Servo3000: Live on the Web

Stuff White People Like is, without a doubt, one of the best blogs I have read in a long time.  Let’s see which items on their list I have actually blogged about:

• #8 Barack Obama
• #19 Traveling
• #35 The Daily Show / Colbert Report
• #38 Arrested Development
• #40 Apple Products
• #42 Sushi
• #50 Irony
• #52 Sarah Silverman
• #58 Japan
• #68 Michel Gondry
• #77 Musical Comedy

So yeah, maybe I am not a unique and beautiful snowflake.

This is one of the funniest videos that I have seen in a long time.  Cracked imagines a party attended by Wikipedia, Facebook, Digg, YouTube, Ask Jeeves, Craigslist, Google, Something Awful, eBay, Amazon, MySpace, Urban Dictionary, and many more.  Head on over to their site and check it out.

So Idaho senator Larry Craig, he of the airport bathroom rendezvous, has an interview with Matt Laurer and drops this bomb:

But I don’t use the Internet. I don’t have a computer at my desk. I’ve never used the Internet. It’s just not what I do.

Ok, that’s fine.  Not everyone uses the internet.  But the thing is, Larry Craig is a member of the Congressional Internet Congress Advisory Committee.

Way to go, Senator.

This is an amazing video that everyone who uses the internet needs to watch.  Henry Rollins = Hero.

via BoingBoing

Inspired by this comic, people have been sneaking chessboards onto roller coasters (with this pieces glued to the board) and getting some truly awesome souvenir photos. Check them all out.

[via BoingBoing]

(Image and site from Make Magazine)

I love this converter of strange units. Here are some fun facts:

• 1 testicle of a right whale = 10.02 Jennifer Annistons
• 1 placenta = 29.88 US quarters
• 1 average bowel movement = 7.05 human eyeballs

These units of measurement are way better than pounds or kilograms.

I love this blog, about a guy who has kmiller@gmail.com and gets lots of misdirected email.  For a long time, I had a an email that looked like this: myname@comcast.net and someone else had myname1@comcast.net.  I got his email all the time, which I would happily deal with as I felt a kinship with this mystery person who shared the same name as me.  At firstl, I would send a polite reply and refer them on to his address.  Over time, I started to only reply to important looking emails and then, after a while longer, I got sick of doing this and just deleted them as they arrived, with two notable exceptions.

Other Scott was some kind of counselor and I got sent someone’s complete case file from a psychiatrist.  I wrote her back to let her know it had been sent to the wrong address, expecting her to point out that I had received private data by mistake and that I should delete it.  Instead, the totality of her reply was: “Whoops”.

The Comcast address was a spam magnet, so I ignored any porn-related email that came my way in droves.  But then I got an email from the man himself, the other Scott.  He had subscribed to a porn site and had given them my email by mistake.  He wrote me to ask if I could dig through my inbox and see if that had sent his login and password to my address.  Sure enough, I had a brand new login and password to some unknown porn site and forwarded them on him.  The other Scott never even thanked me.

FlickrVision is far too engrossing; this is going to be a big time waster for me.

This story about a UK judge who doesn’t understand the web has been everywhere today.  The catch is that he is presiding over a trial involving inciting terrorism over the internet.  From the article:

Prosecutor Mark Ellison briefly set aside his questioning to explain the terms “Web site” and “forum.” An exchange followed in which the 59-year-old judge acknowledged: “I haven’t quite grasped the concepts.”

I don’t think the story here is really about the case in his courtroom.  I have had to testify about the software development process before and attempt to explain things that, although are basic to me, are extremely foreign to someone with no experience in the field.  Judges learn the basic concepts and figure out how apply the law, which is something they should know very well.  I give kudos to this judge for admitting that he doesn’t know the lingo and for taking time to understand it.  Still, it scares me a little to think about a digital copyright case coming before a luddite one day.

I think the real story is more about the digital divide that still exists.  For most of us, certainly for all of us who read blogs, the web is an indispensable tool and hearing that someone doesn’t use it is like someone telling us they don’t use the phone or the postal service.  How much longer will it be viable to not have any knowledge of the web?  How do you convince people who have ignored the internet revolution that it is time to get on board?

This story about a UK judge who doesn’t understand the web has been everywhere today.  The catch is that he is presiding over a trial involving inciting terrorism over the internet.  From the article:

Prosecutor Mark Ellison briefly set aside his questioning to explain the terms “Web site” and “forum.” An exchange followed in which the 59-year-old judge acknowledged: “I haven’t quite grasped the concepts.”

I don’t think the story here is really about the case in his courtroom.  I have had to testify about the software development process before and attempt to explain things that, although are basic to me, are extremely foreign to someone with no experience in the field.  Judges learn the basic concepts and figure out how apply the law, which is something they should know very well.  I give kudos to this judge for admitting that he doesn’t know the lingo and for taking time to understand it.  Still, it scares me a little to think about a digital copyright case coming before a luddite one day.

I think the real story is more about the digital divide that still exists.  For most of us, certainly for all of us who read blogs, the web is an indispensable tool and hearing that someone doesn’t use it is like someone telling us they don’t use the phone or the postal service.  How much longer will it be viable to not have any knowledge of the web?  How do you convince people who have ignored the internet revolution that it is time to get on board?