Gadgetopia

They’re made out of Meat, by Hugo and Nebula Winner Terry Bisson : Joe sent me this sci-fi short story, which I think is absolutely brilliant. It will take you three minutes to read it.

“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they’re made out of meat.”

“Maybe they’re like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”

“Nope. They’re born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn’t take too long. Do you have any idea the life span of meat?”

The Wikipedia page links to a page on “carbon chauvinism,” a term I had never heard before but have long-considered over the years.

Carbon chauvinism is a relatively new term meant to disparage the assumption that extraterrestrial life will resemble life on Earth.

No one cares about your garage band: This is an actual Wikipedia admin page helping administrator identify pages created to promote someone’s garage band.

Typical characteristics of garage band pages […]

Lack of capitalization: People making articles about their garage bands generally forget that capitalization of proper nouns is one of the underlying principles of the English language […]

Lack of any formatting whatsoever: As 99.9% of garage-band-page-creators have no prior experience with Wikipedia and its formatting system, garage band pages are often devoid of the markup present in standard pages.

[…] Use of the word “hardcore”: All garage bands, even if they are not “hardcore” seem to love to describe themselves as such.

They helpfully include a sample article as an example of what to look for and delete:

BRINGERS OF DARKNESS are revitalizing audiences with their raw energy live show and undeniable chemistry of brotherhood. They transcend a world that is locked in genre and commercialism; though they know they can’t do it alone, they are the seeds of a revolution.

Members: Tim kingsworth - guitarist born to rock, tim has written many of bringers of darkness’s best songs including “my love is like ten thousand arows”

Shayne tracy -vocals Stunning gutteral screams, as raw and wild as the songs

barett lee- bass player the best bass player in idaho is barett lee, his awesome riffs bring bringers of darkness’s songs together

wade wilson- drummer      played everyware, now the pumping heart of bringers of darkness beats 

It just gets funnier in the section entitled “How Do I Know if Anyone Cares About my Garage Band?”

 Pwnie Award Winners: I didn’t even know this existed. There’s lots of hard-core technical awards in there, but this year’s big winner was Twitter, who won in the “Epic FAIL” category:

[…] this year Twitter learned the hard way that when your entire security rests in the cloud, it only takes one unused hotmail account and a bored teenager to get your entire business plan, all your employee’s personal information, and administrative access to your 55 million dollar web application. According to Twitter’s top secret internal documents (now published on Techcrunch) “Are we building a new Internet?!?” Well if they are, it’s one that needs more security.

Most expensive javascript ever?: Opera needed some new servers – lots of them, costing lots of money.  They got some test servers from a vendor, but the results were not good.

[…] one of the world’s biggest hardware vendors - whose name every single reader will be familiar with, and whose hardware a good share of you will be using right now - apparently didn’t do their homework. When Opera’s sysadmin booted up the server to test their web-based administration interface, they came across a single JavaScript statement that managed to piss off everyone up to and including the CTO.

Can you guess the line of Javascript?

Headset Hotties: This Web site was long overdue, frankly. An ode to perhaps the most over-used stock art cliche of them all.

Flickr Photo Download: 1983 Compuserve Ad: I really love this CompuServe ad from 1983.

Last night, we exchange letters with Mom, then had a party for eleven people in nine different states and only had to wash one glass…

I’m not up my on Net history, because I didn’t know they were doing this back in ‘83. If someone had asked me, I’d have pegged something like this at the early 90’s.

Bastet AS3 - Bastard Tetris: A Flash port of Tetris that actively works against you.

The catch, though, is that the game looks at your playing field and determines which piece you will probably want most and then …. denies it to you.

WHOPPER SACRIFICE - Sacrifice 10 friends from Facebook for a free WHOPPER: The folks at BK have written a Facebook app. You install it, and when you have unfriended 10 people, you get a free Whopper.

Brilliant marketing. I love it.

Barack Obama added you as a friend on Facebook. This is hilarious, no matter what party you call home.

Despite common assumptions that President-elect Barack Obama’s Cabinet nominees are told of their selection via personal phone calls, the Los Angeles Times has learned that the famously tech-friendly Mr. Obama is actually notifying his picks by “friending” them on the social networking site Facebook. Requests to Mr. Obama for comment on the following transcript have gone unanswered, though he did “poke” us just as this went to press.

The transcript that follows… I won’t spoil it; just click the link and read it!

Sean Penn Demands To Know What Asshole Took SeanPenn@ gmail.com:

In an impassioned 1,900-word open letter published in Monday’s Washington Post, actor-director Sean Penn urged the unknown person who registered the e-mail address SeanPenn@gmail.com to “come forward immediately, rather than wallowing in the shame and ignominy of fraud.”

Years ago, I went to get my first Hotmail account. I signed up for my name at Hotmail. It was taken. I was like, “Oh well…,” then “Hey, wait a minute…” After all, my name isn’t that common, I thought.

So I emailed the guy, and he responded. Very nice guy. He was a race car fabricator in California, and we had a great conversation about The Pass at Laguna Seca (at 1:01 or so) among other things. We had a lot in common it turned out.

the crowbar arrived at CERN, Freeman received it, world saved: In one of the LHC promotional pictures from a while back was a guy who looked a lot like Gordon Freeman. Hilarity ensued.

As scientists at CERN prepared to turn on the LHC for the first time, the gaming reddit community realized the significance of this historic scientific event: a resonance cascade and dimensional tear, followed by alien invasion.

One of our quick-thinking redditors suggested a plan to save mankind. We’d send CERN a crowbar. Just to be safe, we made it a wrecking bar, threw in a headcrab hat (for training purposes) and Fark donated a Half-life strategy guide to the cause.

The guys at CERN had a sense of humor, and sent back some pics of the crowbar in action.

The Joy of Tech comic: I have never thought about it this way. Somewhat brilliant.

Internet Explorer Makes Desperate Overture To Become Default Browser: I almost feel sorry for it.

After months of futile entreaties to upgrade to its latest version, web browser Internet Explorer made a last-ditch proposal to become local man Jeremy Drewing’s primary Internet application Monday.

The Best Gmail Error Message: This made me laugh this morning.

LinkedIn: Jonathan Lambert:

One time I was like, “no, Jon, we’ll never make that deadline,” and then he roundhouse kicked the project in the face and we beat the deadline by 7 weeks. It was either Jon or Chuck Norris, I can’t remember.

Jon (and Kalsey, incidentally) are both with WorkHabit, which is coming out of the gate to do crazy big Drupal hosting.