This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.
It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.
Free disposable voicemail that you can get forwarded to you automatically via email. Feel free to spam me with WAV files at (617) 440-3295.
When old and new media collide — Someone at Reader’s Digest calling themself ‘rdeditor’ is submitting articles from rd.com to reddit and digg.
Fascinating bitchfest on the BBC discussion site around Scottish folks not supporting England in international sporting events. Interestingly, most of the kneejerk racist comments are from the English, accusing Scots, amongst other things, of being “bitter miserable idiots”.
If I ever write a patent, I’m going to sneak in the phrase “The user may even choose to produce a Tarzan-type yell”.
“Derek Trotter” gets a Nigerian scammer to ship a wooden carving of a Commodore 64. Just fantastic!
Yes, its obvious: When you’re presented with more food, you eat more.
Ken Jennings, the long-running Jeopardy champion, has a blog. He always appeared a hugely entertaining and funny bloke on TV, and his blog only cements that reputation.
Interview with Warren Buffet concerning his massive donation to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation last week. Basically explains that he’d rather their team spends his money, than him having to hire more people.
I managed 85%, with only a couple of guesses. Not on there: “We all know the 13 stripes are for good luck. But why does the American flag have precisely 47 stars?”
I think Joy & I will have to start playing this…
All good points. DVD offered a *lot* more than VHS (picture quality, extra features, no rewinding, chapter selection), and wasn’t as inconvenient as Laserdisc. Bluray and HD-DVD just off “more” DVD. Will either of them “succeed”?
For my sins, I’m hopelessly addicted to the current British series of Big Brother (damn you UKNova!). Since it’s not covered by TWoP, I’m delighted to find this excellent snarkblog on the Radio Times site.
A collection of folks’s sketches when challenged by Brain Age. I’ll have to upload some of my own “artistry”.
I’ve just changed my voicemail message to say “Send me an email. I rarely check voicemail.”
The lead singer, Chantel, has a helluva lot of energy in her. Especially considering they've cancelled the next four dates in the tour because she's sprained her leg.
Chantel getting the crowd to crouch during "nth Degree". As I took this photo, she was admonishing the Axis security, and telling them to crouch too.
Managed to get a pair of "Standing Room" tickets in the "State Street Pavillion" at Fenway. Since it was a pretty grey day, not everyone had shown up, so we had seats for the whole game. Result!
“Get angry if they don’t believe you. They will eventually. They always do.”
Does what it says on the tin. Pitchfork scoured YouTube for 100 awesome videos, skipping over your usual suspects like Jonez, Cunningham and Gondry.
Get every single thing DirecTV broadcasts for a $7,500 annual payment. How much pr0n would you have to watch to break even on this deal?
Application for the position of Middlesborough Football Club, based on “vast experience (on Football Manager 2005)”. Gets an excellent response.
“The industry’s idea of a “perfect” DRM scheme is one that is not controlled by either Apple or Microsoft, and which gives only them (the record industry) complete control over what users can do with their downloads. Such a scheme does not exist, and it does not exist because it isn’t possible.”
Grauniad to offer easily-print-outable on-demand PDF news digest.
“I’m Pretty Sure This Isn’t Your Bag”, “Nothing Worth Stealing In Here”, and more.
Just added this to groovymother out of idle curiosity. Sign up, get a free dollar, then donate a penny every time you visit here, or other affiliated sites.
Local startup tourb.us has launched. User-contributed and web-scraped gig listings. Includes my pet favourite feature: Enter your last.fm username, and they’ll email you if any of your favourite bands play locally.
Genius! This is everything social software should be. User-generated content, bringing people together.
Tango do a nice spoof of that Sony bouncing-balls-in-SanFran advert. The rest of the astroturf site is pretty decent too.
Interesting article. Though I like the Monopoly question, I think I’m going to steal the “design a control system for an elevator” one from the comments for the next time I interview someone.
For those of you who care about such things, my Mario Kart DS friend code is 073086–862758, and my Tetris DS friend code is 140719–694460.
For those who don’t care about such things, my social security number is 078–05-1120.
Genius! Watch movies with your friends across the internet. Social software so you can heckle and chat as you watch DVDs.
SlimDevices have battled the uPnP demons, and Squeezeboxes will soon be able to stream Rhapsody content.
I bought the DS Lite that I've been craving for so long this morning. Joy's been quite taken with Brain Age.
I'm hoping to get it back off her soon so that I can indulge in a little more Super Mario.
I finally gave in.
The oldest season pass on my TiVo, recording The Simpsons off of Fox 25, has now been deleted.
When I first got a TiVo in 2000, I was thrilled at its Simpsons-gathering abilities. Not just the new episodes, but two reruns a day in syndication too. Awesome.
