onotob

Paul Ruebens (you know, Pee-Wee Herman) is 54 years old.

Posted at 10:59 am.
2 Comments

Bringo is a service that will skip through an automated phone system and then call you when it is connecting to a representative. Since I am relationally obligated to say that automated phone systems are only really hated because they suffer from rather endemic poor design I won’t champion this service too much, but you have to admit it’s a pretty cool idea. You select the service (they probably have static maps of the phone trees stored), provide a call back number and wait for Bringo to ring you back.

One does wonder, however, how they plan to make money out from this.

Posted at 11:02 am.
No Comments

A couple of Congresspeople are subsisting on food stamps for a week to experience what it’s like for the working poor in the U.S. They have $21 to last them 7 days. That’s the average amount of federal assistance a food stamp recipient gets a week. $3 a day.

As an added bonus, both of them are blogging about the experience so we can all read along. I think this is a really great exercise. It was also recently undertaken by Ted Kulongoski, the governor of Oregon.

Posted at 4:36 pm.
1 Comment

There’s a long, complicated story going on, with Flickr caught in the middle. A Flickr user found an online store selling their photos without permission and posted to Flickr about it. The thread reaches 450 comments before being removed by Flickr admins, which, of course, causes a Slashdot front page post.

Death threats, misunderstandings and cache. I love watching these little net dramas play out. When it’s all said and done, I wonder how much this mess weighs, in kilobytes.

Posted at 11:41 am.
No Comments

The guys at 37signals have launched a blog devoted entirely to updates and information about their product line. I’ve been using Backpack for a while now and loving it. Loving it so much, in fact, that I want to start a consulting company just so I can have an excuse to use Basecamp to manage a project.

Maybe I’ll sign up for the free version and just manage my CSI: Miami-watching schedule with it.

Posted at 10:50 am.
3 Comments

Matt Haughey’s new blog Fortuitous is off to a great start. Matt’s been able to turn his various online projects into a full-time job and he’s started Fortuitious to write about his experiences running communities and a business online.

Posted at 11:08 am.
7 Comments

We had about 20 minutes to kill, my girlfriend and I, so we thought we’d stop and check out the puppies being sold on the side of the road. What harm could it do, really?

Enter Ripley, our new chocolate Labrador Retriever. He’s precocious and mouthy and all the things that puppies are that non-pet-owners loathe to hear about from pet owners.

Bask in the glory of a puppy sliding backwards on a hardwood floor.

Posted at 9:40 am.
4 Comments

Lee’s plan to save the world is as follows:

// Lee's plan to save the world...
var lee = everyone.getPerson['Fastenau','Lee','William'];
var myPerspective = {evil:'Killing people',good:'Playing videogames'};
for (var personId in everyone) {
	var p = everyone[personId];
	p.desiresWorldPeace = true;
	p.proactive = true;
	p.perspective = myPerspective;
	p.send (lee,p.assets.getAssetType('cash').getAmount(1,'dollar'));
}

Posted at 12:22 pm.
2 Comments

I stumbled upon an MP3 of this a couple of years ago and it is easily one of the funniest things I have ever experienced.

Posted at 8:54 pm.
2 Comments

Over the course of two days I read every list of five over at Merlin’s Lists of Five Things

It was amusing and I highly recommend doing it yourself.

Posted at 7:53 pm.
No Comments