The Passion of the Mel?

Apparently.
Holy cow!

"The Lifehacker's Dilema"

by Dave Grey (via Merlin at 43Folders)

NSA spotting

Check out this screen grab from a Daily Show piece aired in late June. The premise: the NSA domestic surveillance would have been much easier to spot if people had only inspected their phone bills a little closer, check out the other line items:

Wal*Mart Nicht!

Wal*Mart bails on Germany.
Link via Buzzmachine and an update from MetaFilter.

iPod has "Four Year Life Span"?

Which is perfect — if you're a replicant :-)
Link to Gizmodo.

Tom Petty on NPR's "Fresh Air"

During my first days in University environment (specifically, 97 King Street West in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada -- don't look for it, it's not there anymore ;-) with a great group of guys I'm still friends with today, Tom Petty was a house favorite... and still is. Here's a great interview between Tom and Terry Gross of NPR's talk show "Fresh Air".
Link to NPR Fresh Air page.
Link to interview MP3 download.

Winning at any cost...

...has come to this?
I suppose the old adage about political elections ("it's not the voting that matters, it's the counting") sort of applies to sports ("it not the winning, it's the not getting caught").
"Landis Tests Positive for Doping" Washington Post
and New York Times story link via Paul Kedrosky.
UPDATE: Freakonomic's has this to say re:
cocktailing the night before a race.
UPDATE: and in further defense of Floyd...

CEO Geek-fest!

Mexens Technologies CEO, Cyril Houri, is interviewed by the MSMobiles tech blog. A fairly gruelling but truly outstanding technical conversation (read: "full on geek out" :-) about how the Navizon Wireless Positioning System works with PDA's, cell phones and smartphones as an augmentation / replacement for GPS positioning.
Link to MSMobiles.
Direct Link to the MP3 audio file (90 minute interview).

Blast from the past...

...and hopefully, this one won't hurt anybody:

Human League's "The Lebanon" -- linked via MetaFilter.

To boldly go?

The cast of classic Star Trek perform "Camelot" from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. An awesome mashup!
Link to YouTube via MetaFilter.

"Ain't it the Truth" Cory...

In a recent CBC.ca story Cory Doctorow writes:

" Wikipedia gets it wrong all the time. So do bloggers. But then, so do newspapers, magazines, TV and radio. The interesting thing about systems isn't how they perform when they're working to specification, it's what happens when they fail.

Blogs, Wikipedia, and other online media fail gracefully indeed. When a newspaper gets a story wrong, it can take 24 hours to get a correction out – if it corrects it at all. There's no ready way to link criticism of a newspaper article with the article itself. Certainly, you can't make the edits yourself.

But if you find an error in a Wikipedia entry, you can fix it yourself. You can join the discussion about whether a blogger got it wrong. Automated tools like Technorati link together all the different blogs discussing the same topic, turning them into a conversation. "

Link to CBC.ca via BoingBoing.

"Who Controls the Internet?"

Is the net erasing national borders?

Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith (Assistant US Attorney General under John Ashcroft) talks about his latest book (co-written with Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu) called "Who Controls the Internet?"

Aside from a very concise summary of the book, what's cool about this 20 minute speech is that he mentions a company called Infosplit and it's role in developing geographic identification technologies.

I was proud to serve as Infospit's VP of Business Development prior to its acquisition by Quova and extremely priviledged to work with an absolutely brilliant CEO/Architect/Engineer, Cyril Houri. Both Cyril and Infosplit are mentioned fairly prominently in the good Professor's book in the context of the Yahoo! US / Government of France / Nazi item auction case and the role Infosplit technology played in settling it.


powered by ODEO

This audio is part of an ongoing series offered by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

24 Hours of Toronto

A 60 second / 24 hour time lapse of Toronto as seen from the intersection of Yonge Street and St. Clair Avenue. I used a tripod mounted SONY DCR-PC100 DV Cam, Gawker 0.8 and a dual core MacMini to capture one frame every 60 seconds.

P-47 "Thunderbolt" Camera Footage

Recently declassified gun camera film from P-47's in action over Europe in WWII, proving once again that -- War is hell. (via MetaFilter)

"Kawabunga Yahweh!"

OK, I just finished a long walk through some forest trails in downtown Toronto and while I was chugging along this KQED radio Podcast episode of "Forum" (hosted by Michael Krazny, NPR San Francisco) popped up on my iPod.

Michael was interviewing / chatting with Steven Kotler, author of the book "West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origins of Belief".
What an amazing conversation, ranging from spirituality to neuro chemistry to biology to healing -- and let's not forget that wonderful, acquatic, slacker-hippy nonsense called "surfing" ;-)

Highly recommend you make / find some time to give this a listen... and feel free to pass this blog link along to your surfing and non-surfing pals alike. Really great stuff.

Here's a link to the KQED "Forum" interview hosted on Odeo
(you can listen in your browser or download the MP3 version).

Canada's NFB Shorts Online

Oh, what a happy day!
The National Film Board of Canada has just posted 50 classic animated short films online, spanning 60 years of brilliant work by artists. Some of this stuff is absolutely fantastic and includes a couple of my favorite shorts of all time -- Richard Condie's wonderful "The Big Snit" and Cordell Barker's classic "The Cat Came Back".
Fun for the whole family -- literally.
Check it out.
Link to National Film Board of Canada (via Cory at BoingBoing).

Series of Tubes

Last week Alaska Senator Ted Stevens described the interent as a "series of tubes" (via cory at BoingBoing) and today this brilliant MP3 mashup tune showed up in my aggregator -- it's hysterical.

UPDATE: Well, this didn't take long :-)


UPDATE: and finally, the New York Times chimes in with a story here.
Intersting how the article headline calls Steven's comments a "slip of the tounge" vs. the fact that he has little to no idea what he's talking about.

UPDATE: another Daily Show desk piece...

John Hodgman, the fellow who plays the PC in Apple's recent commercial blitz, is a regular Daily Show guest. This clip features Hodgman discussing Net Neutrality by way of pretending that he's a computer of some sort. I wonder what kind of computer he would be? (via TUAW)

Novak talks on outing Valerie Plame

Novak finally spills the beans on 2 of his 3 sources (Karl Rove, Scooter Libby) that Valerie Plame (wife of amabasador Joe Wilson, who spoke out against the Bush administrations "facts" that Iraq was amassing yellow cake uranium from Niger for a WMD program) was a CIA agent... and he's protecting the 3rd sources identity, even though he doesn't have to. Interesting stuff.
Link to NPR audio stream.

Ornithopter makes aviation history!

Whether you're a geek or not... this is awesome!
(and it happened right here in Toronto!)
Link to the Toronto Star (via my orthogonal pal, Shai Berger! :-)

Ken Lay

First the company has a massive failure... and then so does his heart.
Ken Lay dead of a heart attack at 64.
Link to CBC News.

If you haven't seen the film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room check it out. An excellent corporate morality tale in the American style.

UPDATE: The Washingon Post's Howard Kurtz has a good media/story roundup here.

Eye spy with my little eye...

A view from my balcony tonight...
Good to be back at Yonge & St. Clair!
Link to full resolution.