American in Spain

It’s really simple. I want my contacts organized in groups, just like any RSS client. When I open up my Twitter client, I want to go directly to my friends’ new tweets before reading my celebrity or news tweets. I care more about jagosaurus or sgazzetti are up to than what celebrities like Wil Wheaton or Penn Jillette or John Hodgman are doing. And I want an unread count for each group, like most RSS readers give. The total unread count should be shown in the dock icon.
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Below is my Twitter feed posted during the birth of my daughter, saved here for posterity.
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A month ago, a scandal rocked the e-commerce world. A Development Rep from Belkin, a computer peripherals manufacturer, was caught hiring people to write fake reviews of Belkin products on Amazon.com. The internet tubes rattled with outrage! Everyone in the e-commerce industry knows that the latest must-have feature for your website is customer product reviews. Amazon.com has been the leader in e-commerce since the beginning, and their review system is excellent. I openly admit to being influenced by product reviews in my recent prepurchase researching. They’re really quite helpful…or are they?
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One of the uses of Twitter, I’ve found, is for complaining when there’s no one around at the moment to hear your complaints. So you broadcast them on Twitter. And one common activity that results in the “bored and angry” mental state necessary for such tweets is being on hold on the telephone. Here are a few recent tweets in this genre from people I follow.
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Sarah Palin’s career has been full of ups and downs in the past six months. It’s interesting how traffic to my Can Sarah Palin really see Russia from her house? post has ebbed and flowed with Palin’s popularity. The other events that have affected this traffic graph were my blog getting dugg and a link from Bad Astronomy. Check it out:
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If you’re ever curious what the weather is (or was) like here, there’s a solution! I recently discovered a very well done 360° webcam in nearby Laredo. You can download 7330×900 high resolution photos from every quarter hour of daylight going back to November 3, 2007. It will also generate timelapse videos, but 15 minutes is too long of an interval to make an interesting timelapse video.
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Today I was accidentally plagiarized by one of my blogging heroes, Phil Plait, keeper of the Bad Astronomy blog. He wrote a post titled “How far away is the horizon?” in which he goes about explaining how to calculate the distance to the horizon given your altitude above Earth. His methods are slightly different, but his diagram and data almost exactly match my “Distance To The Horizon” post from last March. When confronted about it, he said,

Holy cow. Mine really *is* similar to yours. I swear, I never saw it. I even searched to see if someone else had done this before! Great minds, I guess.

I believe him, of course. Even accidental imitation is a form of flattery.

I still like my post better because I calculate the distance along the surface of the ground and I include a handy javascript calculator rather than a lookup table. Plus, mine has actually been put to good use calculating the distance from Sarah Palin’s house to Russia!

At no point in the process of creating this image did I realize what it would be in the end. All I knew when I started was that I felt like doing some Photoshopping. Struggling to come up with an idea, I was staring at some of the objects on my desk and two caught my eye, a gemstone globe and a miniature ceramic chipmunk. I’d already done the “creature standing on the globe” trick with the BITWRATHPLOOB blog header, but nothing else was coming to me. So I held the globe out at arm’s length, focused on the chipmunk, and snapped a picture. Once imported into Photoshop, I cut out background and removed some of the background reflection from the globe’s surface. At this point, it was clear that I needed a star field, so I found a Photoshop tutorial to generate one. As soon as I put the globe and chipmunk in the foreground, the text that was needed popped into my head, and I knew my creation was complete.
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When I worked for a government institution twelve years ago, I recall that there were some bigwigs that worked there that had their secretaries print out every email they received and place it on their desk as if letters had arrived. I presume they would dictate responses. I was always amazed at such a fundamental misunderstanding of what electronic mail is about. But it was 1996 and every web page still used the <center> tag, so I forgive them.
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There is a certain video making its round through every news program on the planet, and doing pretty well on the internet too, of an Iraqi journalist launching two shoes towards President Bush’s face. Not only is the video pretty funny, but it’s hugely symbolic for the failure of Bush’s presidency. I think that everyone who has seen it has probably been impressed by old Dubya’s evasive maneuvers. It’s like he’s been practicing dodgeball on the White House lawn or something.

It occurs to me that the internet is ripe for any parody videos involving flying shoes. If I had any video special effects skills beyond iMovie, I would make one myself. The best idea I’ve come up with is a parody of The Matrix. There are two scenes to choose from. Either President Bush bends back until his torso is parallel to the ground, arms flailing, as time slows and we see the shoes fly past in slow motion. Or we go with the scene at the end of the movie and Bush simply holds out his hand and the shoes slow down, stop in mid air, and fall to the ground.

A good viral video idea is worth thousands of dollars. All you need to make it an advertisement is for Bush to take a sip of some beverage either before or after the action, or for the shoes to have a logo on them as they fly by in slow motion.

C’mon, Internet! Get to work!