How to make Fantasia ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery:
This isn’t 100% authentic, because Cold Stone doesn’t have pistachio nuts. The almonds work almost as well.
Just before today’s trade deadline, the Giants have traded Damian Moss, Kurt Ainsworth, and a left-handed prospect to Baltimore for 14-game winner Sidney Ponson. I can’t say I’ll miss Moss but it does hurt to lose Kurt. (I ought to sell these, I could make a million.) The question will be, are we better off with Ponson than we were with Ainsworth and Russ Ortiz, who was traded to Atlanta for Moss at the end of last year? Ortiz is having a terrific year, but then so, apparently, is Ponson.
This is not what Larry Niven had in mind when he wrote about “flash crowds”. A true flash crowd is a spontaneous, unplanned gathering that occurs at or near a newsworthy event. The online equivalent is the so-called “slashdot effect“, where Web servers are overwhelmed by a sudden surge in traffic caused by hundreds of thousands of Slashdot readers following links on the main page.
The “planned mobs” organized by Rob Zazueta are interesting, but really nothing more than performance art. They are not flash crowds.
Pac Bell’s Internet arm sues music industry over file-sharer IDs
In a complaint filed with the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, Internet service provider PBIS, operated by San Antonio-based SBC, alleges that many of the subpoenas served against it by the Recording Industry Association of America were done so improperly.The suit also called to question some sections of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the federal law the RIAA contends supports its latest legal actions. A spokesman for SBC said the RIAA’s use of the DMCA in its legal quest for online song-sharers butts up against the privacy rights of SBC’s customers.
“The action taken by SBC Internet Services is intended to protect the privacy of our customers,” said SBC spokesman Larry Meyer.
Go SBC! Who knew.
Tried my first Krispy Kreme donut today. Now I see what all the fuss is about.
If only we’d been at the A’s-Indians game last night…
“All of a sudden I’m a strikeout guy,” said an amused Mulder, who relies on fooling hitters more than raw power. “I made better pitches as the game went on. I was pleased about that.”
(For the uninformed: When an A’s pitcher racks up eight or more strikeouts in a home game, the crowd receives coupons good for a free Pepsi 2-liter. Mark Mulder K’d eleven Indians last night!)
Minor template change to fix the sidebar overlapping the right margin in IE. It always looked fine in Opera.
I see Google is now selling spam blocking software. Well, give them a click (because those clicks bring me money) but remember SpamPal is free.
“95% of all Slashdot .sig quotes are incorrect or completely fabricated.” -Benjamin Franklin
Somehow I missed this when everyone else probably didn’t, but anyway: Microsoft Clippit
It’s a Flash game where you try to eliminate Clippy from an Office document. And the voice of Clippy is supplied by Gilbert Gottfried. Perfect…
Oh man, that’s funny. I posted about the baseball story, and Google is now selling baseball tickets.
Wonder what will happen when I post about using the LG 5350 PCS phone as a mobile high-speed modem?
Everyone except Amalgamated Cheese.
Yes, I’ve added a Google AdSense block to the sidebar. It will display up to four text-only ads in a “skyscraper” format, and Google claims the ad content will reflect the content of this site. We’ll see how it goes–as I ramp up publishing and start adding the tutorial guides for which I’m known, hopefully the ads will generate a bit of income to offset hosting and bandwidth fees.
The Mercury News’ Skip Bayless writes today about how and why Bonds is happy, and so is the team. Much of the credit goes to new manager Felipe Alou:
Bonds is obviously much more comfortable with Alou at the controls. Few managers could use so many lineups and split playing time among so many proud players without constant public flare-ups. But this team has come to trust Alou’s hero-a-day hunches and in-game instincts. He has pushed all the right buttons — even psychological ones in demoting and reinserting Jesse Foppert and Damian Moss in the rotation.
I’m loving every minute of this Giants season and can’t wait for the post-season.
The perfect match for the Series, of course, would be the A’s, also under new management this year though not showing the significant improvements over last year seen at Pac Bell. Still, they’re three games out of first in the A.L. West as I write this, and in a fierce battle for the A.L Wild Card slot.
Bay Bridge Series II? Here’s hoping.
Update to the Using Trustic post below:
No additional RESULT_CODE settings are necessary. Trustic returns 127.0.0.2 for an untrusted server, and SpamPal by default interprets any IP address as meaning “spam”. So the DNSBL settings I gave below ought to work as given.
Working on adding a “comment” thingy as seen on other sites. HaloScan seems to be the commonly-used solution.
haxial.com– a collection of useful and attractive utility applications, for Windows and Mac OS. Found through a link on the Java Password Generator.
I use SpamPal with the Bayesian filter plugin as my client-side spam filter on Win2K. It works well enough but I’m always looking to improve things, so this article (and the subsequent /. discussion) gave me the impetus to see if SpamPal could be made to use Trustic’s DNSBL in addition to its preconfigured lists.
The answer, at least for SpamPal Beta 1.295, is yes–using the “Extra DNSBL Definitions” section of the Options dialog. Here are the steps I used to add Trustic to the DNSBLs used by SpamPal:
LIST TrusticNAME Trustic DNSBL
TYPE STANDARD
WEBSITE http://www.trustic.com/
ZONE queryaddress
DESCRIPTION Trustic is a community-based block list that prevents untrusted servers from sending spam. It is a new approach to the spam problem, and it is better than existing solutions.
Substitute the personalized query address you saw in step 2 above for queryaddress.
That’s it–SpamPal should now be checking Trustic’s DNSBL for your incoming mail. Trustic may require additional RESULT_CODE settings–I’m waiting for a response from Trustic and will follow up if needed.
It’s going to be another busy weekend, I think. Sigh.
Edit: Now a better exploit has been created. I expect this means that the patches we worked on until the wee hours now need to be updated again.
On Barry Bonds’ 39th birthday, he circles the bases after hitting the game-winning home run off Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Mike Myers in the ninth inning.
The Giants have now won eight straight, including two consecutive four-game series sweeps, and lead the National League West by a season-high 11 games.
Every 80s movie ending ever made (thanks Mistryl)
This is just brilliant, especially if you remember all those confusingly similar “likable loser overcomes adversity and gets the girl” movies from the 80s. Requires QuickTime 4 or RealPlayer.
Lightning Kills Giraffe at Disney Park
Lightning struck and killed a giraffe at Disney’s Animal Kingdom as the animal roamed among tourists, company officials said Wednesday.
The accident occurred Monday as a severe lightning storm moved over the Kilimanjaro Safari attraction, Disney spokeswoman Diane Ledder said.
“To the best of my knowledge, it was a quick death,” she said.
It was unclear if any tourists saw the lightning strike.
Betsy the giraffe, who was 6 years old, was the first animal to die from a lightning strike at the theme park, Ledder said. “It’s very unfortunate and unusual … but it has happened in the past” at other U.S. parks, she said.
The park has lightning rods placed throughout the safari area to protect animals. Animals can also be brought inside during severe weather, but the storm came through with too little warning, Ledder said.
Project Insomnia is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache
