Yesterday Matt censored my Jeter poster while I was at class:
So while he was out seeing a Noam Chomsky lecture, Halley “improved” his pillow.
Oh yes. I haven’t cared about baseball all year, but it’s on now.
The URL calendar.google.com is resolving, much like talk.google.com did shortly before Google Talk launched. Another new Google product on the horizon, perhaps? (via)
Tufts now has its own Google Maps “hack,” Campus Compass. You can search for various services (ATMs, ping pong tables, wifi spots) and it’ll pin them up on a campus map with links to more information. This is the kind of thing that cities and towns should have.
COLONIE — There’s a new drinking policy at Siena College.
No drinking.
Of anything.
Even water. Or iced tea. Or coffee, Red Bull or lemonade. Or vodka or beer, for that matter, in case anybody gets any bright ideas.
According to a policy dated Sept. 17, students are “no longer allowed to consume alcohol or any other beverage in any type of container outside of their townhouse or in any public area on campus.”
[...]
But does the new policy also mean a person who buys a Pepsi in a vending machine on the Loudonville campus and opens it on one of the lush quads is breaking the rules?
Yes, Gianopoulos said. But they can crack open that drink once they reach their residence, she added.
(via)
One of the perennial topics on the Flickr forums is the possibility of expanding to include video sharing in addition to photos. While the staff chews on that idea, there are two site already set up for this: YouTube and Vimeo.
Both sites have the same basic functionality and setup as Flickr. You can upload videos, add tags, have a list of friends, and comment on others’ work. Interestingly, neither service offers a paid subscription plan, even though hosting videos is more expensive than hosting photos. It should be interesting to see how (and if) these sites scale.
YouTube is the more popular of the two, so the community aspect is stronger and it is generally more polished. Amazingly, it appears to allow an unlimited number of uploads, although each video must be under 100MB. I do think they missed the point in forcing every video to have a title, at least three tags, and a description; Flickr’s “add it if you want to” philosophy seems much more appropriate. Also, being a family-oriented site, YouTube prohibits nudity and anything that isn’t “appropriate for all audiences.” I can see keeping porn off the site, but nudity is borderline and forcing everything to be G-rated is probably a bit stifling. Here I think they should take Flickr’s lead and aim for something in the middle.
Vimeo is aimed more at geeks and is designed for short video clips. You are allowed 20MB of bandwidth per week, but there are a few nice features that YouTube: uploading by email (especially nice for cell phone videos), the ability to link directly to the videos, and integration with del.icio.us and Flickr. You can’t set privacy per se, but you can stop people from adding tags to and commenting on your videos. There is no forcing users to tag, title, and describe the stuff they upload, either. There isn’t a Terms of Service agreement that I can find, so Vimeo might be more accepting of “objectionable” content, but I’m not sure. I hope they’d still weed out the pornography, though, since their bandwidth bills would go through the roof otherwise.
It’s tough to pick one over the other — YouTube has the community and the wide-open upload limit, but Vimeo has the neat features and is less restrictive in terms of usage. See what you think.
Sunday night might have been Bernie Williams’ last home game at Yankee Stadium. After starting in the Yankees farm system and having an illustrious 14-year career as a pro, WIlliams’ contract has run out again, but this time it’s unlikely to be renewed. The NY Times has a story on his farewell appearance.
Bet you didn’t know that God and friends have their own heavenly interior decorating show.
I went to see Boubacar Traoré last night for my Intro to World Music class. He’s a Malian singer-songwriter-guitarist who plays something between blues and Arab music. It was good stuff. I wrote up a short Wikipedia article on him based on some quick Googling.
The New York Times has a new humor section.
It’s not quite what you’d expect — there’s not a page of comics shoved in behind the Business section or anything. Rather, there’s a new weekly feature in the Times Magazine. It’s an innovative three-part section called The Funny Pages. The first part is a serial graphic novel (which I suppose would traditionally be called a comic strip, because come on, it’s in a newspaper) by Chris Ware. There is also True-Life Tales, short autobiographical stories from various authors, and Sunday Serial, a good-old-fashinoned serial novel. It’s really quite a good addition — check it out.
You will after looking at this poster. “Whoa,” as Neo might say. (via)
Lo, I am overcome with wonder and merriment.
I bought Audio Hijack Pro mainly so I could record the RealPlayer streams from my Intro to World Music class website (and so I could rip the audio off of the rest of my music DVDs). To find more cool stuff to listen to, I started an Ask MetaFilter thread and was directed to PublicRadioFan.com.
Whoa. Bestsitever. It’s a massive index containing dozens of public radio stations, hundreds of programs, all sorts of genre and content filters, and links to all of the internet streams. Seeing this site inspires the same sense of wonder as, say, the first time you used the internet or saw a huge library — so much stuff, so little time.
You might remember the one day a couple of weeks ago where they gave away Opera for free as a promotion. Well, apparently they liked that idea, because now it’s free permanently. I still like Firefox better, but I applaud this move nonetheless.
Incidentally, the Firefox 1.5 beta is excellent. The only issue I’ve had is that sometimes the graphic on the refresh button doesn’t load when I open the program, but that fixes itself once I click on it. Of course, there are a ton of extensions that don’t support 1.5 yet, but my two favorites — Mouse Gestures and Greasemonkey — do. Give it a try.
The new Béla Fleck and the Flecktones album, due out in January, is going to be one of those newfangled DualDiscs that are all the rage these days. The CD audio will be on one side, and a DVD featuring live performances and a Q&A session will be on the other. (via)
It wasn’t getting cancelled — it was changing the way the show ends.
The show used to end with the credits. Right after the last frame it would head right into the brassy punch of the theme song, adding an exclamation point to whatever silly joke the show ended on. Now it ends by awkwardly cutting to a black screen…and then rolling some commercials. The credits come up a couple of minutes later, squished on the bottom of the screen, while we get to hear about what’s coming up next on FOX.
Ugh. Totally ruins the last joke of the show.