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Letting iTunes play normally can be more varied than putting it on random. This is what I just heard:

• “New York State of Mind” – Billy Joel
• “The Christmas Song” – Bing Crosby
• “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” – Bing Crosby
• “Just a Friend” – Biz Markie
• “Had to Cry Today” – Blind Faith

My library, of course, was sorted by artist. If I hadn’t come in at the end of Billy Joel, and if I had more Bing Crosby songs (or Biz Markie songs), it wouldn’t be nearly as cool. But as it stands, I’m amazed that non-random iTunes-ing produced such a ridiculous mix of genres.

If you eat a Thin Mint after eating mint chocolate chip ice cream, it doesn’t taste like anything.

I relate this so that others might avoid wasting such a rare and precious cookie. Learn from my mistake.

He was second-in-command at the FBI during the Nixon era. Here’s the Google News link, and here’s the article in Vanity Fair [PDF].

I got sick of the default WordPress theme, and I’m experimenting with others. The site will probably undergo drastic changes over the next couple of days until I settle on something that I like. I should note that I haven’t mucked around in HTML or CSS in a few months. You have been warned.

Daily Type is a fun website. Five Russian type designers post “original typefaces” (read: neat doodles with words) every day. They’re cool to look at, and some are actually pretty funny. This one is my favorite.

(via Kottke)

Wired has an article on Peak Oil, a topic for which I churned out a mediocre paper in high school but continue to have a modest interest in. The article has quotes from people who believe we’re about to run out of oil and from those who don’t, but I can’t tell if the naysayers have any science to back up their claims or if it’s just wishful thinking. Something about the whole discussion gives me a queasy feeling, I have to say.

Firefox developer Blake Ross writes in his blog about college news sites that use link farms to generate revenue. It’s a seedy way to make money — basically the search engine equivalent of spam — but I can’t help but sympathize with colleges trying to cut costs. I am proud to say, though, that our paper just runs regular ads.

Eh. The scenes were a choppy, the dialog was laughable, the story was unspectacular, and the lightsaber fights were much longer than necessary. But it was still enjoyable. That, I think, is George Lucas’s talent.

This website is neat — you use the spacebar to tap out a rhythm, and it matches up what you played to a song in its database. It only works for a few songs right now, but it’s an idea that has interesting potential.

(via Computers and Music)

Yahoo has recently announced a new service called PhotoMail. From what I understand in the press release, you can email people a bunch of thumbnails of your pictures — 300 per email, in fact — and store the originals for free on their server. That way, your family and friends can just click the thumbnails in your message and see the real pics, and you can send pictures without taking up a ton of space in the email.

There are two weird things about this service.

One, it adds to the confusion around Yahoo’s photo services — now there’s Flickr, Yahoo Photos, and PhotoMail. Flickr and PhotoMail both offer unlimited or near-unlimited disk space; Yahoo Photos and Flickr are both primarily for storage; PhotoMail and Yahoo Photos are both aimed at less tech-savvy users. Hopefully they’ll integrate their services in some logical manner.

Two, this is the message I got when I tried to see what PhotoMail was about:

We’re sorry. The Quick Select Tool could not be installed. Quick Select is the browser software that enables PhotoMail. Quick Select is only available for PC users running Windows 2000 or XP with the Internet Explorer browser [version 5.5 and higher]. Quick Select Tool and PhotoMail are not available for Firefox, Netscape, and Macintosh users. If you do meet the requirements outlined above, please try closing all open browser windows and restarting Internet Explorer. Then visit Yahoo! Mail and try installing the Quick Select Tool again.

(Emphasis mine.)

Not very forward-looking, is it? To me this seems like a rushed, poorly thought out response to Google recent dominance in web applications. Maybe it’ll catch on, though.

Think Secret is reporting that Steve Jobs and Mel Karmazin, the CEOs of Apple and Sirius Radio respectively, met recently to discuss the possibility of an iPod with satellite radio. As noted in the article, XM Radio has already approached Apple, but they were unable to strike a deal; Karmazin was similarly unsucessful, at least so far. Still, the possibility of, say, a satellite radio-capable 60GB iPod photo is enough for me to get excited over.

Something Awful has the “Fashion SWAT,” apparently a more sarcastic version of the fashion police, that makes fun of ridiculous superhero costumes in its latest issue. Check it out here.

According to a New York Times article, Thefacebook, the college networking website that grew from one school to over 800, is now hitting the big time in Silicon Valley. They’ve received $13 million from a firm called Accel Partners, which has bought an undisclosed stake in the company, and they’re planning take it public (eventually). Hopefully the suits don’t commericalize everything and ruin the collegiate atmosphere.

Said the Gramaphone is another cool blog I found on Metafilter, which has quickly become one of my favorite websites. STG is a music blog that reviews and comments on individual songs. They host the MP3s temporarily so you can hear them as well. I’ve only listened to a few of their selections so far, but they seem to cover a variety of styles so you’re likely to find something you enjoy.

“The Slashdot effect,” a.k.a. “Slashdotting,” is a well-known Internet phenomenon. When tech-news site Slashdot links to an article, it begins to generate somewhere between several hundred and several thousand hits per minute, often forcing smaller websites to temporarily shut down.

So when I submitted a Wired article to Slashdot yesterday, I wasn’t worried — Wired is a popular magazine and could certainly handle the traffic. What I didn’t expect was for my site to start getting traffic as people read my summary and clicked on my name to get here. It was no Slashdot effect, to be sure, but it was kind of neat to get hundreds of hits from around the world for no real reason.