who knew?
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Go to the Bay Area Blog »This is the personal web log of Michael A Clasen.
Kellandra The Spider Gremlin Ooak Plush (via Super Punch)
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nice buggy dontcha think
Digital Muse for Beat Poet
By JOHN MARKOFFPublished: January 22, 2010Days before Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, introduces his Next Big Thing (the consensus holds it will be a sleek tablet computer), I called up Gary Snyder, the Beat-era poet who writes about the American wilderness.
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Go to the Bay Area Blog »Now, Mr. Snyder might not seem the best person to ask to reflect on the milestones of the digital age. He is 79 and lives in the Sierra foothills in Northern California. But his world and that of the early personal computer makers, like Mr. Jobs, overlapped, in both time and space.
He has a nuanced understanding of computers. He is a devoted Macintosh user, though he said he wrote with whatever was at hand. And while everyone in Silicon Valley is on the edge of their seat waiting for Apple’s introduction on Wednesday of its newest “creation,” Mr. Snyder is taking a wait-and-see attitude.
Word of an Apple book replacement had not yet reached him in the California backcountry where he lives without electricity. He almost never uses a cellphone and has no use for BlackBerrys. He considers texting “abhorrent.”
But Mr. Snyder said he liked his laptop. “I like the storage space it has,” he said, “and I like the ability to have back files accessible to me wherever I go.”
In a poem, unpublished and reprinted below with Mr. Snyder’s permission, he breathes life into his computer, something that many of us tend to do with the machines that increasingly consume our lives.
Personal computers, Mr. Snyder said, feel like sentient beings. Next week, Mr. Jobs may be preparing to offer his most sentient Macintosh yet.
Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh
By Gary Snyder
Because it broods under its hood like a perched falcon,
Because it jumps like a skittish horse and sometimes throws me,
Because it is poky when cold,
Because plastic is a sad, strong material that is charming to rodents,
Because it is flighty,
Because my mind flies into it through my fingers,
Because it leaps forward and backward, is an endless sniffer and searcher,
Because its keys click like hail on a boulder,
And it winks when it goes out,
And puts word-heaps in hoards for me, dozens of pockets of gold under boulders in streambeds, identical seedpods strong on a vine, or it stores bins of bolts;
And I lose them and find them,
Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly laid out and then highlighted and vanish in a flash at “delete,” so it teaches of impermanence and pain;
And because my computer and me are both brief in this world, both foolish, and we have earthly fates,
Because I have let it move in with me right inside the tent,
And it goes with me out every morning;
We fill up our baskets, get back home,
Feel rich, relax, I throw it a scrap and it hums.
Copyright Gary Snyder, used by permission
God Hates Shrimp
Shrimp, crab, lobster, clams, mussels, all these are an abomination before the Lord, just as gays are an abomination. Why stop at protesting gay marriage? Bring all of God's law unto the heathens and the sodomites. We call upon all Christians to join the crusade against Long John Silver's and Red Lobster. Yea, even Popeye's shall be cleansed. The name of Bubba shall be anathema. We must stop the unbelievers from destroying the sanctity of our restaurants.
from Boing Boing
Raras Fotos de Star Wars
— Publicado por fael hace 4 semanas, 2 horas
major nerd alert - heh I like em
CONTRA COSTA COUNTY, CA - The National Weather Service issued a tornado warning Saturday afternoon for Contra Costa County.
Weather spotters reported a funnel cloud near Brentwood that was moving southeast at 5 mph.
The tornado was expected to be six miles southwest of Discovery Bay by 1:20 p.m., according to the weather service. The warning remains in effect until 2 p.m.
Bay City News
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Waiting for the big big funnel
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Buy early and buy often for a good cause
1928 all-girl, all-banjo orchestra plays "Shakin' the Blues Away"
It doesn't get any better than this. (Thanks, Amy!)
truly
Post-Avatar depression hits thousands of fans [video]
Posted Jan 12th, 2010 at 6:34 PM and seen 4690 timesAvatar may be one of the highest grossing films of all time, but it’s got a lot of fans feeling blue—pun intended.
CNN just came out with an extremely detailed report on the intense depression that Avatar is causing among a certain segment of fans. Psychotherapist Stacy Kaiser describes the fans as “lonely to begin with. They’re seeing Avatar, they’re lonely people, a lot of them don’t have a lot going on in their lives right now… The movie opened up a portal for them to express their depression.”
To simplify, people are depressed because their own lives don’t measure up to the fantasy, a phenomenon Kaiser attributes to the dissatisfaction one feels after seeing a romance movie if one happens to be unattached and dissatisfied.
krikey kidz its JUST a movie, albeit a Billion Buckz wun
Photo of Martian dune field
Image: NASA/JPL/University of ArizonaThis is my new favorite picture of Mars.
now that's alien
Boy Genius:
Other issues that I can’t live with day to day? How do I copy text from non-editable field like an email, webpage, or SMS, or even a 3rd party application? Oh, I can’t. Say what you want about the iPhone not having copy and paste for two years — a joke — it’s the single best implementation on the planet for a smartphone and Google’s approach is almost as bad as RIM’s with the Storm-series.
It’s not just the iPhone’s interface for copy-and-paste; it’s also the interface for selecting text and pictures before you can copy them. I’d say it’s one of the nicest and most thoughtful UI designs I have ever seen.
Pink Floyd • 2010 Syd Barrett Calendar
This full-color calendar from StormStudios runs from December 2009 to December 2010. Featured images include: paintings by Syd Barrett, the album covers of The Madcap Laughs and Barrett and the lyrics to “Lucifer Sam” and “Astronomy Domine” (illustrated by Finlay Cowan and Dan Abbott respectively).
Obviously a must have for twenty-ten