Boost your Internet Connection in 2 minutes
I just came across a great little utility today, and am amazed I've not heard about it before now. Its called TCP Optimizer, and it's greatly boosted my download speeds.
Finally Some Snow!
Crazy snow storm here last night. I love it! I actually wish we'd gotten more snow though, instead of the freezing rain that came half way through the storm. The roads were pretty bad last night. Snow removal is attrocious here; I'm used to Caribou where they plow all night. MDI is like that too. They plow non stop until it stops snowing and all the roads are cleared.
Amme and I went down town to go to a restaurant but there was nowhere to park so we went to UNOs instead. On the way out of Old Bangor we almost got stuck, crawling up a steep hill at about 0.5mph. At one intersection there were cars stuck at either end of a light and nobody was moving. We were glad to be heading perpendicular to all that. UNOs was good. In the past I've had an aversion to it, I'm not sure why, but their food is really good and the prices are fair. There was a really strange girl in the booth next to us talking to her boyfriend like you'd talk to a kitty going "broccoliiiiii... Eat it broccoliiiiii! brooooooooooooocoliiii!" it was bizzare to say the least.
An Uncanny Resemblance
I usually don't post about celebrities, but I have to get something off my chest.
Have you ever had something trigger a memory or connection in your hind-brain, but it wouldn't come to the surface? Tonight Amme was watching VH1 and that insufferable show "I Love New York" came on. If you're fortunate enough to have never seen this show, its about this mentally unstable girl (nicknamed 'New York') and her quest for a "man", with different men fighting over her. Think "Jerry Springer" meets "The Bachelorette" and you pretty much have the idea. Anyway, whenever I saw 'New York' on television, something would start nagging me. What was it? I couldn't figure it out. I vaguely thought it was something to do with her resemblance to someone, possibly about her massive, titanic, eyebrows and eyelashes. Yet unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, it would pass as soon as I changed the channel.
Then tonight, out of the clear blue, it hit me. My high school teacher Mr. Willey would call it a "Wow Moment". That instant when something finally clicks into place, like the key piece in a huge puzzle that lets you step back and comprehend the whole picture. Tonight I had my wow moment, and finally realized who "New York looked like:
The Troubled History of the RBOCs
When I took my first Telecom class in college, I learned about the 8 RBOCs or Regional Bell Operating Companies being set up after the AT&T monopoly was ended.
My teacher said although they were all former "Bells", they had no joint interest. However, I wasn't so sure. At that time, they had already begun to buy each other and were down from 8 to 4:
- SBC (Ameritech and Southwestern Bell and Pacific Telesis)
- Verizon (GTE and Bell Atlantic and NYNEX)
- BellSouth
- Qwest (US West)
I had a scary premonition that day that this would keep up until there was again 1 company, or at least 2 companies with a joint interest...
Mooninite Mayhem
Man, so much to rant about. As far as the Mooninite thing, I was going to be brief but I can't hold my tongue. Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Austin, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and New York all didn't bat an eyelash at these effin' lite-brights, and thats all they really were. They weren't "hoax devices" because there was no hoax. It was marketing. At best you could call them street art, and at worst they are improvised billboards.
Knowledge Is Only a Few Clicks Away
The internet is truly amazing. Check this out:
I was on twitter and read the following on the public timeline (a list of all public updates):
"the song 'so much' by spill canvas is amazing"
I thought to myself, "I wonder what that song sounds like."
Embedding an image in a URL
The up and coming Hackszine, by the people that brought us Makezine, and Craftzine, has a cool (old-ish) post about embedding image data into a URI, using the "data:" URI. This actually works for any data (image, text, xml, etc) but the most fun thing to me is using it for images.
The URI string could get very large very fast, however, so the converter limits you to 51200 bytes. It also takes a little finagling once the converter spits it out, as you have to take out the single-quotes, tabs, plus signs, and carriage returns. This is done pretty easily with a RegExp search-and-replace for: '*' (replacing it with nothing). once you do that, you have to strip off some bits from the beginning and end, so it looks like this: Me.
Fun stuff!
Chatspeak as symbols
This is a little old, but I found it quite interesting:
An amusing exercise
It is a discussion thread over at Typophile about what chat shorthand (lol, wtf, rofl) might look like as symbols, much as 'at' has '@', or 'and' has '&'. Though most chat shorthands are acronyms instead of single words, it is still a very neat topic with some great ideas. I prefer the one pictured to the right of this post for LOL, submitted by gmckenzi.
I also have been pondering a discussion I had with someone at work about how we do not *usually* laugh literally "out loud" when we type lol, or actually fall out of our chairs when we type rofl (how would we type it if we were?), although there have been times when it has happened. Instead, maybe we should use an alternative, and leave LOL for more hilarious outbursts. You could just take the acronym of out, producing LIL (Laughing In Loud) but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, plus it looks like an abbreviation of little.
Perhaps LI or LIW, for Laughing InWardly, would work. Or we could spark a whole new term like TVF (Thats Very Funny) as in "That's very funny, a fly marrying a bumble bee... I TOLD YOU I'D SHOOT! BUT YOU DIDN'T BELIEVE ME! WHYYYYYYYY DIDN'T YOU BELIEVE ME?!?!". God I love that show.
In lieu of LOL, I tend to use "heh" when I find something funny, and "heheheheh" when it is funnier still. Note that I mean this as "heh heh heh", as in a chuckle, as opposed to "he he he", a feminine giggle...
So what do you all think? Do you like LIL, LIW, TVF? Create your own and post them here. I would love to hear your input on this!
PS: *bonus points for a symbolic for "OMG WTF BBQ" that is not just letters run together.
Recent Photos
Lifestream
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Checked in at Verve
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The new Automata guest strips are effing awesome. (Original: http://j.mp/26LCa3, 1st set: http://j.mp/b0azD, new start: http://j.mp/9qfPKA) [euicho]
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OMG The Pillars of the Earth mini-series! [euicho]
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Watched Pandorum last night. I love dead ship exploration movies (space and sea), so I really liked it. Sorta like Survival-horror meets SGU [euicho]
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Checked in at Neville Hall
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Mmm I just ordered my second Ramen Box: http://j.mp/dlABX3 . If you like Bibim Guksu try the Paldo Bibim Men! Otherwise try the BBQ Chicken. [euicho]
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Wow. I haven't listened to DJ Keoki in such a long time. [euicho]
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Checked in 2 times.
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Checked in 2 times.
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Checked in 2 times.
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First time golfing in 3 years and my back hurts... I think the golf gods want me to associate golf with pain very early on. [euicho]
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Checked in at Caribou Country Club
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Checked in at Neville Hall
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UMaine police believe suspect has left the area. Safe to resume normal campus activities. More @ umaine.edu [euicho]
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Robbery Update: No new info on bank robbery. Suspect remains at large. UMaine police recommend taking steps to ensure personal safety. [euicho]
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Armed robbery reported at Bangor Savings near UM Orono. Suspect at large, possibly on campus. Seek safe shelter. More at 581-INFO [euicho]
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Checked in 4 times.
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