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Standup comedian Mitch Hedberg was found dead in a Jersey hotel room yesterday, according to MTV. It’s weird to think about that. I saw one of his last shows — he performed here at Tufts on March 10th. Poor guy.

In other death news, Terri Schiavo and Johnnie Cochran also bit their respective bullets in the past day or so. I was getting sick of (and sickened by) the Schiavo case, so I’m glad that’s over. Not sure that I have much of an opinion on Cochran.

Man, go back to school for a few days and your blog goes to hell. And by “goes to hell,” I mean “does not get updated for awhile.”

I started a Wikipedia article on Future Man over break in an attempt to feel productive. It’s just a stub right now, so do feel free to flesh out/correct it if you can.

Also, latest in my series of nifty Mac software is NetNewsWire Lite, an RSS newsreader. (Scroll down to the bottom of the page — they hide the Lite [read: free] version pretty well.) I thought it would help me spend less time combing through blogs and news sites, but instead it’s made it so easy to do so that I spend more time on it. Oh well.

In housing news, the lottery for waitlisted kids that was scheduled for today was postponed until April 4. Also, today’s Tufts Daily tore into ResLife, much like I did in my email but with more factual detail. I’m glad I’m not the only one frustrated with them.

Bits on Wheels is another fun program to fool around with. It’s a Mac BitTorrent client that has a snazzy graphical representation of the download in progress. I went to etree’s BT listing and picked a random show to test it out, and I’m having fun just sitting here watching.

(via Waxy)

A pair of recent articles from the Times on the future of digital photography: one on a wireless digital camera that emails pics through WiFi, and another on binoculars outfitted with digital cameras.

Wirehog is a nifty program that was co-created by Mark Zuckerberg of thefacebook fame. It’s been spreading through thefacebook for some time now — it was opened up to students at select colleges, who then invited friends to join (like with Gmail). Matt extended an invitation to me this afternoon (thanks!).

The program is the client-side part of a file-sharing network. You download a little piece of software, make a username and password, and then you can download files from your friends on thefacebook. It’s unique in that it uses your web browser for the interface, rather than a standalone program (although the program has to be open to share files). The site has a nerdy explanation for how it works if you understand this sort of thing: “Wirehog is an HTTP file transfer system using dynamic DNS and NAT traversal to make your personal computer addressable, routable and easily accessible.” Um. Cool.

As they point out, it’s also useful for accessing your own files while you’re not at your computer. Like any filesharing software, you can set which folders on your computer you’d like to share — but Wirehog lets you set a “lockbox,” which is a set of files that requires an extra password. Keep the password to yourself, and you can share all your important documents in case you need them somewhere else.

Unless I’m missing something, it seems like this is a centralized design — meaning that if someone were to get www.wirehog.com shut down, the service would be gone. Keep your fingers crossed on this one as well as Ourmedia.

Also, if you use thefacebook and want to get on Wirehog, drop me a line with your email address and I’ll invite you.

I found an interesting factoid in this old New Yorker article: Pyra, the company that created Blogger (i.e., this), was cofounded by Meg Hourihan — a Tufts graduate. Looks like we’ll have another famous alum on our list, once blogging goes into the stratosphere.

Incidentally, our “list” includes singer/songwriter Tracy Chapman, Wicked author Gregory Macguire, and Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis. Not bad.

President Bush has a head fetish.

No idea what words on the site say, but that much is obvious just from the pictures.

(via glassdog)

Transparent Screens is my new favorite Flickr pool. Basically, you’ve gotta take a picture of a surface, upload the picture to your laptop, and then make it your desktop. Some cropping may be necessary to match up the edges.

Here’s my first attempt and some of my favorites.

Google’s AdSense program, which serves most Internet text ads (including the one at the top right of this page), changed its Terms of Service — now members are allowed to disclose how much they’re making. Previously, this was a breach of contract for some reason.

Well, I’m not one to take my rights for granted. Since I signed up with AdSense on January 17, 2005, I have made a total of…$0.47. Google deposits the money into your account when the balance gets to $100, so if I stay at this rate I’ll get some free cash by around 2040. Nice! I’ll add it to the midlife crisis fund.

