An instructables how to gives some fun hints about how to avoid eating insects and insect byproducts. The article uses simple candies to illustrate how insects are commonly disguised in the ingredients listing. This probably won’t effect which foods I choose to eat but it’s nice to know. An added bonus would be to freak out my friends.
Blogosphere aghast
I seem to be in a headline-capping mood today… On Technorati, there is this headline stating, “Pluto demoted: BLOGOSPHERE AGHAST“. Quite funny, and spot on. I never realized Technorati had the ability to make emergency headlines but this feature is actually quite nifty.
Technorati Tags: blogosphere, headline, pluto, technorati
For the sake of sensationalism
I don’t get some journalists. I realize that it might be every journalists dream have their story read and passed around but some take it to pretty extreme ends.
This morning, for example, I woke up to a headline that read “Hezbollah sinks Australian warship“. From the sound of it, I figured something horrible had happened while I was asleep and Hezbollah had killed hundreds of Australian service men. I clicked the link only to find out that this was untrue and that Hezbollah was only doctoring photos.
This is a lot better, in my opinion, than killing people. The only purpose of the headline is to further demonize Hezbollah. What if somebody like myself had only read the headline? I would be walking around with misinformation, an offense similar to that of Hezbollah.
So newspapers, please do everybody a favor and cut down on doctoring headlines, especially if the article itself is about forgery.
I should also probably mention that it is my dream to, one day, become a journalist.
Technorati Tags: hezbollah, journalism, newspaper
Unifying external weblog editor bookmarklets
I realized today that external weblog editors need a unified bookmarklet. What I mean by this is that there should be one link that will send a post title and permalink to your favorite blog editor, similar to the del.icio.us bookmarklets people have on their blogs. Ecto already has this but not everybody uses ecto.
I am proposing that there be a unified bookmarklet and developers implement this into their programs. Ecto’s is fine so it should be something like:
blogit:title=post title&url=permalink&text=other text
Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, bookmarklet, weblogeditor
Announcing wp-ecto Plugin
I was reading my daily dose of RSS today when I stumbled upon an article with little social bookmarking links at the bottom of it. This, in itself, is nothing special since a lot of blogs have the small bookmarklets to various social bookmarking sites on their blog… even I do. However, I felt that this post was worth more than your average social bookmark and wanted to blog about it.
I looked at the icons for a second and I realized that there was no easy way to blog something using an external editor like there is for social bookmarking sites. There is no unified standard for external blog editor’s bookmarklets.
The one that that I know does exist, is a bookmarklet for ecto. So, I whipped up a quick plugin that will send the post title and permalink to ecto when a link. I currently have it running and if you would like to try it out, click the ecto icon to the right of the post title. Ecto is required if you would like it to work.
Installation
Installation is fairly simple, just decompress ‘wp-ecto.tgz‘ into your wp-content/plugins folder and then activate it in the admin panel.
To display the icon on your blog, add the following code where you want it in your template:
<?php if (function_exists('wp_ecto')) wp_ecto(); ?>
The icon is wrapped in a div tag with the id ‘wp-ecto’. Currently my styling is:
#wp-ecto {
float:right;
padding:2px;
}
That’s about it. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please drop me a line with the form on the bottom of the page.
Technorati Tags: bookmarklet, ecto, plugin, wordpress, wordpressplugin, wp-ecto
Patriotic T-Shirts… in Arabic
In a stroke of satirical genius, somebody has suggested making t-shirts that say things like “Declare Jihad on Illiteracy” or “I Love America” in arabic.
Technorati Tags: america, funny, iloveamerica, patriot, usa
Eating a Live Wasp
A user at Ask MetaFilter asks, “Can I eat a live wasp?” At the time of this writing nobody has yet said yes… One person did, however, say that wasps and bees can be eaten after being boiled and even gives some tips as to how to prepare them.
Youth Against Sudoku
From the girl in my class who fills out the square puzzles instead of listening to lectures to newspapers from as far away as India, it seems that nobody is safe from sudoku. However, a group as been formed that is attempting to fight this plague. They call themselves Youth Against Sudoku and they hail from Finland. To help others who would like to rebel against “the cursed logic game”, they have formed up an anti-sudoku manifesto:
They turn our world black and white, unimaginatively logical, and statically squared. Simplicity is unexciting, and excess logic kills variety. Is there nothing left but nine times nine? We are concerned, concerned about 81 traitorous squares, concerned about mankind. People waste their time and brain capacity by pondering over numbers, useless numbers, addictive numbers.
And they have a cool design… via Web Creme
Technorati Tags: sudoku, youthagainstsudoku
Buy 2000 fake identities
Now, with the power of the internet and just two American dollars, you can buy 2000 fake identities and have them shipped directly to your email. This basic package comes with fake names, addresses, telephone numbers and credit card accounts. If that is not good enough for you, for an extra thirteen dollars, you can get 10,000 identities complete with social security numbers. If you are unwilling to pay, you can select your identities manually with the Fake Name Generator.
Update: Somebody remind me never to blog when it’s after my bed time…
Note Taking Hacks
As you might have read in a previous entry, I have recently begun carrying a Moleskine notebook around, almost religiously. As an acolyte in the cult of molskinery, I am always on the look out for neat tips and tricks that can help me organize my notes better. So today, I was reading the 43Folders Wiki page on ‘note taking‘ and stumbled across a link to some good hints. My favorite is the use of symbols.
