Territorial Pissings

In the ongoing Hans Island saga, the BBC is reporting that Mr. Harper has told the US Ambassador to piss off:

The United States defends its sovereignty, the Canadian government will defend our sovereignty.

Apparently, we’re going to build three new armed ice-breakers. You hear that Denmark? Your elite figure skating brigade will be useless now.

Update: Richard pointed out that a Canadian Sea King helicopter was forced to ditch off the coast of Denmark this evening. I don’t know what these shifty Danes are up to. Feb. 2nd


Nothin’ to Rollyo

I’ve seen lots of weblogs around with Rollyo search boxes, maybe it’s better than the built-in search functionality of most blogging software. Unfortunately, the site is powered by Yahoo — they don’t index my site. So, it’s impossible for me to use the service.

Update: At long last the power to move mountains in mine, muahahahaha! Or at least my ability to toy with the unwitting fools who stumble into this steaming pile via Yahoo has increased. That’s right, Dave Pell has added eightface to the Yahoo index. Break out the fireworks, it’s been years in the making.


Stairway at St. Paul’s

Stairway at St. Paul's

Stairway at St. Paul’s is probably the coolest music video that I’ve seen in a long long time. Jeroen Offerman spent three months learning to sing Stairway to Heaven backwards and recorded his performance on the steps of St. Paul for confused spectators.

This film comes via the first issue of Wholphin, a new DVD magazine by the folks at McSweeney’s. With a level of pretension that we’ve grown to expect, Jeroen’s contributions to the magazine are used as dvd menu items. It’ll come on eventually if you leave the DVD menu playing, it happened to Tavis and I while we were playing some Mario Kart DS. It was a weird experience.

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Don’t Be Evil

Google — circa January 2003

The world’s biggest, best-loved search engine owes its success to supreme technology and a simple rule: Don’t be evil.

Google — circa January 2006

Leading internet search company Google has agreed to censor some of its services in China in order to satisfy Beijing’s restrictions on free speech.

Three years? Seriously, that’s all it takes for Google to crumble? It’s been more than fifteen years since Tianamen Square, guess it’s all buttercups and roses now. I could be wrong, but I’m guessing Larry and Sergey have figured out how to harness the slow moving tanks of democracy.


Four Things

I’ve been tagged for four things by Matt, it’s been awhile since one of these meme’s floated around. The site has more readership now and I’ve been slacking with the personal sections, so here goes.

Four jobs I’ve had in my life

  • Carny
  • Janitor
  • Teacher
  • Web Designer

Four movies I can watch over and over

  • Braveheart
  • Monty Python and the Holy Grail
  • Run Lola Run
  • The Shawshank Redemption

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Web Infinity Point Oh Plus One

Web Infinity Plus One

Now that Zeldman’s on board we can get past this icky Web 2.0 nonsense and move on to the next version.

As for me, I’m cutting out the middleman and jumping right to Web 3.0. Why wait?

Sounds good to me, but we should really stop dicking around. Unfortunately, Web Infinity sounds like a bad car name, so in true playground fashion we’ll go with Web Infinity Point Oh Plus One. We can even shorten it to Web iPopo for marketing and a nice conference namey feel.


Exploring the past

A duplicate of a Chinese map from 1418 calls into question the European discovery of America. There are authenticity issues because the map is actually a reproduction from the 1700’s. Much of the recorded history surrounding Zheng He’s voyages has been destroyed over the years by other Chinese dynasties, so we’ll probably never know all the details — there was a recent National Geographic feature about his voyages. Regardless of the map’s authenticity, if the Chinese were capable of exploring Africa, and Austrailia, I don’t doubt that they were able to reach the Americas.


Fork beta 1

Fork b1 (inline asides) - 900px

What’s black and white and red all over? You guessed it, Fork for K2. And what is a K2 you ask? Other than the oft-neglected peak situated beside Everest? If you’re familiar with WordPress, K2 is the successor to Kubrick, the popular default theme. It aims to be a bit more than a standard theme, with out of the box support for a number of plugins and a slew of built-in options. You can download the latest K2 beta via Binary Bonsai.

Lots of people are running K2, it’s a decent option if you don’t want to get into the php/css guts of a WordPress theme. That said, the stock look might be getting you down. That’s where Fork comes in. You should be able to drop it into a default K2 install, enable it via the options panel and have a dirty greyscale theme without any real work. It should also offer a little bit of insight into the theme’s visual customization.

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