You might be wondering what the hell I’m doing, having a text ad on a site without any traffic. Well, for one thing, it doubles as a hit counter: since 1/17/05, there have been 1,168 visitors — an average of 17 per day. It’s also somewhat amusing in its attempts to determine the content of the site to provide relevant links. This entry, for example, prompted a bunch of ads for fur coats. (Man, no wonder nobody clicks on these things.)

Anyway, I bet this entry here generates a bunch of search engine optimization ads. Just watch.

The New Yorker raves about Spamalot in the latest issue. This is exciting to me not only because I love Monty Python and am dying to see the show, but because I get to see “Ecky-ecky-ecky-ecky-f’tang-f’tang-boing-boing-ole biscuit barrel” printed in an otherwise pretentious publication.

Ourmedia might change the Internet.

The site, which launched yesterday, provides “free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches.” They mean business, too; they’re backed by the guys at the Internet Archive, who have about a petabyte (1,000,000 gigabytes) of Web data stored, so it’s a feasible mission statement. It’s still in alpha (i.e., not nearly done), but it’s already quite impressive. They link you to Creative Commons licenses when you upload stuff, and they plan on using all the modern bells and whistles — BitTorrent downloads, RSS feeds, folksonomies — once they get the ball rolling.

If that last paragraph made no sense to you, here it is in layman’s terms: this is a site that lets you upload as many pictures, videos, audio files, and text files that you want. Any size, and they store them forever, for free.

The problem will come when the copyright vultures take notice. The site is only intended for uploading works that a) you own the copyright for, and b) you want to be shared with the public. That being said:

Could I sneak material onto the site that isn’t mine or doesn’t belong here?

No doubt. We’ll admit that up front: we’ve reduced the barriers to entry to almost zero. So what would be the point? It would be like knocking over the neighborhood kids’ lemonade stand.

(From the Contributors FAQ.)

That makes it sound a little too much like Napster’s stance. (Late-game Napster, that is, after they were backpedaling to try to stay alive as a free service.) Keep your fingers crossed; this project has amazing potential.

Here’s a good hypothetical for you:

The question: How many 5 year-olds could you take on at once?

The specifics:

- You are in an enclosed area, roughly the size of a basketball court. There are no foreign objects.
- You are not allowed to touch a wall.
- When you are knocked unconscious, you lose. When they are all knocked unconscious, they lose. Once a kid is knocked unconscious, that kid is “out.”
- I (or someone else intent on seeing to it you fail) get to choose the kids from a pool that is twice the size of your magic number. The pool will be 50/50 in terms of gender and will have no discernable abnormalities in terms of demographics, other than they are all healthy Americans.
- The kids receive one day of training from hand-to-hand combat experts who will train them specifically to team up to take down one adult. You will receive one hour of “counter-tactics” training.
- There is no protective padding for any combatant other than the standard-issue cup.
* The kids are motivated enough to not get scared, regardless of the bloodshed. Even the very last one will give it his/her best to take you down.

What follows is a remarkably thorough and logical discussion, centered on the finer points of kicking five-year-old ass. Won’t somebody think of the children?

(via Waxy)

The Wall Street Journal, of all publications, has an article on the history of yelling “Freebird!” at concerts (via Kottke).

What to do about it? Well, according to Dave Matthews, M. Doughty from Soul Coughing once said “there should be a law that every time someone yells ‘Freebird!’ the band has to play it. Pretty soon no one would ask for that fucking song anymore!”

Well, the rumors turned out to be true — Yahoo! has acquired Flickr creators Ludicorp. Here‘s the entry in the Flickr blog about it; here‘s the thread with responses from the Flickr community; here‘s a blog entry by Yahoo! employee Jeremy Zawodny.

Not sure if I have a good feeling about this, but all parties involved seem to be optimistic so far. We’ll see.

Language Log is my favorite blog-o’-the-moment. (Sorry — that was my St. Patrick’s Day celebration.) If Safire made “On Language” into a blog, and injected a littl more personality into it, he’d end up with something like Language Log. And with entries like “Ex-words, ex-parrots, and nominal tense,” what’s not to like?