow in Buenos Aires. I’m not too good with international weather patterns, but apparently this only happens every hundred years or so. For those who are geographically challenged: google maps.

Apparently not an uncommon thing to do, but the guy who is Harry Potter wears the same clothes everyday to fool the Paparazzi. I’m not sure how effective it is, but it at least sounds pretty clever.

GOP conspiracy theories are in the thick these days. My ole buddy santorum has been hinting about attacks on the us. now if i hinted that there would be attacks on the US in the upcoming months you can be sure as hell i’d be sent to Gitmo. I’m just sayin’s all.

and to continue my hegemony against the us, this Irish economist points out that the international community is pretty fed up with our economically retarded policies of borrowing more, spending more, and saving nothing. somebody needs to be saying it. bread and circus??? and in case you’re wondering, here’s what he means by two fingers.

AppScout posts a little article about a webapp called 71 miles. I haven’t been able to check it out for myself, but it looks promising.

If you’re going to get a new cellphone, you may want to check out exPhone to find good directions on how to donate or recycle your old cellphone.

Also in the cellphone sphere of the webernet, check out cellswaper. You can sign-on and swap around your annoying contract to either get a shorter one or get rid of your old one.

Freak out about oil? Freak out about water? Just freak out because humans will destroy the earth? I dunno, but here’s a couple articles about 1) running out of water and 2) stop drinking bottled water.

A really boring article about yawning.

Hilarious blog entry about Iranian news reporting that 1)the US (implied) is using squirrels to spy on Iran and 2) that

Maybe, Imam will use UFOs to attack his enemies.

Now, I’m not saying this is a valid source (note the massive attack of popup ads), but it is at least entertaining.

I’ve probably blogged about this before but, the open sourced cellphone has begun selling developer editions for 300$ or so. I’ll be keeping my eye on this over the next couple of years. I’m not sure but as far as I know this is the first example of a commercially available opensourced hardware/software object.

while i’m still skeptical about carbon output issues, makemesustainable is a neat take on social webbing that let’s you calculate your carbon footprint and take practical steps to reduce it.