I indent my notes from the left edge of the paper about half an inch. This allows me to put my symbols in the left margin. I use four:
- If an item is particularly important or insightful, I put a star next to it.
- If an item requires further research or resolution, I put a question mark next to it.
- If an item requires follow-up, I put a ballot box (open square) next to it. When the item is completed, I check it off.
- If I have assigned a follow-up item to someone, I put an open circle next to it (similar to the ballot box but a circle rather than a square). In the notes, I indicate who is responsible. When the item is completed, I check it off.
Technorati Tags: moleskine, notetaking, symbols
Quin Starts a Blog
My good friend Quin will be leaving tomorrow for a year in Belgium. So us back here in the states can keep up with his adventures, I have talked him into starting a blog. It is hosted on unbrain.net and can be found at je.suis.un.pizza.unbrain.net. As of the time this post was written, he has not written anything on the blog.
Please, bookmark the site, it should be an interesting read over the next 10-12 months if he does, in fact, use it. If he doesn’t, however, I will leave him nasty phone messages telling him to stop wasting 5MB of the precious 26GB of space on my hosting plan.
Occupation is a Crime (and College Tours)
Last week, I took a trip to the east coast to check out colleges. I’m only going to be a junior in high school this year but I figured I could get a head start and actually find something that I like.
On Thursday morning I went on a tour at Georgetown University. It was raining and my mom and I were avoiding driving around Washington D.C., so we took the metro and then a shuttle to Georgetown. It ended up that the shuttle was not specifically to the university and we were forced to walk about 4 blocks in the rain until, finally, we broke down and bought umbrellas at a CVS drug store.
The Georgetown University information session was the same as every other of the six colleges I went to besides Georgetown. The tour was also pretty similar… “Here is a residence hall”, “Here is the student union”. However, while we were walking around campus, I started noticing flyers about an “Emergency march on Washington to protest the US-Israeli War.”
Now, if you know me at all, you would know that I don’t like war and I’m relatively anti-zionist so I pointed the flyers out to my mom, hoping she would ask me if I wanted to go. Surely enough, she asked me on friday when there was an article in the Washington Post about it.
On Saturday morning, we checked out of our hotel and walked around D.C. looking for some breakfast. On the way to Ford’s Theatre, we found a diner style restaurant called The Waffle Shop across the street.
I, hailing from southern Californian suburbia, have rarely, if ever, been to a true American diner. I think the closest I’ve been has been watching The Blues Brothers. This restaurant would fit right in with the movie too. I was very tempted to order four fried chickens and a coke or dry white toast. I resisted the urge and went with a breakfast special.
After breakfast, we still had some time to kill before the protest so we hit up the presentation at Ford’s Theatre and then walked through the natural history museum onto the national mall and up to the Washington Monument. After taking a couple pictures of the Capitol, we moseyed on over to Lafayette Square in front of the White House.
We caught up with a smaller group of people marching to the protest carrying signs that said “Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine: Occupation is a Crime” (which was actually the overall slogan at the protest).
The police were out in force as well as the Christian counter-protesters ignorantly refusing to believe that Muslims and Christians believe in the same god. The only people not out there were the Jewish counter-protestors. There was actually no organized Jewish protest because, according to Misha Galperin of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, “the event was purposely scheduled on the Jewish Sabbath to thwart any response on its part.”1
We stayed at the protest for a couple hours. It was pretty fun but I felt a little bit out of place. Having been organized by muslim groups, that was the main audience they were catering towards and I’m not muslim. The speakers were interesting even though they mostly restated the same idea in many different ways. I stood off to the side of the stage with my mom so we never actually got to see the speakers.
Behind us was a group of high school kids that were veterans to rallies and demonstrations supporting Islam. One of them brought their younger brother along who was actually interviewed by some news reporter.
After about seven speakers, we decided to walk around and check out the rest of the demonstration throughout the park. In the road (I believe it was Pennsylvania Ave.) were people laying down covered in black with Palestinian or Lebanese flags over them. Towards the center of the park, the socialists had taken over and were handing out free issues of “The Weekly Worker” and just as we were walking in, some orthodox jews were walking out of the center of the crowd holding signs condemning the “zionist atrocities”.
Across the street, behind the stage, the police had set up there area of operations in the shade. There were tables lined up with banners saying things such as “Muslims for Peace & Justice” and people walking in lines carrying coffins.
It was getting to be late and my mom and I had a plane to catch so we started walking back to our hotel to pick up our bags and get the car. On the way out, we saw the orthodox jews lined up with the press taking pictures of them as well as the official front of the march.
We never actually got to participate in the march but while we were walking back, we noticed that the streets were being closed by the police and people looked like they were beginning to march.
Technorati Tags: israel, lebanon, protest, washingtondc, whitehouse
Don’t Leave Home Without It
I have recently added a couple new items to the list of things I should probably not leave home without. First is a moleskine notebook. I know I am just following the internet “cool kids” with this one but these little books are amazing. I carry around a small un-ruled notebook and jot down notes and things I should remember.
The other item I have started carrying around is a rosary. I fell in love with this set of beads last weekend when I was attending the Steubenville San Diego catholic conference for teens. It is amazing because, after you are done praying a decade, you don’t remember what you were thinking about before.
Technorati Tags: catholic, moleskine, rosary, sandiego, steubenville