Your mileage may vary, but after half a dozen views I feel ready to break some chairs (in a most joyful way!).

The original is definitely worth a watch too.
(Thanks @david!)

It needs to be several minutes longer though:

I would really like to find this, but I can’t seem to find any references to it.

Here’s what I (think I) remember:

- The guy the hoax was played on was contacted via a video game forum (he was young – maybe 17 when it started, 19 when the hoax finished)

- The hoax involved emails, mail, fake identities, etc.

- at one point the guy was flown somewhere and  led through some forest trail or something under the premise that he was saving the world

- the guy the hoax was played on had a great attitude about it — a quote from him went something like: “I had fun and would be available to save the world again if the need arises”

I’m pretty sure it was on Boing Boing…?

If anybody can find this on the web I’ll give them…um…I’ll send them a hand-drawn postcard. Is that enough bounty?

If you like the image/movie effect on the front page of ideacog.net and have a little tech-savvy, feel free to download the source:

Download Burnt Cog (zip, 1.3mb, GPL/MIT license)

Here’s what a movie looks like, here’s what an image looks like.

From the README file:

Burnt Cog is a simple flash-based image or movie displayer based on a folder of media. After you install it,  put images/flv files into a folder. They will be randomly displayed with a title-overlay and a nice burn-in effect. It also (optionally) auto-generates a light-weight navigation of the items in the folder.

I wanted a tool that was extremely simple to add content to. In this case – I just drop new flv, jpg or png files into a folder. The filename will be converted to the caption and they’ll immediately enter the rotation.

There are probably a ton of other great tools like this, but I’m afraid I’m stubbornly DIY. If it helps someone else, great!

Cheers,

Ben

A few years back, these same people came out with a flash game called Samorost. The world they built was just gorgeous and detailed and interesting, and at the time I don’t think I’d seen anything like it, especially not made with flash. Their new game looks to easily top that. Check out Machinarium – you can demo the first few levels.

My new favorite nearly-syllabic-correct haiku:

where is the love
where is the swine flu
where is the undertaker

Bored? What, you finished with all those degrees already?

(ouch, though the last question seems to be well-enough answered by the preceding 9 questions)

Things you cannot escape from: Death, taxes and… iphones!

I love that “How can I keep from singing lyrics” is one of the top suggestions. As I’ve always suspected, music is a virus.

And as far as: How can I get taller?

Good luck with that, people.

Had Twitter not popularized stalking, ’who should I follow’ would be pretty creepy. Actually, scratch that, it still is.

Who should I follow
Who should I marry
Who should be invited to the rehearsal dinner

….seems like maybe someone is getting a bit ahead of himself, here.

Who is my god?

I’ve alarmed the cat by several dramatic readings of this in my quiet office now.

will I ever marry lyfe jennings and get pregnant, and will it be love? Here’s a quiz!

For this edition of the paper, nearly all the rules taught in journalism school were thrown out the window. Writers used the first person and showed up in nearly every photograph alongside their interview subjects

Of course they did. For the stock market summary author Avri Herling wrote:

“Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place…”

Very fun. I volunteer for the next round.

Read the article: http://www.forward.com/articles/107571/

Via Boing Boing

Alternately: Comcast drives me crazy. They’re too expensive, hard to reach, and I don’t want their TV crap. I just want the pipe.

But look at these speed differences:

Clear WiMax (on the fastest plan, ~6MB):

Comcast (re-installed today)

To be fair: Clear tried hard. They were very friendly, their support was patient and knowledgeable. I tried their suggestions and once or twice got up near 4mb…but never consistently.

If you happen to be in an area where you get a better signal, and if you’re not running a freelance web dev business, maybe you’ll get better mileage. Sadly, I’m on Comcast’s wire again, and Clear’s box is heading out.

Dear8ball.com housed a fun little robot application I worked on for a while. I plugged it into twitter via a jabber bot so that you could simply reference it: @dear8ball ___(question)____ and it would grant you a magic 8 ball reply. It worked pretty well! It was a great project that I got 85% through, ran into a little technical difficulty, and then more or less lost interest. It happens.

And that’s a good thing — I wish it would happen more often. Every good idea does not merit implementation. Incidentally, it looks like someone else did work on a similar project (though that looks to have gone extinct now too).

In my pairing of domains, I recently gave away listmaker.org, and have let a few others expire as well. A little focus never hurt nobody.

It’s a great domain, I think, and at one time I had plans for it.

Build your web app there, house your blog, etc.

Just leave me a comment here over the next few days about how you might like to use it — if you’re the only one it’s yours (by the way – it expires in two days – but I will register it for you for another year at gandi.net, and then transfer it to your account). If there are a couple of interested people, I’ll pick the one I like best. If you have no technical skills — I’ll even host it for you at dreamhost for a year (with wordpress?) to get you started.

Now, who wants it?

A few weeks ago there were a number of books in the slipstream genre here instead, presumably because their algorithms looked up other books by my publisher and fitted Couch into this genre. Now enough people have bought Couch that they’re able to do some direct correlating.

What does it say? It says that the people at Walker Tracker are completely awesome. Thank you so much.

But I love how it looks, too. It’s as if people were buying the book and a pedometer simultaneously in order to set out upon the quest in the book for themselves. I would know it true were it accompanied by a few other tell-tale items. Say, a mustache trimmer, wire cutters, some RAM and a Spanish phrase book.

I would love to find other items on Amazon that tell a sort of story – items bought together to perform a single esoteric task. Certainly there’s some mystery that could be gleaned.