9:12 AM (0 comments)
Wow. I've gotten a lot of great responses to my LazyWeb request, via the comments thread of my post, the thread on LazyWeb, and email.

I've now realized that one should probably ascertain that something doesn't exist before one asks for it to be invented. Which should be doubly true when your request comes with regard to search engines.

But everyone's been very polite about my ignorance, allowing me to spend the weekend playing happily with a bunch of new search tools. I'm going to keep poking at them for a couple days, building up my lists of pros and cons, and then I'll give everyone a roundup early next week.

4:28 PM (0 comments)
Sorry to be so quiet after such a wordy relaunch yesterday. Today seems to have been eaten up by company meetings and work on a new site I hope will be launching in the coming week or so. More news on that when it happens.

But I was digging through some boxes last night and came across what has to be my favorite news photo of all time. My folks have always had a subscription to the St. Pioneer Press, so that must be the source. As to the date, I remember it hanging on the wall of my bedroom before I went off to college, so it must have been published sometime in the 1989-1991 period, though a cursory Google search couldn't nail down specifics. Just another of the times I really wish I had a NEXIS/LEXIS account.

Anyway, here's the picture:



(Click here for a larger 70K version.)

First, know that I did no Photoshoppery to this picture other than tweaking the color balance to cover for age-yellowing, and adjusting the contrast to hide the ads on the other side of the newsprint that bled through in scanning.

Second, despite sitting on the liberal side of the fence, let me say that I don't post this picture because it's embarrassing for Reagan. Far from it. I think it's great that he was self-confident enough to take off his hat and wave to the crowd, grinning like it was just another day and not one where his head had just been popped open for a while. Good for him.

No, the reason I post the picture is Nancy. The look on her face alone--"Ronnie! NO! The hat was supposed to COVER your head!--is enough to make me laugh, but seeing that she's reaching forward to try and cover up his head with her hand? Priceless.

2:48 PM (0 comments)
Movies, media, and television links. The non broadband-enabled should beware, but here we go:

An excellent post on MeFi a couple weeks ago about the history and mystery of the Wilhelm scream (be sure to download the movie) led me to Hollywood Lost and Found, where I came across some great articles from the creation of sound effects for Robocop to great behind the scenes photos from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai.

On the topic of movies--The Lord of the Rings...as made by Howard Hawks in the 1950s. And from there, if you didn't see Glenn's link last week in the comments, be sure to check out Starship Exeter, quite possibly the most ambitious fanfilm ever made.

Finally, Lisa Rein was kind enough to digitize the Daily Show's terrific bit called "So You're Living in a Police State" and release it to the web. Great stuff. In a time where one constantly suspects that the news is actually propaganda, it's nice to see something that's at least clearly counterprop.

12:32 PM (0 comments)
Based on my recent writing project, where I found myself either too lazy to reach for the dictionary sitting right next to my monitor or frustrated at taking my hands away from the keyboard...

I invoke the LazyWeb:

What I want is a toolbar, much like my beloved Google Toolbar, that will ping Dictionary.com for either dictionary or thesaurus results (or perhaps, via a pulldown menu, results from any of the sources on Reference.com.) It might mean the loss of a bit more screen estate, but I think the trade-off for what could be an indispensable tool is worth it.

Bonus points if you could set a default checkbox so that results would always open in a new window (something I'm frustrated that the Googlebar doesn't have.)

Double bonus points (because I suspect this is much more difficult) if they could install a feature where you highlight text on a webpage and it spellchecks it for you.

Triple bonus points if they figure out how to make money providing me with all these great features for free.

11:59 AM (0 comments)
JP passes along a link: the first thing the sound files on Casper Electronics bring to mind is the poor power droid being tortured under Jabba's palace at the beginning of Return of the Jedi. For crying out loud, when you've got a machine that we've taught how to talk, don't revel in your ability to make it scream incoherently--make it bust out old-school Dictionaroke style!

For more Speak-and-Spell fun, don't miss the SaS simulators available online, Yesterdayland's history of the line, the Smithsonian's grub-pale prototype, a technical yet interesting design history (PDF) of the toy, and the Datamath Calculator Museum's page on the Speak and Spell Compact, including some MP3 files of what the machine sounds like when it's not being tortured.

10:35 AM (0 comments)
Check out Chad's terrific new plane, the Frog, over on the Towlebooth's flight line. Chad is a constant reminder of the kind of things I would love to do if only I could (would?) spend more time away from the keyboard.

1:40 AM (0 comments)
A couple of Cory Doctorow-centric links: first, to his website for his new novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Cory has taken the amazingly bold step of offering the entirety of his novel for free download (in a dizzying array of formats) under a Creative Commons license, simultaneously with its print release. I downloaded and read the novel in PDF form last week, and it's fantastic--tomorrow I'm setting off on a trek across the Net to find some of the interesting conversations I'm certain that the novel's concept of "Whuffie" has sparked. Apparently the promotional part of the online release has worked--I went to two major chain booksellers in the Madison area tonight in search of the dead-tree edition of the book, and both were sold out.* (If Down and Out isn't enough Doctorow fiction for you--and it shouldn't be--he's got a story appearing in Salon this week as well.)

Cory is also part of the always terrific boingboing, and for the last 24 hours the boing has been my launchpad to coverage of fallout of the Eldred v. Ashcroft decision, from the opinions of the Supreme Court Justices to an online copy of Spider Robinson's story "Melancholy Elephants".

More good coverage of the entire trial on the blog of Eldred attorney Lawrence Lessig. I'm sure he'll have some good things to say in the coming days as well.

* UPDATE: Apparently the book may not have been sold out, despite what I was told by wandering clerks--it just may not have arrived yet. Moral of story: don't trust what clerks in major chain bookstores are saying unless they (and you) have looked directly at their computers and the shelves.

1:03 AM (0 comments)
I'm back.

Of course, it's just as I was knocked out of the blogosphere for a couple weeks that Patrick was nice enough to add a link to OD to his front page. I hope that some of the folks who have been stopping by from Electrolite while I was on hiatus come back now that there will be something to see.

After a year and change of compulsively posting, it was interesting to take a couple weeks off. Just because I didn't have time to post didn't mean that I didn't have time to surf around a bit, and I came across a lot of interesting news and links. Maybe I'll play catchup a bit in the coming days.

Part of starting up my own page was to satisfy the my inner link carny--Come and see the Internet oddity! If it's not real, you can keep the truck!--while allowing people to come to me, rather than force it on them. But one of the reasons I was away was to catch up on some deadlines, and that reminded me once again just how much I love writing simply for the sake of writing. So I hope you won't mind if I start being a little...wordier in my normal posts, and I might even post some non-linkloaded posts once in a while.

If I'm not meeting your MDA of links, I've revamped the sidebar (not the one with the photos, though this is a wholly fresh batch; sorry about the heavy download for the non-broadband folks) to include all of the news and link sources I visit, the personal pages I find particularly interesting, and the online communities where I hang around. If you thought I was posting great or obscure links, it's probably only because I was standing on the shoulders of these sites. Join me in reading them. Oh, I'll keep cross-posting the best, but throwing open all my sources like this should help spur me to go find some new ones. We both win, Dear Reader.

So. Now, let the posting begin.