However, the show has descended into the doldrums of crappiness. Everyone accepts that the golden years were through Season 7, which are all out on DVD now (and which I own). The show was hit-or-miss for a few years after that, but it just plain sucks now. Every time recently that I’ve tried watching a new episode this season, I’ve just gotten depressed about how bad it’s become, and give up before the first commercial break.
And since the syndication is mostly focussed on the last few years, it’s just not worth recording. (I note that even the obsessive of alt.tv.simpsons gave up writing episode capsules in 2002!)
So farewell, then, to OFF. Hope the movie(The Simpsons Movie (2007)) doesn’t suck.
The Windows app they *really* have to clone for the web if they want to create a GoogleOS.
Andrew Collins takes “Tom’s of Maine” to task for selling out to Colgate-Palmolive. I feel the same way about Ben & Jerry’s. It pisses me off that their hippy origins are being exploited to profit Unilever.
The next Pixar movie, directed by Brad Bird. If your PC can handle it, try watching the HD trailers. The detail is freaking incredible.
Signs you work for A Big Company: The first time you see a new product, it’s a review on Gizmodo. I have a pair of QC2s that I love to bits. Can’t wait to get my hands on a pair of these.
Interesting offering from the Googleplex — Sync your bookmarks, saved passwords and cookeis across your Firefox installations, via Google’s big-ass database in the sky. If there were a way to do this using my own server, I’d be all over it.
The programme for this year’s Fringe is out. Now I just have to decide what I want to see when we’re in Edinburgh in August. Decisions, decisions…
I’m going to have to give Django another crack some time soon.
Mark Fletcher’s leaving Bloglines and Ask.com behind to go entrepreneuring elsewhere. Best of luck, Mark.
Ooh! I think I know how I’m spending this evening.
“Is the source code available for this phone? Not that I plan to do anything personally right now with the source, but I’d like to see it. Now, if possible, my good man. Chop chop!”
OK, the viral marketing for Snakes on a Plane has gone too far. Putting real snakes on real planes? That’s just dangerous.
Dell/IBM to Mac laptop ratio seemed to be about 80/20 in favour of PCs.
Monster did a great job of selling themselves. We only saw their “labs” area, rather than the cubicle farm I’m sure exists there, plus a tour of their network operations, to wow the geeks.
glenn’s notes on some of the frustation in the organisation of BarCamp sum up my complaints pretty well. Except I’d also add that the font on the name badges was too small.
Veracode sounds like it will be fascinating. Not sure how much of it is public knowledge, so I’ll keep my mouth shut for now. And I got to meet Dildog.
PB Wiki sucks salty dogs’ cocks in hell forever. Once you saved an edit, no-one else could edit the page for 15 minutes, because you “kept” the lock.
Bil Lewis gave a superb demo of his Omniscient Debugger for Java. He managed a great gotcha moment for the audience when his debugger crashed. “You should debug your debugger,” said a sarcastic audience member. “Good idea!” says Bil, as he shows that he was running the debugger inside a debugger all along. (That this debugger then crashed with a bug only marginally detracted from his showmanship)
The Reddit chaps rock. When the video for their presentation, Ingredients for Web 2.0 Success, is posted, watch it. It got the biggest reaction (and had the most crowded room) of any session of the weekend.
I had the pleasure of giving a ride back to Boston to Eric Skiff of Common Ground, a New York charity, looking to end homelessness. Not put a band-aid over it. End it.
The links I promised that I’d post from my session, Powerful, Pointed Presentations: Creating Passionate Users, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Presentation Zen and Really Bad Powerpoint. And thank you to Larry the Basset Hound for his cameo.
State funeral for the old bag? NFW! My mum was riled enough by this to write to Tony Blair and complain!
"Pierre Francois from Underscore_ Consulting" (who looked alarmingly similar to Alexis from Reddit) did a great presentation, somewhat reminiscent of Stephen Colbert's "The Word" segment. The video should be up soon.
Geekfood
Spotted on Brian's laptop. Purchasable from GoatseSticker.com
This was right at the start of BarCamp, before it got completely filled for the day.
Nigeria is reportedly highly interested in the $100 laptop. Won’t it feel good when you know that the “Your relative Larry Begbie has died” spams were produced on one?
Fantasy World Cup may be no more, but Baddiel & Skinner are doing free podcasts. I look forward to the one following England getting knocked-out. Should be fun.
A comprehensive list of all known bunny names. “And please, this is not a list of possible bunny names, so don’t just send a name a bunny might have.” When I was a kid, ours was http://purl.org/ceryle/bunny/#bid0511.
Cunning social tweak on Flickr comments — ANY ALL CAPS SENTENCES GET CONVERTED TO LOWERCASE.
Wow, the Beeb are streaming live video of all their World Cup coverage. Geo-limited to the UK only, but still, that’s a lot of bits to shuffle. I can’t imagine office IT folks are particularly thrilled about this move!
This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.
I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.
